Officially Announcing My New Pastoral Role

I'll be joining the staff of The Neighborhood Church in Bentonville, Arkansas as Sabbatical Pastor for a season.

I’ve been quietly “easing into” this new role since January, but we recently announced that I am officially joining the staff of The Neighborhood Church (we’re working on a new website) in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The Neighborhood’s founding Pastor, Joe Liles, will be taking a four-month sabbatical over the summer of this year. I’ll be preaching, pastoring, and managing communications for the church during that time, and I’m already phasing into it so the transition is as smooth as possible.

Just a few months after we moved to Bentonville in the summer of 2011 so we could start planting Grace Hills Church, Joe and Jess Liles moved into a house just down our street to begin planting The Neighborhood Church.

We had coffee and discovered some common deeply-held convictions about why the world still needs more (healthy) churches, not less.

If you think two guys planting churches with somewhat similar approaches in the same town at the same time could create a sense of tension or cooperation, you’d be mistaken. I’ve never felt anything but “we’re in this together” from Joe. That’s what happens when leaders set aside ego to do “kingdom” work together rather than guarding and protecting our own little institutional corners of it.

If you know Pastor Joe, you know him as one of the most extroverted human beings on earth. One Sunday, when our church was meeting and Joe’s wasn’t, he and Jess attended our services, where Joe immediately became one of our greeters, thanking everybody for being there and encouraging them to come back again the next week.

When I stepped down as Pastor at Grace Hills in April of 2021, Joe reached out. We’ve met regularly over the last five years. Joe is one of several voices who have helped me heal from burnout and stay connected to the work of local churches.

I’m excited about this because I’m still hanging onto hope that the church, as a localized gathering of people who follow the risen King Jesus, can change in healthy ways to meet the moment we are in with love, truth, and compassion.

I love people. Much of the communications work I do has be behind a laptop for hours every day. I may be an introvert, but one of the maxims I’ve learned to repeat is that when I am moving toward people rather than away from them, I know I’m on a healthy emotional track.

I believe that the next ten to twenty years are going to require church leaders to adapt like never before.

We must be willing to listen, rather than simply preaching and producing more content.

We must create spaces in which people with hard questions about faith, life, and relationships can show up with their skepticism and be welcomed.

And we must model real love for the world, embodying and becoming the very essence of God’s love to all of our neighbors.

I’m thankful to get to fill a new role and to keep cultivating a richer faith life, both in myself and in others.