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.
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 that obedience is never wasted, even when the outcome isn’t immediately visible. And something remarkable happens when the people of a church embrace God in that way. Faith becomes contagious.
People begin to notice that confidence remains even when certainty doesn’t. They see leaders who acknowledge reality without surrendering to it. Over time, resilience itself becomes part of the church’s witness. Because in a culture increasingly defined by anxiety, outrage, and fear, a community that quietly trusts God through uncertainty points people toward something entirely different.
Toward a Savior who has always been and will forever be faithful.
Looking Ahead: Building the Table
About two years ago, in the middle of season of uncertainty, I found myself feeling the weight of leadership. Like many church planters, I had quietly started carrying the pressure of believing that somehow this all depended on us. As I sat there, an unexpected memory came rushing back.
Years ago, when our oldest son Henry was about two years old, I was repairing an old table in our house. He wandered into the room wearing a sideways baseball hat, a diaper, and a pacifier, completely convinced he was there to help. He grabbed a drill that was far too big for him. He picked up screws. He held pieces together. Honestly… he mostly, he slowed me down.
Objectively, the project would have been finished much faster without him. But that’s never what I remember. I remember building the table with my son. I remember watching him smile every time he contributed. I remember how much joy there was in simply doing it together.
Sitting there years later, God gently reminded me that I had forgotten something. Somewhere along the way, I had begun treating church planting like a project I was responsible for completing rather than an invitation to join Him in His work. That realization changed something in me. Jesus never said, “Go build my church.” He said, “I will build my church.” Our invitation is different. Our invitation is to faithfully join Him.
For the Christian entrepreneur or church planter, God has invited you to build with Him. All of the pressure you feel to produce becomes overshadowed by the privilege of participating with your Heavenly Father. The joy in the work is to be found with the gratitude of understanding that what you are trying to carry is His, but He wants to carry it with you.
What’s Next For Nuvo
My prayer is that, by 2030, Nuvo has grown far beyond what we can imagine… not simply because more people attend our services, but because we’ve become the kind of church people long to be part of. I hope we’ve developed leaders who instinctively lead with both conviction and compassion. Leaders who are courageous enough to create spaces where honest questions are welcomed. My hope is that this culture becomes so deeply embedded in who we are that every season of growth only strengthens it rather than dilutes it.
I pray the influence of that culture extends far beyond the walls of our church. I hope we plant churches. I hope we raise up leaders who go build ministries, businesses, nonprofits, and communities that reflect the heart of Jesus. I hope our people carry this culture into neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and cities across the country. My prayer is that the culture multiplies further than our church name ever does because the Kingdom has become so much bigger. I pray God chooses to expand Nuvo and chooses to spread what He’s taught us through countless other expressions of His church. Multiplication.
Ultimately, I believe churches change cities by becoming healthier and then multiplying that health. I want Nuvo to continue growing in every way. More people discovering Jesus, more families finding hope, more leaders being developed, and more churches being planted. But I also want every person who calls Nuvo home to leave convinced that they are missionaries sent into their own sphere of influence. Success won’t simply be measured by what happens inside our Sunday gatherings. It’ll be measured by what happens from them.
If, by 2030, people across our city and beyond are creating spaces where others can explore and experience Jesus because they first experienced that culture at Nuvo, I believe we’ve accomplished something extraordinary. We’ll have helped cultivate a movement of ordinary people faithfully living on mission. And I can’t imagine a greater legacy than that.
To the Leader Considering What’s Next
If I could encourage the leader sensing God calling them to something new, it would simply be this: don’t be afraid to build the kind of church you wish had existed for the people you’re trying to reach. Don’t simply build for everyone. Build it for someone. Be intentional about who you’re building for, and let every decision flow from that conviction.
Hold your mission tightly, but hold your methods loosely. The people you’re trying to reach will change. Your city will change. Your strategies will certainly change. That’s not failure; it’s faithfulness. The mission of Jesus never changes, but the methods we use to carry that mission into the world must continually adapt. Don’t become so attached to your plans that you miss where the Spirit is leading next.
Build a culture before you build an organization. Healthy systems matter, but systems simply amplify the culture they’re built upon. If your culture is rooted in humility, grace, authenticity, and a deep dependence on Jesus, your systems will strengthen it. If it isn’t, no amount of excellence will compensate. Spend as much time shaping the hearts of your leaders as you do refining your strategy.
Most importantly, remember that you’re not building the Church. Jesus is. He never asked us to carry that weight. He simply invited us to join Him in His work. Your responsibility isn’t to manufacture outcomes; it’s to remain faithful.
Plant the seeds. Love the people in front of you. Tell the truth with grace. Stay resilient when the path is uncertain. Trust that God is always doing more beneath the surface than you can see.
We are living in one of the most spiritually curious moments in recent history. Beneath the noise, the skepticism, and the endless opinions, people are still asking the same questions humanity has always asked: Is there hope? Is there purpose? Is there grace? Is there a God who knows me and loves me?
The church has the extraordinary privilege of answering those questions… not simply through sermons, but by becoming communities that embody the life of Jesus. I believe you’ll discover what we have. People are far more open to exploring faith than we often imagine.
Let’s build churches where people don’t simply hear about hope, but experience it.
Churches that look like hope.
And feel like home.
