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Q & A
Q&A: Allowing Jesus to show up Mary Jacobs, Sep 25, 2009
Jorge Acevedo
The Rev. Jorge Acevedo will receive the 2009 Distinguished Evangelist of the United Methodist Church award later this month from the Foundation for Evangelism. Since he became lead pastor at Grace Church, a multi-site United Methodist congregation in Cape Coral, Fla., church attendance has grown to more than 2,600 in weekly worship. He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
Obviously, you have a heart for evangelism. Why? I wasn’t raised in a church. I know what it’s like to be very far from God, what it’s like to be purposeless, what it’s like to be lost in a world of addictions in my own life and the life of my family. Out of my personal experience I bring a real passion to reaching people who are far from God. God has given me a passion for reaching the unchurched, the once-churched and the over-churched.
The over-churched? Explain. The “over-churched” person is the second son in the prodigal son story, who never left home. The over-churched have lived a good life. They lived in the father’s house, but didn’t have the father’s heart. Churches are filled with men and women who’ve been in church every Sunday, but in their hearts they are very far from God. The intimacy of their relationship with Jesus is but a faint memory. There are a lot of over-churched people who are United Methodist in name, but not Christian by their own testimony.
How do you convert the over-churched? It’s a slow process. Converting the convinced is really hard! They are convinced that everything is OK, and yet they don’t bear the fruit of a faithful follower of Christ. They are not engaged in the personal and social dynamics of the gospel. You reach them by modeling faithful discipleship in the life of the church. The best way is for them to see these unchurched people who come into our church and see the vitality of a fresh new relationship with Jesus. It’s pretty contagious.
My philosophy of church growth is pretty simple. If you look at the Gospels, wherever Jesus showed up, a crowd showed up. If we just allow Jesus to show up in our churches, a crowd will show up. But in many churches—by our forms, our liturgies, our music, our sermons—we keep Jesus outside.
“Allowing Jesus to show up”—what does that look like? It’s not just a matter of worship style, I can tell you that. But I don’t know the answer to that. You know when He’s there and you know when He’s not. It’s like asking somebody what it’s like to be in love. You know it when you’re in it.
What about reaching the unchurched? It’s about meeting people at their point of need. That’s nothing new. In our case, what God has allowed us to do best is our healing and recovery ministries. At all three of our campuses we have Celebrate Recovery, which reaches every week between 600-700 people. Six nights a week we offer some kind of recovery ministry, Bible study, step study, support groups.
Let me frame what I mean by recovery because we tend to think of just drugs and alcohol. Everybody needs recovery, because sin is the ultimate addiction. Sometimes that sin is spending too much money, getting in bad relationships, letting anger get out of control, shopping too much, eating too much, or doing too much alcohol or drugs. Everybody needs recovery. It’s just a matter of what you need recovery from.
We’ve tried to create a culture that says everybody is in recovery from something. There’s a culture of deliverance and healing that pervades everything we do. We major in life change.
It occurs to me that “recovery” is another way of describing the kind of transformation described in the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Absolutely. We put it this way: “We want to rescue people from the hell they’re living in as well as the hell they’re heading to.” Salvation is not just about pie in the sky until you die. It’s about rescuing and redeeming my life right now. Jesus said in John 10:10, “I came that you might have life and have it overflowing more abundant.” So we have all kinds of recovery groups, support groups, small groups, Bible studies that are helping people recover.
I wouldn’t call it a renaming of what we read in “Amazing Grace”; it’s a fleshing it out. From something that’s spiritual and eternal in the sweet by-and-by, to something that’s practical and livable right now this side of the grave
You’ve presided over some pretty amazing change at Grace Church. When I came here in 1996, the church was averaging about 400 in attendance on Sundays, and had been in a five-year decline. My first Sunday here, they told me we had $29.16 in our checking account and owed $1.2 million on a building. The church was filled with wonderful people who had just kind of lost their way; they were good people who had just been lulled to sleep. Yet there were 30 people who had been on the Walk to Emmaus who were praying for renewal. They are the unsung heroes of this story: that group of people prayed that God would do a new thing in their church.
I was a first-time lead pastor, 36 years old, younger than anybody else in the room, and God just started to work. I’m a pretty optimistic person. I just started picturing a future that we could be the body of Christ, the way the Bible defines us. For the last 13 years, we have worked diligently, just trying to be faithful to what the Bible says the local church can be.
A large portion of our membership is what we would call “the working poor.” Our challenges, they’re typically financial; we don’t have problems with volunteers. We’re a hard-working, working-class congregation that just happens to be real big. We average a little over 2,600 every Sunday in 10 services.
What made you grow? We had an inner transformation that led to an outer transformation. I think we grew because of the grace of God. God was very gracious to us and God honored the work that we did and have continued to do.
It’s not formulaic. Growing a church is more art than it is science. It’s listening to the Holy Spirit and being willing to obey whatever God asks us to do. Most of the time it feels like we’re a train running 60 miles an hour and we’re laying the tracks before us as we go. It’s a fast-moving machine. A dozen initiatives have grown our church: We have great music, great children’s programs, great recovery programs. But the reality is that our people have listened to what God asks us to do and then just done it. It’s a dance.
As you know, Methodists are not known for evangelism. We lost thousands of members last year. Are there any lessons to be gleaned from your experience? We suffer from spiritual and heritage amnesia. We’ve forgotten what the Bible says about the local church. [Willow Creek Community Church pastor] Bill Hybels says the local church is the hope of the world. God has given the local church the primary responsibility of doling out the grace of God to a broken and hurting world. But we’ve forgotten that.
We have also forgotten our historical tradition as Wesleyans. We were a movement begun among the working class; we’ve become a movement primarily among the white collar. We’ve forgotten our roots of personal piety and social holiness. We have part of our church that is passionately committed to saving souls and another part that’s passionately committed to meeting human need. The genius of the Wesleyan movement, to quote [Good to Great author] Jim Collins, was the “genius of the and, not the tyranny of the or.” Churches that God seems to be working in and through are those that seek to live out the Wesleyan vision of the spiritual life. Churches that forget that, die; churches that live into that, live.
How has God surprised you in the last 13 years? I’m surprised that people keep coming back. It’s a miracle. I’m amazed at how far down God can reach. There are thousands of people whose lives have been radically transformed by the grace of Jesus through the ministry of Grace Church. One of my dearest friends, Jim, was a fifth-of-vodka-a-day drinker, two six packs of beer and a handful-of-Vicodin taker, a womanizer, who, when his wife came to see me and I told her to “Run, don’t walk, get in recovery.” Her husband got into treatment, came back to our church and got busy walking the walk as a disciple of Jesus. Today he and his wife, Kim, lead our marriage ministry. If you had told me that eight years ago when I first met Kim, I would’ve told you that you were smoking something. But now I’ve seen the amazing life change in this one guy’s life and it reminds me that it’s God that does this, not us. There are thousands of Jims out there with stories like that.
Our job is to set the table. God’s job is to serve the meal. What we try to do every day is set the table so God can come and serve the meal. And when He serves the meal, people don’t leave hungry. They leave transformed.
Jorge Acevedo
What about reaching the unchurched? 
