Leadership Lab: Jessica Liles
Over the past year the Church Anew team has been working to connect and build resources for church leaders to see what their colleagues are doing around the country. With that the Leadership Lab was born. We have interviewed several church leaders doing innovative and amazing things, and we want to share their knowledge and wisdom with the world.
Church Anew recently sat down with Jessica Liles, Deacon and Director of Faith Formation and Education at the Neighborhood Church in Bentonville, AR. She has also been recently named as the Director of Youth Ministry for the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) and Director of the 2027 Youth Gathering.
Church Anew: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jessica Liles: I live here in Bentonville, Arkansas. I'm a deacon in the ELCA, married to a pastor. We started the Neighborhood Church about 11 years ago. We planted this church straight out of seminary. We have two kiddos. I particularly love traveling a lot, and national parks are our thing. Joe and I get to do a lot of other fun work for the larger church. We've been part of Mission Developer Training and helping lead the church planning component. We've been doing that since 2018. I've been connected to the Youth Gathering since 2009 and working in the Interactive Learning Center. I've been recently working on a special project with a network called Formation Co-Op, to think about reimagining youth ministry and what that would look like.
CA: Can you talk a little bit more about your ministry context?
JL: Yeah, absolutely. Joe and I planted the Neighborhood Church. He was called here in 2011. We started in an elementary school in a Cafetorium [cafeteria/auditorium], and we rented the space for three hours. We had three hours to get in, set up, have service, and then tear down, but one of the neat elements that we kind of wrapped into worship was fellowship in the middle of service, kind of also holding to the larger framework of worship that gathers the word at meal sending.
And we took the elements of that, and the Lutheran hymnals, and revamped it to feel kind of non-denominational. When folks walk into worship at the Neighborhood Church, they're like, wow, this is non-denominational. And you have these great songs that you hear on the radio with a great prayer and a great message. After the message, we roll right into traditional worship including the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's Prayer and communion. Lots of folks find this is engaging when we have this mix of hitting their spiritual needs in a variety of different ways.
CA: What has been a bright spot in your ministry, whether it be through the Neighborhood Church or through your work with Churchwide, statewide, or synod-wide kind of work?
JL: Being a deacon is this interesting space where you act as the bridge between the church and the world, or the larger context of the church. I think one of the brightest by spots of my ministry is living in that space.
I think another one of the bright spots is the Youth Gathering. You just plop in a city, see 30,000 youth participate and embrace the unknown, embrace the city, embrace everything. I really love interactive learning. It’s amazing to watch young people walk into that space and be able to try to tangibly interact with their faith. They get to see other places in this world where they might connect that maybe they don't see in their home congregations, or they learn about a new ministry and make connections with other folks in other parts of the country, or the world.
CA: What have been some of the challenges in your journey of building the Neighborhood?
JL: Building a church from ground up is some of the hardest work you will ever do. I think part of that challenge is trying to figure out and navigate the space in which you land. This is where you're going to plant a church. You’ve got to get connected to the right ministries, other churches, and create a support space in and around everything you do.
I think for mission starts, one of the bigger challenges often is the movement of people in and out of the building process. The first couple years you have these really impactful, involved, and crucial leaders that helped you start this thing. And then you realize that they must go on to their next thing. That's a really unexpected challenge that I don't think Joe and I were prepared for at the beginning. Now we realize that every ebb and flow of folks within the ministry has come and gone at the right time. The spirit is just moving in this ebb and flow of people because of the gifts they bring are what we needed at that moment to move us to the next spot.
As you grow, just sustaining is a big challenge for mission starts. Part of it is that movement from the pastoral congregation to the programmatic congregation because when you're the person that has done everything and then you start to move into the next phase things get tricky. There are other people that are doing the work and allowing the congregation to see them as knowledgeable and as important as the pastor and the other leaders. Navigating some of those components gets to be a challenge, not just in a mission start, but in a lot of churches that are growing.
CA: So, throughout all of this, where have you found support and encouragement?
JL: I find that camaraderie with other mission planters, people that are in a similar space as you, creates a really supportive and encouraging space. Pastor Anna Johnson at Churchwide has been one of our biggest supporters, encouragers, and cheerleaders. Reuben Durand has also been another one that has just been a phenomenal support for us, as well as some of the other staff at Congregational Vitality. But really getting in and getting connected to other folks living it really has been super life-giving for us. It feels like you're not the only one living these things. They understand the bigger picture of what's happening and are willing to give you compassion, and support, and encouragement. That's been huge to have folks that just have your back and understand the hard work of starting a thing from scratch.
CA: What spurred you and your husband to start the Neighborhood Church? What hole in the community were you trying to fill when you originally decided to create a church plant?
JL: It goes back to our calling together in seminary. I came from a super small town in the northeast corner of North Dakota where our pastor was shared with two congregations. It was a two-point parish. Joe came from Phoenix and Las Vegas where his dad was a pastor of large, massive churches. We kept trying to figure out how we would do ministry together when we came from such different places. For us, it ended up being a great space for us to think about how to merge our experiences.
When we got in the space of starting a church, we needed to just sit and listen for a while. There’re some really important conversations you need to have with city planning, with school districts, school boards, a variety of the other nonprofits in the area, and other churches in the area to figure things out: Where are the gaps? What do we need here? And I think what we intended to bring to Arkansas was this idea of a church for young families, partly because we were in that space and stage of our life of having young children. We embraced that idea of ministering and focusing on young families. Just this idea of providing something new and something different in the lens of the Lutheran world.
When we got to Arkansas, there were all these churches that didn't have any particular denomination in their name. That was a component that we both thought was super important. We don't have Lutheran in our name, and that was intentional because we wanted folks to not be afraid to walk in our doors if they didn't understand what Lutheran meant.
CA: What makes Neighborhood Church so approachable?
JL: Yeah, you walk in and everyone's going to say hello to you. It’s that sense of hospitality and welcome that is so important to us. When you start a church, you think all about what the culture of the church is going to be? What are we going to do? Our folks have realized that at one point they were a visitor, and someone walked up to them, and said hello, and had a fantastic conversation with them that made them feel welcome. Then they feel empowered to go and do that for the next person. Anyone can walk in and be welcomed.
Also, we’re super focused on kids in regard to our worship. We greet the kids and try and engage with them. Then we talk to the parents. If you're focusing on young adults, you have to engage in conversations with young adults, not with their parents. That's been a big part of us really trying to be a welcoming, approachable congregation.
CA: Many parents struggle to get their kids interested in to church. How can adults foster a love of faith and community in their kids?
JL: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's so foundational to faith going beyond the childhood years into the teen years, into the college years.
Our catchphrase is this: parents don't bring kids to church; kids bring parents to church. If you think about that it means that you are engaging, and you're tailoring the experience to children. On Sunday morning when mom and dad are tired, and the kids wake up excited for church, mom and dad will go to church because the kids want to go to church. Think about walking into the space, from the parking lot all the way in. What elements screen children? What elements engage children?
We have a super engaging children's ministry. Again, a lot of this has changed because of COVID, but I think what was so successful for us was that in our form of worship, if you will, families start with worship together. We do this two or three song opener where families are together worshiping. Joe comes up and does a welcome. He invites kids forward for a quick sermon. He provides a super engaging children's message, and he does a fantastic job getting the kids excited. He engages the kids and asks them to bring their parents up. So, if we're doing a pushup contest, Joe's not going to ask the kids to do the pushup contest. He's going to ask the kids to go grab their parents, and their parents are going to have a pushup contest engaging the family in worship. We also create opportunities to keep children engaged in the traditional aspects of worship.
Some people love it and stay forever, and some people are mortified and will never come back, but I think being comfortable in that is an important piece. We're not trying to keep all the sheep; we're trying to feed the flock. If they are not being fed here at the Neighborhood, we know all the other pastors in the area, so we can help find the place where you're going to worship and be connected the most.
I think another successful thing that we've done from the very beginning is expanding church use. Walking into church is a super scary thing for a lot of people, so we built the church as space to be used for more than just a Sunday morning service.
We do popcorn theologies on Friday nights. We would play whatever popular Disney or Pixar movie was happening at the time. We would have food and they would watch the movie as a family. And then the only thing we did at the end of the movie was ask the question, “where did you see God in this movie?” And we wouldn't let the parents’ answer. We wanted the kids to answer, and then we circle up and we pray and that's it. It was easier for families to invite friends to something like that rather than on a Sunday morning. It was an easy stepping point for an experience of the church without it being a worship service.
We had an experience before we planted the church. Like I said, I think I was pregnant with Landon. Kaleigh was probably year and a half, almost two maybe. And we were sitting in a church in the area, a traditional Lutheran church, and she's a year and a half. She does not sit still. She won't go to the nursery. So, she's literally crawling up and down the pews, and then a lady turned around and shushed us, and I thought Joe was going to lose his ever-loving mind. Then we walked out of the room, he's like, we will never ever have that happen to the Neighborhood. That is a no-go for me. Kids are a huge part of our life. So yeah, it's playful.
CA: The Neighborhood has really innovated in using the internet and social media. Especially since the pandemic, when everything was shut down.
JL: Yeah. Joe does a great job being aware of what's happening next. We were streaming when COVID hit in March. Joe knew how important it was to be there and to be streaming from that very first Sunday. It was supposed to be our largest Stewardship Sunday of the Neighborhood's history. And it was that Sunday we chose to go completely digital.
We realized how hard it was to pivot for a lot of other congregations. By that May, we had reached out to, I think, all 65 synods at that point offering to teach them how to use streaming tech. I think we had between 100-150 churches join in on that. That's where a big catalyst for our outreach towards that ministry started. We met Matt Short, who's at Milwaukee Synod, and he got us connected to a grant with the Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod churches in Milwaukee.
We did a tech conference for them. We did three lead-up events, and then a big one-day conference on Digital Reformation, that’s what we called it. And then helped install tech into probably 15 different churches in Milwaukee. We’ve continued to install tech, and cameras, and switchboards, and all the things that you need to stream. So not only was it important for us to be there, but it was also important for us to help others to get to that point because the larger Church understands now too. Your reach is now farther beyond your town or even your county. You have people watching from all over the country, from all over the world.
It is so important to continue this ministry in the digital sense, whether it be streaming, or social media, or little video clips on YouTube, whatever it is.
CA: As we wrap up, what words of encouragement and or challenge would you share with other leaders in your faith community or in another city?
JL: What we've taken as the vision of the Neighborhood is grounded in Philippians 3:12-14, and it is that we strive to change church and create relationships. If those are two foundational principles that church leaders or churches can live by, it gives them permission to do a lot of things that I think folks might be nervous about. It empowers you. Creating relationships foundationally with God is so important. And like I said, the foundation of all of that is so that you can go out to the community and build relationships there, and then build relationships within the congregation. That changing church isn't scary when you're doing it, when you've created relationships on a great foundation. Change is hard. And we went through a lot of change in 2020 and beyond.
My encouragement would be to continue to embrace change and to try something different and to think and move outside the box. Joe and I did the keynote speech at the North Texas North Louisiana Synod Assembly this spring, and we like to do this paperclip activity. We call it “clip art”. So, we all know that the paperclip has one use, but we want you to tell us as many uses you can have for the paperclip. Write 'em all down. Now apply that process to the church: What are the uses of the church? How is your church building being used? How is your ministry being used? Then we give you a pile of paperclips, and you to build something out of paperclips that's functional, or art, or whatever.
Church leaders should do the same thing for ministries. It’s okay to stop doing something. It's okay to do something completely different. Try something for six weeks. If it doesn't work, try to fix it and move on, or scrap it. Always being willing to change, to move, and embrace the culture and the world around you.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Schoen, one of our Church Anew interns over the summer, for her work conducting many of the Leadership Lab interviews and getting the series launched!
Jessica Liles
Jessica Liles has served in many different roles; children's ministry, youth director, admin, and overall master organizer of all things church. Ordained as a Deacon in 2021, she is the extension from the church out into the community! She currently serves as the Faith Formation and Education Director guiding people to understand how to live out their relationship with Jesus!
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As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
