Whatever It Takes: How Chad Fisher Built One of America’s Fastest-Growing Churches (Part 1)

A few months after 9/11, 20-year-old Chad Fisher was called to the Middle East for one year of National Guard service, building bases, repairing infrastructure and patching holes in runways that had been bombed.

During that time, he struck up a friendship with some Nepalese men who worked in the gift shop on his military base. One Sunday, he attended an underground church, worshiping with 120 Nepalese men who weekly risked jail or deportation for gathering together in the name of Jesus.

“It was one of the most powerful, Spirit-filled, passionate, faith-infused experiences of my life,” Fisher recalls.

The stories of the Nepalese Christians forever changed his perspective of faith. “I stood looking face-to-face with people who had paid a price for the gospel. I began to ask myself, “What price have I paid?”

When Fisher wrote in his journal I will do whatever it takes to start this church, he didn’t know what it meant. He had no thought of planting a church. He didn’t see himself as a pastor. Others were far more equipped. It just didn’t click.

Surely, he thought, God would never use me.

Almost two decades later, Fisher leads one of the fastest-growing churches in the nation. Between December 2018 and February 2019, Rock City Church in Columbus, Ohio, experienced growth of more than 2,000 people.

But that’s not the statistic that stokes Fisher. During about the same time—from January to May 2019—more than 2,000 people, many of them millennials, made decisions for Christ.

Here, Fisher describes a fusion of vision, surprise, expectancy and sovereignty in doing whatever it took to start this church.

As a child, what was your relationship to the church?

I grew up in the church. My great-grandfather on my mom’s side started Faith Memorial Church, an Assemblies of God church in my hometown of Sandusky, Ohio. My grandparents and parents were believers. I was baptized at the age of 7 or 8.

Did you ever question your faith?

When I got to my late teenage years, I started realizing I was having a harder time finding my place within the church. Was the faith I grew up with someone else’s faith handed down to me? In my journal, I was asking things like, Lord, where is your presence? I went to a Christian school, and I would watch all my friends, one by one, fall away from faith. I remember asking God, Why aren’t we reaching and engaging my generation?

What did you want to do with your life?

At the time, I had no idea. I went to college to study business. I wanted to pursue something more secular and enlarge my world. I joined the National Guard in 2000.