Next & Level - Christianity Today

The Next Level Church in Denver began as the Gen-X brand of Applewood Baptist Church in 1993. It eventually became independent, and was known for a high-energy Tuesday night worship event drawing thousands from the Denver metro area.

Now 15 years old, The Next Level Church is facing the challenges and changes that come with time. It’s now more, well, level.

Entering the building of Greenwood Community Church (the facility TNL now rents for its Tuesday night service), it becomes clear that some elements have not changed. The crowd is still young and predominantly single. No walkers or strollers here. And they still prefer the music loud. TNL brings their own giant stacks of speakers to supplement the sound system used by Greenwood’s largely Boomer congregation.

But these holdovers from The Next Level’s origins belie the maturation the church has experienced. Today those gathering number in the hundreds, not thousands. The primary focus of the church is no longer the Tuesday night event, but the geographic home groups that meet on Sundays. And unlike the first half of its life, TNL is no longer led by a highly visible and dynamic senior pastor. Instead, a team of four core pastors share equal responsibility for the ministry.

One of them compares their leadership philosophy to the way a band composes music: “It’s organic, artistic, and collaborative. It’s right-brained.” They compare it to bands like Coldplay or U2 rather than corporations like Microsoft or GE. And there is no room in their lexicon for words normally associated with workplace hierarchies. Authority, they say, comes from trust, love, and being a brother rather than a boss.

Two of the core pastors, Jared Mackey (ministry pastor) and John Miller (worship pastor), have been with The Next Level Church from its inception. Dave Terpstra (teaching pastor) took a more prominent staff role after TNL’s senior pastor departed in 2000. And Brian Gray (community pastor) is the newest member of the team. Together with six additional elders, the core pastors set the direction for The Next Level.

Our generation is approaching ministry more as an art than a science.

By choosing to flatten the leadership hierarchy, TNL represents a trend among next generation churches of discarding the corporate models popularized by traditional and megachurches alike. But does it work? Can a church function efficiently and faithfully without a senior pastor sitting in the corner office and standing in the pulpit? After eight years filled with successes, failures, and personal crises, the pastoral team of The Next Level answers with a resounding “Yes!” But, they caution, team leadership is not for everyone.

Leadership‘s Skye Jethani sat down with TNL’s core pastors to discuss the blessings and challenges of their team approach and chronicle the church’s journey from one man’s band to becoming a band of brothers.

When did you first develop the idea of team leadership?

John Miller: We started in ’97 with a team leadership model. We had four core pastors leading the four core areas of the church—teaching, worship, community, and ministry. But as time went on, there was cultural pressure for a single leader. Our teaching pastor at the time was the guy everyone saw, and his raw talent was attracting people. Eventually he was seen as the senior pastor. It was an evolution.

Jared Mackey: At the time we had an outside board of advisors encouraging us to use a more traditional leadership model. They were all pastors at other churches with dominant senior pastors. As TNL began to grow, they pushed us toward a more corporate model with a senior pastor.

Brian Gray: That model worked for what we were: a church fueled by a highly dynamic event where a lot of people showed up once a week. We weren’t focused on community, caring for people, or developing people. We were a big event.

Miller: But around 2000 the train came off the rails because of sin. Our senior pastor was suddenly gone and we decided to go back to the team approach we had intended from the beginning.

Was there pressure to simply replace the senior pastor?

Miller: Our advisory board was telling us it was essential to our survival.

Mackey: But some of us didn’t just want to find another bug light to attract the flies. We wanted to be more than an event. We wanted to be a church. We now had the opportunity to start over.

Dave Terpstra: After the mess with the senior pastor, we found out what the ecclesia really was here. Attendance fell from almost 3,000 to less than 500, but this smaller group was really committed to each other. We began to engage one another more deeply. We experienced real community. So after the crisis, we knew we needed to do church differently. And that certainly impacted the way we thought about the leadership structure.

So, the move toward a team model wasn’t just a reaction to what had happened to your senior pastor. It was part of becoming a different kind of church.

Gray: It was for me. I wasn’t at TNL during that crisis, but I also saw a senior pastor model entirely fall apart at my previous church. It got really bad. I began thinking there had to be a better way to do church. There is something systemically unhealthy about becoming dependent upon a single leader.

Mackey: I wish those stories were rare, but they were the norm in the stream of Christianity I grew up in. It seemed like imploding churches were the rule rather than the exception. Granted, I’m a preacher’s kid, so I’ve seen a lot. But I know a lot of pastors who have left in failure.

What is it about the traditional structure that breeds so many problems?

Gray: I think it inadvertently fosters isolation and creates this guru mentality that puts very high, maybe even impossible, expectations on the senior pastor.

Miller: In our case, we did put too many responsibilities and burdens on our senior pastor—a lot more than one guy should handle. We made him the public face of TNL. He was the go-to guy for everything. And the rest of us were okay with that because we liked being in the background and not having to bear the burden of making it all happen. But in the end, it was unfair to him and it was unfair to the church.

Just because we believe in a flattened structure doesn’t mean we don’t believe in leadership.

Why does the model remain so popular?

Mackey: Because it’s all we’ve known. And in some areas, it has been very successful. It produces results, but at what cost for the leaders?

Miller: I’ve traveled a lot, and the concept of team leadership doesn’t seem as strange in other countries. We have a rugged individualism in America that supports it. And we have an artful way of finding Scriptures to support our cultural values. We come to the Bible with our presuppositions about how we think leadership should be done rather than looking at the different leadership models in Scripture.

Gray: If your bias is toward a model with a senior pastor who is also a speaker and you look for that in the New Testament, you may identify Peter as the leader of the early church. He is the public voice of the church in the beginning of Acts. But at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, where one of the biggest decisions facing the church was made, you see a plurality of leaders. Besides, the marching orders come as much from James as Peter. So we need to take off our cultural lenses that force us to see the church structured with a senior pastor, associates, and a hierarchy, and recognize that Scripture leaves room for different models of leadership.

Terpstra: Culturally, we also like to worship celebrities. We all have a little paparazzi in us that we bring into the church. I grew up in a large church, and I had great confidence in the godliness and wisdom of my senior pastor, Chuck Swindoll. Confidence in a great senior pastor can be healthy, but celebrity worship is really unhealthy.

What happened when you began to communicate the plan to move toward a team model?

Miller: Our board of advisors dissolved itself. They were supportive, but most of them were dynamic senior pastors. They didn’t understand the concept of team leadership. It was totally foreign to them, so they didn’t feel they could help us move in that direction.

Mackey: We also irritated a lot of people because we started team teaching. They were used to seeing the same person every week. That bothered them more than anything else.

Terpstra: We’ve adapted that now. I’m the primary teacher. It’s still a team, but I teach two-thirds of the time, and the other third is covered by Brian, Jared, and guest teachers.

With one pastor primarily in the pulpit, how do you prevent Dave from evolving into the senior pastor like before?

Terpstra: Weekly beatings. (Laughter.)

Gray: We don’t worry about it because none of us wants to be the senior pastor. Ask any one of us about our aspiration to be a senior leader and we’ll all give you the same answer: Not only do I not want to be the senior guy here; I don’t want to be the senior guy anywhere.

Why do you all share that view? Is your generation turned off to hierarchies in general?

Miller: I think the way our whole culture processes things has changed. There was a time when information was proprietary, and it was controlled and managed by people in authority. Today, because of technology and the Internet, information is more accessible to everyone. Authority isn’t about control anymore. It isn’t about holding the keys to information.

Terpstra: I think our generation is approaching ministry more as an art than a science. Since the Enlightenment, “doing church” has been seen as a science, and it was seen as linear, organized, with clearcut leadership principles. Our generation doesn’t see things that way anymore. We approach things more creatively, more organically.

Gray: I think our generation is redefining authority. When Jesus taught, the crowds were amazed because he taught with authority unlike their teachers of the Law. The other teachers had authority because of their positions and their titles. But Jesus’ authority wasn’t based on those things. I think there is a parallel shift today. The previous generation viewed authority organizationally. You knew who had authority because of their title or where they were on the chart. Our generation is suspicious of that. For us authority is more about character and integrity and authenticity.

Miller: Ultimately leadership is about how we influence each other and our community. It’s not about a position or a title.

Do you think team leadership is more biblical?

Gray: I don’t think a church needs to be structured this way. There are other legitimate leadership models, and we recognize that no structure is perfect. If you change structures, you’re just trading liabilities. The liabilities that go with the team structure suit our culture, and they suit our personalities.

Mackey: But there are also some real benefits. At many churches, people come because they like the style or personality of the senior pastor. That’s not so much the case now with TNL. Someone might not particularly resonate with Dave, but they might resonate with John, or Brian, or me. That allows different types of people to come into TNL and still connect.

Terpstra: The longer you’re a part of the community, you’ll find the traits of leaders you may not have initially been attracted to rubbing off on you. I’ve experienced that myself from being around these three guys. I’m being influenced by them. That reminds me that there isn’t just one correct way to walk with Jesus in the twenty-first century.

How do you make decisions as a team?

Mackey: Slowly.

Miller: That’s one of the liabilities. But on the other hand, things can fall apart very quickly with a senior pastor and much more slowly with a team. That stability means progress can also be slower.

Terpstra: But just because we believe in a flattened structure doesn’t mean we don’t believe in each of us exercising leadership. Jared leads at times because the issue relates to his area. Unless I strongly disagree, which I have unlimited permission to do, I’m going to follow his lead. When it comes to worship details, what do I know? I’m going to follow John’s lead on that stuff. That’s one of the best parts; I don’t have to have an opinion on everything that happens. I don’t have to carry the burdens of the whole church home every day. This system is very freeing.

Mackey: Someone is responsible for developing new ideas for each of our four core areas. I might present the idea to build a house with Habitat for Humanity, but I expect the idea to get beat up on.

Gray: By “beat up,” he means we’re going to change details and refine ideas.

It sounds like a process that requires a lot of maturity and a lot of trust.

Gray: Absolutely. The need for trust has led to some difficult questions at times. How are we not trusting each other? Are there ways we need to trust each other more? Asking those questions isn’t about feeling warm and fuzzy; it’s completely practical and functional.

Terpstra: Our team structure demands healthy relationships and healthy communication. Without those we cannot get the job done.

Mackey: A lot of church staffs talk about the importance of having healthy relationships, but sometimes it’s just talk. Our structure demands healthy relationships.

Terpstra: Our trust gets tested when we ask someone on the team to sacrifice more for a season. That’s much easier within a hierarchy. It’s easier for a general to command a lieutenant to take a hill and risk his life, or to set aside his preferred agenda. It’s a lot harder to look a peer in the eye and ask him to sacrifice himself.

It’s difficult for these guys to look me in the eye and ask me to do something hard. But we’re like a band of brothers. I would die for these guys, and I know they would die for me. We can ask each other to do hard things because we’re not sending anyone out alone.

Mackey: The call of the follower of Christ is to look out for the interest of others. And that comes into play in this room.

Can you give an example?

Mackey: A few years ago, Dave presented an idea for changing the way we handle church membership. The idea was to set the bar higher for people, to communicate more clearly what was expected of them. We all thought it was a good idea. We packaged the idea, the board approved it, and it totally flopped.

Define “flop.”

Miller: Some people left the church. They said, If this is what you’re asking of me, I can’t fulfill these expectations. Others said, You guys are retarded. Do you think that after all of these years you can just rewrite the culture of TNL with one program? I had a lot of conversations with people who blasted the idea, and I defended it because we came up with it together.

Mackey: We eventually recanted. We knew the idea just wasn’t going to be easy in this community, but we didn’t blame Dave. We all contributed to the idea, we all approved the idea, and we all took the criticism for the idea.

Brian wasn’t originally part of this team. How do you recruit new pastors for a “band of brothers”?

Terpstra: We knew Brian before we hired him, and we knew his previous church. We had a lot of connections, and we spent a lot of time talking together on someone’s porch over drinks. It was a relational process.

Gray: It felt a lot like dating to me. We were all checking each other out to see if there was a fit.

Miller: We don’t hire the person because they can do the job. We hire the person because they’re the right person for this team. Their abilities are important, but we have to find somebody who works with this team’s chemistry.

Mackey: I remember talking with Brian before he was on staff about some problems that would make a lot of pastors uncomfortable. But Brian was able to roll with it. He fit our culture. Churches talk about hiring based on character, competency, and chemistry. Being a team means chemistry is just as important as the other two.

Most churches rely on their senior pastor to develop a vision. Where does vision come from on your team?

Terpstra: Let’s back up first. We don’t operate with the same kind of corporate drive that you see in a lot of churches. We don’t talk about vision that way. We are much more about creating a community than taking a territory.

Miller: We’re more familial than corporate.

Gray: We develop vision more organically. It’s not efficient, but that doesn’t mean we are unintentional.

Mackey: I use the band metaphor. Imagine four guys sitting in a room deciding they’re going to make another album. There is a lot of work to do between making that decision and going on tour. And there is a whole group of people, engineers and producers, who shape the final sound. Vision begins with the four of us sitting in a basement talking, but then it involves a lot of other people.

Gray: Jared’s describing a more right-brained process. I’ve been a part of four churches, and I’ve always seen vision constructed in very left-brained, linear, mechanical ways. We are more artistic, more organic about it. When the early church responded to the Jew-Gentile controversy, they decided to do what seemed best to them and the Holy Spirit. Seems is a totally messy word. As a former scientist, I have little room for that kind of imprecision. Yet that’s sometimes the best you can do with a plurality of leaders.

Terpstra: We try to ask who God has called us to be right now. We’re not obsessed with the future. We don’t set benchmarks of achievement. I think we are accomplishing things for God’s kingdom, but our success isn’t about measuring them and putting a notch on our belt.

TNL has been through one significant leadership crisis. If another crisis occur, how do you think your team structure would respond differently?

Mackey: We weren’t too far from that scenario. There was a time when my future here was in question because of problems I was facing in my marriage.

Terpstra: Jared and his wife separated, and our team had to determine the best response. How could we best care for them, and how could we cover his responsibilities in the church?

Mackey: These guys all expressed that they would fight for me because they cared for me. But they also said my marriage comes first, and if firing me would save my marriage, they were prepared to do that.

How did the congregation respond when they learned about Jared’s marriage?

Terpstra: If Jared had been the senior pastor, the church couldn’t have handled the crisis. The entire church would have been handicapped by his inability to lead and shepherd during that season.

Gray: But that shows the strengths of a team. Because a cord of three strands is not easily broken, the organization can still function if you remove one person from the team. Most hierarchical church structures are like a tower. If one piece is removed, the whole thing starts to crumble. Many senior pastors are reluctant to be open about their problems because not only is their job in jeopardy, but so is the health of the whole church.

Mackey: I stepped away from my role on the stage for several months, and it was really healthy. It gave my wife and me the space to focus on our marriage, and I think it modeled things well for the congregation.

Miller: We all face personal problems at times. And when there’s a need, being a team allows us to take a back seat and focus on those things every once in a while. Most structures don’t allow lead pastors to take a backseat.

Are there ever times when you wish the church had a more traditional structure?

Terpstra: No. Now I’m having more fun in the church than ever before. And it looks to just keep getting better.

Gray: I’ve not enjoyed working on any other church staff as much as I’ve enjoyed working here.

Mackey: I agree. Sometimes people refer to the time when thousands of people were showing up as the glory years of TNL. But we disagree. These are the glory years, because now we are a healthy community that knows and cares for each other. That started on the inside with this leadership team.

Brian Gray community pastor; Jared Mackey ministry pastor; John S. Miller worship pastor; Dave Terpstra teaching pastor