David Gibbons had an unlikely education for someone who would pastor a multi-ethnic church. Growing up in a fundamentalist church, he attended one of fundamentalism’s flagship schools, a university with a policy at that time against inter-racial dating. “There were many great things about the school,” he says. “The speech and arts programs were phenomenal, the academic standards were high, and they had a lot of women! I thought my chances were pretty good.” But David was quickly informed of the school’s policy against inter-racial dating. “I complicated things for them,” said David, “because my dad was white; my mom was Korean. I’m inter-racial!” The school told him he had to choose between Caucasian or Asian. He couldn’t date both. Eventually David met the woman there who would become his wife. She is Caucasian and American Indian. Today David is pastor of NewSong Church, which he planted in Irvine, California, in 1994, with multi-site locations in Los Angeles, North Orange County, Dallas, Mexico City, London, India, and Bangkok. Andy Crouch and Marshall Shelley interviewed David about how his understanding of the gospel has grown and developed.
What part did your carefully segregated college experience play in your calling and ministry?
Looking back on that whole experience, I always ask, “Why did God take me through that?” I think he was preparing me, actually, for the way we do church around the world.
That’s a surprising twist on the story.
Ethnic churches have their own forms of prejudice. It’s not talked about much. It’s okay for people of other ethnicities to come to the church and sit there. But when it comes to marrying my son or dating my daughter, there’s hostility.
The Asian church was unfamiliar to me—I had grown up in a white, majority culture church. But some mentors encouraged me to explore the Asian part of my heritage. So I attended a Korean church that was known as the premier church on the East Coast at the time, and I saw the children bored during the service. I had never before experienced that.
I’d been raised in a fundamentalist church that kept it lively and fun. And I thought, Hey, things should be a little more engaging than this. I realized that if the leading Korean church is having trouble retaining their second generation, this must be going on all across America. So I joined the staff of a Korean church in Dallas. I fell in love with the people, but also experienced the heartaches of second-generation issues—the so-called “silent exodus.” All these experiences caused me to examine my life and who I was, my biracial background, my heart for the globe and not just one culture.
Where did that examination lead?
When I visited California in 1993, I sensed God saying something. In a hotel room, I heard two words: “Psalm 40.” I heard it twice, and I looked it up: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he … heard my cry. He brought me up out of the pit … out of the miry clay. He set my feet upon a rock, making my footsteps firm. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many will see and fear, and will trust in the Lord.”
I felt an urging to move to California. It was crazy, because we had just bought a house, but we moved. We sold everything, moved to Orange County, and launched NewSong Church in 1994.
You can’t reproduce the megachurch model around the world in most urban settings.
What influences shaped NewSong?
We had a vision of multi-ethnicity and ethnic reconciliation and reaching the next generation. The country was still reeling from the L.A. riots, and the need for a church like this was obvious. We were also influenced by the church growth principles that were so important in the 1990s. And our church experienced rapid growth.
It started taking off, which was great. But the problem with rapid growth is it’s very hard to reflect deeply. You’re juggling twenty balls, and you’re just trying to keep up with small groups, community life, the various crises that come along.
About ten years into New Song, I began to be dissatisfied. I was in the middle of a funding campaign—I don’t know if you’ve ever been through one, but they’re not easy, man. Really difficult.
I hear plenty of amens from our readers.
We were about to buy more than ten acres of land in Orange County right off the freeway. It was a beautiful piece of land—and it was going to cost $20 million just for the land, and then over $30 million for the different phases.
And I was thinking, Why am I doing this?
To be frank, I started asking myself, “How many of these church people really do anything? Maybe 20 percent like most churches. Am I just building a bigger shoebox for people to sit and listen and leave? Do I want to raise all this money for a bigger shoebox?”
I was going through my “reluctant pastor” phase. It was probably part of my midlife reorientation, but I was really questioning what I was doing and whether it was worth it.
In the midst of this, I went to Bangkok with some strong CEO-type business leaders.
What happened in Bangkok?
We met with a missionary who spoke to us about his work, and he really emphasized his despair over Bangkok: “We’ve been here for more than a hundred years, and just one percent of the population is Christian.” He described the sex industry, the mafia, and so forth, a dark and negative portrayal. But much of what he said was true.
As he was speaking, I noticed something I hadn’t felt in a while: surges of excitement. Why am I feeling so much energy right now? I wondered. I was in the midst of something so much bigger than me, something so beyond human capacity. Things I couldn’t figure out. A huge city with complex problems—and I realized that’s what had been missing.
Things had gotten too predictable at my church. I was just running a big congregation.
In the end I felt God was saying I needed to move to Bangkok—right away.
“But God,” I argued, “the church is growing. We’re right in the middle of a lot of things, including a capital campaign. C’mon, not now!”
No, he seemed to say, you’ve got to go now.
So I went home told the story to the leaders. Amazingly, they were overwhelmingly affirming. Some were crying, but they said, “You’ve got to go.” So we changed the fundraising campaign. We raised money not just for buildings, but for furthering the cause of Christ all around the world and especially Thailand—and they sent me off with my family. My children agreed to go, which was a shock, by the way.
How long were you intending to be there?
At least one year. It was a great change of pace. In Bangkok, you don’t drive, you walk. There’s a lot of time for reflection while walking from place to place. I had time to sleep real well and time to think. I visited other churches and discovered that the Evangelical Covenant denomination there had 4,000 people in roughly 400 churches. It hit me. Back home NewSong had about 4,000 in four congregations.
I saw four churches with 4,000 people versus 400 churches with the same number of people, and the question I felt God posing to me is, Who’s stronger?
So who is stronger?
The four hundred churches. You could knock any one of them out, and the rest would keep going. So much of our default protocol is centralized and built around one leader.
That same year I visited Vietnam. Have you heard of the Cu Chi Tunnels? They were dug underneath the fields—miles and miles of tunnels, dug with their hands. And they survived the onslaught of the biggest military force in the world. Actually, when the United States dropped napalm on that ground, it actually hardened and fortified those tunnels.
These guys were all about small units. And they were so resourceful. They would actually use the Americans’ tools. When American planes would crash, they used the rubber from the tires as shoes. They could almost float in the water in the rice paddies. Whereas American soldiers would drop in with their boots and their 80-pound backpacks, and they were sitting ducks. I felt horrible for the Americans, out of their element. But looking at it from a Vietnamese perspective, the resourcefulness was tremendous.
So a lot of times you don’t want to go in big. You want to go in small.
I started to ask what this meant for the church and our emphasis on bigger and bigger. We decided to launch organic-sized churches. Not house churches, but mid-sized.
By mid-sized, you mean …
From 30 to 300. Most verges would be 30 to 100. That size has a lot of power especially for young adults, because they want intimacy but they also want energy of a larger group.
Something as small as a house church is very fragile, not sustainable in many cases. And if you look at how modern armies and special forces move, they work in units of three, 12 through 30, and about 300. My guess is the biggest movement in churches of the future will be among those 30 to 300.
We call them verges, short for convergence, because they are a convergence of the best features of a small and a large church. I believe this size is going to be the most effective in many places around the world.
At the same time I was learning the absolute necessity of letting local people lead in this kind of church planting. You have to believe that the locals know more than you.
This is not always easy for an outsider from a powerful corporation or nation or church to believe. But innovation always happens on the fringe, and the larger an organization is, the more removed the leaders are from the growing edges where real change can take place.
You constantly have to fuel the fringe.
So leaders of larger organizations can become isolated at the center?
Absolutely, because you get larger, you give more attention to internal systems to keep the machine going. So you’re not in touch many times with the little movements on the fringes. Yet the next significant thing will probably start as little movements on the fringe.
I also learned I needed to lift up local leadership—we don’t always come with that mindset. We had to learn it. We have to believe that the locals really do know more than we do!
We’re sort of trained to assume David needs Saul’s armor—that leaders need a certain structure.
Yes, Saul really wanted him to use the armor, but David tried it on and said, “No, that’s not going to work for me.” He preferred his slingshot.
I began to realize that as a young church planter, working the church growth principles like crazy, I had been wearing someone else’s armor. I began to realize maybe it didn’t fit that well. Then I was reading about Gideon in Judges 7, where God whittled down his army from 32,000 to 300 men.
There’s that 300 again.
It seemed like the Lord was saying, Dave, what do you want? Do you want 30,000, or do you want 300 radicals? I remember boldly saying, “Three hundred, Lord! Yeah, three hundred warriors!”
So I was fired up. But after that year in Bangkok, I came back to California and assumed my church understood the vision and values. I started asking, “Are we willing to give up our buildings? Are we willing to decentralize into many forms, many different sizes? To focus more on third culture leadership than on Sunday morning experiences? Are we willing to move into Santa Ana, not far from Irvine but with an under-resourced population we’ve neglected so far?”
Wow. How’d that message go over?
I started sharing that vision, and people started leaving. We had a 25-percent reduction in people and in giving over a year. I remember thinking, God, I didn’t really mean it.
Many were disappointed in me. I think they just wanted to celebrate having me back, to have a time where instead of talking about mission and change, they could just say, “We just missed you, Dave.” But I thought they were ready to hear the Word in a new way.
From the beginning of NewSong, we had a dream of planting a church in every major urban center in the world. But the form we were trying to replicate was the megachurch model. Of course, to have a megachurch, you have to have a megaleader.
So I was always looking for the capital-L Leader, the Bill Hybels-type leader. And the truth is, that kind of person is very hard to find.
Oh, c’mon, there must be at least six of them, worldwide. (Laughter.)
Yes. And in the meantime I’d been ignoring some really great people. To be honest, I wouldn’t pay as much attention to them. I began to realize I had missed a lot of opportunity to develop leaders who could lead really well with groups of 30 to 300.
Then we did a cost analysis. How much did we spend each month for this building? I think it was about $70,000 a month. And how much space did we use? About 30 percent of the space in a given month.
Well, in an urban center, every square foot is big dollars. Add parking lots, and you’re talking major money down the chute. For what? I realized I wasn’t being a good steward of space. You certainly can’t reproduce the megachurch model around the world in most urban settings. How are you going to do that in London or Mexico City? There churches will have to be creative in use of space and development of indigenous leaders.
What did you learn about leadership from your time in Bangkok?
At first, we were ramping it up according to the megachurch model. People were wowed. We had several hundred coming out, and not many had seen that before in Thailand. Then one of our leaders, a young man named Meta, came up after one of our services looking very disappointed.
“Dave, this isn’t NewSong,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but inside I’m thinking, Hey, man, I started NewSong!
But he said, “We say we’re about everybody getting involved, but only one person is speaking, only a few are leading worship, few people are doing anything. The rest are just sitting there. Before, when we met in our smaller groups, our verges, we were in circles. Now we’re in rows.”
I took a step back. I realized he knew this culture better than I did. “Okay, Meta. What do you think we should do?”
What did he think should happen?
Smaller units. Decentralized. We ended up creating smaller units all over the city. People don’t like to drive in Bangkok—it’s too difficult to get across the city. So we created what we call undergrounds. They can meet in cafes, restaurants, academic buildings. They meet everywhere.
And to tell you the truth, if we had gone the megachurch direction, it would have required huge resources. Instead, now after two years, they’re self-sustaining, meeting in cafes, clubs, restaurants, and homes.
When you do church this way, it means handing off leadership into smaller groups. Do you worry about a loss of control and uneven quality?
No. This is how real movements of God start. Bigness can slow you down. There’s nothing wrong with bigness, by the way. I’ve seen beautiful whales in the ocean, man. I’ve seen them dance and splash in the water. Those are miraculous moments. They’re magnificent creatures. But the truth is there aren’t a lot of whales. But there are millions maybe billions of minnows. I like both big and small. But assuming big is better can hurt us, especially if we consider cultures, cities, and God’s focus on the weak and the fringe of culture.
I don’t think bigness is going to fit most people or most cultural contexts where the church needs to grow.
Does this imply a new level of trust in God, rather than in systems that can scale predictably?
I meet a lot of pastors, and many of them see pastoring like a job—they’re just tending the machinery nine-to-five. I think the next movement has to shift toward saying, “I’m willing to sacrifice my pastoral job and be bi-vocational … do whatever it takes.”
The truth is that it’s harder to make a living with a mid-sized, organic model. So if you really believe in this, embrace the fact you’re going to have to support yourself with another job. I’ve started doing that myself. I’m a partner in several outside ventures—a commodity trading firm, a nonprofit called Xealot, a Web startup called villocity.com. I don’t have to be a pastor to support my family. In fact, I’m a better pastor because I have other occupations. My jobs change; my calling remains the same.
We’ve been asking, “Is our gospel too small?” It sounds like you’ve been rethinking what counts as big and small.
I love the church. It’s God’s vehicle for transformation. But I don’t want the church to become so centralized that it can’t reproduce, can’t adopt multiple forms. And that works better when you’re small, when you’re on the verge, on the edge. Small is the new big. Big isn’t bad, but it’s overrated.
If the core of the gospel means truly loving God and our neighbor, then individual churches may not get big. But the church will be more enduring and virile than ever.
When the world, especially the up and coming generations, see the church willing to forego size and instead loving people who are not like us, treating them as neighbors, it’s a thing of beauty. And it’s irresistible.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
