Editor’s Note: This interview is the fifth installment of Evangelical Action’s series “How Does Your Church Grow?” and is your opportunity to meet the pastors of the local church plants, hear their stories, and understand why in a city filled with empty churches, theirs is flourishing. To learn more about the goal of this interview journey, please click here.
The Rev. Thomas Hinson presides over 7 year-old Church of the Advent DC, notorious for its Millennial congregation. 
A good problem to have, Hinson laughs as he says we “pray for people over forty to come.”
Sitting in his Dupont Circle office, IRD staff Chelsen Vicari and Jonathan Fuller listened as Hinson described what it looks like to empower and equip the rising and eager saints of Washington D.C.
IRD: I’ve heard it said that Church of the Advent is filled with young professionals. Is that the demographic now?
Hinson: Overwhelmingly. We actually pray, pray, pray for people over forty to come. I envision doing an exchange program with churches in the suburbs where we can bring in people over the age of forty or empty nesters. Can we do like a six-month exchange? One of the questions I get most often is, “Do you have anyone who could be a mentor for me?” Our average age is 28 or 29, I would say.
IRD: There are obviously great benefits to having such a young, thriving church. What are the challenges then of ministering to this young culture?
Hinson: It’s a lot of fun. One of the benefits is that a lot of people are really highly motivated. They have high energy and high motivation. I think one of the big challenges, to be frank, is the kind of idealism. A lot of people come to DC very idealistic. They want to change the world tomorrow and do it singlehandedly over a latte, right? So a lot of times we sort of jokingly talk about the way that people come into the church and DC and they have to go through a phase of disillusionment where their ideals sort of slam into reality and they are broken down. Then we step in and help put them back together and then they really become vibrant members of the community. But it’s the challenge of that kind of idealism.
Along with that, and this really going for all of us as a human tendency, but there’s also a lot of arrogance. There’s a lot of high-level education, incredible résumés, and the breadth of worldly experience, but it hasn’t been tempered by life experience yet. So when you have a church that’s overwhelmingly young you have a lot of people who think they know a lot more than they actually know. So the kind of people who have been humbled, who are teachable, that have lived enough life that they might be questioning some of their earlier assumptions that they grew up with, that’s something I feel we see happening a lot and is a really good thing. Those are some of the challenges. A third challenge I would add is when we say we want a diverse church, one of the things we mean is simply age diversity. Everybody at our church is at really similar life stages, so the questions I get most often that aren’t on the hot-button issues, are, “Who should I marry?” “What should I do with my life?” and “Do you have anybody who could mentor me?” Those are the three questions I hear on a weekly basis.
IRD: I’m wondering, how are these young people finding your churches? How do you promote the church or get the word out since you were just meeting in the basement of a Methodist church?
Hinson: That’s a good question. We intentionally, when we planted Church of the Advent, did not advertise, because part of our vision is “small church.” Not that there’s anything wrong with larger churches, but we believe that when you’re in a place like DC reaching the type of people we’re trying to reach, it’s easy to come to DC and feel lonely and disconnected and isolated. I think DC is a tougher city to break into in terms of the community. And so our vision is really that our church would be a family and would be intimate. We really envision smaller neighborhood churches where we envision people being able to walk to church or people making decisions to move and buy homes and live near where they worship. We believe the church should be intimately involved in the goings-on of the neighborhood. And so we didn’t advertise and we really envisioned a church that would grow through word of mouth. We don’t see the purpose of a Sunday service being attractional. Now that being said, we try to structure it such that we are always reaching to, teaching to, addressing skeptics.
When I say we don’t see it as being attractional what I mean is we don’t see the primary means of growth as the attractiveness of the worship service. We want people who come to our church to be coming because they’ve already gotten to know and been invited people who come to our church. That core set of assumptions grew into the way we do small groups. We call them core groups and they’re meant to be “outward-facing middle spaces,” if you were. They try to be spaces where non-Christians and Christians can build relationships together. A lot of our core groups have some kind of way to do that. They’ll meet twice a month to do some kind of bible study, but then once or twice a month they’ll pick the same bar, the same happy hour and go there every other week. After a while they become regulars and this kind of middle space community begins to build where they see the same people every week and people notice that they’re coming regularly and they’re talking about why they’re coming. Next thing you know people start coming to the bible studies that happen the other weeks and next thing you know they come to Advent. What people are really hungry for is community.
IRD: Absolutely. As young professionals living in Metro DC, we certainly understand how tough it is to come to this city without family and friends. It’s a very harsh climate. I turned to a local church right away to find some normalcy. Especially interesting is how you make a point of reaching out to your neighbors.
Hinson: We talk about every person in our church is a potential front door to the church. Not having a building makes us think very differently about what church is. It reminds you that church is the community. You might be waiting in line at the grocery store waiting to check out, but the people around you are actually standing on the front steps of our church. We try to create this sense of, “You are the front door to our church. You are the way in. You are the entry into this community.” I think people have taken that to heart. It delights me when I ask people how they found our church – it’s fine if they say they found our website – but I love when they say, “I met so-and-so who I work with, and I went to their house and had dinner and loved the people that I met so I decided to come and check it out.” That, in my mind, is the ideal way that people find our church.
IRD: You mentioned hot-button issues earlier. Do you preach about those hot-button issues? I mean, we’re in DC. Religion and politics, unfortunately, tend to be what everyone talks about at our dinner tables. So do you talk about those policy issues from the pulpit?
Hinson: Rarely will I stand up and say, “Today we’re going to preach a sermon on homosexuality,” or “Today we’re going to preach a sermon on abortion.” There are several ways we try to go about it. One, we are intentionally not politically oriented when we talk about those things. We talk about them in such a way that they’re almost pre-political issues. Advent is interesting because we are overwhelmingly liberal, progressive, democratic people in terms of politics. A lot of people that come to Advent, this is the first church they’ve really been a part of actively. A lot of them are newer to the faith or younger in the faith. They’re trying to reconcile ways they’ve been formed to think outside of the church to think, and some of those assumptions are clashing with their discipleship as they’re rethinking human nature and ultimate meaning and purpose and things like that. There are a lot of people that are in transition, so to speak. The quickest way to lose them is to start talking in any kind of political way, so what we try to do is address those issues in a distinctly non-political way.
Even though we will address the fact that they have political implications, we’re very aware of the fact that on any given Sunday, we have people on every side of every fence you could ever imagine. We have Christian, non-Christian, gay, straight, pro-everything, anti-everything. Any line of division you can imagine we probably have people in the pews on any given Sunday that represent that way of thinking. Addressing those things is really tricky. What we really have to do is get at not issue-driven sermons or issue-driven teaching, but what we try to do is address the underlying assumptions or philosophical frameworks that drive the hot button issues. That’s a much longer conversation.
IRD: Empowering and equipping the saints comes into tension with a lot of what our popular Christian context points to as the role of the pastor. So when you’re working with a young church plant full of young people, what does your role as a pastor look like on a day-to-day basis?
Hinson: Fantastic question. The pastor as “rock star personality” is a toxic element for our church. I think if people want to be on the front lines of ministry being a pastor is the last thing you should do. I think people who work in banks, schools, and hospitals are on the front lines of ministry. I came from a counseling background and as a counselor I was a primary caregiver. I’ve realized since I’ve been that I’m more of an equipper. I take Ephesians 4 very seriously. I think that fourth category is “pastor-teachers,” and I think God gives “pastor-teachers” to the church to equip the saints for the work of ministry. That’s Ephesians 4, right? So I think the role of the pastor, we’re behind the scenes people.
I’m consistently challenged, inspired, and often humbled by the things that people in our church do that I’m either unwilling or incapable of doing. A great example is we really wanted to start a homeless ministry but I don’t know how to start a homeless ministry. I didn’t know the first thing about that; there’s not a “How to Start a Homeless Ministry” class you take in seminary. But there was a really courageous, faithful young man in our church named Brian who just walked into the front door of the homeless shelter right next door to where we were meeting and after a few weeks of his pioneering work I was able to very literally follow him into that and see a ministry grow. Experiences like that that I’ve had time and time again.
I really come back to those because they remind me that my job as a pastor is to equip people. I’m a minister of the Word and sacrament. That’s what I do. I feed people, I equip them, I train them, and then I get to sit back and be humbled and awed by what they do.
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