The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 062: Jerry Gillis on Attractional or Missional Church? How One MegaChurch is Doing Both
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before, in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. (upbeat music) - Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 62 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff, and I really hope our time together today helps you lead like never before. And this one's kind of fun. Actually, the next couple of episodes, I've got guests who, I could drive to their church. Well, no, that's not true. I can drive to Jerry's church. You're gonna hear from him in a few minutes. But next week, we've got Tim Gupdell. Well, I could, it would take 20 hours. But at least he's from the same country, Canada, which is cool. Jerry is from Western New York, just outside of Buffalo. And we're gonna talk, I think we will settle the debate. How's this? Between missional and attractional church. If you've, you know, engaged that at any point over the last decade, they seem to be mutually exclusive categories. And missional churches seem to be on the small side. And I don't mean that in any derogatory way. It's just what I observe. And then attractional churches seem to be on the, the large side. And then people criticize attractional churches saying, you're really not making an impact on your city. You know, and you can go back and forth and back and forth. And I have in those discussions before. But Jerry has done something really powerful. He is actually, he leads a very large church, multi-site church in Buffalo, New York. One of the largest churches actually, you know, north of wherever mega churches end. You know how that goes. And they are actually an attractional church that does a lot of missional things. So I think this is gonna be a fascinating interview. You know, if you've never heard of Jerry, you're gonna really enjoy meeting him today. And the chapel is a large church, just outside of Buffalo in and around all of Buffalo, New York. They've done an incredible job growing there over the years. Now Jerry is an Atlanta native, apparently a Bulldogs fan. I'm not like not a sports person, but I know that will mean so much to so many of you. And irritate many of you at the same time, which is probably why I'm not a sports fan. But anyway, he's also affiliated with a network of churches called Christ Together and speaks to many, many people around the world, many leaders around the world. So, and he has been the lead pastor of the chapel since 2002, so he's been at it about 13 years. And he's got some really interesting things to say about leading a mega church. I mean, by every definition, the chapel is a mega church. And again, all the links will be in the show notes, so that'll be a lot of fun. Hey, I just wanna say thank you to everybody who makes this podcast awesome. You guys know, I continue to love it when you leave reviews on iTunes. It gives me real time feedback about what's connecting or sometimes what's not connecting. And it gives you an opportunity to sort of chime in. And iTunes uses that to get the word out to other people. So, if you've left a review, thank you to all of you who haven't yet. Hey, if you could do that, that would be awesome. I'm gonna read a few reviews 'cause you've heard me say it a million times, but there's nothing I love more about doing this podcast or writing my blog than interacting with you. So, Johnson You left a review a couple of days ago. He said, been listening every week for almost a year. He's a 22 year old recent college grad who aspires to be a church leader. And he says, the podcast greatly accelerates my knowledge and leadership by years. I'm so thankful for this podcast. Hey, if you're a young leader, I just want you to know that fuels me, man. I hear from so many of you who are like under 35 and your encouragement means an awful lot. So, thank you. Roasterman76 is cuddle of Tuesdays. And I hope by Roasterman, you know, that's your handle on iTunes or whatever. I hope you barbecue, I hope that's what that means. He says, I enjoy Kerry's podcast because he covers such a wide array of topics for today's leaders and confession. That's exactly what this podcast does. Like you never know what you're gonna get. And so you have some, you know, very well-known people like Andy Stanley, Perry Noble, Craig Grishel, Ravi Zacharias, Mark Batterson, Pete Wilson, Jeff Henderson, many, many others like that. And I know I've dropped some off the list. Like John Acre, for example, you know, very well-known people in church world. And then some people you've never heard of, which I think makes it more interesting. And also people from the business community as well, like we had Lewis House just last month, which was great, one of the most listened to podcasters. So I hope this like, you know, variety eclectic mix serves you well. And then one more, and I love getting this review. It's from Brandon May from Augusta, Georgia, who says, huge help for the bi-vocational pastor. That is something I've never done. So I'm just so grateful that this helps. And it's my goal to get a bi-vocational pastor on the podcast in the next year. So if you know of somebody, or maybe we can talk to Brandon, I don't know. He's 30 years old, just planted a church in March of 2015 in Augusta, Georgia. He's working a full-time job for income while getting the church up off the ground. Hardest thing he's ever done. He's a new pastor and young leader, starving for wisdom and good content. Hard for him to get that during the day while working his job. So because his job requires him to use his hands. But one benefit is he can pop in his headphones and listen while he works. And this podcast, as a result, has been a huge help for him. So he loves it because the content applies to him, even though he pastors a small church of 60 people. That's cool, you know, Brandon, just so you guys know where I'm coming from. Like I know large church pastors listen to this podcast, mid-sized church pastors listen to this podcast, small church pastors listen to this podcast. So, you know, having led a small church and now a larger church, I'm always trying to figure out like, how does this application work wherever that goes? So if that's helpful, that's good. I just want to say thank you so much. And thank you to everybody who's not only left reviews on this podcast, but about my new book, Glasting Impact, Seven Powerful Conversations that'll help your church grow. If you've read it and you haven't left a review yet, could you head over to Amazon and do that? That would be like incredible. And thanks for all the feedback. And as you heard recently, the audio book is now available. So if you're a headphones type person, like Brandon is, and you want to listen to the book, you can do that instead of having to read it. So without further ado, that was just like a thank you and a shout out to all of you who listened and all of you who are just so super encouraging. Let's jump into the interview with Jerry Gillis from the chapel. Well, Jerry, welcome to the podcast. Really, really glad to have you. And we are not that far apart. You're in Buffalo, I'm North of Toronto. And you are the lead pastor of the chapel church for the last 13 years. And it's been quite a journey and quite an adventure for all of our listeners who are either in a place like Canada or Western Europe or Australia or that whole rim from like New England, across the north, down the west coast of the US. You don't find a whole lot of mega churches in a place like Buffalo, do you? No, you don't. I mean, I'm originally from the southeast United States and you usually hit a golf ball in a direction and find one of them. But here in the northeast, it's just not that common. Yeah, it's not. So tell us a little bit about the chapel and your involvement there for the last 13 years. As I said, originally from the southeast United States, but ended up through not only serving at a church in Georgia, but also in Florida, but then ended up in Western New York at the chapel. And the chapel was a church of about 1,700 people when I came 13 years ago as a 32-year-old. Right. Now that should probably be illegal in most places because just the maturity level and all of those things, but they were gracious. And I actually came in with a co-pastor. So there was a guy who transitioned. The guy who founded the church was the pastor of the church for almost 40 years. Wow. When he passed away, most people thought that church would just kind of cave in on itself because it was a product of that generation where everything kind of orbited around the singular leader. Right. And so that was just, but again, that was a product of the generation. It wasn't good, bad, right, wrong. It was just, that's how it was. And so when he passed away, people thought, maybe they were gonna fold up the tent. But in fact, a transition pastor came in who was in his 60s, who not only studied the ship, but also the church began to grow just a little bit. And so it probably grew 3, 400 people in the two years that he was transitioning them. Yeah, it doesn't happen very often, does it? Not often at all. And this guy came out of John Maxwell's organization, was working for InJoy at the time, but had mastered in the past, fruitfully in a number of places. And so he knew what he was doing. And so he said, you know, we need to look for a younger leader who can lead this church into the future. And so we ended up connecting, got called a stabuffalo. We ended up serving alongside one another for a couple of years, which was, if I had to do it over again, I would do it all over again. That's cool. Because it was, you know, I'm a young leader. He's an older leader. And we're trying to transition to church. And so he took some bullets for me. Yeah. That were intended for me to me, because he kind of stood in the gap and supported me in that regard and showed great humility in the process while imparting some wisdom to me as a young leader. And it made for a healthy transition of our church to be able to move in the direction that God was kind of leading me and our new team to be able to move it. Boy, there's a lot of lessons right in that. I mean, interministries rarely go well. Churches rarely grow. And when there's co-leadership for the first few years, I mean, that tends to end up being a power struggle rather than anything else. So that's a really cool, like God's story. That's a great story. Yeah, for sure. Was it called the chapel? Like did you do a name change and that sort of thing? We didn't. It was called the chapel. But when we moved locations, we started to grow a little bit earlier in the process and again, adding services. And you can only do that in one day. There is a limit. So we ended up in four services in the same day. And it was just, I was in my mid 30s going on, my mid 70s, it felt like it was just rough and it was rough on volunteers and all that. And so when we ended up purchasing property, another story and a great one, how God provided. And we built a new facility. We just, we ended up calling it the chapel at cross point because we were moving into the cross point business park in the place that we were. So we changed the name there. Okay, and you made a lot of other changes along the way too, which would be a fascinating conversation that we'll probably have some other time because what we really want to focus in on, and this is sort of where your passion is these days, I mean, I guess to a certain extent, you're a bit of an attractional church, right? Which a lot of mega churches are, you have weekend services, a great band, helpful communication, if you see your videos, like you got lights, the stage, the whole deal, right? The band, all the stuff that growing larger churches tend to have these days, but you're really passionate about becoming more missional and reaching out to the city of Buffalo. Tell us about how your heart has sort of gone there and what involves, what, you know, missional involves and why that has become so intriguing to you. - Sure, so all I knew coming out of the places that I had been, and I consider this perfectly acceptable and fine, but all I knew was really the idea of church growth, that's what I broke in with, that's how I cut my teeth, that's what I had observed, that's what I knew. So when I got here, I knew some things practically to be able to do, to help a church to grow. - So what did you do early on? - Just some simple things, you know, we did some simple things like actually greeted people when they came in. - Oh, that's a good idea. - Simple things, make them feel at home. You hopefully have helpful communication. You hopefully do some things relative to parking that makes it more feasible for people when they're coming in because, you know, we had to have an offsite parking and we got to shuttle to bring people over. Just really, I mean, for lack of a better term, customer service things that actually help facilitate the experience for people. Now, granted, when people are coming to faith in Jesus and those kinds of things, there is a contagion that goes along with that, that is really a God work. And so those were just some simple items. - Right, so it's more than just parking. I mean, you can have good parking that nobody shows up to, or on the other hand, you've got the Holy Spirit moving and changing lives and people being baptized and it's transformational. And it's a growing vibrant church in a city that doesn't have a ton of growing, large, vibrant churches. - Yes, for sure. And so we were growing and then all of a sudden, you're getting these requests to do interviews and people are asking, hey, what's happening because you're here in the Northeast and now you've got a church that has gone from 1,700 to close to 3,000 and everybody's asking questions. What's the secret sauce? You know, and so I was growing actually, interestingly enough, turning into a really poor interview because I was saying, I don't know, people are, they love Jesus and it's becoming contagious. And that wasn't really enough text for a good interview. And then I really started becoming kind of internally a bit frustrated because what I kept asking myself was this, is this really what I'm designed for? Am I supposed to be a large machine operator? When I signed up for all of this, when I got called to all of this, is this really what I get up in the mornings for? That I really guess that the idea is, I guess my next job right here at the chapel is to make this bigger and better. And if I do that, then the next job after that will make it bigger and bigger. (laughing) That's what I was living with, Kerry, where I was kind of going, that's a little bit of an internal frustration that was kind of stark for me and I was struggling with it. So I ended up just turning my attention shockingly back to the scripture and pressing myself into God and saying, God, what is it that you want? What is your heartbeat for your church? Not just for ours, but for your church. And I spent about a year devotionally in the Sermon on the Mount, just understanding as best I could, the idea of the kingdom, the size and relativity of what the church's role is in the kingdom of God in the place that we were at and really began to come to some different understandings of how I viewed the church and how I viewed its role and its purpose and its nature, not only for my congregation, but for the church at large. And so that's really where a shift began to happen for me. - Okay, so you spent a year in the Sermon on the Mount, which is not that long. I mean, that's three chapters of the Bible. And I think a lot of people I know whose churches have grown and ours to a certain extent, I mean, we're just above 1,000. But yeah, there is a machine aspect that comes with it. There's a systems thing which is necessary, but can also be very frustrating. And you're not at 3,000 anymore. You're double that at this point. So it's quite a machine and in three locations now, right? So yeah, there's definitely machinery there. And let's drill down on that a little bit more. Do you think that's like necessary? Do you think you have to have, I love your term machinery? Or do you think that there's an element of disobedience in that? Or like, how do you feel about that? - Yeah, I've wrestled with it. It's a great question. I mean, you do need a skeleton to be able to function in a body, right? So there has to be some kind of structural understanding, but we don't want the structure to get in the way. And so for us, what we started to realize was that we just had to start aligning ourselves in such a way that we would be consistent with the mission of God in the world. And that whatever that mission was, when we began to understand what rises up out of the scripture and out of the heart of God for the mission that he has in the world, that if we could answer that question, then we structure ourselves accordingly. So in other words, we came to some conclusions. And there was this kind of really sovereign, kind of interconnection with my life experience, what was going on in our church. At the time I was doing some postgraduate work, working on a doctorate and actually studying some of these things. And then ran into another guy who's a messiologist who's become a friend of mine in Dwight Smith, who's kind of just like a kind of like an apostle Paul in the modern day, just a little bit eccentric and a little bit funky. And he's one of the smartest guys I've ever been around. And he'll live half the year in Bangkok or in Chennai, India or whatever. He just goes wherever, whenever, and he's a part of these great movements. And so I got to kind of play out some of the, both the sociology and the missiology with him, along with some of the studies that I was doing. And here's really where I came. There were four primary things, Kerry, that I kind of came to in terms of a convictional level of what a church that is on mission to see the mission of God happen in its region, it has to kind of bear out. The first one was, there has to be a geographic intentionality. In other words, my congregation has been placed in my location by the sovereign spirit of God for a reason. - Right. - That I am to work toward mobilizing people to reduce the darkness where we are in our location. And we do that by, you know, kind of drawing what we have termed a circle of accountability. You could call it anything you want. Use any geometric term of, you know, you could use a triangle of influence or you could, whatever. We call it a circle of accountability. And basically within that sphere, we want to know everything that's going on in that sphere. Are there hospitals, are there schools, what are the churches in play, because it's going to require that we figure out how to marshal and mobilize all of our resources to see the saturation of the gospel, not just in declaration, but also in demonstration. In that area. So you have to have a geographic intentionality. Whatever else you do with Acts chapter one, verse eight, there is a geographic intent that unfolds in the book of Acts with Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, under most parts of the earth. You actually see that unfold in the book of Acts. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, is that there has to be partnership in the greater body of Christ. In other words, the idea that we're going to, you know, have a t-shirt that says, "The chapel is going to win Western New York to Jesus." It's just stupid. It's never the intent of God for that to occur. There is a greater body of Christ at work, and it's never just the chapel's job to get that job done. It is the church's job, if that job done. So there has to be a partnership in the body of Christ. Third thing is, there needs to be an interdependence in leadership. Now, by that, I mean this, that in Ephesians chapter four, where there is apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher, as you've heard many people, the Alan Hershes of the world, the Dwight Smiths of the world, who have talked about these things, that all of those functions of leadership need to be engaged in a region or a city to see the full equipping and mobilization of the people of God, so that they can be released to fulfill the mission of God. So you can't play Moses on the mountain anymore. That's an Old Testament construct that we've tried to import, in my view, into the New Testament, where it's not me going up on a mountain, telling everyone what God has said, but instead, I am a functioning part of leadership, called leadership, within the body. I am not separate from it. There already is a head, and it is not me. And I have to function interdependently, not only in my local church context, but in my regional context as well, if we're gonna see the mission of God for every man, woman, and child, to hear and see the gospel of Jesus Christ, we're gonna see that play out. And then the last thing, Kerry, was spiritual formation. Has to be a priority. Because ultimately, the genius of God is the spirit of God within his people distributed to all different places. That's the genius of God. So we don't wanna mobilize empty shells. We want to see the mobilization of people who are in a transformational, rich relationship with the living Christ. And that will see a transformation in the places that they go. - Wow, okay, well, let's go back. Let's break that apart one by one. So first thing, your circle of accountability. Is that the right term? - Yeah. - Circle of accountability. So that basically means you've got a geographic area in which God has placed you. And I think a lot of the stereotype of a tractional church is come and see. This is a place you drive to. This is the place you come. You come for an hour. You come midweek for something. And you come and then you go back. But it sounds like you're more of a go-and-do model. Like, let's come and see more go-and-do. It's like, where are the hospitals? Where are the schools? Where are the different neighborhoods? It's not just affluent middle class, upper middle class people who come to our church. We have a responsibility. And Buffalo is a very diverse city. I mean, living close to it, I've been there many times. And I mean, it's got some hoods, man. It's got some neighborhoods, that's for sure. - Yeah, there's a lot of diversity here. And to your point, if we take a tractional and say that a tractional is basically a collecting community, kind of a come and see idea, missional would be more of a reaching community. The idea that we are trying to saturate the region with the gospel of Jesus Christ, both in word and in demonstration. It's not just one or the other. You're not on the corner with just a bullhorn. That's not the idea. - So how do you do that? I mean, is that through programs in the church? Is that through the witness of the members, like the people who come to the chapel? Is it all of the above or a third option? Or how are you guys doing it? - Yeah, it's a great question. So you could split this into levels if you wanted to. - Sure. - If you wanted to take it at the church leadership level, then the chapel has a responsibility, as a church of some muscle and some influence. The chapel has a responsibility to help lead that at a church level. So that would mean that we need to endeavor to try and see the saturation of the gospel in this region through partnership and through planting that may not even be associated with us. In other words, it might not be our name brand. So as an example, we have planted around 14 churches now and that does not include our additional two campuses. So we have partnered or planted to partner, or partnered to plant, I should say, 14 churches in our region, 70% of which are within about a 10 to 15 mile region of our church. And none of them have our name. None of them are accountable to us. They take on their own deal because we feel a responsibility that it's bigger than us. In fact, we're so serious about it, that you have to pull the body of Christ together in a region to accomplish this, that we help plant a church called Northgate Church, which is led by Pastor John Hasselbeck, who came out of a church called the Tabernacle, which is a real historic church in Buffalo, assembly of God church, various historic church. He came out of that church and we partnered with the Tabernacle and ended up at the end of the day, 14 different congregations of seven different denominations together planted Northgate Church. So that's not one you hear about very often, and it's only about four years old, maybe five, five years old or so. Church of about 300, they're expanding. God's doing a wonderful thing there, but this is about the body of Christ being together for the mission of God in a region. And sometimes you have to just put a helmet on and run into some walls and see what happens. - Wow, that's great, Jerry. So I mean, did you have, did you have, are all the church plants doing okay? Like I know it's different. Did you have some failures? Did you have some times where you're like, okay, we're gonna try this to reach the city and it didn't work out the way you wanted to? - Yeah, so far of those, all of them are still in existence. So really grateful for that, at different levels. So one of the churches that we planted in a particularly disadvantaged part of maybe the North Buffalo Black Rock Riverside area, which is a challenged area, educationally and economically and sociologically. The church that we started was a little further away from that, but then the church felt like they were called into that place. And so we helped them shift into that place. They're called renovation church today. And they are a church of about 700 now and is helping to reach that area. Again, the good thing is now we don't have the pressure at the chapel to have to turn in like denominational figures or here. These things are just things we're excited about. So we've got of the churches that we've helped to plant or partner to plant, there are close to 3,000 people worshiping in those churches, not affiliated with the chapel and our five or 6,000 that are worshiping there. But we're helping and we feel a responsibility to make that happen because what God wants for our region is every man, woman and child to have a repeated opportunity to hear and to see and to respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether that's at the chapel or not. - Well, what's interesting to me about that is I think sort of the growing mega church impulse would be what we need 15 campuses in the city. That's what we need, right? Which then adds to your machine and the machine does get very, very complex at a certain level. I mean, I think anybody involved, we talk to people at the largest churches, there's just the level of complication and that and it gets difficult at a certain point. So your solution was, well, we'll have three and then we'll just help others get going. And so what kind of like relationship do you have with them then? Is there like, is there a financial commitment to that? Is there any kind of governance or they're totally independent and you're just there cheering them on? - The answer is yes. To every one of the scenarios you just... (laughing) So in some of the cases, so in all of those cases, there has been some sense of financial contribution. To some of them, it is still existing and is significant. Like for instance, if you plant back into the urban core of the city, then a church in the suburbs is gonna have to put out of their mind the idea of, hey, three years and yourself sustaining. You're gonna have to take that suburban mind out and realize that part of the sacrifice of the gospel is being able to push back into the city and it may mean that you are kind of helping support and partner with for a very, very long time to see the work get done there. And that's a part of, I think, the responsibility suburban to urban that we need to be able to start to think through. So we've done that. We've also helped to plant other congregations that are at this point reasonably self-sustaining. But what we have helped to provide is maybe the discipleship side, maybe the leadership development side. We've helped to invest in some of those kinds of things. And so kind of we've done all of the above and in some cases in even one congregation, all things at once. So we've done a bunch of those. - Oh, that's really cool. So there is a level of complexity to that. And yet it's not quite the same as being in 15 locations. - It's a little more fun to deal with the complex when you're giving yourself away than it is when you're trying to brand replicate yourself. It's just for whatever reason, and by the way, it's okay, anybody who's listening to us that has 15 campuses somewhere. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I'm a proponent of it. We've got three ourselves, we may add more. So I'm perfectly fine with that. But for me, there's actually more joy in the giving of yourself a way that has your name not attached to it, either your personal name or your church brand name. It's not attached to it. You're just helping to fuel the mission of God in the region that you're in. There's something that's just, there's more joy in that for me for whatever reason. - Yeah, you know, I think you're onto something there. And it's interesting. I mean, church planting was a big thing in the '80s and '90s. It still is today. There's a ton of churches being planted, but this idea, you know, Saddleback, Rick Warren did that. They have multiple campuses, but they also planted, I don't know, a huge number of churches, but I don't hear as much these days of large influential churches launching other churches. You tend to hear more of the campus replication model. Again, not that there's anything wrong with that. We have two campuses. I mean, I think it's a great thing, but yeah, I love the mission heart and the selflessness behind your model. That's really, really kind of cool. Okay, so that was part one. Tell me a little bit more about how you make an impact in the city. So how does Buffalo, people who don't go to church, interact with the chapel? Obviously through the life and witness of your members, but are you doing programs or projects in the city as you adopt this mission mindset? What else do you do? - Sure. There's a combination of things. I mean, we could get a list, some of the programmatic features of how we mobilize people toward a particular cause or a particular thing that we're supporting or we're engaging with, whether that's populating the volunteer need at the cancer 5K that's gonna be going on to raise money for Roswell Cancer Institute. Or there's a million of those things where it's really just about rubbing shoulders with and bumping lives with a bunch of people that don't know Jesus. But we're also helping to do that. We're really local church-centric people. We really help to fuel local churches to get after what they need to get after in their geography. So we're doing that at a leadership level. So just a couple of weeks ago, I convened about 50 pastors from our region and talked to them about kind of some things that God was stirring in my heart and really asking if I could have their permission to share some of those things. I mean, we paid for their lunch so they were willing to do that. - You buy pastor's lunches, it has a way of working. - So we're doing that and we're actually mobilizing many pastors of all ethnicities, of all kind of orthodox denominational streams that we could all agree fundamentally on the gospel and on the nature of God. But outside of that, there's a lot of differences in the way we worship and all of those kinds of things. But we're pulling them together and basically organizing around say Erie and Niagara County where there's 1.25 million people, how we can break that down into smaller pockets with clusters of churches working together in their particular context to see every man, woman and child have a repeated opportunity to hear and see the gospel in that particular locale. So we're actually strategizing toward that end. - And this goes to one of your other points which is that it's not gonna be the chapel that takes all of Western New York, right? And you know, probably in the first decade of my leadership, I had that idea that will take the city and then one day it occurred to me that my church is not the kingdom of God. We are a part of the kingdom of God but we are not the kingdom of God which is actually tremendous relief. You know, kind of like what you said earlier, you know, as the machine grows and grows and grows and it gets more complicated, you also end up in a place where, yeah, it's just complicated, but if you give it away, it has a way of being very rewarding. So what's the response of local churches being to that initiative? - It's been tremendous. So for instance, we've had an opportunity to, again, with a lot of these churches that we've helped to plant or to launch, we've done that in partnership because we've come to a place to realize that unity is not just for the sake of unity, that unity is actually for the sake of mission, that the reason that we are unified is for the sake of God's mission in the world. That's really kind of the point and that God has really tried to corner us into that, helping us to see that we by ourselves can't get this done. It's true that he has one bride. We don't get that right on a test. If we were at help, how many, you know, how many brides of Christ are there? Well, Jesus is not a polygamist. There is one bride, right? We know that to be true. But what's different is starting to try and act like that is so. That is a different thing altogether. And so how do we begin to act like that is true and not leave ourselves, the chapel for a long time, lived on its own island. It was able to fund its own stuff, had its own staff, you know, everything, it could just live on its own island in isolation. It could host its own conferences. It could do anything it wanted to do by itself and be self-supported. But we realized the emptiness of that and frankly the disobedience of the word that you used earlier, the disobedience of that, that that is not the design of God's church in this region. So we had to start readjusting and realigning ourselves toward an end where we felt like we were consistent with the heartbeat of God. - Okay, that's fascinating. So you talked about, you know, picking an area and mobilizing for it. You talked about cooperating with other churches that you are not the kingdom of God and you had two other aspects of that. Just go through those and break them down a little bit more. - Yeah, well, we talked about an interdependency in leadership. So, for instance, the idea there is that I can only bring what I bring. And if I am the singular head of everything that occurs everywhere, then my church, my congregation is gonna die the death of my weaknesses. They're going to live in some of my strengths, but they're gonna die the death of my weaknesses. So I need to make sure that I am actually leading interdependently with other people, as opposed to being an independent leader, being an interdependent leader. That is a part of what the body metaphor stands for, that the body itself is interdependent. There's already a head, it is the Lord Jesus. We have to find our leadership within that body. And so we have to not only do that locally, and that can be with staff or with volunteer. It doesn't really matter 'cause we actually have a co-pastor relationship now. I'm more the face and the voice in terms of the public communication side. But our co-pastor for mission advancement is a brilliant strategist. He helps to formulate kind of a lot of what we're doing, even though he's not an out front guy. But we are co-pastors together, along with kind of a pastoral leadership team that we just don't make decisions in isolation. But second, the second tier of that is, is that you have to lead interdependently within a region. You have to figure out some kind of ecclesiological understanding that everybody could come to that says, okay, we're not trying to make everybody the same church. We're not trying to make everybody look and smell and feel and worship exactly the same. But we do have to make sure that on the singular things that have made us Orthodox followers of Jesus for 2,000 years, that we are united on those things and figuring out a way to do that together in our region, whether that's through church planting, whether that's through, for instance, we did in Buffalo three years ago on Good Friday. We did an event called Good Friday Together. We packed the first Niagara Center where the Buffalo savers play. In fact, the whole thing with the body of Christ, we had seven different pastors who spoke for five minutes apiece and actually held to their time, which you knew that was. - That is a miracle. That's an act of God, that is. And each of them spoke on the seven last sayings of Jesus. We shared communion together as the body of Christ in Western New York in Buffalo. We took up an offering that we invested into the city, $100,000 that we invested into education, youth mentoring, building sustainable housing for people that couldn't afford it, things like that that we invested back into the city. And I'm telling you, we got our city's attention because the church of Jesus Christ was unified around the gospel of Jesus Christ, showing the love of Christ to the city that we lived in. - Sure, that's amazing. I mean, this is just so inspiring. This is such an under the radar story. I mean, what, three hours apart, I didn't know 98% of this. This is really, really cool what God is doing. - And it is a God thing. That's why we don't do much to promote name or brand or any of those things. We're just excited about what God is doing in our midst. - Wow, and one of the things I've thought about, when I thought about where the church is going is, can an attractional church become missional? But I think what you're showing us is the answer is yes. That you can be very missional as an attractional church because they seem to be two poles of a debate or a discussion and the attractional churches are big. - And I think a lot of attractional churches, I don't want to be stereotypical, do things for their community, but I'm not quite sure I've seen it at this depth or this level, particularly working with other churches in terms of planting them, getting different denominations together, interdependent leadership, sure, from within, but then without, which is very interesting. - Yeah, well, I mean, I think you can maybe say it this way if I'm kind of spitting this out as I'm thinking it. With an attractional church, you could actually accidental your way into being an attractional church, but you cannot accidental your way into being a missional church. - Oh, well said. - It has to be intentional. You can accidentally be attractional, but you cannot accidentally be missional. Maybe that's a better way to say it. Because ultimately, you really have to laser in on the questions that get you to the place of being missional, which is, what does God want? And what would it look like if God did what he wanted? You asked those two vision questions, and it changes everything for you because you have to let that rise up from the scripture itself and say, okay, what does God want? What is the meta narrative from Genesis to Revelation about what God's heart is for the world? And then what would it look like in my context if God was doing what he wanted? How do I cooperate with him along that line, so? - And so let's drill down a little bit more into where this vision came from. I mean, did this, you got a little bit frustrated with running a larger attractional church. You didn't like the machine part of it. It didn't spring out of that year-long Bible study, or like, where are you getting this vision for sure? It's cool. - So it was kind of a conglomeration of things just in the sovereignty of God that I'm really grateful for. And this is a part of where grace enters in, and you kind of go, thank you, Jesus, for helping me when I didn't know how to help myself. So I pressed in, and when I say a year, I didn't write a book or do anything like that about the Sermon on the Mount, I just devotionally was spending the majority of my time there over the course of the year, just saying, God, help me to see the identity of your heart for your church and for your kingdom. And that's a good place at least to begin. Of course, the Book of Ephesians is a tremendous place to read when you want to understand the purpose and nature of the church and the mission of God in his heart for the world. But this was a spot I spent a lot of time in. In the midst of that, God began to do something in my heart where I was asking, I didn't formulate the question as well as I just said a moment ago because I've been able to hone that since. But the question that I was asking is, God, what is it you want of us? Because it doesn't seem to be, just do bigger and better and live on your own island. And so between that, between starting to study that a bit at the doctoral level, just kind of thinking about these things. And between running into a friend, this messiologist that I met, who was giving words to what was going on in my heart that I did not know yet how to articulate. Have you ever had one of those times, Carrie? - Oh yeah. - Yeah. - The listeners have had the same thing where there was something going on inside of you that you knew what it was intuitively, but you didn't know how to articulate it quite yet. - Absolutely. - And he gave me words that caused my heart to explode. And then all of a sudden, my mouth started exploding because now I could articulate what was going on in my heart all along. And it was this idea that I wanted to resonate with the Missio Day, with the mission of God in the world, and align my church, my congregation with that big idea, because that is what, when God called me, that was what was going on in my heart. It wasn't to be a machine operator. That is what now gets me up in the morning when I go, I am cooperating with the God of the universe on his mission in the world. That is what gave me new life, new energy, new focus, new vision. So for any of our friends who are listening who may be struggling a little bit, if we will press back in to the heart of God and God gives us a fresh vision for his work in the world and how we can join him in that process, it transforms our energy and takes us from a place of maybe frustration and burnout to a place where we start to go, I am alive in the context of the ministry of God now. - Wow, you know, I love, thank you so much for taking us into that place of journey. But this happened while you were leading the chapel, right? - Yeah. - Yeah, so I think, I think a lot of people, if they have that kind of awakening, if they have that year with God and some doctoral studies in the mix, and you know, they feel their heart shifting, would then look around and kind of say, well, and clearly I can't do that here, we have a machine, we, this is what I, not only what someone else built, this is what I've built. And then you went and you changed what you built, which I just want to stand up and applaud right now, I think that's amazing. Now, when you changed vision, so to speak, was that hard? Like did people, like, I'm sure it's not hard for you because you're moving into your passion, but like, how did you cast vision for that to your elders? How did the people of the chapel respond? Did you have people leave? Did you have people say, well, I gave to this vision and now you're a different dude and I don't know who you are? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. All great questions, I would say this. It became easy for me because it was walking into my passion, but it was incredibly frightening. It has to be frightening because in my mind, I was thinking, hey, am I basically in a place where I'm kind of setting myself up to be canned here? If I'm gonna leave people to this person by saying, oh man, I sold you a bad bill of goods and now I'm, I don't know, I think maybe what happened was is that the grace of God so overshadowed us, I don't have a great answer for this, except for the grace of God so overshadowed us, that our people came to a place where they realized that I too am growing in grace and I too am growing in my knowledge and understanding of the heart of God and that their ability to see that actually transpire, that I didn't go at it like a bull in a China shop but tried to graciously lead people to where I felt like the heart of God was leading us, that they were willing to trust that and come along for the journey. So we actually did not lose a lot of people, we lost some, but we didn't lose a lot and in my heart breaks 'cause I don't wanna lose any. I care about all the people, even if they were frustrating or even if they were kind of stodgy or whatever, that's okay, they're people that Jesus died for and that he loves and that I love as well. And I realized, okay, if they're gonna leave, go somewhere where you can throw the whole weight of your existence behind the vision of a particular location because I know that we won't be able to reach everyone, we will need different expressions all over the place to reach everybody. So that was tough at first and a little bit scary, but we made it through there and kind of pushed through there and our kind of elder board team really got on board, our staff team really got on board because what we did is we were processing this behind the scenes for quite a while before we ever started publicly acting on that and I'll tell you what we did to begin. We began by planting the first church that the chapel had ever planted in its history. That was a catalytic moment for us that we took one of our staff team members and we planted him in North Buffalo to lead out on what was then called the chapel at Elmwood, which eventually became renovation church. And so that was the catalytic moment where our church began to see, okay, this is bigger than us. Let's do what God's called us to do and reaching every man, woman, and child. And I believe the spirit of God allowed for the resonance of his own spirit, consistent with his truth, to be clear to all of his people. And we just got on board together and started moving. - Well, you know, that's great. I love a couple of things you said and I've never quite thought about that. Sure, as a leader, if you're gonna stick around, you grow in grace, you change and you've got to lead the congregation through that change and the group. And I think if you're just open and vulnerable, like you were and said and processed privately before you talked about it publicly, I think that's really important. Those are a couple of really important change principles. Okay, so that is a really, really cool story. You've kind of blown a few paradigms out of the water for me, which is always a fun conversation, Jerry. I'm sure there's some church planters and some church leaders listening who can identify with the frustration, whether that's frustration over the machine, whether that's frustration over, you know, whatever their situation is, and they wanna make a change or they wanna become more missional in the same way that the chapel became really a missional church. What advice would you have for them? Like what would you say, hey, start here? Or by all means avoid this, like do not do that. That's a mistake. Do you have any advice? - Yeah, here's what I think. It's not easy to give advice in those scenarios 'cause you feel a little bit like a doctor who's an actor, who's trying to give actual medical advice, you know. - Right, right, that's what I think. - At some points I start to feel a little bit nervous about that, but for those that are maybe church planters or are feeling like God's calling them to plant a church or something along that line, I would say that it is, if I could counsel you in any way it would be this, start with the DNA of mission instead of the pragmatic of the model. In other words, if you can land that there, if you can say the DNA of the mission is that we've gotta be serious about our circle of accountability, that we've got a partner in the greater body of Christ, if we're gonna get the job done, that I'm gonna have to interdependently lead instead of leading alone, and that we're gonna have to develop our people's spiritual formation so that they are the mobile temples, the presence of the living God. They are the mobile temples that wherever they go God goes. If I can start to lock those down and begin to build some thinking and some strategy around that, then the model is what the model is. There's better guys than me to talk about models, and there's a lot of guys who talk really, really well about those. I am a philosophy first guy before I am a pragmatic guy, so that's my default, but I would say to them, don't just plant the church that's in your head, plant the church that's in your neighborhood, based on the DNA of mission as opposed to just a pragmatic model that you think might be good. So that would be kind of, I guess, what I would say there. - That's good advice, that's really good advice. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you and I keep forgetting, how long into your 13 year leadership did you start to make this shift? - Yeah, it was about three years. So yeah, close to three years, that was when I was kind of in what I call my dark night of the soul. St. John of the Cross said, but it was kind of in that dark night of the soul where I was just going, and what am I doing? And it was great because we were growing a lot. I think part of the issue for me was, when you start getting some attention, you start realizing you've got to answer questions. And then when I start answering questions, I have to start being self-reflective. Our church was growing so quickly and you're doing four services on a Sunday and all that's happened. I didn't have time to be very self-reflective, but then people start asking you, "Hey man, what's going on there? "What's happening?" And then you have to start self-reflecting and that's where the trouble began for me. (laughing) I actually started-- - You didn't like the answer? - Yeah man, I started asking myself questions. And that's where some of the trouble began, but I would encourage people not to push away from that. I think it's extraordinarily helpful. And you may determine, the truth is, if we're being gut-level honest, some people are not going to be able to accomplish this vision in the present context that they're in. They would do more damage to the people that are there and they would do more damage to themselves and their family if they tried to do it. And I recognize that. God's grace was apparent here. We were able to do that. And I had the grace of God and the grace of the people to be able to do what we did here. And I still thank God for it today, but I know that not everybody's in that spot. - Yeah. Jerry, you've rattled a lot of cages. I love the fact that what you're doing. And in a good way, I mean, in the best way, I think when we get provoked out of the status quo, it can be the best thing for the church. And I'm sure you have helped a lot of leaders today. So I just want to say thank you. And I know that people are going to want more. You write a blog, you have a great website at the chapel. So just tell us where to find you online. And of course, naturally, we're going to link to all this stuff in the show notes. - Sure. vchappel.com is our church address. And jerrygillis.com would be my website. I don't blog that much. I am not prodigious as some people like, say, that might be on this podcast who are prodigious and very helpful to a lot of people. I'm not quite along that same line, but occasionally I'll write about some big kind of pertinent issues. - Yeah, it's sort of a philosophical thing. And that's Jerry with a J, not a G. - Jerrygillis.com or thechappel.com, either place. - Great, and we'll link in the show notes. Jerry, just thank you so much. Thanks for the impact you're having on Western New York, City of Buffalo. And I think you've encouraged a lot of leaders who maybe are in areas that are not terribly churched and you encourage a lot of leaders who are struggling with their model. And I think you are helping move the whole debate about where the future of the church is going forward a little bit today. So thank you so, so much. - Thank you, Carrie. It was an honor to be with you. And I really appreciate what you're doing for leaders both nationally and internationally, both Canada, the US, and some of the global listeners that you have. Thanks for what you're doing to serve the church. - Thank you very much, Jerry. So grateful to Jerry for his time today and for his insight. And remember, this is church in Buffalo, New York. So not exactly a hotbed for seating mega churches. So if you're ever in the habit of saying, we get to ever grow a big church. We can never make a difference in our community. Just go to Buffalo. I've been there many, many times. And I mean, they're not a whole lot of big churches there. So when you are tempted to use an excuse as we all are, as to why God can't possibly use my church, just remember he grows them in places that you wouldn't suspect. And maybe he wants to do something through you. So Jerry's story inspires me on that level, but also super helpful in terms of me increasingly thinking, of missional as an adjective rather than a noun, like just as something that describes a church. And I think you can be missional and attractional at the same time. You make up your own mind on that, but that was a super helpful discussion. If you want more, you can go to the show notes and you can find them at carrynewhough.com/episodes62. And you'll find all the things there. And by the way, people have said like, where are the show notes? Like if I didn't write that down, just go to my blog, carrynewhough.com. And then you'll even see on the right-hand side, recent post. So if it's a recent episode, you'll find it there. You can just search the name of the guest and then you'll find it. So there's a little search thing at the bottom right and use type in Jerry Gillis and the show notes will pop up. So hopefully that's helpful. Next week, as I said, we have Tim Gupto, my friend, from Moncton, New Brunswick. Again, places that are unlikely to spawn large churches, but there are a couple out there and Tim has a fascinating story. If you've ever had to take over for someone else in leadership, you do not want to miss Tim's story. He stepped in as a senior leader, as a leader in his early 40s, for a guy who had been in that church and really was the only name associated with it for 44 years. So he tells that story. And I mean, it's just fascinating, even if that's not your situation, but if it is, you don't want to miss it. And the best way to never miss it is to subscribe. So you can do that for free on iTunes, Stitcher or Tune in Radio. And we will see you next week. Hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before. - You've been listening to the Carry New Hough Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]