Aaron Colyer: I am with Jim Jackson from the Orchard Christian Fellowship in California. And Jim just to clarify one more time, you are okay with having this conversation recorded?
Jim Jackson: Yup.
Aaron Colyer: Okay. Well, I want to say thank you first of all for taking our survey, we sent that survey out to about 500 pastors that met our metrics for church revitalization and we're at about 130 who have taken that survey and because of your answers I now interviewing you. And so I want to thank you for being willing to do the interview. My specific area of study is a connection between evangelism and church revitalization and really church members understanding that every Christian has a responsibility to fulfill the Great Commission. And based on your answers, a couple things. You said evangelism is highly important. And also maybe even more importantly, you said, the out of those six areas, the greatest member acceptance at Orchard Christian Fellowship is an uptick in personal evangelism.
Aaron Colyer: And then you went on to say in regards to that there was an increase in personal evangelism. You said strongly agree. That the majority of active members could share the gospel and have gospel conversations you said strongly agree. And then, that they're engaged in gospel conversations on a regular basis. You said slightly agree. So, all those are very strong answers that would have me consider hearing more from you about this culture that is being developed at Orchard Christian Fellowship where people are understanding I've got to be the mouthpiece for the gospel. So thank you. One more time. I do have for academic research purposes and ethic statement that I want to read. Once we get this out of the way, I'll do less talking and do more listening. Okay. This is similar to what you saw on the survey. The only change is, I am asking to use, some of the things you say in our publication in our research, but I want you to know that you can opt out at any time.
Aaron Colyer: So take a listen and then if you have questions, I'll be happy to take them.
Jim Jackson: Sure.
Aaron Colyer: Agreement to Participate: The research in which you are about to participate is designed to determine the critical elements of your church's recent revitalization. This research is being conducted by a six-man research team pursuing doctoral degrees at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for purposes of understanding and encouraging these elements among other churches. In this research, you will be asked to describe your church's experiences. During the interview portion of the research, notes will be kept for your specific church revitalization, which may appear in the publication of the research. If you desire any of the information given to remain confidential, please inform the
interviewer. Participation in this study is totally voluntary and you are free to withdraw from the study at any time. By your completion of this Interview, you are giving informed consent for the use of your responses in this research.
Aaron Colyer: You have any issues with that?
Jim Jackson: Sounds like a dream come true.
Aaron Colyer: Oh, there it is. A dream come true. Well listen, brother, I certainly would love to chat and have a water cooler conversation, get to know you a little bit better, but I want to respect your time. So my goal is to keep us at 30 minutes. So, if you want to talk a little bit afterwards for personal things, let me know. But, let's get this interview done in 30 minutes. I've got five primary questions that are related to the connection between evangelism in church revitalization and we may slow down and say, okay, well tell me more about that or give me an example of that. Or if, if we're running low on time for the sake of time and respecting your time, I may speed up so I can get to all five questions. Are you good with that?
Jim Jackson: Sounds amazing.
Aaron Colyer: Well then let's do it. Based on your answers, it seems that there has been a culture shift where people are prioritizing fulfilling the Great
Commission and personal evangelism. What's been done at Orchard Christian Fellowship to change that culture in the last several years. And then also, how long have you been the pastor there?
Jim Jackson: Okay. So my history in brief is, when I was in college at the Master's College in Santa Clarita, I was the first youth pastor of the church that I was attending while I was in college. And that group, God really blessed that youth ministry. And years later I was contacted because I had done a lot of camp speaking and I spoke for FCA and a bunch of other
organizations. A guy contacted me about his student ministry at a much larger church. And so I ended up there for quite a few years. And then I ended up planting my own church right off my own couches. And God blessed that a lot. We ended up with our own property in Claremont, California. And we're right next to the Claremont colleges, which, if you're not familiar with that, it's basically the Berkeley of Southern California. And so it is a hyper liberal, hyper. a very antagonistic (inaudible)
Jim Jackson: So God miraculously started moving there. And from there, through other contacts I ended up finding out about this church in Temecula, California that had lost her pastor through a moral failure. And they had about 140 people. And I didn't really want to come here. I had never even heard of Temecula because God is really blessing our church plants. And we were exploding there in Claremont, which like I said, it was a miracle of God. But, basically the Lord changed my heart and we came here not knowing one person. The church had been here for 40 years and had never grown beyond 200 people, in a location of about 250,000 that had exploded about 10 years ago and had never grown. But other churches around here had grown tremendously. So it was kind of an odd thing.
They own their own property, but it really small buildings, buildings for about 200 people. We (inaudible) to this day. Over the next, so I've been here five years. And over about the last four years, we've gone from 140 people to, we just did over 1200 last Sunday. So we have, we're one of
Jim Jackson: Usually healthy church growth is about six to eight percent. Really, really slamming church growth is, you know, if you're doing over 10 percent a year as far as being able to attract and keep 10 percent over the previous year, that's fantastic. That's amazing, considering most of us are doing zero. The last two years we've been at 43 and 38 percent. So it's just been off the charts. So I say all that to say, I've been here for five years and God has just blown this place up.
Aaron Colyer: Amen. Praise God for that. And I love that you're giving God the glory. I mean, that's a constant theme that I'm seeing with guys that are seeing God move and give this church revitalization to the places where they're leading is that it's, it's the Lord's name that we're wanting to see go forward, you know, and so I'm grateful for that reminder. Thank you for that background. So then from 200 to 1,200 in 5 years
Jim Jackson: And less that for about 40.
Aaron Colyer: Yeah. So in that building, the culture of evangelism, what's been done to build that culture of evangelism?
Jim Jackson: Yeah, so I can tell you one thing that I had never heard in a Christian school or ever been in a church that had ever done it. God really put it on my heart that really every aspect of the church is evangelism. So what I did it was the budget is evangelism. When I started hiring staff because literally when I walked into this campus it was me and a secretary and the budget was like $280,000 for the year. And I think this year we're on track to do like one point six, so within four years, not only has the church grown numerically, but amazingly miraculously, usually the last thing is, the last thing to be under the Lord's leadership is people's wallet.
People are giving towards it.
Jim Jackson: So that tells me that we've not only done numerical growth, but we've done the hard work of people buying into vision because people give to vision people rally around vision. So right behind the Lord's blessed the following people here. One of the major things I did was every single thing in the church has to have an outreach element. So every ministry has to have some reality. How is the children's ministry? I'm
evangelizing, how is the janitorial ministry evangelizing? How is our executive pastor as part of his role, what's he doing to evangelize. So in other words, evangelism didn't become a section of the church or a guy I hired to do evangelism. It actually became the DNA of our church where we literally exist, not for ourselves or to have some other guy go do it that's hired to go do evangelism, but we became evangelists as a church.
So that actually, as we're speaking right now, I just walked out of our sanctuary and my whole staff, everybody, the secretary that answers the phones, my executive secretary, my youth pastor, my worship pastor, my junior high guy, everybody's over in the sanctuary, redecorating for our new series. We go around where weeding this campus, we've got about six acres here. And it's the idea that we're responsible for as a staff, as leaders, as servants of God's church here, to make sure that this campus does evangelism. So in other words, so it doesn't look like trash. So we make sure that everything that we've got is functioning to its highest level of excellence so that when people walk on this campus, they go, wow, somebody cares. So in other words, I don't leave that to the
janitorial crew. They help, but it's a whole thing. I do my staff meetings every Tuesday morning and we push evangelism. How are we, how is every one of our ministries, including myself, we self-dissect every single staff meeting on how we are promoting the gospel in our ministry.
So when I got here it was me and a secretary and I literally built this thing from dirt up. As far as the staff I've hired and as far as the DNA that I've set and that's been the major thing is evangelism isn't a thing that we do once in a while and it's not a guy that hire. It's literally who we are as a church. So, I reformatted the whole church to run with evangelism as its core piece.
Aaron Colyer: I love that man. Yeah. That's one of the survey responses that you had like, I think the question was what's been the biggest contributor to the church revitalization and you said everything hinges on evangelism and then that's what you're saying here in your interview as well. So it's very intriguing to me to think about janitorial staff and gospel conversations. I don't want to make assumptions, but do you have examples of, I mean, people are on campus there in, in Tamika, California, is that right? I don't know my geography in California.
Jim Jackson: Temecula, Temecula.
Aaron Colyer: So, someone comes on campus and a janitor runs into them and they're looking for an opportunity to share the gospel. Is that what you intend to say in saying that?
Jim Jackson: So it's both I've got my junior high guy who also doubles as some janitorial during the week. And so not only is he obviously already a pastor of the church, but it's both ends. And so when people walk on here, we immediately assume God sent them here for a reason, whether it's a homeless guy that stumbles off the street and goes, I need some money for bread or beer or whatever he's looking for to the white collar guy who shows up in the seven series Beamer. We assume that God's called everybody out to our piece of dirt through our doors for something more than their felt needs. So felt needs are important. But we use that as a starting point, not an ending point, to push people towards the gospel.
So, in answer to your question, yeah, every conversation with the janitor or with myself is a push towards figuring out where their next step is for the gospel. Whether it is that they write commentaries or that they can't even spell Jesus. You know, we look at every opportunity as an
opportunity. Whether the janitor here or myself as an opportunity to help them take that next step. And if it's evangelism, if they're totally unsaved and obviously that's the goal. So it's, it's both that it's conversational and make sure that the facilities work to the degree that they honor the Lord as much as we can.
Aaron Colyer: Yeah. Yeah. That pursuit of excellence. I, I heard that in your previous comment. Let me, let me shift gears to my second question here. What kind of trainings, what kind of tools are y'all using to equip people to be able to have these gospel conversations?
Jim Jackson: So when you're talking these people, you're talking your church
Aaron Colyer: Yeah. Yeah. Your church membership.
Jim Jackson: So, number one, I think the number one thing is people have to hear it be important to me first. Here's often what happens is, again, we get stuck in this thing where I've had to blame it on the seminaries to tell you the truth, where they help people dissect the Word and they can dig the truth out of the Greek and the Hebrew and what Paul is trying to say in some of his letters or whatever. But at the end of the day, people aren't leaving with a passion to share Jesus. People aren't leaving with the applicational side of like, who cares about the Greek declension of that word? Who cares about the historical ramifications of 2000 years ago as long as long as it's not applying to my life or how I'm going to let somebody else on board than what's the point.
Jim Jackson: So my, my thing has been, I have to exemplify that from the stage I have to exemplify when I preached, I direct people to the cross. So I just did 19 weeks in Joshua, pretty much verse by verse. That's a 3,500 year old book with not a whole bunch of gospel type things in there. But man, at the end of this people were getting saved and people were excited about sharing the Lord with people. Because I take off from every passage right to the cross and what at least by the end of the sermon. And so what that does is it tells everybody not only now I see how I can help other people apply what I learned in here. Whether it's dealing with your kids are dealing with how to be a better godly wife or whatever the
application is it's always how to glorify God. And sadly guys don't get taught that in seminary for the most part. It's how to exegete a passage, but they've forgotten how to exegete their culture. And if you don't have to exegete your culture, then you're not helping your people go back to their work or their home or whatever and be gospel oriented. So that's the umbrella answer.
Jim Jackson: As far as specific nuts and bolts answer, we have a bunch of classes that we do. We've run out of space on this property so we don't have a lot of room to do formal type classes during the week. But all of our classes have some element of how to do evangelism. Which is our, Discover the Orchard class, which describes kind of where we've been, where we're going and about the gospel, what we believe in, those kinds of things.
And it has an element of how to share the gospel. We run everybody through that class, that's interested in joining our church. We have membership at our church and so from the top down all the way to the bottom, whether it's me on Sunday mornings, people see how important and how to share the gospel out of every passage.
Jim Jackson: Basically, we do communion every week, so I talk about the gospel every Sunday out right before we close in worship. So, they're hearing the gospel in the sermon they're seeing the importance of the gospel at the end of every sermon, during communion and why you need to get saved. I call people to repentance every stinking Sunday, every Sunday at the end of every sermon, whether I'm preaching on a Joshua or I'm preaching out of John. Because the community, it gives me an
opportunity to share exactly the elements of what the gospel about. You need to repent, to get saved today before you leave this place.
Jim Jackson: So everybody is kind of getting trained every week ad nauseum. And
then the more on the formal side of it is it happens throughout each one of our ministries. So it's Youth Ministry, Children's Ministry, they talk about the gospel. Then during our Discover the Orchard class would kind of, what we would consider at this point the formal way of talking about (inaudible). We answer people's questions at the end. You know, the questions they have about the gospel or disagreements or whatever.
Aaron Colyer: Okay. So I have so much rich content, so I have a lot of follow up. First of all, when you say people have to see it's important to you first you mentioned of course preaching. Would you also include in that they're seeing you are actually sharing the gospel during the week, too. Like that you're leading by example.
Jim Jackson: Right. So what I do is I actually right now I'm a football coach for a local football team. So in our valley, football is huge. Outside of California probably only got Texas that's as big, bigger than in our valley. We have nationally ranked on ESPN high school football teams. Literally right here from my valley. I can almost throw a stone to two of them, which is Mira Mesa and a Vista Marietta. So, I'm on a coaching staff here at the high school. Actually, we've got a game today. Funny that you
mentioned that.
Jim Jackson: What I don't want to do is sit in my office all day and read these books and exegete a passage and I feel like I've done evangelism myself.
Because the thing that really stokes evangelism. Here's the problem is pastors really don't cool off, I don't think, in their love for the Lord because they feel like they're serving the Lord by giving the people the best of themselves when they preach. Which is I'm going to honor the Lord by giving them excellent food to eat. Which is correct. That is their goal. But at the end of the day, you know, Paul tells Timothy, do the work of an evangelist. Jesus was an evangelist and heaven knows Paul was an evangelists. Two thirds of the books in your new testaments hit him going, laying down the foundation for those churches.
Jim Jackson: So you never see in the Bible some guy that went to seminary or went to the synagogue and just called it a day after he just wrote a sermon. You know? So what it does for me is I have to get out of my office and go.
What are the things that I love to do? I love football and I've played football, coached football, and so now this is the fourth or fifth year, since I've been in this community where football's a big deal, where I go get on a staff where all I hear is profanity and I see totally lost kids. So I build a rapport of respect with those kids and the staff. And then
obviously all the gossip is man, he's a pastor to. So it's this weird world of vulgarity, but the beauty of the gospel ends up there and so it's stokes my fire to continually know what it's like to be a regular person outside my office trying to share the gospel with a lost culture. So it's a touch point that keeps me sensitive to how God's moving in our culture.
Aaron Colyer: Yeah, I like it. A quick comment about seminary. I mean, there's lots of things that we can critique seminaries on, but I, in my experience, in doing my MDiv was back in 2006, I took a spiritual disciplines class and every week we had to turn in an evangelism report. Every week it was part of the grade if we did not have an evangelism conversation that we