In conjunction with our most recent print issue of Leadership Journal, an exploration of the State of the Pastorate, we asked a series of pastors a simple question: what is the current state of your pastorate? The full collection of essays will be updated throughout the week.
What’s the state of your pastorate? Let us know online through tweets, blogs, drawings, or smoke signals. Include the hashtag #mypastorate, and we’ll feature our favorites in a post next week.
In the fall of 2012, I joined the pastoral leadership team at Saddleback Church as the lead campus pastor in Irvine. Coming from a church planting background, I was a fish out of water in a church structure so vast, fluid, and rich with historic influence. At the same time, my wife and I were both confident that the missional values flowing from senior pastor Rick Warren deeply aligned with the passion God placed in our hearts.
Three years have passed, and I’ve learned faith-stretching and painful lessons in growing our local body. We’ve done things that may appear counter-cultural in expanding God’s kingdom: we (1) launched an extension worship site on the other side of town, (2) relocated our campus to a building nine miles away, (3) replanted a remnant core team of 300 at our old worship site, and (4) sent out two of our associate pastors to help lead these new congregations.
I would never suggest going from one congregation to three within a couple years as the blueprint of growing a church while maintaining a healthy blood pressure level.
Whew … take a deep breath. I would never suggest going from one congregation to three within a couple years as the blueprint of growing a church while maintaining a healthy blood pressure level.
The cost of kingdom growth
The price of growth often requires us to release some of our best leaders to the mission field. That’s what pastors must face when we invest energy and emotion and literally feed our ministry leaders, only to realize it’s time to send them off.
A secular study claimed that a new employee’s value equates to at least a two-year investment of training and wages. Keeping your talent is the most logical and effective way of building up the organization. However, Scripture tells us otherwise through the life of Jesus and Paul as seen in their experiences in kingdom growth and leadership development. Despite the growth pains, there are joys that come in reloading a ministry for another season so God can allow us to advance once more.
Growing pains
In the early 1980s, Saddleback Church wanted to help plant churches in nearby cities. One of the first target cities was Irvine (15 minutes north of Saddleback’s Lake Forest location). But nothing took hold until Easter 2008. The multisite church strategy fostered new vision for Saddleback Church to launch an Irvine campus. This time, within three years, Irvine blossomed into the largest regional campus.
God’s favor blessed the church with a vibrant congregation filled with passion and many strong leaders. Three services in Northwood High School’s 650-seat auditorium wasn’t enough to hold everyone. We created an outdoor overflow area with a tarp-shade and portable TV screen to create enough space to seat everyone. Things had to change quickly.
The first solution was to start an extension site across town in another high school. We hoped this would provide space and also allow others to grow into leadership roles. And we looked for a permanent home for relocating the congregation. At this point, the sweaty weight room was not cutting it for the youth ministry of almost 200 students. The facilities limited our ability to grow beyond our current size.
In 2014, God blessed us with a new church facility nine miles away and the relocation happened! Yet, there was a price to growth. We were forced to reexamine our leadership pipeline with pastoral staff and lay leaders.
Rebuilding the walls
One of the main reasons the Northwood High School location was growing so fast was due to the multitudes of new homes being built in the area. Everyone in church planting knows that new homes mean new families looking for community, and new churches can provide that.
We realized that we still needed to reach these neighborhoods. So even though we’d moved, we needed to maintain a presence in the ripe harvest fields surrounding Northwood. It also meant that we needed to rethink our leadership base to do ministry well at both locations.
For the next few months (January-March 2015), I had to intentionally ask people to “leave” our church and help serve the Northwood High School campus. Yes, I encouraged people to leave their seats of “comfort” and follow their ministry “calling” to the community where God could use them to reach others for Christ. For the last six years, these people had seen God bless their church and finally land a permanent home. Now I was asking them to go back to the days of set-up and teardown at the crack of dawn. I am not sure who felt crazier–the people hearing me say it, or me hearing me say it.
Then, in March 2015, we sent out one of our best associate pastors. He had been one of the key members who helped birth the Irvine campus in 2008. We made it official. Irvine North was born, and it had a new pastor. The people had to see that our pastoral team affirmed this mission. We wouldn’t ask people to go if we weren’t willing to let one of our key pastors go as well. Selfishly, I had so many mixed emotions. I told myself that I’d recruited this guy, hired and developed this guy, but I was so WRONG! God had found this guy, and God had used people like me to shape him for a future purpose that we never really considered until recently. While I had a short-sighted view of growing my organization, God was busy preparing this man and others to lead our newest Saddleback campus.
Such leadership redeployments don’t stop. The cost of growth means other ministry teams are looking at your best talent. One month later, another associate pastor was selected to help bring new vision to another Saddleback campus in another city. (Really God, you can take my left arm, but please, can I keep my right arm?) Again, we can be slow and near-sighted in recognizing the whole grand scheme of God’s plans. In those moments, that pain of losing your best pastors and a chunk of your congregation reminds you that this is NOT your bride that he died for. While losing colleagues and team members may sting, but you cling to the hope that God knows what he’s doing.
The Aftermath
So what happened to our church after the relocation and the relaunch? Approximately 70-75 percent of our congregation made the move to Irvine South, and 25-30 percent of the members stay backed to help re-launch the Irvine North campus, with some being key members of the original campus.
Next, I was faced with who would now lead the new fledging campus. It would require a lead pastor and a worship leader. Fortunately, we’ve been developing both positions in our extension site, and they were willing to take on the new challenge.
While in some ways, the division felt like loss, the narrative didn’t stop there. Before the North/South “split,” our congregation averaged about 1,800 in attendance. We had outgrown the high school facilities and needed to find a new home. Eight months later, the two campuses in the same town are now averaging about 2,300 in attendance. That net gain of 500 new faces experiencing the Lord’s love is a miracle of God’s grace.
Any church planter would give his right and left arm to see that type of growth. Sending our best people also stretched our members’ faith by asking them to fill in various leadership positions. Attendance grew, service increased, and the peoples’ spiritual faith stretched. What more could any pastor ask for?
While it’s crazy to think that dividing human resources, financial investments, and leadership personnel would help build the body of Christ, God asks that we trust him. “Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this” (Ps. 37:5). God’s way can seem uncomfortable and unconventional, but I hope you experience the same joy I have in releasing your best for God’s mission.
Kevin Nguyen is lead campus pastor at Saddleback’s Irvine South campus in California.
