Hope Church: Multiplication Through Subtraction

Hope Church
Las Vegas, Nevada
Website: HopeChurchLV.com
Founded: 2001
Connection Points: Discipleship environments, serving, small groups
A 2025 Outreach 100 Church

Tell me about the community surrounding Hope Church.

We have three locations within the Las Vegas Valley—Las Vegas, Boulder City and Henderson. A lot of people only know [Las Vegas] because of the Las Vegas Strip, but it’s common to live a normal life in a normal suburb here. In fact, my wife and I can go months without visiting the city.

Las Vegas is very multicultural, so the neighborhoods around Hope can have low-income schools, very rich neighborhoods and everything in between. There’s great diversity all across the city, spiritually speaking. The latest stats say about 92% of people in Vegas don’t know Jesus. But at the same time, there’s a lot of incredible stuff going on here for the kingdom at some great churches here. 

How does Hope Church reflect that community culture?

The founding pastor of Hope Church, Vance Pitman, moved here in 2001 with two other guys from the South. I joined the staff several years later. After 17 years, Vance went on to lead a church-planting organization, Send Network, within the Southern Baptist Convention.

I want to honor the groundwork that the founders laid here at Hope. Intentional diversity was definitely something we’ve carried from the very beginning. So we have diversity all over our staff, all over our church. We reflect our community—both generationally and culturally. We don’t just cater to a single culture, and that’s how we’ve always operated. For instance, we’ll intentionally sing a contemporary Brandon Lake worship song followed by a gospel song, complete with a full choir. It’s healthy for people to understand different cultures within the community of the church.

As a 2025 Outreach 100 Fastest-Growing Church, how do you define growth?

After COVID-19, we found ourselves starting over in a sense, as people had embraced casual Sundays by the pool and flipping through some YouTube sermons. We started to build up our base in 2021, and the pastoral transition happened in 2021–22. While we expected attendance growth due to the nature of our city, we began to ask ourselves what intentional growth looks like. In my first sermon as senior pastor, I said, “I’m all for God growing us wide, but what does it mean for God to grow us deep?”

Churches can just focus on how to get wide, but it’s harder to take a greater number of people deep. Our discipleship environments are intended to take us a level deeper. We’ve also seen the highest number of baptisms in our church’s history.

God has overflowed that into wide growth as well. We have been talking about moving from spectators to participants and wanting our whole church to really dig deep into discipleship.