Dave Gibbons: Getting to the Fringe

The next few years did bring phenomenal growth, and you soon had a megachurch growing under your feet. But something wasn’t quite right.

The growth pattern was on this crazy trajectory. But as a megachurch begins to emerge, what’s next? You have to get land to continue the escalation of the vision. And we found a choice piece of property right off the I-5 freeway. But when we put in a bid, the Korean car company Kia outbid us. We raised the bid, Kia outbid us again. After a while, we were advised to just give in.

I remember during the capital campaign, I had taken the manta, “It’s not about the building, it’s about what happens inside the building.” Common fund-raising motto.

But then I noticed how disappointed I was when we didn’t get the building. It was like the Lord was saying, “It’s a little bit more than you think ‘about the building.’” I went into this funky stuff for a while—maybe part of it was mid-life on top of the church thing. In my cynicism, I was thinking, Is this all my life’s going to be? Am I just trying to build a bigger box where 90 percent of the people still aren’t going to be doing anything?

In my cynicism, I went through this thing where I didn’t really want to be in ministry for a while.

By this time, NewSong had been making some progress advancing its global vision. In retrospect, it seems providential—and somewhat amusing—that you should go to Thailand right at this time of introspection and reassessment. That certainly became a tipping-point event, didn’t it?

I went with a group of CEOs and entrepreneurs from NewSong, several of them multimillionaires with huge interests in Asia—and aspirations for God’s Kingdom. Bangkok is a city of 13 million and, as one missionary explained, Christians have been there for 125 years and have only been able to reach about 1 percent of the population. All these guys on our team were befuddled. What could we possibly do? But I started feeling an energy I hadn’t felt in a long time. God was nudging me, I think, because the need was bigger than me, the opportunity greater. It energized me to confront a challenge I couldn’t resolve just by generating another process. This was so God-sized that we knew if we could achieve something, He would get the credit.

That’s when you got a rather unusual invitation.

There was an older women working there in Thailand who had been one of NewSong’s first major investors about 10 years earlier. Now, at around 70, she was working in an English language school in Bangkok. She said, “Dave, you need to come here.” I said, “No way. We’re growing. I’ve got to take care of the church back in Irvine.” But she was pretty insistent.

At the time I was doing some devotional reading from the One Year Bible, that section from the Gospels that talks about the Lord of the Harvest. And two words stood out to me. At the conclusion of the story it said, “Go now.” That just really struck me. It felt like the Lord was personalizing the message to me: “Go now.” I said, “Lord, the church in Irvine is growing. What am I going to do?” And he said, “Go now.”

When I got back to the States, I spoke with the staff, and they started crying. They said, “Dave, this is the vision of NewSong. We’re supposed to be doing this. It makes a statement when we send out our pastor.”

You first tried to export NewSong Irvine to Bangkok, Thailand. How did that work out?

[Laughter] Well, we followed the church model of ramping up, core development, preview services. And we had this big service and a lot of people came—including all the missionaries, everybody. They’d never seen so many people coming together. I was feeling pretty good, and then I saw the Thai guys who were part of our core. They came to me looking discouraged.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

They said, “This isn’t NewSong.”

I said, “What are you talking about?” In my mind I’m thinking, Hey, I helped start NewSong. What do you mean, This isn’t NewSong? [laughter]

They said, “Well, when we were meeting before, we were always in these little circles and everybody got to talk. But here we’re just watching a few people doing it.”

The Lord just convicted me. He said, “Dave, you’ve just relied on your own default methodologies that you’ve learned. Respect the locals! Learn from the locals! I can work in different forms.”

So that’s when I said, “Well, what do you think we should do?”

They said, “Why don’t we start doing smaller groups? We can meet like this once in a while—maybe once a month, or once every three months. But let’s meet in smaller groups all over the city.”

Dave Gibbons
Dave Gibbonshttp://www.newsong.net/

Dave Gibbons is the founding pastor of Newsong, a multisite, international church with campuses in inner city L.A., North Orange County, Irvine and Bangkok, among other places. He's also the CVO and founder of Xealots, a nonprofit that equips creatives, entrepreneurs, activists, artists and innovators to discover their destiny and live it out.

Keep Calm and Minister

Can you pass the "Timothy Test?"

4 Ways God’s Spirit Leads His People

We don't always have the full picture, but discerning how God is leading you is not unclear.

Fit for the Kingdom

The Lord prompted Reardon to think about combining Christian fellowship with fitness in order to create a new small group for men.