God's given you a vision to plant a church. You're gifted and maybe have the team ready to go. However, there are thousands of details and hundreds of questions that you have. In this podcast we will answer some of the common questions and answer listener submitted questions to help you fulfill the call the Lord's given you.
Welcome, everyone, to 101 Questions at Church Planters Ask. I'm your host, Danny Parmalee. And for some of you, it's welcome for the first time. Some of you, it's welcome back. We are relaunching this podcast after a good hiatus, good amount of time, and a major change in it is that we have added a host, Chris Hifil.
Danny Parmelee:Hey, Chris. How are you doing?
Chris Highfill:Hey. What's up? Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Danny. Man, I've been waiting for this invite for a long time, so this is, like, gosh.
Chris Highfill:Amazing.
Danny Parmelee:I know you you've basically been kind of, you know, begging to be part of this, and I finally relented. And so okay. Fine. Fine, Chris. Actually, that's not true at all, but we are super glad to have you.
Danny Parmelee:We're gonna actually, the whole point of this kind of relaunch podcast is for those that, don't know you. I'll recap just a little bit about myself as well. We're gonna talk, just kinda briefly a bit about what we're gonna cover, what we hope to cover. We we call it a 101 questions that church planners ask. I think our list is at, like, a 140 right now.
Danny Parmelee:We have an Excel document, and we're kind of just working through that. And a lot of these are questions that church planners, ask you and I both over and over again, and, that was kind of actually even the beginning of the idea of it, of of the podcast. Hey, man. I'm answering the same question over and over again. So, hey, why don't we just record some of these?
Danny Parmelee:In that way, we can point people, in that direction. So, why don't we,
Chris Highfill:kinda take things off less people that way too. So it's good.
Danny Parmelee:Yes. Yeah. It's it's less work. It's basically us being lazy, type of, type of situation. But why don't
Chris Highfill:we Listen to our podcast. We'll answer the question.
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. We'll start off. Chris, tell us just a little bit of yourself, your family, a little bit about your church, and then also, even the role that you have as far as, you know, coaching and and training church planters.
Chris Highfill:Yeah. Well, my name is Chris Ifill. I'm lead pastor at Grace River Church right outside of Saint Louis about 20 minutes from downtown. And, we started Grace River 10 years ago, my wife and I. We've been married for 20 years.
Chris Highfill:We have 3 kids, Ella, Jack, and Ally. They're 14, 16, and 18 years old. So we basically have like a student ministry at our house. It's pretty awesome. I was a youth pastor before I was a planter.
Chris Highfill:I always joke with Danny that, youth pastors make the best church planters. The joke there is Danny wasn't ever a youth pastor. He just jumped right into church planting.
Danny Parmelee:Well, I I was for an internship, and I was horrible at it. So, you know, just just for accuracy sake. So in turn
Chris Highfill:Yeah. I actually wasn't a very good youth pastor either, but I just stuck with it for a long time. And so, 13 years in youth ministry, and then, really felt like, man, one of these days I'm gonna, like, pastor adults. What's that gonna look like? And I really am the most least likely guy you'd ever meet to be a pastor.
Chris Highfill:So I I I we were kinda, like, trying to figure out, like, okay. How am I gonna be a lead pastor of a church? And I really wanted to reach it, be a part of a church that was reaching people that were really far from God. And I'd always read about it, and I'd heard about it. I'd heard about churches that were reaching people that other churches weren't reaching.
Chris Highfill:And so I was beginning to do research on it and began praying through it. I've come to found out, man, the best way to reach the people that nobody else is reaching is to start a brand new church. Especially in your thirties, early thirties, that was my only option. It was like, okay. I could take a dead or dying church and turn it around or and and spend the next 10 years of my life doing that.
Chris Highfill:Or we could start something from scratch. Obviously, both have some pretty significant pain points, and both, require a different set of skills. And so we're really glad that we went this route. We planted Greece River, and it's been a lot of fun. We were portable for 5 years, and then we moved into the 1st permanent facility 4 years ago.
Chris Highfill:And it's been unbelievable having a building. It's really changed a ton of things. We say it a lot though. The building is not, the church is not a building that you drive to. It's a movement that you choose to be a part of.
Chris Highfill:A movement that's helping people meet, know, and follow Jesus. So, it's never been about a building, but man, location sure did help. And I think we're gonna talk about that in the episode to come, the importance of a good location.
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. I was actually just, going to say that, because, specifically for you, you were was YMCA your first, or were you at a school first and then the YMCA?
Chris Highfill:Yeah. We were at an elementary school first, for 1 year in elementary school, and then 4 years in a YMCA. I forgot to mention too, I'm the regional director of church planting, so I actually work in partnership with Danny. And, so we help new churches get started. Love doing that, and we love helping accomplish the dream that, God has put in different in people's hearts.
Danny Parmelee:Yep. And so your, yeah, your full time job lead pastor, church, yeah, church planter lead pastor, but, also, with that, yeah, helping out with Converge. And we say there's kind of no such thing as a part time job because you actually do a phenomenal your your regional area, essentially, you know, Converge Mid America Southeast Caribbean stretches, you know, from Northern Michigan down to the tips of Florida. And you do a few things in the Caribbean now and then. Not too much with church planting, but, you know, just to just to be with our pastors down there.
Danny Parmelee:So Yeah. Give us a little, context of, Grace River as far as, you know yeah. You started, you know, just a handful of you, went to multiple services. How many services at you're at now? And, you know, I I know it's not all just about numbers, but just contextual size of stuff that, you know, growth that you guys have kind of gone through at each of those, stages, especially going from elementary to YMCA and then YMCA to the building that you're in now?
Chris Highfill:Yeah. Yeah. So we started with 4 people in my living room. We parachuted into a brand new community 10 years ago. We didn't know anybody here.
Chris Highfill:And so that was a big step of faith. And I told my wife, I give this about an 80% shot at working, you know, but to be honest with you, I never said it out loud to her in those early days, but it was more like a fiftyfifty shot. You know, like I had no idea what I'm doing, whenever we got started. And, so we started in my living room with 4 people, and then we grew our launch team to around a 100 people. We started in the elementary school that my kids went to.
Chris Highfill:And so, we had a great relational connection. It was in the community we lived in. It was fairly centralized in the community. So, it was a great elementary school. It actually had more parking than most elementary schools have.
Chris Highfill:So that was super helpful. We grew to around a 150 at that, at that elementary school, and then we quickly began to run out of space. The opportunity became available for us to meet at the YMCA. And so we went there, and, we were in the y for less than a year and then went to 2 services. And, then soon after that really took off as a church.
Chris Highfill:We were averaging over 300, and we realized, man, we really need our own facility. And so with the help of Converge, we did a capital campaign and a super helpful, with 50 families, we raised over $500,000 to get the building that we're in today. And the building we're in today is kind of a miracle, because I told our church back when we did the campaign, man, we we don't have a piece of property to point out or an architectural design. Like, we don't have any of that. We're just
Danny Parmelee:we're just saying, hey, buy
Chris Highfill:into the vision, buy into the dream of what we have going on. And it was amazing that they did that. And then I told them, I really feel like God's gonna meet us in the middle. Like, we're gonna take this step of faith, and let's see what God will do. And that weekend, the building that I'm sitting in right now dropped $400,000 in price.
Chris Highfill:It went from 2,100,000 to 1,700,000. And then we also found out the building has a built in tenant, and the tenant pays $10,000 a month. If you do the math, on on a $1,700,000 loan, it's $10,000 a month. So their rent paid our mortgage. They were here for 4 years, and we were basically mortgage free as a result of that.
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. That's awesome. And but good news is you had to boot them out, because of growth so that you could expand and, can continue. So and you guys just just just just just finished it, or you're close to close to finishing that expansion and renovation?
Chris Highfill:Yeah. We're halfway through. So, really, there's I guess, we're 30% through because there's 3 phases of this renovation. But we just finished the the part of the renovation that the clinic used to take up. A clinic was in here that took the the tenant space.
Chris Highfill:And so there were 6,000 square feet that we freed up, and we built We were able to double our kids ministry square footage. And so, that's pretty amazing. And now we're doing lobby and auditorium renovations, and then we're gonna add a 100 more parking spots. So all pretty crazy what God will do. And really, it starts with a yes.
Chris Highfill:Like, just I said yes to God, and, I was able to get some really good coaching, some really great training. You'll find out in this podcast, I'm not all that smart. I just have really been able to to to get some great coaching and some great training from people. And what I love doing is sharing, some of the dumb taxes that I had to pay, by just making bad decisions. And so now one of the perks to listen to this podcast is we can help give you some of the cheat codes on how you can avoid some of those mistakes that that we made in the early days.
Chris Highfill:Right? And, Danny, for you, I mean, you planted Epikos Church in Milwaukee. Tell us a little bit about that church for those of you that don't know your backstory. And, man, you're kinda like a celebrity too, so I don't know. We'll we'll just ease into it.
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. Well, I will give the, extremely short version of that, but, my wife and I, right after we got married, I went to seminary at Bethel Seminary in Minneapolis, Saint Paul. And, in 2004, we moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We also did kind of the parachute thing. We did you know, we weren't hive off of another church, and it wasn't our hometown.
Danny Parmelee:And so it was basically just gathering a few interested people, meeting in our living room. We ended up, it wasn't intentional. It wasn't I wasn't coached this way as a model, but we did kind of small group multiplication, in the beginning before we ever launched, but we ended up launching in 2,005. I was 25 years old, so our entire launch team, was college students, singles, young professionals, and young married with no kids. So we were a very, very young church.
Danny Parmelee:Our 1st year's annual offering was $11,000. That was annual, and, year 2 was, I think it was, like, $36,000. So we didn't have any money, at all, but God did some, cool stuff and continued to kind of grow our church. We were, using an old, Presbyterian, church, and we were meeting on Saturday night, which that was brutal. That was horrible.
Danny Parmelee:Eventually switched to Sunday nights, eventually, which I'll share this story in more depth, later. But, eventually, we bought that building that was very, important kind of key moment for us because it allowed us to have Sunday morning services and Sunday evening services. And, yeah, and over time, we stayed involved in church planting, and, eventually, we did campusing, as well. And so that's, part of my story that I love to be able to share because sometimes people are a 100% only church planning or only campusing. And for us, we really did both and really, learned a lot, through that.
Danny Parmelee:So
Chris Highfill:Now was that 3 or 4 campuses? How many were that?
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. So, 33 campuses, that we had total are our main campus, which was, downtown near the university, and then we had one in, West Dallas, which was a kind of a, not not a suburb is maybe not the best way to describe it, but as as close as you can be to kind of the city, but being outside of the city. And then, later, we launched, another one on the north side, of the city, which was in a a a very, very different even cultural. I mean, it was, I think, 95% African American, high poverty rate. But, yeah, we kinda fell backwards into becoming a multiethnic, multicultural church, which was very, very cool.
Danny Parmelee:And so we just continued down that path. So
Chris Highfill:Yeah. And then afterwards, you took a position with Converge as vice president of church planting.
Danny Parmelee:Talk a
Chris Highfill:little bit about that.
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. Yeah. 2017. So in 2017, you know, made made the transition difficult thing. You know, I talk about it all the time that as a church planner, we say work yourself out of a job, and that's what I would train all of our people in 2017.
Danny Parmelee:I'm like, oh my goodness. We've got 3 strong campuses, really great staff, great leadership. I think I've I've worked myself out of a job. And so, you know, moved to Nashville, Tennessee. That's where I am now.
Danny Parmelee:And, started this role so that I dedicated a 100% of my time. And I had been working with our, you know, with our network of churches being involved in church planning, but I just made that switch to make that full time And, you know, kinda basically, essentially set up the the leadership of Epicos to hire that next pastor. Now they've gone through, some difficult times and pastor transition, so that is super hard to watch, from afar, type of thing. And they they made some strides and added another campus, but then, shut a campus down. And yeah.
Danny Parmelee:So that's kind of a a difficult thing to kind of watch from afar, for it. But yeah. So now that's my my full time role with some change some change coming. Yep.
Chris Highfill:Yeah. Big changes coming too, which is great. So, we will announce that real soon, and so exciting stuff there as well. And, man, you've been busy, with a lot of different projects. And you were at, like, 3 podcasts at one time, one with, like, Ed Stetzer.
Chris Highfill:Right?
Danny Parmelee:Yeah. Yeah. So so, people are asking, wait. A a relaunch of the podcast or what happened before? It's actually pretty easy.
Danny Parmelee:Is it podcasting is great and fun, but, man, is it a ton of work? And so 2 of the podcasts that I did, one with, Converge National and then, the one that I did, it it required a a bit more of the the, production and programming on, on my end. The one that was done with Lifeway with Ed, they did, a majority of the production. So that was really great. And, of course, that was fun being with Ed, and I, you know, I set up a lot of the different guest interviews.
Danny Parmelee:And so that was really, easy to do because all I had to do was drop Ed's name, and people would be like, oh, yeah. Of course. I've got 20 to 30 minutes that I can, you know, give some time.
Chris Highfill:Sure.
Danny Parmelee:However, with all of those, man, it just became so much. So we had our list of all of these different, you know, questions to go through, and there just wasn't, enough time. And so we took a little pause there. But I'm super excited, and I and sincerely, Chris, I'm really excited that you're doing this, with me. I think that you have so much to offer.
Danny Parmelee:I've done tons of trainings with you. And just, not only your personal story, but I know you've just worked with so many different churches. And so you bring an element to this that I think is just gonna be a really fantastic. And we are we're gonna continue to invite other guests and to hear, from others, you know, you know, just kind of their experience or if they're an expert in that area. So we'll be able to do that.
Danny Parmelee:But, yeah, I'm just I'm super jazzed to see what this next run is. I don't know if we'll get all 101, and how quickly we'll be able to do that, but as many as we can, we definitely wanna be answering these questions and to kinda cut through the crap. One thing that is awesome about this go around is that we've got some sponsorship, and we have, Champion Digital Media who's doing the postproduction for us. So that takes a huge load off, for them to be able to help with that. And then outreach.com as sponsors, we're really excited.
Danny Parmelee:And each time, we'll talk about what that means and how that is a benefit, to you as the listeners, because even as they're sponsoring us, for the listeners, you have an opportunity to get I think it's, like, 15 or $1600 worth of free stuff and signage and marketing to kind of as a as a brand new church plant to get off the ground really, really strong. So lots of good things ahead. Super, super excited to see, what God will do in this, next season of the podcast. Well, that's a wrap for our relaunch of 101 questions at Church Planters Ask. Thank you so much for listening.
Danny Parmelee:If you have questions, you can go to church planters ask.com, and you can leave a question there. Or if you're watching this on one of the social media platforms, you can drop your question directly in the comments. And, we would love to be able to help you on your journey. So until next time, keep asking those questions.