The Original Burden: When the Church Didn’t Follow the People
Urban Islands Project was the label of the mission in the first Exponential Shark Tank experience. This is the story of the unfinished journey from Urban Islands Project to the Next Wave Community and beyond.
The origin of the Urban Islands Project was not theoretical. It was observational – and deeply unsettling. I saw it happening with my own eyes. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, population patterns in the United States followed a predictable trajectory. As suburbs expanded, people moved outward from city centers into newly developing communities. Churches followed the people. Suburban church planting became the dominant model, and it made perfect sense for the era.
But by the 1990s and early 2000s, something began to shift. In city after city, population began flowing back into urban cores. Downtown districts were revitalizing. Young professionals were returning. Immigrant communities were growing. Walkable neighborhoods were regaining appeal. Density was increasing in the very places where it had once declined.
And yet the church, broadly speaking, did not follow at the same pace. The result was an increasingly odd and concerning reality: In many urban centers, as population density increased, the presence of the church decreased.
More people. Less church.
That disconnect lodged in my spirit and raised some questions that would not go away: Why wasn’t the church following the people back into the city? And what about the faithful city churches that never left? Had our church planting practices become calibrated for yesterday’s population patterns rather than today’s mission field?
Reading the Demographic Signals
The concern that eventually led to the Urban Islands Project experiment was not merely anecdotal. For decades, researchers have documented the large-scale population shift from American city centers to suburbs during the second half of the 20th century. Between roughly 1950 and 2000, most urban neighborhoods in the United States steadily lost population to suburban development, fundamentally reshaping the geography of American life.¹ The expansion of interstate highways, mortgage policy, and employment decentralization further reinforced suburban growth during this period.²
Yet by the late 1990s and early 2000s, signs of partial urban revival began to emerge. Brookings Institution research documented renewed demand for housing in many downtown districts and close-in neighborhoods.³ Studies also showed a growing concentration of young, college-educated adults moving into central city neighborhoods across major U.S. metropolitan areas during the 2000–2010 decade.⁴
Denver reflected this pattern in a meaningful way. Between 2000 and 2020, the city and county of Denver added more than 115,000 residents – a substantial share of that growth occurring in close-in neighborhoods and the urban core.⁵
Taken together, these dynamics created a complex demographic reality: decades of suburban momentum followed by selective but meaningful re-urbanization. It was within this shifting landscape that my concern grew – that the church’s planting patterns were still largely calibrated for the suburban expansion era rather than the emerging urban opportunity.
At the time, however, I was living in Springfield, Mo. – not exactly an urban laboratory. I had working theories about why this gap existed. But I did not want to build a strategy based purely on theory.
I needed to see it up close.
Moving Toward the Problem
Rather than simply analyze urban ministry from a distance, after much prayer and deliberation, my wife and I made a decision that would shape the next decade of our work: We would move into a major city and attempt something that, at the time, felt both exhilarating and impossible.
The goal was straightforward but bold – to mobilize 10 church planting teams to launch neighborhood-focused churches simultaneously within the same city.
The conviction behind this approach was simple but strategic:
- Cities are not monolithic.
- Neighborhoods have distinct cultures.
- One large attractional model would not adequately reach the complexity of the city.
- A distributed, neighborhood-based strategy might give us a clue as to the shape of urban planting.
Denver became the proving ground.
In 2014 and 2015, we successfully mobilized seven church planting teams to converge on the Denver metro area. That convergence alone became a significant learning laboratory.
The concept was simple. Recruit planters from different organizations who were all called to the same city. Facilitate a learning community environment where the planters could learn from each other in real time. In addition to real time learning, the community would provide emotional and spiritual support for the planters are they took on the rigors of starting new faith communities in urban places.
Each team entered a different neighborhood context. Each faced unique challenges. Each was forced to wrestle with the realities of ministry in environments where traditional assumptions did not always translate.
Encouraged by what we were learning, we later repeated similar convergence efforts in:
- Minneapolis/St. Paul
- New York City
- Nashville
Each city sharpened our understanding. Each planting team surfaced new insights. Each context exposed both the strengths and limitations of our inherited church planting instincts.
This was the beating heart of the Urban Islands Project.
A Story from the Denver Front Lines
One Denver planting team – led by Matthew Collver and his wife, Elora – captured the dynamic we were seeing across multiple neighborhoods in multiple cities.
After relocating to Denver as part of the Urban Islands Project convergence in 2015, Matthew and Elora focused their efforts in the Park Hill neighborhood, launching what would become The Hills Church. Like many capable planters, they initially anticipated momentum building through familiar launch strategies: strong preview gatherings, steady attendance growth, and early financial traction.
But within the first year, the neighborhood began to tell them a different story.
Relationships took time to form. Trust had to be earned through consistent presence rather than event-driven momentum only. Early gatherings were smaller and more relational than programmatic. Financial support grew more gradually than many suburban models would predict.
What might easily have been interpreted as underperformance became, instead, a moment of discernment.
Rather than forcing the neighborhood to conform to inherited expectations, Matthew and Elora began to adapt their approach. One of the most significant milestone moments came when The Hills Church made a strategic shift: instead of relying solely on a weekly large gathering, they began alternating between microchurch expressions and larger corporate gatherings every other week.
This adjustment better matched the relational rhythms of their context. It allowed deeper neighborhood engagement while still maintaining a broader worship touchpoint.
Over time, the fruit of that adaptive posture became increasingly clear. Today, The Hills Church functions as an embedded faith community led by multiple leaders and expressed through gatherings in homes and schools throughout Park Hill. The church now includes more than 200 parishioners connected through approximately 10–15 microchurches across the neighborhood. What began with traditional launch expectations has matured into a distributed, neighborhood-rooted ministry presence and a sustainable community of faith in an underserved part of the city.
Their journey reinforced a critical insight that surfaced repeatedly across the Urban Islands teams:
Fruitfulness in complex urban contexts often requires a different scorecard than success in more homogeneous suburban environments.
What We Discovered in the Field
Planting multiple churches in challenging urban contexts has a way of clarifying reality very quickly.
One of the most important discoveries was that many capable leaders struggled not because of calling or character, but because they were attempting to apply suburban planting instincts in environments that operated by very different rules.
We began to notice recurring friction points:
- Launch expectations were often unrealistic
- Financial ramp-up was slower
- Trust-building took longer
- Community engagement required deeper presence
- Traditional success metrics created unhealthy pressure
Over time, these field observations crystallized into what eventually became known as the 12 Mind Shifts required for effective ministry in complex, non-ideal settings.
These shifts were not developed in a vacuum. They were forged in the lived experience of planters navigating real neighborhoods, real financial pressures, and real cultural complexity across multiple cities.
The framework is articulated in my book, Next Wave – Discovering the 21st Century Church, where we outlined the internal recalibrations leaders must make when traditional church expressions struggle to gain traction in emerging contexts.
In many ways, the Urban Islands Project accomplished something deeply valuable even where it fell short numerically. Outcomes varied by city and team. But we gained something that has continued to shape the movement: Clarity about the adaptive mindset required for 21st-century church multiplication.
Sidebar: The 12 Mind Shifts for the 21st Century Church
(Adapted from Next Wave – Discovering the 21st Century Church*)*
- Rediscover the Church – from building the institution to catalyzing a movement.
- Reimagine Discipleship – from discipleship as a program to a lifestyle of disciple making.
- Reinvent Funding – from self-sustaining to sustainable.
- Rethink Team-building – from titles and positions to communities of disciples on mission with Jesus.
- Redeem Architecture – from empty buildings to fully utilized assets.
- Reclaim the Ecosystem – from Isolating to complementing.
- Recalibrate the Timeline – from launching to emerging.
- Refresh the Metrics – from bodies in the pews to disciples in the marketplace.
- Refocus Church Habits – from calendar driven to mission driven.
- Reconsider Core Values – from institution focused to mission oriented.
- Recommit to Multiplication – from addition to movement.
- Reactivate Spirit Dependency – from duty to necessity.
Lessons Learned and Pivots Along the Way
Every field experiment teaches you things you cannot learn in a planning session. Several key lessons emerged from the Urban Islands Project journey.
Urban and rural have more in common with each other than they do to suburban contexts.
The prevailing model of church planting (large, fast, critical mass launch) are not as helpful in rural and urban contexts. Much of what we have learned in the urban applies in rural places as well. In fact, over time it dawned on us that the foremost challenge is the emerging 21st century culture which is born in cities and quickly exported to other contexts. Twentieth century approaches will continue to work in the suburbs in the near term but eventually approaches discovered in the cities will become essential everywhere, including the suburbs.
Context shapes method more than we realized.
Transplanting suburban models into dense urban or sprawling rural environments rarely works without significant adaptation. Leaders needed more than encouragement; they needed permission – and coaching – to rethink pace, funding, team formation, community engagement, and measures of success. More experience is helping us see guiding urban and rural models begin to emerge. But continuing innovation will always be necessary.
Sustainability must be designed early.
Many urban and complex-context plants struggled financially not because of poor stewardship but because of fragile initial design. Financial sustainability is rarely an end-stage fix. It is an early-stage design decision. We realized that the traditional model of church funding (tithes and offerings received from the beneficiaries of the church ministry were no longer adequate to empower sustainability. Multiple revenue streams must be cultivated and activated prior to the emergence of the new church and continued as a part of the sustainability strategy of the church.
Leaders need pathways, not just vision.
Urban Islands Project created energy and experimentation, but over time we recognized that leaders approaching a new context needed a clearer developmental roadmap to find their way forward. This realization led to the refinement of what is now the Next Wave Innovation Framework:
Discover → Discern → Deploy → Develop → Duplicate
These phases summarize the path that every innovator follows. Discover the need. Discern what is needed to address the need. Deploy experiments. Develop a rhythm of contextual engagement. Duplicate – start over at discovery to figure out what is next and appropriately reproduce the original Gospel impulse.
How the Vision Has Evolved
Urban Islands Project has emerged into the Next Wave Community. This was not a simple rebrand. It was an expansion born out of accumulated learning. We realized that leaders called to innovate needed a place to process their discoveries with parallel innovative peers. And innovation is what will take the Gospel into contexts where traditional approaches repeatedly fall short.
If Urban Islands Project focused primarily on urban church planting experimentation, Next Wave Community focuses on bringing together ecclesiastical explorers who are building the broader ecosystem required for resilient, multiplying initiatives in any challenging context.
What began as a focus on mindset transformation through the 12 Shifts has now expanded into building the full ecosystem leaders need to thrive – relationally, strategically, and financially.
Looking Ahead: The Emergence of Next Wave Foundation
The lessons that began in Urban Islands Project and were articulated through the 12 Shifts of Next Wave have now pointed us toward an additional frontier: the strategic deployment of catalytic capital.
As the Next Wave Community has matured, one reality has become increasingly clear.
Many leaders today are better trained. Better coached. More aware of multi-stream sustainability. More thoughtful in their design. And yet, a familiar barrier keeps appearing.
At precisely the moment when a promising initiative could accelerate toward sustainability, access to timely capital is often limited or slow to materialize. This observation has led to the development of what we are now calling the Next Wave Foundation.
The vision is straightforward but strategic: to bring real catalytic capital into the Next Wave ecosystem – not merely concepts or coaching, but targeted financial investment aligned with well-discerned initiatives at the moment when funding is often hardest to secure.
Together:
- The 12 Shifts shape leader thinking.
- The Innovation Framework guides the pathway.
- The Community provides relational and coaching support.
- The Foundation provides catalytic financial acceleration where appropriate.
These elements are being designed to function not as isolated initiatives but as an integrated system for helping next-generation founders reach sustainability more quickly and multiply more effectively.
Encouragement for Leaders Launching Today
If this journey has taught me anything, it is this:
We are living in a moment that demands both courage and adaptability from emerging leaders.
- Do not be discouraged if inherited models feel increasingly strained. Often, that tension is not failure – it is a necessary reality of the innovation journey.
- Think ecosystem, not just initiative. Design for sustainability early. Seek community. Be honest about where catalytic capital may eventually be needed.
- Embrace discernment before deployment. Speed is seductive in entrepreneurial cultures, but thoughtful front-end work consistently leads to stronger long-term outcomes.
- Diversify sooner than you think you need to. Multi-stream sustainability is not a late-stage adjustment – it is an early-stage architecture decision.
And finally:
Pivots are not failures.
Adaptive leaders are not those who never adjust. They are those who adjust wisely while staying anchored to their core calling.
The Road Ahead
We are still early in the Next Wave story. What began as a concern about the church’s presence in rapidly changing urban centers has grown into a broader movement focused on helping mission-driven founders build resilient, sustainable, multiplying initiatives in complex environments.
The conviction remains strong: When the right God called leaders are supported by the right ecosystems – and resourced with timely, strategic capital – the potential for Kingdom impact multiplies dramatically.
The work ahead is significant. But so is the opportunity. More people are alive on planet earth today than ever before. In fact, one out of every 14 humans who has ever lived is alive today! The human population of the earth did not reach 1 billion until 1800. Now it stands at 8.3 billion and growing. The greatest days of the church are still ahead of us. May we be like the men of Issachar, who understood their times and knew what to do.
Footnotes
- Steven D. Whitaker, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Population, Migration, and Generations in Urban Neighborhoods, 2019.
- Roger Auch et al., U.S. Geological Survey, Urban Growth in American Cities, 2004.
- Alan Berube & Natalie Holmes, Brookings Institution, City and Metropolitan Inequality on the Rise, 2016.
- Victor Couture & Jessie Handbury, NBER, “Urban Revival in America, 2000–2010.”
- U.S. Census Bureau, City and County of Denver population estimates, 2000–2020.
