Gene Appel is senior pastor of Eastside Christian Church, a multisite church based in Anaheim, California. He is co-author with Alan Nelson of How to Change Your Church (Without Killing It), and is a main session speaker for the upcoming 2025 Amplify Conference, October 21–22 at Wheaton College.
In the following interview with Outreach, Appel shares why collaboration is the best road to change in the church, how he rallied the key leaders at Eastside around a streamlined vision, and how they keep the temperature of evangelism high at the church when it tends to be one of the first things to dissipate.
When you took over Eastside in 2008, it was actually your second tour of duty there. You were an intern at Eastside before you became the pastor of Eastside. How do you feel like having that gap between when you first started as an intern and when you became the lead pastor helped you think through change at the church?
Well, huge difference in time, that’s a 28-year gap. So, [it was] 1980 when I interned at the church.
Yeah, for sure. Lots of change.
It was a going and blowing and reaching lost people kind of church. At that time weekend attendance was like 1,500 to 1,600—which was a very large church in 1980. There wasn’t the proliferation of megachurches like there are today.
So, it really made an impact on me of what a church could be. It was led by a great pastor at that time who led the church for 22 years and became a great mentor in my life. His name was Ben Merold. He left the church in ’91 when he was 65 years old. The pastor that followed was a tremendous guy, high character guy, prayerful guy, but the church kind of lost its vision and its focus. And for the next 17 years or so, it started to decline.
I started [as lead pastor] in the fall of 2008, and that entire year the church had had 56 baptisms. In a lot of churches that’d be like the day of Pentecost, but this is in Southern California at a church which at the time was about 1,800 people, and within 20 miles of our campus lived 5.6 million people.
I was just like, Surely heaven wants us to do better than that. So, I guess you would say when Ben left, the church probably, like a lot of churches get to, felt good about their history and their past, but then also in some unhealthy ways where you think, Well, we just know how to do it. And they live in the old methodologies and just keep doubling down on, Well, if we just do more of the old methodology, we’ll get more results, and that wasn’t happening.
By the time I came, there were leaders who were hungry to win again, and who were humble enough at this point to realize the old plays don’t work anymore, and we’ve got to reinvent, re-engineer for a new day, for the time that we’re in, not the time that we used to be in.
Yeah, that makes sense.
By that point I’d been pastor at Central [Christian Church] in [Las] Vegas during that gap period for 18 years, and had led through dramatic change. My five years at Willow [Creek Community Church] was also a time of pretty significant change. So, I would say, I just became more seasoned about leading through change. And it was a good test for me, because at that time I’d done a lot of teaching both nationally and internationally on leading through change, and it was like, Hey, do these principles I teach really work? It was just like running the playbook on them and finding out there is a science and there are principles about leading through change and people can learn the practices. It’s not just all intuition. There’s a skill set you can develop.
Oftentimes when you hear about a lead pastor coming in [they’re immediately] changing things. But your model was very collaborative, and you took time to really understand the culture of the church, how it had changed. You brought the key leaders in and got them to take ownership over the change. Could you speak to that collaborative process a little bit, and why that’s a better way to go about change than just the leader coming in and blowing things up?
I wasn’t always that collaborative as a leader. If I were to go back into my 20s and 30s, my approach to leadership would be pray and discern where God wants us to go and then get up and cast the vision and try to sell it. And you can get things done that way. But what I’ve discovered over time with wisdom and experience is that if you move slower and build a coalition of leaders who share that vision, you can actually go further faster than moving faster at the initial get-go.
Change [is] like a gardener planting seed. You prepare the soil, you plant the seed, you cultivate and water, then you experience the harvest. Any leadership is always preparing the soil—which most people don’t do. They want to get right to the vision. And then after they plant the seed, they neglect to cultivate, water and fertilize, and get rid of the weeds. They just want to experience the harvest.
So when I came to Eastside, I can say we didn’t make any changes early on, because I wanted to do what we were doing the best we could. One thing I could control was the preaching. I may not be able to fix every other thing, but I would focus on that—things that I could do well.
I formed a strategic planning team and between our strategic planning team, and with our staff and our elder board, we began a six- to nine-month process of strategic planning that we did in community together. When I arrived at the church they had that quote on the lobby office wall—I think it’s a Stephen Covey quote—“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
So one of my first staff meetings, I got all the staff together and I said, “Hey, I see this quote. Everybody seems to be quite proud of it, points it out when we walk into the church office lobby. I’m the new guy here. Today I want you to tell me what the main thing is.”
We started listing line-by-line-by-line on a flip chart and filled five pages worth of main things. Everybody was laughing because they realized we don’t know what the main thing is.
When we started the strategic planning process, I used that as a basis to say, “Hey, we’re not clear on what the main thing is, so we’re going to take whatever time we need—it doesn’t matter to me if it takes three months, six months, two years—but I want us to get to a point where we can all say, Yes, that’s the main thing. And we can all put our hand in the huddle and say that’s what we’re going to accomplish.
So we began a process over the [following] months of determining the main thing. We wanted to get our language down to just like three or four main things and get it down to a couple of words. I’d rather have the main thing be a little incomplete that everybody can remember [rather than] something that’s so complete, nobody can remember.
We got focused on that, and I kept preparing them: “OK, once we determine the main thing, then we’re going to figure out what’s our expression of those values. What are we going to measure to determine if we’re succeeding or not? And then our roles are all going to change because we’re going to move toward accomplishing that vision. We took nine months to do that, and when we actually unfolded that vision to the entire church I got down to the end of my message and said, “You probably all think, We have a loony new pastor in our church, like this is just a crazy vision that we want to move toward.” And I continued, “You’re probably right. I probably am. But I want you to know I’m not the only loony person in this church.”
At that point I had all the strategic planning team, staff and elders join me on the stage—there were like 35 of us at the time—and I said, “You know, I had my assistant do the math this week and represented on this stage today are 683 years of connection in this church. These people love this church. They’ve given their lives, their time, their prayers, their resources for this church. They would never do anything to hurt this church. And as best we know, as best we can discern, this is where God is leading us. And we’re asking you to join us on this journey and on this vision.”
That was really important, because it’s not how many embrace a change that determines whether it succeeds or fails; it’s who embraces the change that determines whether it succeeds or fails. These were key influencers in the church. Everybody in the church knew somebody on that stage that they could talk to. What that did was when we started implementing change in the [following] months and hit the inevitable headwinds and speed bumps that you hit when you change, our leaders were united and committed and could not be divided on that. They had gone public with their affirmation of this vision. I think it really enabled us to move a lot further faster than if I had just been the new pastor [who] one month after I got there said, “Hey, I’ve been to the mountain and here’s where God’s leading us.”
So what did that main thing become?
We didn’t come up with anything new. We just gave language to what’s been the story of the local church for 2,000 years. The language we came up with right out of Acts 2 is: Pursue God. You know, they were devoted to the fellowship, devoted to the Word, to prayer, to breaking of bread. Pursue God, Build Community—they met from house to house, not just in the temple courts—and Unleash Compassion locally and globally. So those are the three things we’re about, and that’s all we do. If it doesn’t fit in those buckets it may be a good thing but it’s not what we feel called to do at Eastside.
Our language is not magic, but what’s magic about it is it’s our language. We own it and it’s who we are. I remember when we actually landed on that message, the sense inside of me and I think in a lot of other people was, That’s not just a good vision for Eastside, but that’s what I want my life to be about. I want to pursue God and build community and unleash compassion in a broken world. That’s where we landed.
Evangelism has always been one of your core values even when you were a kid. How do you encourage the person in the pew to have more of an evangelistic mindset?
Well, here’s one of the things that I found when I came to Eastside. This may be a little unique to our church, but I’m sure it’s true of a lot of other churches. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about where they were spiritually. It wasn’t that they didn’t love their neighbor. They did, and they understood what those stakes were. Our particular challenge was that our people were so busy they didn’t have time to love their neighbors. In one of my earliest meetings with some of our staff I got people together who led any ministry that would help an adult grow spiritually. In those days, there were men’s ministries, women’s ministries, young adults … we still had kind of an old Sunday school model there too and small groups.
I said, “I’m the new guy here. [What are] all the different ministries that we have to help adults grow spiritually?”
Again, I had a flip chart [at] the front of the room, writing them down. We didn’t have five, we didn’t have 10, we didn’t have 15 or 20 or 30. We had 32 different ministries to help adults grow spiritually. And I’m like, “How does anybody know about these ministries? How do you promote them? How well can they be led? How do you resource them?”
That was an example of how complex we were. And when you got under the belly of those 32 ministries, we had lots of people in our church involved in multiple ministries. I [joked], “We [should] start a celebrate recovery group for groupaholics,” because they were just involved in so many different things. They [were] all stand-alone great ideas, but the volume of it created so much sideways energy in the church: Now I don’t even have time to have a barbecue with my neighbor. Now I don’t even have time to go to a ball game and hang out with somebody. Cause I’ve got this group on Tuesday and this group on Thursday.
We had a daughter in junior high and a daughter in high school when we came to Eastside, and just for our two kids in our family to be involved in the weekly ministries of Eastside it involved five different days over the course of the week. There was a Sunday morning gathering. There was a large group gathering for junior high midweek, a large group gathering for high school midweek, a separate small group gathering for junior high midweek and a separate small group gathering for … so it’s five days a week. Now, how healthy is that for families?
None of it [was] bad in and of itself. The volume of it just prevented us from being focused on building relationships with those who are far from God. So, we had to do less ministry to reach more people. It sounds funny, but people had to be trained in how to do life with nonbelievers or people spiritually disinterested. We actually did training [nights] for people on how to have a neighborhood open house and not make it weird and not make it a church event. It gave us an opportunity to vision cast. It gave us an opportunity to train. And then it gave us an opportunity to tell stories after it was over about, Hey, look what God did or Here’s what was frustrating or Here’s what was hard.
It’s been a while since we’ve done something like that, where it’s been that specific, but that’s what we needed at the time to get that into our DNA—where that became normal in our church—because it wasn’t normal at that time.
So you’ve pastored a church in Las Vegas and now you’re pastoring a church in Anaheim—two very destination-oriented cities. Do you feel like that makes it easier to reach out to people because you have a fresh crop of people coming through, or does it add difficulty to it because it’s more transient?
Yeah, two very different places. And you wouldn’t think, because they’re both [in the] western part of the United States. In the 18 years that I was there Vegas was a city of 500,000 people, and when I left it was over 2 million. We saw a dramatic kind of growth I probably didn’t fully appreciate at the time, and how the growth of the city contributed to the growth of the church. People in transition, people moving, people losing the fabric and relational roots from somewhere else and coming [to a] new [place] and kind of hungry for that. So, Vegas was, and even to this day continues to be, quite a growing city. That’s not true where I’m at in Anaheim or North Orange County, California. It’s very stagnant. It would be very rare to find a new housing development where I live because there’s just not property left to develop. A church can’t go buy 50 acres of undeveloped property because that doesn’t exist where we are.
So I would say the challenge is much higher to keep the church evangelistically focused where I am now versus when I was in Vegas, because we don’t have that natural growth. We have just the opposite happening. We have people leaving California by the tens of thousands, and we lose good families at Eastside every week moving to other parts of the country. I think [that] makes us work five times harder evangelistically. And it makes us probably a lot sharper and more intentional than we might be otherwise.
So how do you maintain that vision? We’ve talked a little bit about drift and how that easily happens over time. So how do you keep that main thing the main thing? How do you keep people rowing in the same direction, especially now that you’ve been at the church for over 15 years?
Yeah. The evangelistic value is the quickest value to dissipate in any local church. If you’re going to keep the evangelistic value alive, it takes a disproportionate amount of vision and emphasis and teaching and value. And it’s got to bleed out of your teaching and preaching and gatherings naturally and intentionally on a regular basis. I always tell other church leaders, “You gotta be raising the evangelistic value in some way every month in your church, at least once a month, or it’s gonna dissipate really fast.”
The [non-Christian] people who need you to do that aren’t around the table to say, Hey, don’t forget about me. Stay focused on me. The only people around the table are people who’ve already experienced grace and are growing believers. We’ve got to pay attention to [nonbelievers] too. We can’t forget that this is the mission field that God’s called us to. So, I think there’s a public thing that has to happen there.
I think there’s [also] a personal thing that has to be true of the lead person in your church that they champion and believe in those values and live out those values and can talk naturally about those values in their own life.
I think one of things that is a secret sauce at Eastside is we do corporate ministry plans twice a year. We have six key measurements we use to determine how we are doing at Pursuing God and Building Community and Unleashing Compassion. Two of those measurements under the Pursue God one are weekend attendance and baptisms. That doesn’t tell us what’s going on in a person’s heart, but if attendance is going up and the number of baptisms is going up, we do think that’s an indication that there’s an ever-increasing number of people who are pursuing God somewhere on a spiritual journey in their life. Baptism is as good an outward expression as we have of somebody who’s solidified a decision in Jesus and gone public with their faith.
So, when we’re doing ministry plans, we’re looking at what are the trends happening in our weekend services and baptisms. And if they’re trending downward, what do we need to do to stir that up? If they’re at great levels, what’s happening that we want to keep adding fuel to that fire? And why is that working? And I’d say that ministry planning process of every six months—and we’re also measuring our groups and people serving and our local and global compassion efforts—keep us measured and balanced as a church.
We just plant the seed and water. God brings the increase. But we’re gonna try to make sure [we’re] doing our part.
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