Joby Martin: Why Churches Must Multiply, Not Just Grow (Part 1)
How did you come to plant The Church of Eleven22?
I’m an accidental church planter. I didn’t mean to do it at all. In my mind I was just minding my own business.
I was a youth pastor and loved it. I’ve never seen any ministry role as a stepping-stone to something else. I’ve just tried to be faithful to whatever opportunity God gave me. I was serving at this really loving Methodist church (even though I wasn’t Methodist) here at Jacksonville Beach, Florida. The church was a fairly typical large-church model. They brought me in as the youth pastor, and I did that and was happy doing so.
“Sometimes it feels like trying to put handles on a bullet train—just inviting people to grab on to what God is doing.”
My senior pastor—Jerry Smith—was the best pastor I’ve ever met in my life. He was the kind of man who wakes up, reads his Bible and lives like it the rest of the day. Literally the best Jesus follower I have ever met. But like every youth pastor, I would sit in the back of our main service and kind of be critical of the way we were doing church. All right guys, I thought, if I’m ever in charge, I wouldn’t do that. I would do this.
Eventually, the Lord was like, All right, here’s your chance. This was circa 2003. As I had worked with students, I noticed a pretty significant gap between them and their parents. In responding to that, we decided to start a new service, and the church let me put my fingerprints all over it. They kind of gave me the reins. As it turned out, it started at 11:22 on Sunday mornings, so that’s just what I called it: Eleven22.
It felt like camp. We would worship super intensely; I would preach way too long. I primarily just preached through books of the Bible. We would call people to repentance and to surrender. I never thought in a million years that it would work. But the cool thing is it didn’t have to. I already had a job. I loved discipling high school kids, so it was no problem.
“I’m an accidental church planter. I didn’t mean to do it at all. In my mind I was just minding my own business.”
Early on, I would gather our crew together and say, “Look, this probably won’t work because our worship guy was a little too intense, and I talked too long. We might cap out at 250, 300 people. But if we can make even 300 disciples for Jacksonville, wouldn’t that be awesome? What a great way to spend our lives.”
But it didn’t cap out. Over six months, it grew to about 1,500 people. We went from one service to five. Eventually our service outgrew where we met. Eventually, my senior pastor said, “You should probably plant a church.” I didn’t even know what that was. So we googled church planting, and an Exponential Conference came up. It was two hours away in Orlando, so we went and started kicking the tires on our next steps.
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I didn’t feel great about it. But my senior pastor told me, “It’s time you did this. I have a real peace about it.” And I said, “Well, that’s funny because I feel like I’m going to throw up in my mouth when you say that.” We gathered the team together, and we were allowed to live in Beach United Methodist Church for a year and a half while we put plans together to launch Eleven22 as a separate entity. We raised money. We found an old, dilapidated Walmart and refurbished it. And on September 23, 2012, we formally launched The Church of Eleven22.
So as I see it, it was a total accident. I didn’t mean to plant it.
