Joy Netanya Thompson: You’ve been described as a futurist, and I’m eager to hear what you think about the future of the church. It seems like we’re at a historical, threshold moment in the church, where it’s obvious something must change but the “whether” and the “how” are not quite as obvious. For this issue of FULLER magazine, we’ve been framing the question about the future of the church with the words “renewing the church.” To start us off, what comes to your mind or your gut immediately when you hear the phrase “renewing the church”?
Dave Gibbons: My gut says it’s renewable and. Renewal is not enough. There needs to be an overhaul, a systemic transformation of the church. Right now there’s a huge reckoning occurring that’s bringing attention to things that should have been noted decades before. But it was difficult because of the success that the church had, especially the evangelical church, in reaching a homogeneous crowd. Illusions were created from our success in growing our churches numerically. But the reality is that the church was becoming more distant from the culture. More out of touch. Our language, metrics, analogies, processes, priorities were misaligned to what originally was the purpose of the church. I think the pandemic exposed our weaknesses—that our metrics were awry, and our hierarchicalism, our patriarchy, our racism, our misogyny … everything is being exposed. And that’s why this generation doesn’t want anything to do with the church. Not only are they leaving and not interested in the church because of these things but some also think about who Jesus is and don’t see what the church does as matching up. Like for example, loving the other or the misfit. We say we love the most marginalized—embodied today in refugees, immigrants, the undocumented, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community—but we have internal gates so they really don’t have access to all the resources of the church; they are not seen as equals.
JNT: Speaking of the pandemic, you’ve said before that your church, Newsong, had an easier time pivoting when the pandemic hit than some other churches. You credit this to a major value shift that happened 10 or 15 years ago, when you stopped focusing on the growth of the church and started focusing on the metrics of how you could change the community around you. It sounds like you were ahead of the curve, in terms of how the church must change to renew itself for today’s world. Tell me more about the shift that happened at Newsong.
DG: What I realized is that the emphasis on the church was so much on hardware, on the size of churches—small, big, micro, multisite, whatever it is—when really it’s an operating system, specifically in how it relates to serving people and the unique dreams God has given them. It’s about culture, leadership, values, beliefs, authentic local outcomes, language, and access to resources. The ecosystem is also about easy user access, simplicity, elegance, and beauty. It’s democratic in a way that the people can engage with it. There are no hierarchies. It’s different from the empire mindset of conquest, which was rooted in previous Christian organizations after World War II. Not to demean what they each did; perhaps it fit the cultural moment. But if you look at Christ’s way of working with people, he led with gentleness, humility, and love.
And then with this new operating system, the metrics of our church were different. While God loves the whole world, he showed us how to love the one. The way to reach the many is through the one. Instead of a self-contained destination center to keep people from cradle to grave, we were called to be more like a boutique school launching people into the world. Newsong started shifting from the Disneyland model of church to more of a practitioner academy model. The processes that we created focused on the development and dreams of the individual congregant or the community, versus just the dream of senior leadership. We flipped the focus from people serving the senior leadership’s vision to senior leadership serving others’ dreams. So our classes and training, our culture, and our teachings started revolving around the question, “how do we help sufficiently equip you into your dreams?” versus, “come join us in our dream to impact the city and the world.”
JNT: I really see how that fits into the culture right now, at least in the US, with design principles driving so many successful initiatives and products, and also the booming coaching industry. Have you had any pushback about how individualist this framework is?
DG: It starts with your intrinsic need as an individual. Usually that’s why you’re coming for the experience or the church. You have this desperation or are on this journey to figure out why you’re here in the world. But in order to be healthy and even to gain clarity of your own individual vision, you have to be in community. So what does community look like? It may not look like the typical church that we know today. We call our community groups ‘havens’ because I wanted a word that would transfer into the marketplace. A haven is a group that’s committed to do life together and it’s centered around three aspects: eating together, which is like communion; meaningful conversations; and play, which could also be working together. Eat, talk, and play. This focus on relationships in community also needs that very practical training of how to relate to one another through conflict, mistakes, hurts, and betrayals. Even people who disagree with you theologically. How do we become a third way group where we can have a different set of interpretations but still be civil and caring? We can’t be what we need to be without one another. Then from being an individual haven, the goal is for people to become reproducing hubs where they are resource centers for others focused on loving and developing others, helping to launch people into their dreams.
JNT: I read that a strength of yours is to descend into a chaotic environment, and see patterns and solutions there. The past few years could certainly be described as chaotic for the world and for the church. What patterns or solutions are you seeing, especially in terms of the church?
DG: What’s becoming clear to me in the midst of the chaos is that we have to be governed more by design principles than by rigid rules and laws. It’s like the way Jesus ruled his life. It wasn’t so much by the law as it was by the ethic, you know, the Matthew 5–7 ethic, which takes a little bit more complexity of thought because it’s more integrative. You’re not going to be black and white with everything. So Jesus broke the Sabbath, and he would heal and touch people that he wasn’t supposed to touch. To me, it’s seeing that it’s not just about the laws that we declare that make us feel more holy or astute because we have exegeted a text. Instead, it’s about understanding the higher ethic Jesus lived his life by, which was love. There’s so much emphasis on these dividing lines, when Jesus was much more embracing. I don’t agree with a lot of the thoughts coming from the more rigid evangelical subculture, but I want to be able to sit at the table with them. That’s what I call the third way. It’s the approach where you may be vehemently against me on how I think about guns or I may be against you on how I think about sexuality and gender, but can we still sit together and respect each other, can we still work together for the common good, treat each other like we are still children of God?
The third way is not about “either/or” but “and.” It’s about loving and allowing mystery to exist. Much like in our marriages and any healthy relationship.
JNT: Are you seeing any examples of renewing the church that are
happening now?
DG: I’m seeing some really exciting stuff happening in pockets throughout South America. The future leaders and culture setters will be from the East and South of our world. Asia has been on the rise and will continue to produce new and exciting innovations around design, art, culture, community, and even spirituality. And much of the creativity is happening in the margins of these places. Not just in primary cities but secondary cities. Renewal is not happening in the central empire structures, because currently they are in survival and preservation mode focused on resurrecting old culture, forms, and metrics that don’t work today. But a new creative class, a new generation is emerging. I see it in the creative class of young people, the artists I see, the music I see in the fringe cultures in Asia and South America. We’re currently in the Dark Ages right before the Renaissance. The shift is seeing this moment as an opportunity. The same energy that it takes to worry and be stressed out can be turned into fuel to pursue the new opportunities that have emerged.
Specifically, I see this with some leaders I’m working with in the creative class. Several of the companies I’m working with are creating cultures of love and people development, not just profit generation. They are triple bottom line companies that care about profit, making a difference, and stewarding the earth. They function like a church community in that they are equipping people but are taking away the religious language and are transparent about how and what they do with resources. And now what’s cool is these leaders have also personally embraced the deep change needed in their own lives and families. They’ve become better parents, better leaders at home—leaders who are loving, listening, and understanding.
One company, which is a leading financial firm in Silicon Valley, has added a value of justice. What successful company do you know that adds a value of justice? And this company is now building an incubator of leaders, which are essentially like rabbinical schools or residency programs that we would have in our churches or in our academies, but done within
a corporate structure.
One of these companies also has concierge services, which are essentially like pastors who are resourcing leaders to fulfill their dreams. But they’re using a language that allows them to meet people where they are, and then provoking those they work with to think about the deeper questions of life. I’ve had more spiritual conversations than ever before in these companies. “Spiritual” meaning not so much “religious” but transcendance, purpose, meaning, and significance. I’m seeing how one leader, one company, can have more influence than multiple megachurches—especially if they think about how to care for their employees, customers, and their local environment. Literally, one company I’ve seen is influencing hundreds of millions of people. Again, not that large numbers are more important, but if you are looking at numbers, then this is the way. Love one well and equip them to love others in the ecosystem God has placed them in. What if our leaders could use what we called “discipleship” in the church and see it as people development unleashed in the workplace? The very people we’re trying to get into our churches we now have access to, but we have to develop a normal language and move away from bait and switch approaches, where we care for people regardless of their belief or resistance.
JNT: Last question: If you could change one thing about the church right now, where every single church—let’s say in the US—would make this change, what would it be?
DG: I would say for churches to learn to love the outsider.
I was introduced to this leader in New York at a special event. I noticed her interest in what I do and an openness to talk about things that were meaningful. When she asked me if I could help her and her company, internally I asked God how I could help her. In the past, I would think of some way for her to accept Christ and then eventually maneuver her somehow into my Christian orbit. But I’ve always felt like this way was disingenuous. Asking God what to do, I thought I heard an answer: “Find out what her dream is and help her to achieve it.” The answer seemed to be from God because I think that’s what God would do. Jesus only did what he saw his Father doing. His life was a life responding to the Father’s initiative, not making things happen. He led with love.
Practically, today, ask yourself, who’s the outsider in your neighborhood? Who is the one that nobody loves, the outcast? That’s where you start. Not with the empire approach, but with the approach to love unconditionally. It’s a love imbued with gentleness and humility. Being bold is not standing up against the government but more about being bold in love, serving others with no agenda. Go with that honest intent, not to somehow woo them into your church orbit. Go spend time with that person and learn how to love them by listening to them, understanding them. If you can make that your main ambition, then you probably will really get to know God and experience a life that is filled with joy and a wonderful flourishing no matter how hard life is around you.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dave Gibbons is an advisor, speaker, and author. He is the lead pastor of Newsong in Santa Ana, California, and founder of X, a global network of leaders whose mission is to help people discover purpose and meaning. He is the author of several books, including most recently Xealots: Defying the Gravity of Normality.
Joy Netanya Thompson (MAT ’12) is Fuller’s editorial director and senior writer.
Joy Netanya Thompson: You’ve been described as a futurist, and I’m eager to hear what you think about the future of the church. It seems like we’re at a historical, threshold moment in the church, where it’s obvious something must change but the “whether” and the “how” are not quite as obvious. For this issue of FULLER magazine, we’ve been framing the question about the future of the church with the words “renewing the church.” To start us off, what comes to your mind or your gut immediately when you hear the phrase “renewing the church”?
Dave Gibbons: My gut says it’s renewable and. Renewal is not enough. There needs to be an overhaul, a systemic transformation of the church. Right now there’s a huge reckoning occurring that’s bringing attention to things that should have been noted decades before. But it was difficult because of the success that the church had, especially the evangelical church, in reaching a homogeneous crowd. Illusions were created from our success in growing our churches numerically. But the reality is that the church was becoming more distant from the culture. More out of touch. Our language, metrics, analogies, processes, priorities were misaligned to what originally was the purpose of the church. I think the pandemic exposed our weaknesses—that our metrics were awry, and our hierarchicalism, our patriarchy, our racism, our misogyny … everything is being exposed. And that’s why this generation doesn’t want anything to do with the church. Not only are they leaving and not interested in the church because of these things but some also think about who Jesus is and don’t see what the church does as matching up. Like for example, loving the other or the misfit. We say we love the most marginalized—embodied today in refugees, immigrants, the undocumented, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community—but we have internal gates so they really don’t have access to all the resources of the church; they are not seen as equals.
JNT: Speaking of the pandemic, you’ve said before that your church, Newsong, had an easier time pivoting when the pandemic hit than some other churches. You credit this to a major value shift that happened 10 or 15 years ago, when you stopped focusing on the growth of the church and started focusing on the metrics of how you could change the community around you. It sounds like you were ahead of the curve, in terms of how the church must change to renew itself for today’s world. Tell me more about the shift that happened at Newsong.
DG: What I realized is that the emphasis on the church was so much on hardware, on the size of churches—small, big, micro, multisite, whatever it is—when really it’s an operating system, specifically in how it relates to serving people and the unique dreams God has given them. It’s about culture, leadership, values, beliefs, authentic local outcomes, language, and access to resources. The ecosystem is also about easy user access, simplicity, elegance, and beauty. It’s democratic in a way that the people can engage with it. There are no hierarchies. It’s different from the empire mindset of conquest, which was rooted in previous Christian organizations after World War II. Not to demean what they each did; perhaps it fit the cultural moment. But if you look at Christ’s way of working with people, he led with gentleness, humility, and love.
And then with this new operating system, the metrics of our church were different. While God loves the whole world, he showed us how to love the one. The way to reach the many is through the one. Instead of a self-contained destination center to keep people from cradle to grave, we were called to be more like a boutique school launching people into the world. Newsong started shifting from the Disneyland model of church to more of a practitioner academy model. The processes that we created focused on the development and dreams of the individual congregant or the community, versus just the dream of senior leadership. We flipped the focus from people serving the senior leadership’s vision to senior leadership serving others’ dreams. So our classes and training, our culture, and our teachings started revolving around the question, “how do we help sufficiently equip you into your dreams?” versus, “come join us in our dream to impact the city and the world.”
JNT: I really see how that fits into the culture right now, at least in the US, with design principles driving so many successful initiatives and products, and also the booming coaching industry. Have you had any pushback about how individualist this framework is?
DG: It starts with your intrinsic need as an individual. Usually that’s why you’re coming for the experience or the church. You have this desperation or are on this journey to figure out why you’re here in the world. But in order to be healthy and even to gain clarity of your own individual vision, you have to be in community. So what does community look like? It may not look like the typical church that we know today. We call our community groups ‘havens’ because I wanted a word that would transfer into the marketplace. A haven is a group that’s committed to do life together and it’s centered around three aspects: eating together, which is like communion; meaningful conversations; and play, which could also be working together. Eat, talk, and play. This focus on relationships in community also needs that very practical training of how to relate to one another through conflict, mistakes, hurts, and betrayals. Even people who disagree with you theologically. How do we become a third way group where we can have a different set of interpretations but still be civil and caring? We can’t be what we need to be without one another. Then from being an individual haven, the goal is for people to become reproducing hubs where they are resource centers for others focused on loving and developing others, helping to launch people into their dreams.
JNT: I read that a strength of yours is to descend into a chaotic environment, and see patterns and solutions there. The past few years could certainly be described as chaotic for the world and for the church. What patterns or solutions are you seeing, especially in terms of the church?
DG: What’s becoming clear to me in the midst of the chaos is that we have to be governed more by design principles than by rigid rules and laws. It’s like the way Jesus ruled his life. It wasn’t so much by the law as it was by the ethic, you know, the Matthew 5–7 ethic, which takes a little bit more complexity of thought because it’s more integrative. You’re not going to be black and white with everything. So Jesus broke the Sabbath, and he would heal and touch people that he wasn’t supposed to touch. To me, it’s seeing that it’s not just about the laws that we declare that make us feel more holy or astute because we have exegeted a text. Instead, it’s about understanding the higher ethic Jesus lived his life by, which was love. There’s so much emphasis on these dividing lines, when Jesus was much more embracing. I don’t agree with a lot of the thoughts coming from the more rigid evangelical subculture, but I want to be able to sit at the table with them. That’s what I call the third way. It’s the approach where you may be vehemently against me on how I think about guns or I may be against you on how I think about sexuality and gender, but can we still sit together and respect each other, can we still work together for the common good, treat each other like we are still children of God?
The third way is not about “either/or” but “and.” It’s about loving and allowing mystery to exist. Much like in our marriages and any healthy relationship.
JNT: Are you seeing any examples of renewing the church that are
happening now?
DG: I’m seeing some really exciting stuff happening in pockets throughout South America. The future leaders and culture setters will be from the East and South of our world. Asia has been on the rise and will continue to produce new and exciting innovations around design, art, culture, community, and even spirituality. And much of the creativity is happening in the margins of these places. Not just in primary cities but secondary cities. Renewal is not happening in the central empire structures, because currently they are in survival and preservation mode focused on resurrecting old culture, forms, and metrics that don’t work today. But a new creative class, a new generation is emerging. I see it in the creative class of young people, the artists I see, the music I see in the fringe cultures in Asia and South America. We’re currently in the Dark Ages right before the Renaissance. The shift is seeing this moment as an opportunity. The same energy that it takes to worry and be stressed out can be turned into fuel to pursue the new opportunities that have emerged.
Specifically, I see this with some leaders I’m working with in the creative class. Several of the companies I’m working with are creating cultures of love and people development, not just profit generation. They are triple bottom line companies that care about profit, making a difference, and stewarding the earth. They function like a church community in that they are equipping people but are taking away the religious language and are transparent about how and what they do with resources. And now what’s cool is these leaders have also personally embraced the deep change needed in their own lives and families. They’ve become better parents, better leaders at home—leaders who are loving, listening, and understanding.
One company, which is a leading financial firm in Silicon Valley, has added a value of justice. What successful company do you know that adds a value of justice? And this company is now building an incubator of leaders, which are essentially like rabbinical schools or residency programs that we would have in our churches or in our academies, but done within
a corporate structure.
One of these companies also has concierge services, which are essentially like pastors who are resourcing leaders to fulfill their dreams. But they’re using a language that allows them to meet people where they are, and then provoking those they work with to think about the deeper questions of life. I’ve had more spiritual conversations than ever before in these companies. “Spiritual” meaning not so much “religious” but transcendance, purpose, meaning, and significance. I’m seeing how one leader, one company, can have more influence than multiple megachurches—especially if they think about how to care for their employees, customers, and their local environment. Literally, one company I’ve seen is influencing hundreds of millions of people. Again, not that large numbers are more important, but if you are looking at numbers, then this is the way. Love one well and equip them to love others in the ecosystem God has placed them in. What if our leaders could use what we called “discipleship” in the church and see it as people development unleashed in the workplace? The very people we’re trying to get into our churches we now have access to, but we have to develop a normal language and move away from bait and switch approaches, where we care for people regardless of their belief or resistance.
JNT: Last question: If you could change one thing about the church right now, where every single church—let’s say in the US—would make this change, what would it be?
DG: I would say for churches to learn to love the outsider.
I was introduced to this leader in New York at a special event. I noticed her interest in what I do and an openness to talk about things that were meaningful. When she asked me if I could help her and her company, internally I asked God how I could help her. In the past, I would think of some way for her to accept Christ and then eventually maneuver her somehow into my Christian orbit. But I’ve always felt like this way was disingenuous. Asking God what to do, I thought I heard an answer: “Find out what her dream is and help her to achieve it.” The answer seemed to be from God because I think that’s what God would do. Jesus only did what he saw his Father doing. His life was a life responding to the Father’s initiative, not making things happen. He led with love.
Practically, today, ask yourself, who’s the outsider in your neighborhood? Who is the one that nobody loves, the outcast? That’s where you start. Not with the empire approach, but with the approach to love unconditionally. It’s a love imbued with gentleness and humility. Being bold is not standing up against the government but more about being bold in love, serving others with no agenda. Go with that honest intent, not to somehow woo them into your church orbit. Go spend time with that person and learn how to love them by listening to them, understanding them. If you can make that your main ambition, then you probably will really get to know God and experience a life that is filled with joy and a wonderful flourishing no matter how hard life is around you.
*This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dave Gibbons is an advisor, speaker, and author. He is the lead pastor of Newsong in Santa Ana, California, and founder of X, a global network of leaders whose mission is to help people discover purpose and meaning. He is the author of several books, including most recently Xealots: Defying the Gravity of Normality.
Joy Netanya Thompson (MAT ’12) is Fuller’s editorial director and senior writer.
Kenneth C. Ulmer, senior pastor of Faithful Central Bible Church, talks about the renewed life and mission toward which God is calling the church today.
