Church Growth, Discipleship, and the Gospel of Grace

A conversation with Fr Everett Lees

This might be the Substack post that I’m most excited to publish thus far. I had the chance to sit down with Fr Everett Lees, rector of Christ Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a conversation about evangelism, church growth, and discipleship. Christ Church first came on my radar screen a few years ago, when a 2020 article in The Living Church discussed it as one of the fastest growing Episcopal churches in the country. A follow-up article in 2021 talked about Christ Church’s experience during the pandemic. This church has an amazing story: when Fr Everett came on as rector in 2011, Christ Church had an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of 40 people and was facing potential closure. By 2019, the ASA was 230 people, and Fr Everett told me during our conversation that Christ Church has now surpassed its pre-pandemic average attendance. Needless to say, this is bucking the trends for the Episcopal Church in a huge way. I think it’s so important for those of us who are committed to making disciples of Jesus Christ within the mainline to learn about what growing, spiritually vital mainline congregations can look like. I found this conversation incredibly inspiring, and I am so thankful for Fr Everett’s insight and above all for the work of the Holy Spirit at Christ Church, Tulsa. With no further ado, here’s our conversation, lightly edited for concision and ease of reading (and so that you can’t see how many times I say “um” and “yeah”):

I have been curious about what you've been up to at Christ Church Tulsa ever since I saw the first Living Church articles about your congregation some years ago. I talk often how we need to take growth, evangelism, and discipleship more seriously as a church. A lot of the time, I feel like I’m talking about things that are a bummer about our church, that we’re not doing well, and so I’m excited to have the chance to talk about what it looks like when a church is growing, and growing in a way that is about getting people to go deeper with Jesus.

I'm glad we're having this conversation. I think that this conversation often isn't happening in the Episcopal Church. I get why; it can be pretty discouraging. I was listening to a bishop and he was talking about how there is nothing more depressing than when you put a lot of energy into efforts at revitalization and growth and the numbers just don't happen. And there's also a reality of overall trends, particularly within Protestant mainline circles, that pose uphill challenges to growth. And then the Episcopal Church: anytime we're spending more money on chancellors than we are on evangelism, we clearly have our priorities out of whack. There used to be a group called the Acts 8 Movement that really tried to push these things. But the energy within the Episcopal Church is to continue to grow central structures and not really to do evangelism or church planting. I think it's a little bit like Sisyphus and some people are just tired of pushing. But I love the Episcopal Church and I think that the Episcopal Church has a whole lot to offer, which is why I'm sad that we don't do a better job churchwide at evangelism.

I think that often talking about growth gets pooh-poohed in Episcopal Church circles. “You’re just about butts in pews; this is a business model of measuring success”, etc. I think some of that is just defensiveness. But I do think it is important to articulate theologically why church growth matters, what theologically sound church growth would look like. Would you say you have a theology of church growth?

For one, we can look at it scripturally. In the New Testament, there are a lot of times when they're counting numbers, right? The Gospel writers tell us that there are this many people who are receiving at the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In the Book of Acts, every time the Spirit shows up, there’s this many people who turn and give their life to Christ. So I think we can say biblically that that numbers actually do matter. It’s not that numbers matter at the top line, so we can just sit there and say, “well, we grew x number,” but it's that each one of those [numbers] is somebody whose life has been changed and transformed through a relationship with Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit. [Each individual story of conversion] is hard to capture in ASA, but anyone’s story is still wrapped up in those numbers. So those numbers really do matter.

I think that sometimes what we miss out on is this: why does it matter that someone follows Jesus? I consider myself of evangelical in that I think that a relationship with Jesus Christ is actually really important. I think having a strong prayer life is important. I think being formed by the Scriptures is important, being transformed by the sacraments is important. Those things are so vital to the good of the world. Those things inform our social and public witness. I think we've created some false dichotomies, divisions between faith and witness or faith and action, and it seems like evangelism and church growth is always the one that loses.

Dwight Zscheile is an Episcopalian out of Luther Seminary. One of the things he talks about in one of his books is that the DNA of the Church of England and then of the Episcopal Church has largely been in an establishment model, where we largely ministered to the upper crust of society. That’s part of why Methodism came around. He talks about how there is something in our DNA as a church that is just really hard for us. You have to work extra hard to work beyond the DNA.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'd love to hear a little bit about what working beyond the DNA looked like at Christ Church when you started there in 2011. You had an ASA [average Sunday attendance] of around 40 people – so, by Episcopal Church standards slightly smaller than average, although not dramatically so – and then the church grew. What did that look like? Did growth happen right away? Did it take time to build the systems that led to growth? I’d be interested in hearing the story of the last twelve years or so there.

So, backing up a little bit, there was church here called Church of the Holy Spirit. It was a fast-growing church, especially in the years prior to the split, when it left and became part of ACNA. When Holy Spirit approached the diocese and said, “We want to leave the Episcopal Church,” the diocese’s response was, “That’s fine. You can leave, we keep the property.” The way that the bishop and the leaders of Holy Spirit mediated that process saved us I don’t know how much money. Oklahoma has not seen very many departures, and there were not many expensive property fights. So, in 2005, the diocese takes possession of the building; they work with a very small remnant from Holy Spirit to try to replant. For the first couple years, they were doing a lot of wound-healing. They didn't want to just return immediately back to “okay, let’s just recreate Holy Spirit, just now called Christ Church.”

In 2011, the diocese saw this as a place that needed revitalization, in part because when Holy Spirit left, the diocese took on their pretty expensive mortgage that they had on the property. And so, the diocese approached me as I was leaving my curacy and asked me if I would take this on. What I encountered when I visited was that people were really passionate about Christ Church. They had all found something that was meaningful here. They were excited. But the other thing was that they were tired. If you were to go back and read their [vestry] minutes, every month there was some new initiative that they were going to try or new thing that they were going to do. You know how Rabbi [Edwin] Friedman talks about how we always look for that silver bullet that's going to save us? That's what Christ Church was doing: they were just constantly searching for the program that was going to save them.

One of the very first things that I did was to say that we would focus on Sunday mornings and doing that well, with good Book of Common Prayer liturgy. One unique thing about Christ Church is that it primarily has used contemporary music, and that’s a little bit different than most Episcopal Churches. And so we focused on building Sunday mornings up and not trying to do a lot of other stuff. We also focused on trying to connect to outreach ministries that were already doing really good stuff. For example, there was a program started by the Episcopal Church in Oklahoma that serves children who have a parent in prison. So we made that the outreach thing we do instead of trying to create our own thing or trying to do twenty things.

So that's a lot of what we did at the beginning: we simplified what we were doing and focused on doing it really well. This gave folks here who had been working hard to try to make this place work some space to just breathe. I can't tell you that there was anything totally brilliant that I did. It was just, “let's do worship according to the Book of Common Prayer well, let's have a good follow-up process when visitors come, and let's begin to build Sunday morning programs.” Because we are in the Bible Belt, Sunday morning is still a thing in Oklahoma; I know that's not true everywhere. But there are lots of places that are outside of the Bible Belt that can do Sunday morning really well, so it's not something that you have to be in the Bible Belt to do.

That makes sense. Okay, so that was it: doing worship really well, cutting back on the existing explosion of programs, and also overhauling follow-up for visitors.

I found that if I could get a contact card from somebody, if I followed up with an invitation to go have coffee or lunch, and if I met with them, there was a really high chance that they were going to continue to come. Then I started a welcome class, where I said “this is Episcopal Church 101 according to Everett,” and if I could get them in that, a high percentage of them would stay for a period of time.

I remember that early on, we had no kids. I mean, literally, there were maybe three or four kids that were here. We had a family who came and said, “We really like the Episcopal Church. We really like what you are all about. But we've been at this really large Methodist church and we can't imagine walking away from all the youth and children programming that they have.” Then I said, “Will you give me six months? And in six months if you don't see movement in our children's and youth program, I hold no ill will if you leave.” Then we started a Godly Play program here, which has become huge and very popular. We really invested in that, so that today probably a third to 40% of our Sunday attendance is elementary school-aged children.

That’s really exciting! I was wondering, in general, what sort of sort of new members have you been seeing? New Christians, lapsed Christians returning to church, people joining from other churches?

It's primarily been three groups. The first group were dechurched Christians, sometimes called ex-evangelicals. The second group were members of Holy Spirit who were tired of church being against people and fighting, and the third group has been Roman Catholics. Overall, the vast majority of them are non-Episcopalians coming from other Christian traditions, which is really great because I get to shape them in a vision of inclusive orthodoxy. I don’t have to sit there and deconstruct the three-legged stool for people. They’re just coming and have found something meaningful about the Episcopal Church through online searches. I would say the bulk of them are people who are coming from Christian traditions outside of the Episcopal Church. There have been some (but not very many) who have come from other Episcopal churches in town. The second group is that we have had a lot of people who had been part of Holy Spirit who came back. We had a lot of people who returned home who had stories and narratives about this place and filled in history that I didn't know about. That third group has been former Roman Catholics. Particularly coming out of covid, they have probably been our biggest growth, especially people who have felt alienated as the church has defined itself in a stronger and stronger way about what you're allowed to believe politically.

Yeah, that makes sense. You talked at the beginning of your time at Christ Church about an experience of exhaustion in the congregation and then a feeling of relief as programs were let go and you focused on Sunday mornings. Through this process of growth, was the congregation ready to go and excited about being a growing church? How did you encourage lay involvement and volunteers?

We were helped greatly by the fact that the diocese came to Christ Church and said, “we’re expending a lot of resources paying the mortgage of a building that only has forty people in it, and that's not a sustainable model; you have a short window in which to turn things around or we're going to have to close this place.” So we were aided by the fact that the diocese basically said, “look, this is your shot,” paired with resources. Oklahoma is blessed in that it does have financial resources and we've been a beneficiary of that. Because of this, there was a fire lit under folks, that if this place was really meaningful to them they had to get to work. So they were excited! They wanted this place to thrive and were excited when they saw it thriving.

The only thing that they've been upset with me about is that, when I got here, the peace lasted forever, because everyone went and talked to every single person. And this is really warm and lovely if you're inside the congregation. But if you're a visitor, it isn’t; you just sit there and you notice that everyone else is being talked to. Somebody might say hi, but you quickly feel like an outsider. So, I started shortening the peace and also discussing some of the theology behind it: that it’s not the “hey, how are you doing?” greeting but a moment of reconciliation. So this is really the one thing I’ve gotten pushback on.

So, I've gotten a sense of the beginning of the story. What was it like to go from the beginning to your pre-pandemic numbers of having a few hundred people there on a typical Sunday?

I will say that we’ve now surpassed pre-pandemic numbers. Something we've gone back to several times is the program the Forward Movement puts out called RenewalWorks. It really focuses on the spiritual growth and vitality of the congregation. It's not just about numerical growth; you can have numerical growth without spiritual vitality and you can have spiritually vital congregations without growth, so I’m not saying that growth equals spiritual vitality. But from RenewalWorks we did develop some programmatic stuff. One of the things that’s been very successful has been sermon-based small groups. There’s a method out there called Sticky Church – so, after talking all about the silver bullet not existing, let me give you a silver bullet: the idea behind Sticky Church is that people are looking for connection and community, and that most people's lives are pretty hectic and busy. And so our primary formation model is sermon-based small groups called Story Groups where reflect upon the sermon, go deeper into the Scriptures that were read, and think about some life application questions. And then group members form a community the way communities are naturally formed. When you're together with each other for three months, bonds form. That has been a successful program for us. But it's taken some intentionality to try not to add more and more and more programs. Someone used to say that the temptation of the church is to build Six Flags over Jesus. And that's hard, because in Tulsa we have a lot of megachurches and they’re going to outprogram us every single day, and we just need to stop trying to compete at that level.

And who leads these small groups?

Lay folks lead these, and we say that the most important skill is a high level of emotional intelligence. Biblical knowledge is not the thing we’re most looking for. We’re really looking for people who know how community small groups work and how to navigate, not dominate, conversations.

So you have these sermon-based Sticky Church small groups, and these newcomer classes that you're doing. Are these the ways that a visitor gets plugged in?

I still find this to be true: if we get a contact card, I send them a handwritten note in the mail with my business card and say, “Let's meet for coffee.” A fairly high percentage of them are going to contact me and say, “Yes, I'd love to do that.” After we have coffee I say, “There’s this foundations class. Why don't you come to it?”, and I send them a follow up invite. Again, a high percentage of them will join that class, and of those who join that class, a fairly high percentage of them will stay involved and engaged.

So yes: the initial contact, which moves into a one-on-one, which moves into the foundations class, which then moves into finding a place for you to connect, whether that's a ministry or an outreach or a story group. And if they do those things, a lot of them stick around for a long period of time.

One of the Sticky Church insights is that one of the reasons why churches have to do so much church growth is because there's this huge backdoor; people are leaving at a fast rate. If you can build those relationships where church is the place where people’s friends are, where their community is, where their people are, they'll come more often.

How, at this point, are new people finding your church? What gets them in the door so they can fill out a contact card to begin with? How does evangelism get talked about at Christ Church and what does it look like for you and your leaders?

Our website is a major driver of it. I mean it really is the front door. A huge number of people who I meet who come to Christ Church had been listening to sermons online for weeks or months. No fooling, a lot of people said, “Well, I took a test online that said I should be Episcopalian.” There's one person I know who's in church leadership who absolutely hates those tests, but people will sit there and take these quizzes on Facebook and get “Episcopalian” and they’ll find us. So a good website and good social media presence are really key.

Then I would say that a lot of the work that I do is networking, being in the community and building relationships. An example of this is Kara Slade (on Substack at Cracker Barrel Barthian) had a colleague at Duke who’s a Baptist youth minister in Oklahoma. He and I got connected and started meeting for coffee occasionally. One day he calls me and said, “We have a family that doesn’t fit the Baptist mold and I think your church would be a great place for them to land. Could I connect you all?” That guy’s now our senior warden. It was just me going to this minister and asking, “How can we help and support each other?” And it led to “Hey, I’ve got this family who doesn’t fit the Baptist mold, and I think they’d be great for you.”  

There’s a guy who does church growth named Jim Griffith, and Jim's whole thing is that the question to ask is not “how do you get your next 100 people?” It's “how do you get your next 10 people?” If you think about it in small doses it’s so much easier. If you’re a church of forty and you say, “How do we get to forty-four next year?”, that’s ten percent growth! We’re not asking for you to be forty and then the next year be one hundred, but could you be forty and then forty-four and then forty-eight? That’s solid growth!

What do worship and preaching typically look like at Christ Church?

I have changed in fairly significant ways since being introduced to Mockingbird a few years ago in a focus on preaching on grace — how that’s something we don’t hear anywhere else in society, and that the church’s central role is to proclaim the Gospel of grace and forgiveness. That really resonates with people. So I would say that really good Book of Common Prayer liturgy combined with grace-centered preaching, almost law-gospel preaching has been a huge benefit for us, where people are like “that really resonates.”

The only thing that we do that might be slightly unrubrical is that we say the Comfortable Words after the Absolution. I really wish that this was a clear option in Rite II. We pray the Prayer of Humble Access [before Communion], which I firmly believe is allowable as an anthem. I think the brilliance of Anglicanism is how the liturgy reinforces this message of grace. Even when we’ve confessed and we’ve heard absolution, we still have nagging doubts [and so we say the Comfortable Words]. And so that’s why I think good liturgy is really important. We’re a church that's doing Book of Common Prayer, that's affirming and inclusive and creedal.

We did start a second service as growth happened and it is organ and hymnal worship. And we have a contemporary service, and it’s not necessarily all contemporary Christian music. We also bring in a lot of Lift Every Voice and Sing and some spirituals, so it’s still very recognizable as Episcopalian worship. I do think that there is something about the theology of hymns that is really important. I think music and poetry has always been an Anglican way of sort of doing theology. But from the charismatic side, these songs of repetition also have their place.

The charismatic reference is a perfect segue for me to zoom back up to theology. I’m wondering how, or in what ways, you've seen the Holy Spirit at work in this time of growth. More precisely, has the last twelve years at Christ Church changed your pneumatology?

It’s really about hearing the stories of folks who have been hurt by church, hearing from a lot of people who gave up on church but never gave up on Jesus, and hearing those stories of how Christ Church has been a place of healing and transformation and reconnection back to God. I think that is a work of the Holy Spirit.

One of those things that's probably changed over the last couple of years has been what they call in the charismatic church “raising the level of expectancy.” Like, really believing that the Holy Spirit can do something. An example of this is that I have been convicted for several years that Christ Church, for all of our talk about diversity, was still largely white. We were not diverse racially. I had laid out that this needed to be something we were serious about, and now we're beginning to see those fruits. I think that there's a level of believing that the Holy Spirit's going to bring people to us that is important, and so I do think that there is something about expectancy that I have begun to lean into more.

What has working on racial diversity looked like?

It’s something that I’ve talked about at annual meeting and in sermons. We’ve been getting connected to folks who are doing that work, like the Matthew 5:9 Fellowship and the One America Foundation. I was challenged by an African-American pastor in town, who said, “if you really want to be multi-ethnic, on Sunday morning when I go and I sit here, up around the altar am I going to see anybody that looks like me?” That’s been a more recent awareness that representation really matters. We’re not perfect at it. I also don’t want to take someone and put them up on a pedestal – it has to be authentic. But it’s something we are being aware of.

You’ve named a few of these already, but I’m wondering: if there is someone who is interested in thinking about growth both in terms of numbers and spiritual vitality, are there resources – books, courses, websites, etc. – that you would recommend?

So, Sticky Church is one, as a model of discipleship that focuses on reflection on sermons which I think is really good. It also has some really great background material about what unchurched and dechurched people are looking for. So I would really recommend that as a resource.

Mockingbird has been transformative for me. It was at a Mockingbird Conference that I heard the Gospel preached for the first time in a way that really changed me. And Mockingbird has lots of really great resources.

In terms of inclusive orthodoxy, Earth & Altar has done a good job of putting together good resources. Forward Movement does a really great job of that as well. The last thing I'll say is that RenewalWorks from Forward Movement is a great resource if you're really interested in the spiritual growth of your congregation.

Last thing: is there anything I should have asked but didn’t? Is there anything else about these questions around growth and discipleship or your experience in the last little while at Christ Church that you’d like to share?

I would really encourage people who read this to talk at the churchwide level about the importance of evangelism, church growth, redevelopment work. In many of our communities and towns, the Episcopal Church might be the only affirming and creedal place that is present. I think those things are important. And so, if you really think the Episcopal Church is worth saving, we have to invest in it. And if we're not going to invest in it at the national level, then, let's take those dollars and do it at a local level. So please advocate for it, make it a priority if you’re going to General Convention.