Stay on Mission: How Skyline Is Experiencing Growth Through Evangelism and Discipleship
From Baseball to Ministry
What lessons have you carried from baseball that have helped you in pastoral leadership?
Sticking with the Word of God. There is power in the Word, and that is what we stick to. I saw it firsthand with nobody knowing anything about the Bible, and yet we’re reading a paragraph from Matthew, and the next guy’s reading it, and the next guy. And everybody’s like—you could see it in us—we were just like, “This is unbelievable.” And then to have a pastor translate some of this stuff for us while we’re doing these Bible studies helped so much.
So today, I stick to the Word of God, and I help people understand it. It’s really important to help people understand what you’re saying. It seems elementary, but educated pastors sometimes preach as if they’re trying to impress their professors from seminary. That’s not helping people. We just want to help people.
Tell me how you came to be the pastor of Skyline Church.
I was a youth pastor, and then I went to High Desert Church in Victorville, California, as an adult ministries pastor. Then we decided we were going to plant a church, and so we planted a church here in San Diego. We went multisite with it. We were in Lakeside, which is where I grew up, and it was growing very rapidly.
We were looking for church facilities, because we were set-up and take-down for eight years. We started with one trailer and ended up having six trailers and a lot of teams. We got a church building that was pretty run down. We refurbished it quickly, then grew out of it. And we’re doing seven or eight services, and it was just untenable.
We’re going to go into a building program, but being here in California, it’s almost impossible to build anything. They gave me the news that this plan—we did drawings, we did everything—was going to take about 10 years. And to raise $10-$20 million over the course of 10 years, nothing being built, that’s going to be really challenging. I just asked the Lord what he wanted me to do.
It was crazy, because at that time, I started getting calls from headhunters for large churches, and a lot of them were large national ministries. I thought, Is God saying something here? But I knew I didn’t want to give up our church plant, because we had so much momentum.
I interviewed with some of these churches, always saying, “As long as we keep this [church plant] as at least a satellite.” At the last minute, Skyline called, and I was like, “I don’t think so.” But then, over time, I realized it’s perfect, because it’s only 20 minutes from our campus, and it was struggling at the time. And it’s a beautiful facility, great location; 65,000 cars go by every day.
We went through the process for several months, and it came down to God making it very clear that Skyline was the place. And so, we took over Skyline, just brought all of our church-plant DNA into Skyline, the same purpose statement, same core values. We basically took it over and started running with our focus on outreach.
Bringing Church-Planting DNA
Skyline is a church with a long history and has been led by high-profile pastors, including John Maxwell and Jim Garlow. How have you navigated coming into an established church but with church planter DNA?
I thought it would be quite a challenge, because when you plant a church, you get to create your own problems. When you take over a church, you inherit them. We inherited some stuff, and we had to try and make changes. And I’m really grateful, because the people who have been there the longest at Skyline were actually the ones that were the most favorable toward change. It’s a very resilient church. The people that have been there a long time have been through a lot.
The church used to be in Lemon Grove, which is about 25 minutes from where we are now. [Skyline] moved to Rancho San Diego, and that was partly John Maxwell. They saw that the area they were in limited what they were going to be able to do. So they bought this property on a mountain, and then had to blast it with dynamite—blast that mountain out—and put this church on this mountain. We call it the miracle on the mountain.
