Looks Like Hope. Feels Like Home.

One of the most significant mission fields in America isn’t found in a city known for hostility toward Christianity. It’s found in suburbia. Across communities like ours, there are millions of educated, successful, thoughtful people who haven’t stopped asking spiritual questions. They’ve simply stopped believing the local church is the place to ask them. Some quietly walked away after painful church experiences. Others watched their faith slowly unravel in college classrooms, online conversations, or through the ordinary complexity of life. Many haven’t rejected Jesus at all. They’ve rejected the version of Christianity they’ve encountered.

For years, we watched the church work incredibly hard to make Sunday gatherings more engaging, more excellent, more compelling. Those things matter. We care deeply about excellence ourselves. But somewhere along the way, we became convinced that production wasn’t the problem we were trying to solve. The deeper question was this: What if the local church was the first place that came to mind when someone had questions about their life and faith? What if a person wrestling with doubt instinctively thought of a church before they thought of Reddit, YouTube, or TikTok? What if people could bring their hardest questions without feeling like they first needed to hide them? That conviction became the foundation of Nuvo Church. Our mission has always been simple: creating space for people to explore and experience Jesus.

About the Role

When we planted, I assumed the greatest challenge would be figuring out how to reach skeptical people. Five years later, we’ve learned something different. Reaching skeptical people was never primarily an evangelism challenge. It was a leadership challenge. Creating a church where people feel safe enough to explore Jesus first required us to become the kind of leaders who could build that kind of culture – and that discovery has shaped everything since.

What Has Happened Since

We Learned That Questions Were Never the Problem

When we planted Nuvo, we believed there were far more people interested in exploring Jesus than the church often assumed. Five years later, we’re even more convinced of that. We’ve watched people who described themselves as agnostic get baptized. We’ve seen families who had quietly drifted from faith begin rebuilding spiritual rhythms around a kitchen table. We’ve celebrated stories of addiction overcome, marriages restored, kids discovering faith for the first time, and adults rediscovering a Jesus they thought they had left behind years ago.

Those stories matter deeply. But if we’re honest, they weren’t the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was discovering that the barriers keeping people from Jesus weren’t the barriers we expected. Early on, we assumed skepticism was primarily an intellectual challenge. We thought people needed better answers to better questions. What we discovered was far more personal. Many people weren’t carrying philosophical objections nearly as much as they were carrying disappointment. Those conversations reshaped how we thought about ministry. Instead of asking, “How do we answer every objection?” we began asking, “What kind of church would someone trust enough to share the objection in the first place?” That subtle shift changed more than our communication. It changed our culture. Every honest question meant someone hadn’t stopped searching. Every difficult conversation became an opportunity to build trust instead of simply providing information.

Over time, we also realized that hospitality extends far beyond coffee, parking teams, or a welcoming smile at the front door. Hospitality became the posture of our entire church. Hospitality is someone who disagrees with us and still feeling honored by the people of our church. Can someone wrestle with faith without feeling rushed? In many ways, hospitality became our apologetic… not because relationships replace truth, but because relationships often determine whether someone is willing to keep listening long enough to discover it.

We also became convinced that reaching skeptical people isn’t about minimizing theology. In fact, we found the opposite to be true. People weren’t asking for a shallower faith. They were looking for a faith strong enough to withstand honest scrutiny, one that could confidently proclaim the historic Christian faith while remaining humble enough to admit that not every question has a simple answer.

Perhaps the greatest shift, though, was realizing that our responsibility was never to convince people Christianity is true. Our responsibility was to remove as many unnecessary obstacles as possible so people could encounter Jesus for themselves. For years, we assumed our job was moving people toward Jesus. Increasingly, we’ve come to believe much of our work is removing whatever keeps people from seeing Him clearly. It’s a subtle, but powerful shift in approach. Sometimes those obstacles are intellectual. More often, they’re relational: fear, shame, distrust, past experience, misunderstanding, or simply the assumption that church isn’t a place where someone like them could belong. When those barriers fall away, something beautiful happens. People don’t simply become more open to church. They become more open to Jesus. Creating space for people to explore faith was never about lowering the bar of discipleship. It’s about removing everything that unnecessarily obscures the One we’re inviting people to follow.

Lessons Learned

The Church We Were Building Was Also Building Us

One of the assumptions we carried into church planting was that if we could better understand skeptical people, we’d become better at reaching them. That certainly proved true. But what surprised us was that God seemed just as interested in shaping us as He was in shaping the church we were planting. The vision never changed. We still wanted to create space for people to explore and experience Jesus. What changed was our understanding of what kind of leadership that vision required.

• Your first strategy usually isn’t your final strategy. Like most church plants, we began with our plans. We had developed launch strategies, communication plans, discipleship pathways, assumptions about what would resonate with the people we hoped to reach. But before we ever even moved to the city, COVID adjusted everything we had planned to set into motion. We built digitally before we ever met in person. We cold called people in our city and built a launch team of people before we ever arrived in Columbus. We often asked, “What’s the best bad idea we can come up with?” and then acted in faith. Some of those ideas worked. Some didn’t. Over time we realized that healthy leadership isn’t defined by protecting yesterday’s strategy. It’s defined by protecting the mission while continually rethinking the methods. The mission never changed: creating space for people to explore and experience Jesus. The methods changed constantly, and church planting taught us to hold our convictions tightly and our strategies loosely. Our first strategy was never meant to be our final one. It was simply our first act of obedience.
• Leadership is emotional stewardship. Perhaps the greatest leadership lesson had nothing to do with preaching, vision casting, or organizational strategy. It had everything to do with emotional health. People borrow far more than a leader’s vision. They borrow a leader’s emotional posture. If leaders become defensive, organizations eventually become defensive. If leaders become anxious, anxiety quietly spreads through the culture. We discovered that creating a church where skeptical people feel emotionally safe begins with leaders who are emotionally healthy themselves. That doesn’t mean pretending everything is okay. It means refusing to let fear become contagious, and absorbing ambiguity without transferring the weight of uncertainty. There were seasons when plans changed, when doors closed, when the future felt unclear. I could tell you the story of a Saturday night we found out the roof collapsed in our venue and we pivoted to go portable in two weeks. Our people didn’t expect perfection. They simply needed leaders who kept believing God’s faithfulness was greater than our uncertainty.
• Faithfulness usually looks less impressive than we imagine. When people picture church planting, they picture launch Sundays, packed rooms, and remarkable stories of growth. Those moments are beautiful, but they aren’t where all ministry happens. The ministry that multiplies is what happens person to person. One of our values is: One person at a time. No matter how much we scale, the focus becomes faithfulness with the person in front of me. When you lead and develop an army of people, volunteers, and staff who are focused on the person in front of them, authentic ministry becomes contagious. It expands and culture expands in very formative ways. These ordinary moments became the places where God quietly did extraordinary work.
• Resilience Allows Us To Experience The Miraculous. If you had asked us five years ago what would most shape Nuvo Church, we probably would have pointed to a ministry model, a communication strategy, or a different approach to reaching the skeptic. Today, our answer is very different. It is resilience. Not resilience defined as stubborn determination or simply refusing to quit. Rather, resilience became the discipline of continuing to trust God without allowing uncertainty to determine who we became. Church planting has a way of confronting every illusion of control. There were seasons when plans changed overnight. Doors we expected to open remained firmly shut. Opportunities disappeared. The future often felt less certain than we wanted it to. In those moments, we discovered that resilience isn’t pretending everything is okay. It’s choosing not to surrender hope before God has finished writing the story. One idea has quietly become a guiding conviction for our leadership team: We will refuse to narrate our future through the lens of our current circumstances. That isn’t positive thinking. It is our theology. Because if Jesus really is building His church, then today’s obstacles never get the final word.

That conviction reshaped the way we led. We realized that one of the greatest responsibilities of leadership isn’t simply making decisions. It’s helping people interpret reality. Every church eventually walks through seasons that don’t make immediate sense. When they do, people rarely ask, “What happened?” The questions seem to weigh much more. Leadership is the ministry of interpretation. It’s helping people interpret present circumstances through the faithfulness of God rather than interpreting God’s faithfulness through present circumstances. Instead of simply communicating information, we continually tell the story of what we believe God was doing beneath the surface. People don’t simply need direction. They need perspective.

And maybe that’s where resilience becomes so important. Without resilience, it’s easy to assume that every closed door is failure. Every delay is God’s absence. Every disappointment is the end of the story. But resilient leaders leave room for mystery. That mystery paves the way for faith… especially within the skeptic. It leaves room for an all-powerful God to still surprise us beyond the ordinary. Looking back, some of the moments that felt most disappointing at the time eventually became the very places where we experienced God’s faithfulness most clearly. Not because every circumstance suddenly became easy. But because resilience kept us in the story long enough to watch God write the next chapter.

I’ve become convinced that many leaders miss the miraculous because they leave too early. Not necessarily by resigning. Sometimes they leave emotionally. They become cynical. Protective. Reactive. They stop expecting God to move before He actually does. Resilience refuses to do that. Resilience continues showing up. It keeps believing. It keeps trusting. And it keeps creating space for people to explore and experience Jesus.