Collin Outerbridge planted Nona Church in Orlando, Florida, with a heart to build a diverse community of faith to serve the Lake Nona Community. Nona Church is a 2024 and 2025 Outreach 100 Fastest-Growing church. The son of Caribbean immigrants and a southeast Orlando native, Pastor Collin is passionate about creating churches that are multicultural and multi-generational, reflecting the diversity of the city of Orlando. He is a main session speaker for the upcoming 2025 Amplify Conference, October 21–22 at Wheaton College, for which Outreach magazine is a partner.

In the following interview, Outerbridge talks about why Nona Church has experienced sustained growth, their focus on creating an intentional multicultural community that equips young people to serve, and how they encourage their members to share their faith.

Your church has made our [Outreach 100] fastest-growing churches list in back-to-back years. What do you think have been some of the keys to that sustained growth?

One of the things that we’re very grateful for is God’s kindness in our church when it comes to creating unity among a people that otherwise many would not expect to see unified. I think that the Scripture is clear that the church ought to look like and serve its community, and it looks like laying down preferences for the sake of a greater mission. I think a significant reason why our church continues to experience this kind of growth is in part because of the people that call it home.

It seems like everyone at Nona has 25% of our church that they wish was different. The problem is that 25% is different depending on who you talk to. But the greater mission of reaching our neighbors, of serving our community, and of lifting our eyes to Jesus seems to be enough to keep us together and connected.

There’s something about a unifying vision that is greater than our preferences, that is focused on serving our community, that I think has led to a strong sense of connectivity that’s allowed our church to grow and to impact people right here where we live.

So let’s drill down on that a bit. A lot of times we’re trying to eliminate the friction to grow churches. I think of the homogeneous unit [church growth] principle: Just flatten everything, make everyone speak the same language, have the same preferences, listen to the same worship music, and that will grow your church. You’re calling people to make sacrifices, to accept friction into their church experience.

It starts kind of in our origin story. I mean, our church planting story is in a YMCA with one of my close friends who is leading worship, and he comes from a very different church background than I do. There would be some weekends where the music time—this is our earliest days—the music time would be 45 minutes, and I had 20 minutes to teach. Then there are other times where it was 27 minutes and I needed to teach a little bit longer. So even in our own staff construction, there was a dynamic that we were inviting people from different denominational backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, all onto the same team. As we were doing that, our staff had to first learn how to serve and defer to one another when it came to the way that we thought church could be. That really set the groundwork and the framework for what our church is today.

In so many ways, our church is an experiment to say, “Is it possible, at least in an anecdotal level, to do away with the homogenous unit principle, to not target a demographic in particular, but to say, Hey, what is the community like and could we be a church where everybody finds something that feels like home for them, but everyone also has to kind of lean in a little bit because of the friction that’s created?”

We’re the kind of church where we’ll have a worship gathering where the music is being played in a sound and in a style that for a percentage of our population is not what they would usually expect. But then they’re also going to hear a sermon that is more organized around a style or format that might be expositional. And then we’re going to end with a benediction.

So this world of competing ideas that you might expect in one church setting or environment, we’ve tried to merge all of that into our space, and in so doing, acknowledge that church history has an amazing expression of ways in which people worship and honor God.

If we can bring all of that into our space, hopefully there’s enough home for everyone, but creating some tension where everyone has to remain humble to a degree and recognizing that this may not resonate with me, but it does with the person sitting next to me.

In that vein, you very intentionally have made the church a multicultural church. What have been some of the challenges and some of the breakthroughs that you’ve experienced in championing that vision of a multicultural church?

For context’s sake, our church is probably 50% non-majority culture. So when we talk about being a diverse church, we really mean being a diverse church and community. For us, that value really comes from where we live. We live in a community that’s about that same percentage dynamic. So from the earliest stages of our church, one of the questions that we were asking is how do we create the kind of environment where the people that we go to school with, that are at the grocery store, that we see at the gym would want to be a part of the kind of church that we’re creating.

Some of the challenge with that has been communicating to people’s discomfort and acknowledging that that’s not a problem to be solved but a tension that we’re going to manage, and inviting people to self-select into that tension with the recognition that they don’t have to, that there are some other churches that they might go to where they won’t have to experience that tension and that’s OK. That’s a decision for them to make.

I think one of the big breakthroughs for us has been engaging in this conversation head on. [It’s] not so much something happens in the culture and now we’re responding to something that might be sensitive when it comes to a racial or ethnic conversation or a sociological conversation or question, but being proactive by teaching the Scriptures, and as the Scriptures bring up these particular questions, engaging them ahead of time and resourcing our people with a worldview that allows them to interact with it in a proactive measure.

Another element that’s been big for us is saying we’re not going to allow the culture to drive our conversations. We’re not responding all the time, but instead saying we’re going to allow the Scripture to drive what we teach and believing that because our God is a global God that has a global mission. Some of these more nuanced conversations are going to come to fruition as we open our text. So when we get to Acts, we’re going to run into Paul at the synagogue and we’re going to run into Paul in Athens, and we’re going to see him and be able to navigate the complexity of that moment and do what’s best for the people that are there.

Another aspect of your church is it’s very deliberate about raising up the next generation. You guys have been very deliberate about equipping kids as young as middle schoolers to do leadership in your church. So talk a little bit about the philosophy behind that and how that has affected the way that your church has operated.

A part of that came out of my dissertation and my work in this area. The question that I was asking a number of years ago was, How do we build the framework that leads to resilient Gen Z Christians? So this is pre-COVID. The deconstruction conversation is beginning to become normalized in our culture. And one of the things that we were looking at was, OK, how do we identify in a proactive way, in a preventative way, what is seemingly causing these deconstruction moments in the lives of Gen Z Christians?

I think it’s twofold. One is that the research that we found, both in my study and just what was available at the time, was that young people that felt connected, not just to youth group but to their church as a whole, were less likely to disaffiliate when they graduated and left home.

So that’s why our intentional design [of] how we do ministry is offering opportunities for children and for students and for young adults to find leadership positions in our church as soon as possible. Just this weekend, I saw a nine-year-old greeting at the front door and a 13-year-old was giving a tour to a brand-new family about our kids spaces, answering all of the questions that that family had about how we do kids ministry. And a 17-year-old was on stage, leading worship in our adult environments with the rest of our team. For us, I think a key element to that is saying, How do we help our young people see this church, not as their parents church, but as their church? That might even look like them going through a membership class and being a part of that process, taking ownership in that way.

The second piece has been holistic mentorship. What we’ve realized is that oftentimes kids live in a duality where following Jesus looks like a missionary or pastor, but it’s hard for them to figure out how to take their passion for art or their passion for engineering and see how those things intersect with the gospel narrative and what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus in that setting.

One the things I’m really grateful for is we are pretty intentional about connecting people that are in business or in a more secular career environment with young people that have those aspirations so that they can see how their work can be worship before they ever get to college.

Those two elements have been really helpful for us. How do we get proactive in helping young people see the church, not as Mom and Dad’s church, but as their church, and [see] youth group as an opportunity to find friends and community but not to be the end-all be-all when it comes to their involvement in a biblical faith community.

So how do you deal with allowing kids to have growing pains [as they learn to lead]?

So I think it’s twofold. I think one is our church model is not designed around the homogenous unit principle. And our church model is probably more designed, I would say, [for] presence than production. Now, hear me, we have a high standard for all of those elements. But for us, what that means is there’s kind of an awareness that our community has that everything on Sunday morning or the weekend gathering, it may not go perfectly. There’s an agreement that that’s not the highest standard. A good weekend for us is not, Did everything go off without a hitch? A good weekend for us is, Man, what are the stories of people that came up after service and received prayer? Who’s the person who took a next step toward Christ? Who’s the new volunteer that took a risk that they weren’t willing to take six months ago?

We celebrate development probably more than we celebrate the destination. And that’s not every church, and that’s OK. We’re trying to take a long view here.

We planted the church when I was in my late 20s, and our vision and hope is that God would give us a 30-, 40-year run of impact. That we would raise up a next generation of leaders. When I think about church through that lens, I’m less worried about the immediacy of the moment on Sunday as much as I am the long-term effect of a life that’s saying yes to following Jesus in our community. That’s one of our governing elements.

I would also say at a very practical and pragmatic level though, there is a training process that our young people have to go through if they’re going to be in the weekend environment. The way that we would put it is that their age is not going to be a limiting factor [for] their ability to participate, but their skill development might [be].

We’ve got a 13-year-old who runs lighting for us in our Sunday morning gatherings. Well, that 13-year-old has been trained and equipped and been in the same courses that we offer all of our adults who are on our production team, and he’s just got to get a really good knack for it. So he might be allowed to produce our Sunday gathering. There might be another 13-year-old who’s not ready to do that yet, but we’re going to give them an opportunity in a kids environment or in a different space.

It’s all about moving at the speed and the pace of the young person that we’re trying to develop. We have this phrase around here: “Everyone’s a 10 somewhere.” Sometimes people just have to be honest with you about where you are. We want to be people that offer that kind of courageous feedback and encourage people to try new things and trust that God has good for them in that space.

That’s great. I love that. You’re talking with the [Wheaton College] Billy Graham Center and Outreach magazine, so I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about evangelism and how your church encourages people to get out [and] get past that awkwardness that we all experience when we’re trying to have a spiritual conversation with someone. How do you at Nona Church encourage your people to be evangelistic and outreach-minded?

There are three things that come to mind. The first one is we want to create the kind of gathering where it’s really easy to invite a friend. So that’s a key element for us. We want to build credibility with the folks in our congregation [so] that they know that regardless of what weekend they invite their friend, their friend’s going to walk into an environment where the words that we use are going to be accessible. If we use Christian language, it’s going to be described and defined for the average hearer, and that person’s going to be in an environment where they’re going to hear a clear gospel presentation. So I’d say that’s the first piece.

I think the second piece is the way that we think about modeling communication from the platform. So for us, like when I’m training our communicators, one of the things I want, [and] I remind them over and over again, is the message is not done unless we’ve given people a clear understanding of who Christ is, what the gospel is, and give people an opportunity to respond to it. Part of what we’re trying to do, even in our teaching, is model to people that every single piece of Scripture points to Jesus. Because that’s the case, we can always point people to the saving grace that comes from him. No matter how practical we are in our teaching, no matter how helpful we are, we’re not done until we’ve given people the gospel.

Then the last thing that I would say is we want to celebrate stories of people living out relational evangelism. So that looks a lot like our staff being encouraged to live and to work and to play among people that don’t yet share our faith, and to share those stories of people that we’re praying for and people that we’re connecting with that we hope will one day say yes to following Jesus, because we believe it’s what’s best for their life.

We want to highlight those stories, not only in our staff, but across all of our leadership teams in such a way that it shows the rest of our church, Hey, you can do this too—that the person that is just like you, who had a burden for their neighbor or for their co-worker or for their friend at school, they shared their story. They shared how God had transformed their life. And we’re going to now show you how that happened and give you resources and tools to be able to do that too.

So I think it’s a threefold approach. It’s how is the gathering designed? It’s how do we communicate in that gathering? And what stories do we tell and celebrate? We’re just as likely, and probably more likely, to tell the story of a person who came to faith outside of one of our gatherings than we are to tell the story of someone who did [that] in response to a gospel invitation on a Sunday morning or on a Saturday night.

To hear more from leaders like Collin Outerbridge who are helping churches mobilize everyday Christians to reach their communities with the gospel, register your team now for this year’s Amplify Conference in partnership with Outreach magazine, and join us in advancing the kingdom of God.