2 church plants bloom on different paths

Key Points:

• The Rev. Joe Graves of Columbus, Ohio, has written “The Progressive Planter,” a guide to successful church starts in the 21st century, based on the experiences of himself and his wife, the Rev. Allyssa Graves.
• The couple started new United Methodist faith communities, one focusing on recovery and the other created by merging a church start and a more traditional, aging congregation.
• Both are graduates of a leadership program offered by the East and West Ohio conferences, which aim to start 100 new faith communities by 2029.

Two married United Methodist pastors helped each other as they planted churches in Columbus with different approaches.

Both are graduates of the Greenhouse Leadership Development program offered by The United Methodist Church’s East and West Ohio conferences, which earlier this year announced the goal of starting 100 new faith communities by 2029.

The Rev. Allyssa Graves is the pastor at Second Chance, one of several ministries under the Open Church banner where she focuses on people with addictions. The Rev. Joe Graves oversees Cityview Church, a congregation created when his 2017 church start Central City Church merged with the more traditional St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, which was struggling with an aging congregation.

The Rev. Joe has written a book that covers those church starts and other approaches. It’s titled “The Progressive Planter.”

A recovery church

Second Chance is a recovery church, and you could see the hard times embedded in many of the faces of the eight adults being baptized on Sept. 21.

The baptisms that Sunday morning weren’t as old school as dunking someone in a lake, but they weren’t a polite sprinkle of water on the head in the sanctuary, either.

Only full immersion would do, so one by one they sat — mostly in their street clothes — in large plastic tubs in the courtyard of Franklinton High School, where Second Chance worships on Sundays (the building was a United Methodist church before it became a high school).

Aided by their pastor, the Rev. Allyssa, and church member and substance abuse counselor Scott Sanders, all but one opted to be gently immersed in water.

“Probably most of the people who were in the room have overdosed, which is basically dying and being brought back to life,” the Rev. Allyssa said. “To be able to experience that in baptism waters is so powerful, I think, for everyone in the community — just that redemption, new life.”

During her sermon before the baptisms, the Rev. Allyssa said the ceremony wouldn’t change any of the challenges people are facing.

“It’s God’s breath in our lungs,” she said. “But we’re going to go home today. We’re going to deal with roommates and people and struggles, and we’re going to go back to work and all of that. But what’s so amazing about God’s grace is that it doesn’t stop here.

“Every single day, God’s grace is going to continue to work in you, to help you be the person that God created you to be.”

The roots of Second Chance go back to the Rev. Allyssa’s discovery of local Wednesday night meetings called The Hope Gathering.

“It was just the most beautiful community,” she recalls. “It was kind of like (Alcoholics Anonymous) plus church. There were some AA readings, people celebrating sobriety, and then there was a teaching based on Scripture and applying Scripture to recovery.”

The Rev. Allyssa partnered with The Hope Gathering and started Second Chance under the umbrella of Open Church. It attracts about 30 people each Sunday.

“Open Church is a collection of micro-churches or Fresh Expressions,” the Rev. Allyssa said. “We have nine different communities that meet throughout the week in different parts of the city and have different focuses.”

Half of those communities are focused on people recovering from addictions. Others are based around the love of the arts, people who have felt harmed by churches and other themes.

“We have a couple mission partners and community-impact partners that we focus on and a prison ministry as well,” the Rev. Allyssa said.

Sanders said that Allyssa has an “approachability” that works for people in recovery.

“Allyssa has won the confidence of these folks, who have dramatic stories of generational poverty and generational addiction,” Sanders said. “These are people that aren’t rebuilding their life when (they) get sober. … Our folks never had a life to begin with, so they’re building for the first time, which means they don’t have the tools, they don’t have the experience. And so it’s not really just about getting sober and everything will be fine.

“It is a complete reinvention or re-creation.”

The goal of the Open Church ministries is “to meet people where they are, make disciples and send them out,” the Rev. Allyssa said.

“How do we build relationships, give people a way to identify their call and their mission and then be able to give them the tools and resources and support and encouragement?” she said.

A more traditional church

About 20 minutes from Franklinton High School stands Cityview Church, also United Methodist. Pastored by the Rev. Joe Graves, it is an entirely different variety of church plant.

The building feels lived-in in a comfortable way. There are high ceilings with prominent wooden beams and stained glass windows.

Built in 1952, for most of its life the Cityview Church building was home to St. Luke’s United Methodist Church.

The Rev. Joe’s previous church, Central City Church, was planted in 2017 in Columbus. It paid rent to hold services in the St. Luke’s building, and both churches worshipped there for a time.

On July 2, 2023, the two congregations merged to become Cityview Church.

“St. Luke’s had been around for a number of decades, and we were kind of getting to the point where a lot of our kids had moved on,” said Tom Culberson, a member first of St. Luke’s and now Cityview. “We were down to a few people who tended to be older, but there was still a lot of support for the church within the small group that was attending.

“We got to the point where we realized we just really belong together,” Culberson said of the two churches. “Our values, our worldview, our commitment to Christ. We just loved their people.”

The Rev. Joe worked to build trust with the St. Luke’s folks by getting to know them better and putting money where his mouth was.

“We invested about $50,000 into their building,” the Rev. Joe said. “We updated all their children’s spaces. We took an old United Methodist Women’s room and made it a nursery. We got rid of the pink carpet and the old furniture. We put in new nursery equipment. … We wanted to be good neighbors, and we also believe in generosity.”

The churches started scheduling some services together, and then the St. Luke’s folks approached the Rev. Joe about a merger and Cityview Church began to take shape.

“St. Luke’s wasn’t hurting financially,” the Rev. Joe said. “They could afford to do the ministry they were doing, but … there was only about six people left doing stuff, and they were getting exhausted.”

There were reservations all around, stemming from other church mergers that had caused bad feelings.

“We developed our own process for how a young, contemporary church plant might merge with an established, older traditional church in a way that respects everyone’s dignity of choice and innate value,” the Rev. Joe said. “We did a lot of listening, a lot of conversations and intentional negotiations. We were very clear about trying to avoid people using ultimatums.”

A stumbling block stemmed from St. Luke’s members preferring a traditional service rather than Cityview’s more modern format. So even though there were only seven or eight St. Luke’s members attending the traditional service, they committed to continuing it for three years.

“Merging two congregations wasn’t the hardest part,” the Rev. Joe said. “Merging two worship styles is always the hardest part. … If that wasn’t handled carefully, that’ll disrupt a merger more than anything else — worship style and then organizational style.”

The distribution of power in a merged church must be intentional and understood by all, the Rev. Joe said.

“When we merged, we talked about how we have a board that takes care of big-picture policy,” he said. “Once that policy and budget is set, our staff and our pastors take care of the day-to-day, and then we just tried to embrace processes where we could respect those boundaries.”

The Rev. Joe saw his top task as creating space for his staff, which came from both churches, to be able to make decisions for their ministry area and not have to run them through a committee.

“Committees are very powerful, but we try to use them for big-picture stuff, not the day-to-day stuff. Worship leaders need to be able to pick songs, not running it through a group of people.”

After months of meetings, both churches took a vote. Except for one abstention, the tally was unanimous in favor of the merger. Now the combined church averages about 100 worshippers on Sunday.

“I think people will continue to be turned away from religion and from Jesus until this type of community is the majority,” said Charlie Kovanda, a member of Cityview, who learned about the church while being given a free popsicle by a member.

“I think young people especially are looking for something like this, so I do have hope that the tide will turn. … I think hopefully we’re the start of a much larger movement that’s going to come cascading across — you know, spiritual revival.”

Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.