One thing we’ve recognized is that a whole group of people in our community simply can’t come to church on Sunday mornings. Bartenders, servers, bouncers, dancers, hospitality workers, first responders, and many others often work late Saturday nights or into Sunday morning. For many of them, Tuesday is traditionally a slower night. If our mission is really to reach people where they are, we believe that sometimes means being willing to rethink when we gather. Tuesday night gives people who may have felt like church wasn’t built around their life or schedule a real opportunity to worship, hear the Gospel, build relationships, and find a church family. There are a couple of other important reasons, too. We want Tuesday nights to become a place where our Sunday volunteers can simply come and be filled—no responsibilities, no serving, just worship, fellowship, and time in God’s Word. It also gives our church family another in-person option when they know they’ll be traveling or away for the weekend. Ultimately, this isn’t about adding another service just for the sake of adding another service. It’s about removing barriers and creating more opportunities for people to encounter Jesus and be part of His Church.

Tuesday nights are going to feel a little different from Sunday mornings—and that’s intentional. We’ll start at 5:45 PM with a meal in the Next LVL Annex, giving everyone a chance to eat, slow down, and connect before service. The meal will be free and open to everyone, with an optional suggested donation of $5 per person for anyone who would like to help offset the cost. At 6:30 PM, we’ll move into the Worship Center for the service itself. The service will include a slightly longer time of worship, a welcome and communion meditation, a shorter sermon, and then something we’re especially excited about: time for prayer, conversation, and connection afterward. As we build our Tuesday night worship team, worship will initially be simpler, using lyric videos and, on some nights, one or two live worship leaders. Our goal isn’t to recreate Sunday night-for-night. We want Tuesday to have its own rhythm: eat together, worship together, learn together, pray together, and leave having built real relationships with one another.

We get it; volunteer burnout is real, and we take it seriously. Passion is growing quickly right now, and while our volunteer team is growing too, it isn’t keeping pace with the church's needs. That’s a challenge nearly every growing church faces, and we don’t want the answer to simply be asking the same faithful people to do more and more. That’s why we’re intentionally designing Tuesday nights to operate with as few volunteers as possible. Our long-term goal is that within six months of the public launch in January, Tuesday night will have its own dedicated volunteer team, primarily made up of people who begin attending and connecting through that service. Ideally, Sunday volunteers serve on Sundays, Tuesday volunteers serve on Tuesdays, and neither group feels like they have to carry everything. And here’s something all of us can do to help: talk about the joy of serving! One of the best ways to grow a volunteer team isn’t another announcement from the stage; it’s people hearing from their friends that serving is fun, meaningful, and gives them an opportunity to make a real difference in someone’s life. If you love the people you serve with and find purpose in what you do, tell somebody! Invite them to serve alongside you. The more people who discover the joy of serving, the lighter the load becomes for everyone, and the more people we get to reach together.

Great question. The truth is, this is an experiment, but it’s not a careless one. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking through it, praying about it, talking through it as a leadership team, and considering how it can help us reach people we aren’t currently reaching. Could it fail? Absolutely. And if it does, we’ll step back, regroup, learn everything we can, and try something else. We’re also going into it knowing we may need to adjust things along the way. The goal isn’t to prove our original idea was right; the goal is to find the best way to reach people with Jesus. That’s actually something important for us to understand about Passion Church. From the outside, people can see the growth and assume everything we’ve tried has worked; it hasn’t! We’ve had small groups disband, made leadership mistakes, launched things that needed to be completely reworked, and tried ideas that simply didn’t accomplish what we hoped. Failure is an essential part of growth. We just want to fail well: pray first, plan carefully, give things a real opportunity to succeed, remain humble enough to make changes, and learn when something doesn’t work. We would rather occasionally fail while trying to reach people than become so afraid of failure that we stop trying new ways to reach them.

We honestly don’t have a specific number in mind. Is it 500? 1,000? More? I don’t know. What I do know is that there will never be a point where we look at someone who needs Jesus and say, “Sorry, the church is full.” As long as there is one more person who doesn’t know Jesus Christ, the Church isn’t too big. What are we going to do—tell them Heaven is too full? Our responsibility is to faithfully shepherd, love, disciple, and care for every person God entrusts to us. Right now, Passion is growing at roughly 30%—which is incredible, exciting, and, if I’m being transparent, a little scary too! Growth brings responsibility, and we take that responsibility seriously.

So will growth eventually mean adding more services? Probably. Could it mean expanding our building or someday needing a larger facility? Absolutely. When will those things happen? I don’t know yet, and we’re not going to chase growth simply to be a bigger church. We’re going to chase people. And as God brings people through our doors, we’ll do whatever we reasonably can to make sure there is room for them to meet Jesus, find community, grow in their faith, and be loved well. When the next season comes—whatever it looks like, we won’t walk into it complaining that we’ve gotten too big. We’ll walk through those gates celebrating every single person God has trusted us to care for.

The simplest answer is: when we can afford it responsibly. Right now, we absolutely need more volunteers, and additional staff would certainly help, but we aren’t yet at a point where another full-time position is essential. Ideally, we want to hire before the church reaches the point where our current leaders and systems are overwhelmed—but we also refuse to add staff at the expense of the church's financial health and ministry. For perspective, a full-time Children’s Director at a church our size could reasonably require around $29,200–$39,400 per year, with a midpoint around $34,300 in cash salary and housing allowance. At our current level of giving, adding that expense would leave very little margin for savings, needed facility repairs, outreach events like the Block Party, and the other ministries God has called us to do.

So we’ve established a practical benchmark: when our regular weekly giving averages around $7,000 per week, not including Project OIKOS giving, we’ll be in a healthier position to begin seriously considering and searching for our next staff hire. That doesn’t automatically mean we hire someone the moment we reach that number, we’ll still evaluate where the greatest ministry need is and what we can sustainably afford. And even as our staff grows, Passion will always be a volunteer-powered church. Staff can equip, organize, train, and lead, but ministry belongs to all of us. Our goal isn’t to eventually hire people to do the ministry for the church; it’s to build a healthy team that helps all of us be the Church together.

I want to level with you all: I love spending time with our people. I love the meals, hospital visits, prayer times, events, conversations, and just being together as a church family. In the early days of planting Passion, I was the primary face of the church at almost everything. But we’ve grown to the point where that simply isn’t possible anymore. Even if I did nothing but hospital visits, home visits, meals, and church events, I still couldn’t be at everything, and if we’re building a healthy church, nothing should ever depend on one person anyway. I also have a wonderful wife, three incredible kids, and my own physical, emotional, and spiritual health to protect. I want to pastor Passion faithfully for a very long time, and part of doing that means learning where I’m most needed and being willing to let others lead and care for people too.

As Passion has grown, my responsibilities have had to change, and they’ll continue changing. Right now, I spend much more of my week on sermon preparation, vision casting, discipleship, developing leaders, building teams, planning for the future, and working alongside Glenda and Marshall on our building repairs and renovations. I’m still going to do everything I reasonably can to show up, spend time with people, make visits, and be part of our church family, but you probably won’t see me at everything anymore. And I actually believe that can be a sign of a healthier church. Passion Church is bigger than Josh. It’s all of us, loving one another, showing up for one another, worshiping together, serving together, and carrying the mission together. The goal was never to build a church around a pastor; it was to build a church around Jesus.

We get this question fairly often, especially since moving into our new building. The simple answer is that Passion Church is a pastor-led, elder-protected church, not a congregationally governed church. That means the Lead Pastor leads the day-to-day operations of the church and provides direction for our mission, vision, ministry, and doctrine, while serving under the guidance, accountability, and protection of our Eldership/Oversight Team. That structure doesn’t mean people’s voices don’t matter; they absolutely do. We listen to feedback, ask questions, seek wisdom, and want to know what our church family is thinking. But ultimately, someone has to carry the responsibility for making decisions and be accountable for the results of those decisions.

And here’s the practical side: if every decision required a churchwide vote, very little would get done, and somebody would almost always leave unhappy. I’ve watched churches argue, and sometimes even divide, over things as small as wall colors, carpet choices, music styles, and other preferences. We simply don’t want to build that kind of culture at Passion. We want to reserve our energy for what actually matters: reaching people, making disciples, caring for one another, and advancing the Gospel. Leadership won’t always make the decision every person would personally choose, and we certainly won’t get every decision right. But we commit to pray, listen, seek wise counsel, remain accountable, and make the decisions we genuinely believe are best for the mission and health of the church.