When Steve Tiebout planted a church in northern California in the late 1990s, he would have relished the help of a worship leader like 23-year-old Curtis Looper. Young, talented, full of energy and with a passionate love of Jesus, Looper already shows the God-given ability to prepare a congregation for corporate worship. And at age 23, he’ll likely only get better.
“Man, if someone would have sent me a 20-year-old who loved Jesus, could play the guitar and wanted to lead worship, I would have jumped out the window screaming ‘Jesus is alive!'” Tiebout says. “When you’re on the mission field and you have people move where you are because God has told them to support and encourage you with whatever you need, that’s terrific. You’re just scratching for anything when you’re in the pioneer areas.”
Tiebout can’t turn back the clock and make Looper a part of the California church he planted 15 years ago. But he is doing the next best thing. He and his staff at The River Community Church (which he started in Cookeville, Tenn., in 2002) are preparing Looper and others to strengthen new churches throughout North America and beyond.
The Johns Hopkins of Tennessee churches
Tiebout never expected to plant a church in his home state of Tennessee, where he grew up and came to faith near Memphis. Through two summers serving in ministry internationally in the Philippines and Germany during college, Tiebout thought God was calling him into international missions. Even while planting a church in northern California as a Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary student, he expected his family would one day cross oceans to serve Jesus permanently abroad.
So when God led the family to plant a church in Cookeville, Tiebout was as surprised as anyone. Why would God call him to a town of 30,000 in the middle of the Bible Belt? But the Tiebouts obeyed.
From the beginning Tiebout planned for The River to be a church that plants churches. At just 2 years old, The River started its first church plant in 2004 when its regular attendance was between 200 and 250. Throughout the next decade, the church planted another 10 churches.
Tiebout’s vision for the 12-year-old church is ambitious to say the least. Develop 5,000 disciples in Cookeville. Plant 500 churches in Tennessee. Partner with one church in all 50 U.S. states to help them network and reach their state. Impact five nations with the Gospel.
For a 12-year-old church in a relatively small town, that’s a God-sized goal. And it won’t come to fruition without an abundance of young, energetic leaders. Situated in the midst of a college town in the Bible Belt, discovering the young and energetic isn’t a problem. But developing leaders takes a plan.
“We’re in a college town,” Tiebout says. “These are just the pieces of the picture that God has put together. God put us here to plant in a college town, we believe, so that we can raise up these church planters and missionaries to go out.”
The medical community has long understood that you must prepare young doctors well before entrusting them with matters of life and death. That’s why you’ll find more than 400 teaching hospitals throughout the United States (with Johns Hopkins probably the most famous example) where doctors-in-training can learn their craft from experienced professionals as they practice medicine with them side-by-side.
“I liken our role to one of a teaching hospital,” says Steve Chatman, the pastor of The River’s nearby Jere Whitson campus. “We’re helping people. We have the skilled, trained, degreed surgeons, but we want to see a steady flow of people with us who feel called to lead in ministry and missions. You can talk about ministry, but we want to give people an opportunity to do the work of ministry and see what church ministry looks like on the inside.”
To help prepare future short-term and long-term missionaries and church leaders, The River keeps a regular team of interns, like Looper. Chatman says these interns get a good glimpse inside the work of those in full-time ministry. They do everything from leading worship to organizing events to cleaning toilets.
Through it all, Tiebout, Chatman and others on the ministry team remain available to answer questions and provide feedback about what interns have experienced. The church has connected much of its intern ministry to NAMB’s Farm System, which utilizes the framework of local churches to train future missionaries and ministry leaders.
Empowerment through networking
The River’s Churches Planting Churches Network in Tennessee also plays a key role in its plan to develop leaders. Tiebout started the network as The River planted its first few churches. Because church planting has challenges different than pastoring an existing church, he realized they needed a support system of experienced peers and mentors. The network not only provides potential places of ministry for the leaders The River is developing, but it provides new church planters around the state an opportunity to learn from more experienced planters.
Church plants in the network meet once a month for training and fellowship. “The Farm System has been a real boost to our students,” says Tiebout.
Rick Burnett, who planted Crossroads Community Church in Baxter, Tenn., with The River’s help, says the network has been a fulfillment of Ecclesiastes 4:9: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts.”
“It has been a real encouragement to us,” Burnett says. “You have others who are going through the same struggles with the same questions. I’m very thankful for the encouragement, the prayer support and the training.”
As part of its ambitious vision, Tiebout wants to eventually partner with churches in each of the 50 U.S. states to develop similar networks-and provide future ministry destinations for the long-term and short-term missionaries the church is preparing
This summer Looper joined others from The River to serve on a two-week trip to Colorado, Washington and Oregon to help church planters and the worship leaders who serve with them. He and his wife plan to spend their lives leading worship and serving local churches. He believes his experience at The River has helped set the stage for that ministry by providing opportunities to use his gifts with the support of mentors like Jimmy Thorpe, who serves as the worship leader at The River’s main campus.
Thorpe first introduced Looper to The River when he invited the, then, 19-year-old to play electric guitar in the church’s college ministry. Soon, at the recommendation of Thorpe, Looper began an internship at the church and was given the opportunity to lead the collegiate worship service. As Looper made the shift from band member to worship leader, Thorpe walked beside him, offering wisdom, prayer and a wealth of experience. Last September he became the worship leader at The River’s Jere Whitson campus.
“A lot of times he’d let me go-kind of a trial-and-error method,” Looper says. “He’d watch me do stuff, and I’d witness for myself how things worked and didn’t work. Then we’d come back together and he’d tell me his own experiences. Things that took him years to learn, he’d let me in on those secrets. I was able to fast-track some of that and learn from my own experiences.”
Of course, there’s a downside to empowering and equipping your congregation for God’s mission in the world. After spending years training future ministry leaders, you often lose your best to the mission field. Tiebout can easily rattle off names of people the church has sent out to other ministry locations-but he won’t retreat from training young leaders.
“Cookeville may be a small town,” Tiebout says. “But we want to be a lighthouse for the nations. Why couldn’t it be through Cookeville, Tenn., where the Gospel goes into all the world?”
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2014 edition of On Mission magazine.