When Tyler Sterchi was fairly fresh out of college and interviewing for his first church staff position, the pastor quizzing him said, if Sterchi were called, he would become the next pastor of that church. Twelve years later, it happened.
That’s what you call long-term planning.
It’s also a well-executed hand-off of leadership, something mostly missing in church life today. And it’s desperately needed as the largest generation is retiring from the scene.
“We think we can lead and strategize our way into a generation of Jesus followers,” said Sterchi, the lead pastor at New Hope Church in Effingham. “We think we can plan a movement of Jesus in each new generation, but we’re wrong.”
It’s not bosses or managers the next generation needs. “It needs fathers and mothers,” he said. “It needs family. And I know that because that was my story.”
While growing up, Sterchi lacked an example of leadership in his own life. Then, when he was 10, a friend invited him to a church event, and he began spending almost every Saturday night at that friend’s house so he could go to church with him on Sunday morning. He became a Christian and was baptized by the time he turned 12.
When Sterchi was 17 he met Tim Maxson, the youth pastor at his church, who he said, “invited me into his life and treated me like a son.”
For three years, from late high school into early college, he described, “I literally went to his house like almost every night. I ate meals with him. I studied scripture with him.” Maxson took him on mission trips and taught him how “to do ministry” before leaving to serve on the international mission field.
Next, Sterchi described being “spiritually adopted” by his associate pastor, Larry Weber, who he described as a “good old farm boy who was called into ministry in his 40s.” Weber, who drove a truck for a vinegar plant in Olney, became a “spiritual father” to him.
“He took me on pastoral calls,” said Sterchi. “I rode with him to conferences. He gave me opportunities to preach and teach.”
A few years before he died of cancer, Weber began telling Sterchi about a pastor in Effingham that he should meet. Sterchi, who was then living in Chicago, kept putting him off. Finally, he contacted Van Brooks, and they arranged to meet. The two hit it off and the rest is history.
More about that later.
Multiple shifts required
“We’re doing an amazing job with young people who will plant the churches of 40 years ago,”
Daniel Yang told the crowd in one plenary session of the Summit. “We might be underpreparing the next generation,” he said. The vast majority of Generation Z (80 million people born between 1995 and 2012) does not identify with evangelicalism. But they are spiritually open.
The prevailing narrative for church leaders is that if we just strengthen our churches, we will change America and eventually the world. But that’s not the solution to the shrinking church and rising unbelief.
“We have a lot of jobs here, but our main job is to make sure we do not drop the baton of God’s gospel,” Yang said. Yang has pastored and planted churches. He works with World Relief, based in Chicagoland.
Reaching the next generations means some leaders will need to focus on different language than the church of Boomers and Gen X has, when their debate has been focused on culture wars. “Some of our in-house arguments—the tone, the lack of graciousness, the bitterness—looks like drilling holes in the boat,” Yang said. “It’s no wonder some are jumping ship.”
“Gen Z will be the ones to transcend the left vs. right, and they will take us upward and forward!”
In his book, Future-Ready Church (written with Adelle Banks and Warren Bird, Zondervan 2024), Yang points to eight shifts in church leadership required for Gen Z and the people leading ministry now. Among them is the reality that church membership is losing its appeal. It doesn’t always “generate feelings of being known and seen. Going forward, church leaders should prioritize not only giving their members a sense of community, but also providing a welcoming space that shapes their sense of identity and belonging” (p. 19).
Beyond “if you build it, they will come,” this represents a major shift in church culture, especially when that culture has been dominated by elder generations. Such a shift is not easy and it takes time. For Paul Cooper it was nine years.
Halfway through his current 18-year pastorate, Cooper was ready to tackle changes that would welcome new people into the life of his small-town church. “I had no desire to pastor a traditional church,” he said. “I saw myself as a church planter. But look where I landed—the most traditional of churches.”
Cooper’s change journey meant reaching the next generations. His church embraced the vision and the change it required—eventually. Today the church has more than doubled in size, with 300 average worship attendance. Read Cooper’s story.
Passing the baton
Back in Effingham about two years ago, Van Brooks was ready to retire and Tyler Sterchi was ready to move up. Sterchi had served 12 years as associate pastor in a variety of roles. And at every step along the way, Brooks was faithful to include Sterchi and other young people in church leadership.
More than occasional opportunities to chime in, Brooks intentionally sought their opinions. Sterchi recalled his pastor-mentor saying in meetings, “For the next 30 minutes, let’s let only those under 30 talk.” And the older pastor would sit back and soak in their young perspectives.
By the time he assumed the senior pastorate, New Hope had grown into a multi-site congregation. Today it is one church meeting in three locations, Effingham, Newton, and Shelbyville. The church has as its vision “to see a greater movement of Jesus in each new generation.”
And its senior pastor, now 36, is making mentoring a priority, just as the men who passed the baton to him did. “Do I know what I am passing on to others?” he asked. “Is it intentional? Or is it accidental?”
This kind of leadership—focused on the next generations—“is not a gimmick to draw a crowd.” Adapting methods to reach them, while the message remains biblically faithful, “is not compromising your beliefs…. This is literally the entire church getting on the same page around that we are called to do.
Sterchi draws on the VIM model developed by Southern Baptist philosopher and teacher Dallas Willard: Vision, Intention, and Means.
Vision isn’t “a side thing, it’s a main thing,” he said. Ministry done with intention requires conscious decisions. “Senior leaders must be committed at every level. It must be talked about with the congregation regularly.”
Means is about budget and time, but it’s also about next generation leadership. “What are your next hires? What is the average age of your team? How much time and energy goes to reaching the next gen?”
“What boundaries are you crossing for the sake of the gospel?” Sterchi asked.