Rob Chartrand (00:01.852)
Well, hey, Robin Waller, thank you for joining us with the Church in the North podcast. It's great to have you here with us. And of course, we've spent some time together already chatting a little bit about the show today. For our listeners that don't know Robin, he is the lead pastor of Lift Church. I think when we say the Hamilton region of Canada, is that kind of it? But you're all over the map. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (00:23.85)
Yeah, yeah, all over the Toronto Hamilton area.
Rob Chartrand (00:28.164)
Yeah, awesome. Well, why don't we get right into it. Robin, why don't you tell us a little bit about the church you lead, Lyft Church. What is it? And maybe give us a little bit of background on your guys' story, how you got into it.
Robin Wallar (00:40.778)
Yeah, so, Lift Church, we basically, very simply exist to see people know Jesus and be made alive and the goodness that he offers us, but specifically by being the church on every campus. And so we have a dream to plant a church, a thriving church on every university campus. And yeah, it's been quite a ride. We've been at it for 17 years now. But kind of rebooted about 10 years ago.
My wife and I were part of a really a restart and I'm sure we'll get into that story for parts of it. But yeah, about eight years ago, we started planting churches and reproducing. And over the last number of years have planted, I think we're on seven churches now, seven different locations and lots of university students, but lots of also not university students, pretty diverse community. And yeah.
Rob Chartrand (01:40.244)
Okay, well, so let's take us back to the beginning a little bit. Did Lift Church exist before you or were you the founder and if you were, like, how did you, where did the idea come from, how to get started?
Robin Wallar (01:53.95)
Yeah, so kind of a crazy story. I joined our church as a first year engineering student right before day one. It was a church plant, kind of just in concept at the time, and I was searching for a church. I really felt like we needed a church on the university campus. And so from my side, I prayed a prayer. This is way back in 2006. I said, Lord, either you can bring me a church.
campus. I don't exactly know what I had in mind when I prayed that or I threatened the Lord I said which I highly recommend and I said you know or I'll just start one here in my dorm room and I guess the Lord just felt like that was a really bad idea and three days later I got a call from a guy who said he was starting a church on the university campus and you know when we started we started as a fairly
sort of ordinary looking church. At that time in the mid-2000s there were quite a few churches on university campuses. The format was kind of established and we didn't do anything super innovative but we did manage to reach some people and but we really started to run into challenges about year three or four. University students obviously don't have any money. I didn't have any money. I was still a university student and sustaining a traditional
funding model for a church plant really wasn't working for us. So out of that, the person who started it, he moved on to take on a traditional family church, a large church in the area. We were just wandering the wilderness for a little while, trying to figure out who are we, what are we doing. I started my career as a software engineer. In that time, met my wife and I got married. Yeah.
And so we had the opportunity to take on the leadership back in 2012. The church had kind of dwindled to about 20, 25 people. And my wife and I sort of just said, well, I guess we'll lead it. And we said, you know, we don't need, we don't need to be paid. We don't need a traditional role. We'll just, if you just give us space to lead, we'll, we'll do it. And it was amazing. Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (04:20.5)
Wow. So did you have any like theological or discipleship training back then? I mean, what was your background? I mean, obviously you're software engineers. They're not teaching you the book of Romans. So what?
Robin Wallar (04:35.514)
Yeah, that's right. And my wife's a publicist, so she wasn't learning the book of Romans either. And so, yeah, we didn't have any formal training. We hadn't gone to seminary, still haven't gone to seminary or Bible college. But we had experienced, both my wife and I, the power of life on life discipleship.
Rob Chartrand (04:38.457)
Okay.
Robin Wallar (05:00.886)
and the incredible fruit that can happen when somebody invests in somebody else. And so I was very blessed through my teenage years to have some great disciplers in my life. You know, I had this youth pastor actually, who was the least cool youth pastor ever. She would say that, you know, she was she was older. And, you know, just wasn't set up in to run the traditional youth ministry.
But out of that, she understood that what she could do was she could equip us to lead. And so she took a back seat and let us take kind of a front seat. And out of that, just taught us to lead, taught us to teach scripture, taught us to communicate scripture publicly. Really, like the leadership work that she did in my life was really quite phenomenal. Her name was Christoski. And so out of that came into our church.
at McMaster's the first year and our original founding pastor, Dave Slater, he took me under his wing. He taught me, he discipled me, invested into me. And so what we lacked in formal training we had received in what I think is the biblical model for raising leaders, which is life on life discipleship. And so, yeah.
Rob Chartrand (06:18.245)
Yeah.
Yeah, and don't devalue those youth pastors, no matter what they're like. Yeah, yeah, wow. Okay, so let's jump ahead again to where you're at with your church plant and you guys trying to find your way there. What happened next?
Robin Wallar (06:24.126)
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Robin Wallar (06:39.006)
Yeah, so 2012 we took over and my wife and I knew that, you know, we were working full time. We had no plans to change that. And so we just said, you know, let's just try to be really clear on who we are and where we're going. Just really believing in the power of a clear vision. And so we clarified, we said, look, we're just a church and we're a church that's committed to the university campus and
That helped people because there was a real sense of we don't know who we are. And it's very hard for people to invest in something when there isn't clear direction or clear vision, clear values. And so that meant we were also clear on what we were not. We were not going to look like a traditional family church. And we felt like that was okay. And then we sat people down and we just started to dream together, pray together and say, Lord, what could we do? And it was incredible. Like it just exploded.
between 2012 and 2014, went from 25 people into many, many hundreds coming out on Sundays and in small groups, we called them simple churches, still do, and we went from having like a tiny church to having a relatively large church in the span of just two years. And those are really fun, vibrant years for us and learned a lot.
Rob Chartrand (08:01.608)
Now, was that just one campus or had you gone to more than one campus at the time?
Robin Wallar (08:06.098)
No, at that time we were just at McMaster and we were just grateful to be alive in some senses. But we started to way back in 2008, so before any of this had happened, I had quite a clear picture, you might call it a vision in my mind, of a dandelion blowing in the wind and the seeds sort of being scattered.
and understood that to be a sort of a call to become a church planting church. And so we had tucked that away and about seven years later started to feel that birth within us again. And so in 2015, we stepped out to plant our second campus at Brock University, basically copying the model that had helped us.
gained some success at McMaster and That began our journey towards church planting and reproducing
Rob Chartrand (09:14.844)
Yeah, you know, they say the second campus is often the biggest challenge. And once you figure out a lot of things there, then it's much more easy to multiply campuses after that. Did you guys face any specific challenges going to second campus? Okay.
Robin Wallar (09:28.734)
Oh man, it was brutal. It was the steepest learning curve. So we were, I was still working full time as an engineer, I was commuting and so was my wife in her career downtown Toronto. And we basically tried to grow on the back of a fairly attractional style of church, good preaching, good music.
Rob Chartrand (09:56.66)
Okay. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (09:57.934)
uh... and uh... we knew that it's not hard to gather young adults in a room if your music is good and your teaching is good like they'll show up or at least they did and i think things have changed a little bit now uh... but uh... we learned some pretty painful lessons that
that at the end of the day, it's the vision and values that hold us together, not the format of what we do. And we discovered that we couldn't export our leadership. We had a real leadership challenge. Although we could find competent people, like some really talented people to provide direction and leadership, because we hadn't raised them in our own context to carry and value what we valued when we tried to send them.
Rob Chartrand (10:45.704)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (10:50.258)
maintaining cohesion was impossible. Um, and so that was the first key learning that was quite, quite painful because those are some, some really good friends. Um, and, uh, and, and it didn't work unfortunately.
Rob Chartrand (11:06.888)
So they began with you, but you sent them out. But then as they got there, there was sort of a mission drift once they arrived.
Robin Wallar (11:13.886)
No, they didn't begin with us. Yeah. Yeah, so they weren't, they weren't sort of one of us. They were friends from outside, really dear friends. And but had and love the Lord, but had some slightly different priorities, ways of seeing things, ways of seeing church than my wife and I did. And so that alignment started to create some challenges in the long run.
Rob Chartrand (11:16.12)
Okay, so they were never with you in the movement. Okay. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (11:42.658)
But the bigger issue was that we realized pretty quickly that we were really blessed with exceptional talent at McMaster in terms of leadership capabilities, music capabilities, teaching capabilities, organizational capabilities. And we learned that there was no chance to raise up enough leaders to be able to reproduce the number of churches that the Lord was putting on our heart.
if our model required superstars. And at that time, our model required superstars, unicorns. If somebody's super talented, it's amazing what they can achieve. But that was like one in a thousand for us. And we needed dozens and dozens and dozens, or we felt like that's what we needed. So we started to really look at our model from a leadership development standpoint, and say, hey, actually,
Rob Chartrand (12:13.948)
Right.
Robin Wallar (12:40.534)
The way we're thinking is too leadership heavy, it's too expensive, it's too complicated, it's too slow to scale to the level where we can actually plant a church on every campus. And so we started to reimagine things. This will be back in 2018 probably.
Rob Chartrand (12:57.22)
Yeah. So I mean, you've got a challenge then with replicating your DNA, which is hard if somebody's never experienced church as you know it and the culture of your local church and trying to replicate that, uh, cause people do what they want to do or what they know. Right. So if they've never been there and then you're having a leadership replication problem or a, uh, um, a polity or ministry style replication problem, you need that talent to do it, to pull it off. So what did you guys do? Did you, did you?
Did you dumb it down? Did you lower the expectations? Did you do a radical do-over?
Robin Wallar (13:32.074)
Yeah, so we, I'd say we had a real come to Jesus moment. I think what had happened was that we grew so quickly that some of the core values that were super important to me personally, but also I think super key to what the Lord did in our church had gotten lost along the way, particularly this really core value of the priesthood of all believers.
that we wanted to see all believers equipped and sent into the mission field. And a subtle distinction between the called and the not quite as called started to creep into our thinking. And when we started to realize that, I was pretty shocked. I felt like, wow, this is not at all what was in my heart.
or what I felt the Lord had called us to be back in when we started leading in 2012. But five years and a whole lot of success and scrambling really to lead things. We had kind of lost our way on that core value. And so we started to ask the question, how could we plant churches in a way more scalable, way more reproducible way that was rooted in
the priesthood of all believers. And I actually had quite a powerful conversation. I met a church planting organization, randomly went out for lunch with their leaders. And every now and again, the Lord, I guess, just puts people in your life that say the right thing in the right moment. And this woman who I met and was just hearing our story just looked at me and she said, it sounds like you've just become really cynical. And...
specifically what I was cynical about was the idea that we could call Christians to actually be obedient to the Great Commission and actually expect a church to respond to that call. I think there had been a cynicism that maybe the called will, but not everybody will. And so out of that, we started to
Robin Wallar (15:55.982)
to rethink and restructure around, okay, instead of raising superstars and planting attractional churches, what if we planted churches where we took our small group leaders, our house church leaders, and equipped and mobilized them to be the planters? And we, instead of paying them, we asked them to get professional jobs in whatever city. And...
Instead of planting by attracting lots of Christians, we started with just evangelism. Good old-fashioned sharing of the gospel. We realized that we were actually pretty good at that. That was something we knew how to raise. We didn't really know how to raise the unicorn leaders, but we knew how to raise competent house church leaders. We knew how to do relational evangelism. We knew how to scale it.
Like we were because we were already doing all of that
Rob Chartrand (16:53.705)
So were you still in your second campus by this point or were you moved on to other campuses launched?
Robin Wallar (16:59.55)
No, by this time we were on our fourth campus. Yeah, so we planted a few more and.
Rob Chartrand (17:01.588)
Okay, okay, yeah. So the other campuses kind of get planted in more of the classic church planting model, which is like Sunday is everything and you gotta get the band and the teaching in place. And then from there, you build your other ministers kind of around that. Is that how they launched or?
Robin Wallar (17:20.022)
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
Rob Chartrand (17:21.348)
Okay, yeah. So this would have been a real paradigm shift for your church to say, okay, no, we're not gonna do it that way. We're going to actually go small and move towards missional discipling leaders launching smaller movements first. Is that correct? Is that a good assessment or?
Robin Wallar (17:40.926)
Oh yeah, it was like a 180 in some ways. Certainly many people perceived it as a 180. I think from my perspective, I felt like it was a returning to who we always were, but we got lost. But yeah, there was definitely, it was not universally well-received or even well-understood. And yeah, those were probably the most challenging.
Rob Chartrand (17:55.524)
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (18:10.274)
challenging years of my life, nevermind just my leadership, navigating and steering that. Yes, so, you know, as I've touched on, there was a lot of really precious relationships that we had called to come kind of labor with us, both from within and outside the church. But as we started to figure out who we really were and what we really wanted to do, a lot of those relationships weren't aligned. And-
Rob Chartrand (18:13.488)
Okay, talk a little bit more about that. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (18:39.934)
I was a young leader and I mean, I'm still not very old, but at that time, I, I definitely had some deficiencies in my, my leadership style. Um, and so I made mistakes, uh, but I think at the core of it, there was a, uh, perception of.
not everybody wanted to go where we were going. And it got thrown out in all kinds of crazy ways. I had team members calling our staff, telling them that I was out of my mind, they should quit their jobs, they were wasting their life. And these were like, these, I had a team member threatened to sue us because we shut down one of their ministries so that we could refocus on evangelism. I mean, it was ugly, it was really ugly. About, I would say half the church left. And-
Rob Chartrand (19:10.493)
Oh wow.
Rob Chartrand (19:26.009)
Wow.
Robin Wallar (19:27.122)
Several hundred thousand dollars of funding walked out the door. And.
Rob Chartrand (19:31.836)
at all your campuses or just your main campus? Okay, okay.
Robin Wallar (19:35.23)
everywhere across the board. And once young adults start talking to each other, the sort of the, it spreads, right? And it was in the middle of that, I was still working full-time as an engineer, and it was in the middle of all of that I felt the Lord say, now is the time to jump, jump and commit full-time to leading our church.
And I was like, really Lord, like now? Like the thing's on fire. And I'm so glad that we did. And although it was incredibly challenging, some of the most precious relationships came out of it. Some of the deepest friendships that we now have came out of that battle together. And kind of learned who is truly with us. And...
Not to say that everybody that parted ways, many of them are now still serving the Lord and joined other church plants and have gone on to great things. But what grieves me is many of them didn't land anywhere. And they took their grievances and just left church. And that was, you know, that was painful to see. But we had a phrase that we used at the time, which was, are we being saved by the gospel or are we being saved by community?
Rob Chartrand (20:46.28)
Hmm.
Robin Wallar (21:02.286)
And we learned that what we actually had was an endemic discipleship issue. We had a vibrant community. We had a vibrant sort of gathering of people, but that did not mean that we were actually making real disciples of Jesus. And what basically happened was we said, guys, we're not here to entertain. We're not here to create the best show. We really want to...
we want to raise disciples that are all in for the kingdom and willing to give their lives for Jesus. And so really we exposed our own issue, our own weakness.
Rob Chartrand (21:41.596)
Right. Would you even say that you expose your own idolatry? I mean, the challenge in ministry is your ministry or your form of ministry or your community itself, your church itself, does get elevated above the gospel in Jesus. And when that's taken away, as Calvin would say, it's like smoke rising from the altars of our idolatry.
your reaction to when it gets taken away exposes something about yourself and about what you truly value. You know what I'm saying?
Robin Wallar (22:14.898)
100%
Robin Wallar (22:20.262)
So often what we value in church are basically just idols. And we were touching all the most sacred ones, worship team, women's ministry, men's ministry, fun events. And then we were replacing it with a call to go and actually tell people about Jesus. Like, hey, like instead of running this event,
we're instead going to ask you guys to go tell people the gospel. So instead of having a whole lot of fun and calling a church, let's go, you know, share the gospel with a stranger. And oh man, that's like a truth serum. And so yeah, it was pretty powerful, but as painful as it was, I would do it again ten times over.
the fruit that it's born and the joy that we've had and this the what the Lord has been able to do in our church in the year since has been truly incredible.
Rob Chartrand (23:30.096)
Yeah, well, let's put a pin in it for a minute of that point in your timeline. But let's talk a little bit about your core DNA. You have some core values that are part of your DNA and you break it down into a phrase, everyone's sent to multiply everything. So can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Robin Wallar (23:48.97)
Yeah, so around that whole tumultuous time, that phrase became the anchoring value statement about who we were gonna be. And really it's four ideas packaged into a phrase. So I'll kind of break it down. So everyone's sent to multiply everything. The first word is, it's everyone. And I've alluded to this already, but we had a real strong conviction of the priesthood of all believers.
that what God was creating in the church was a nation of priests. And that our job as a church, and especially our job as leaders in the church, was to equip those priests, equip the saints for the work of the ministry, as it says in Ephesians. And so that meant that we needed to have the central value that everyone was called to ministry and to mission and to kingdom work.
no divide between the sort of the more called and the not quite so called. And that I was a complete, like I was just an ordinary follower of Jesus. I might be leading the church. I might have a greater mantle of responsibility, but there was no core theological difference in my calling to anyone else in our church's calling. We're called to be a part of the kingdom, fulfill the great commission, do the work of the ministry. And so we wanted to really...
um, root into this idea of everyone. The second, the second piece, if you want to, if you want to jump in, you can interrupt me too. I can just, I can go on this stuff all day. So.
Rob Chartrand (25:26.788)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. I mean, there's so much we can talk about. But let's get through all four and then we can wheel back if we need to.
Robin Wallar (25:33.338)
Sure, sure. Yeah, so sent the, we realized that there's two core impulses in the church that are sort of working at odds or two forces. We have a gathering force and then there's the sending force. There's this incarnating of the gospel, this going and this being amongst the people and then there's the sending of the gospel to go and be amongst other people.
the sharing a meal together, and then there's the going, the feeding the person you don't know. And so we started to reflect on this duality of forces that were at play in the church. And we realized that it was the sending force that was the hardest to keep in focus. You know, our people didn't need a lot of encouragement to gather together. They were happy to gather together. Then the years since we've learned that actually the kind of gathering that we're called to is much more challenging.
as we started to study Acts 2 and that sort of thing. But it was the sending that was really missing. And so we started to say, okay, our church is not just going to exist to gather, but rather to send. And that when we say send, we mean send to plant new churches. And so our whole church ecosystem is built around raising everyone to be a
more disciple makers. And so we're as passionate about where we're not as about where we already are. And so there's this sending aspect. And then the multiply piece is huge. You know, multiplication has become a bit of a trendy subject in the last four or five years in the church. It's like the Holy grail that everybody's trying to find, but at least in the West, we haven't quite cracked.
Rob Chartrand (27:21.428)
Sure.
Robin Wallar (27:29.954)
But the core idea of multiplication was that we weren't going to build our strategy on the talents of the few, but the gifts of everyone. And so the question wasn't how do we build a large, you know, centralized system, but how can we rather create something that's easy to reproduce? Where leaders are training leaders who are training leaders and it's highly decentralized. And so decentralization, reproduction.
the raising and the sending of leaders became a core component. And then the word everything there is just pointing to the fact that it's not just the visible pieces of the ministry that we need to multiply, but it's across everything. We need to multiply people who can make great meals and open their homes. We need to multiply worship leaders, and we need to multiply great people that can preach and teach.
Rob Chartrand (28:24.52)
Right, yep, yep.
Robin Wallar (28:28.162)
that it's the gifts of the body, everything needs to be multiplied, not just a few core skills. And so even right now in our church, we're sitting down all of our team leaders and reminding them that their job as a team leader of any team is to raise more team leaders so that we can send them to join church plants. And so whether that means like we're sitting at, I sat one of our guys down that runs our setup team.
I had him out for coffee last week for one of our campuses. They're just a student, a third year student, volunteer. And I said, hey man, your job is to train a generation of people that know how to create space that is welcoming to people. Job is to raise leaders so that we can send them. I said, one of our biggest challenges is we don't have enough people that know how to create welcoming spaces. And so you gotta help us raise more leaders that can create more welcoming spaces. And he looked at me and he was like, it's like I had a
you know, his, his sense of possibility went from really, really quite small to, he started to see how impactful his role actually was in the broader kingdom. Um, so.
Rob Chartrand (29:38.14)
Yeah. And that's that Ephesians paradigm, right? That God, Jesus had called some to be apostles, prophets, and, you know, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers to prepare the people of God for works of service, not just to do the works of service. And I think that trickles down to all roles within the body of Christ is we're all not just doers, but we're all the equippers, and we're trying to multiply everything everywhere. Let's go back to that scent paradigm. I mean, that's a...
Robin Wallar (30:03.704)
Exactly.
Rob Chartrand (30:08.288)
You're pushing against a pretty strong tidal wave of church ethos, which is very attractional, right? The idea of attraction, you know, and inviting people to, you know, invite somebody to church is that common phrase, which I mean, has all sorts of implications for bad ecclesiology because the church isn't an event. And, but I mean,
Robin Wallar (30:32.234)
Yeah, for sure.
Rob Chartrand (30:36.524)
I mean, that's going to be pretty hard for people to get their heads around that we are the sent people of God called by God on mission into the world. I mean, what are some of the things that you did to help kind of do the switch on that understanding, to move from attractional to extractional, extracting the people of God into the world? Did you have any specific tactics you use or strategies or maybe just teaching or what?
Robin Wallar (31:04.558)
Yeah, a little bit of everything. I think in a way it starts by clarifying what people understand the gospel to be. And so, so much of this actually goes back to how do we understand and relate to the gospel? The core of the gospel is sending. The Father sends the Son. And He sends the Son into a world that is not exactly eager to receive Him. And so...
Rob Chartrand (31:11.732)
Okay, yeah.
Robin Wallar (31:34.438)
Often we think about the gospel in essentially individualistic terms that, you know, what has Christ done, you know, to save me? But there isn't a sense of seeing ourselves as participatory in the work of salvation, the work of bringing the good news, bringing the gospel to the nations, to continue doing what Jesus did for us. Not that we are those who save, obviously, you know, it's Jesus who saves.
but we're called to be ambassadors, messengers, continuing to function as a sent people just as the father sent the son. And so it goes back, I think, to how we understand the gospel. But then culturally in our church, it's just become like what you celebrate, you replicate. And so we deplatformed quite a few people. We stopped celebrating the platform and we started celebrating the sending.
Rob Chartrand (32:31.55)
Mm-hmm.
Robin Wallar (32:34.11)
And so the people who are the most celebrated in our church are those that have done and given the greatest sacrifice to be sent and put up their hands and to say, you know, I will go. Um, and we've got a lot of pretty crazy stories where, you know, uh, you'll have, we have, we have one guy in our church who felt called to go plan to church in Mississauga and, uh, you know, no diss to Mississauga, no disrespect to Mississauga, but
It's not the most exciting place in the world. And he just said, you know, I'm gonna go. He had no job. He didn't know how he was gonna do it, but he's like, the Lord has sent me. So he moved out there and for a year worked to tell people the gospel, mostly Muslim students at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus and just trusted the Lord to bring him a job. And-
Rob Chartrand (33:04.564)
Okay, yeah.
Robin Wallar (33:30.77)
Fast forward two years and the Lord's good. He's working as an engineer. He managed to find a wife and get married. The leader from our church, their little, he's multiplying. Their church's, their little plant is blossoming. And so we celebrate him. And so celebration has been a really important aspect of it. So yeah, there's a theological dimension, but I think that there's a cultural dimension. And we try our hardest.
Rob Chartrand (33:37.02)
All right, he's multiplying. Woo hoo! Ha ha ha!
Robin Wallar (34:00.73)
to every meeting anywhere in the church starts with celebrations of discipleship multiplication, of sending. And so, yeah.
Rob Chartrand (34:10.356)
I, we always found in our, in our church, the one that we planted about a dozen years ago in Edmonton, Crosspoint, it's very missional DNA, but the challenge of social media is, you know, that's very picture driven. So for example, Instagram and, and it's, it's really easy to find pictures of Sunday morning and it's really easy to find pictures of large, large events. But you can't really find pictures of those missional moments because
in many ways you feel like you're violating a personal barrier or relationship, right? So you're not going to post those pictures. And so the, but the adage, you know, I think it's Stanley, Andy Stanley is like, what gets celebrated gets repeated, right? Which, which you've just stated. Um, you celebrate those things and then people start thinking, oh, church is a Sunday morning experience, but, um, you know, did you face any unique challenges with that? I mean, like with how you post and how you talk about things publicly.
Robin Wallar (35:09.226)
Yeah, we actually, at some point, I don't remember when we, we passed a rule that we were not going to post photos of Sundays. We had, we, you know, at that time, less now post COVID, but especially a couple of years ago, Sundays were bumping, like, you know, the whole shebang, the lights, the music, the fog machines, like the, you know, the whole thing. And we just said, we will not post photos of that. And it decimated our social media.
Rob Chartrand (35:16.178)
Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (35:35.919)
Yes, for sure.
Robin Wallar (35:38.578)
And you know what? So what? The people who we were finding on social media, like if you win people with, you win them too. And so the idea that, well, we'll just, I used to think I will get them in the door and then we'll reprogram them. But it's almost impossible. And so instead we just said, okay, we're going to become the masters of the meal.
Rob Chartrand (35:53.212)
Yeah, it's tough.
Robin Wallar (36:05.805)
of great, great meals. And so our church, and hospitality, yeah, so our church eats together.
Rob Chartrand (36:07.888)
hospitality.
Robin Wallar (36:14.594)
dozens of times a week across the church in a large group format.
Rob Chartrand (36:20.13)
How do you do that with college students? Is everyone bringing a mac and cheese or you got some great hosts?
Robin Wallar (36:26.687)
Yeah, no, we've just, I don't know, created this value of we eat well together. We have a group of...
Robin Wallar (36:41.006)
Quite a few people we call missionaries who are non-students, they've graduated, they're committed to being a part of our church. They have jobs, doctors, engineers, nurses, those sorts of things. And they cook a lot. And yeah, sometimes I joke that we could keep Thermos brand in business because we buy so much Thermos products, keeping various meals hot as we transport it. But the...
Rob Chartrand (36:50.405)
Okay, okay, yeah.
Robin Wallar (37:11.614)
It's taken a lot of work. But the upshot is that, you know, that is stuff we can photograph and we can get that out there. But it has been challenging. Like, how do you communicate and attract? But I think what it actually points to is a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is that the core of the church, if we wanna grow our churches, the core strategy needs to be life on life evangelism, not so much advertising.
Um, if people are actually doing evangelism, I don't mean just like I shared my shared the gospel with my coworker. I mean like going out and intentionally finding people to tell the gospel to, uh, in, in a, in a targeted and strategic way. If we're not doing that, all we're going to reach with our advertising likely are Christians or de-churched people. Uh, and, and demographically Canada is, uh,
Rob Chartrand (38:04.372)
That's right.
Robin Wallar (38:09.682)
in 20 years will not predominantly be Christian or de-churched. It will be no church experience. And I don't think that they relate to our marketing campaigns on social media or our attractional style. And so what they do relate to is meals and invitation to life and, hey, can I tell you about Jesus?
Rob Chartrand (38:14.228)
Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
Rob Chartrand (38:30.516)
That's right. And I think that's a really good point we need to pause on for just a minute because I mean, if we talk about Attractional versus Extractional, missional paradigms, right? Attractional is bringing people to church or bringing people to the event that we host Christmas and Easter and all of that. And then Extractional is extracting the people of God out on mission in the world wherever they are, where they eat, where they recreate, where they study.
where they work, all of those places where they live, their neighborhoods, right? So there's a different paradigm here. But the de-churched and if we could say unchurched, you know, just the kind of the classic breakdown. De-churched are those who have a Christian memory. You know, either they've had church in their life at some point or they have family members who have been part of church, you know, they've grown up a little bit. And so they have some common understanding of church, some sort of memory or experience.
And then the unchurch are those who have none. Like it's not even part of their world or their framework. And as emerging generations move along, the number of de-churched in the country continues to decrease and the number of unchurch continues to increase. But if our model is attractional all the time, the people that we're trying to reach continues to get smaller and smaller and smaller. And there's this whole huge percentage of the population that are unchurched that will never darken any event that you invite them to.
unless it's something that's like you're saying has food or people are engaging in rubbing shoulders with them one on one in relationship. Is that kind of a good breakdown of what we're talking about here with your model?
Robin Wallar (40:08.074)
Yeah, I think that that's bang on. And to give you sort of some of our own experiences with that, in the early days, I think a big portion of our growth was from de-churched students. And around, in parallel to all of the learnings that I've alluded to, we started to notice a decrease in the number of people that were responding to gospel invitations in our large format services. 10 years ago, I could preach just about any message and-
Rob Chartrand (40:18.414)
Okay, yeah.
Robin Wallar (40:36.226)
do a call for salvation and have a dozen hands respond. But by 2017, 2018, we noticed that no one was responding. And I was like, either I'm the problem or I don't know what, but when we started to realize, we realized pretty quickly that, no, the issue was that our demographics have changed. And post-COVID, what we've seen is that the number of D-Church students,
And I would say it's not just students. Students are just a reflection of the broader culture and sort of a snapshot in time. The number of de-churches has radically decreased and the number of unchurched is through the roof. And so, and I think it can be misleading because there are across the country, a lot of large mega churches or attractional style churches that are growing and doing relatively well. But I think that it,
Rob Chartrand (41:07.828)
Yep.
Robin Wallar (41:33.55)
betrays the truth on the ground, which is that the church in Canada is probably not .. is not growing as a whole. Our net reach year over year is not growing, despite the fact that the really good, attractional churches are growing. I think it points to a reality that they're probably growing off transfer growth.
Rob Chartrand (41:49.084)
How are they growing?
Robin Wallar (42:02.414)
is say, Lord, like we got to raise a people, a generation of Christians that are passionate about, about the work of evangelism, about the work of disciple making, and that the church is probably, the church in the future of Canada, while there will probably be still a large number of large sort of attractional style, high quality churches, the dominant form of church in the future in Canada, I think is going to look a lot more like the book of Acts, house to house, evangelism rooted.
um, uh, de-professionalized, uh, clergy. And, and, and so we've tried to ask the question, what would it look like if we, if we looked more like the church and acts, um, not just from a utopian standpoint, but from a, from a missy logical stamp.
Rob Chartrand (42:49.616)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, what are some of the challenges you face? I mean, you're taking an 18-year-old fresh out of, you know, a common church experience maybe or some sort of a Christian memory or maybe not. Maybe they don't have any, but they're very young and your goal is to help turn them into a reproducing disciple who's willing to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. I've got to expect that you're facing some similar challenges on all of your campuses.
Robin Wallar (43:20.414)
Yeah, you know, it's not easy. And when I talk to my peers that work in campus church planting across North America, we're all, the reality is that we're all having a tough time. We're all having to work pretty hard. And, and some of our old strategies and our old models maybe aren't working as well as they used to. Some of the specific challenges.
Robin Wallar (43:49.638)
incoming students have adopted, a lot of incoming Christian students have adopted an understanding of the gospel that is, I think, fairly myopic or borderline idolatrous, where their understanding of the gospel is basically that salvation equates to personal self-discovery. And so
Robin Wallar (44:19.978)
learning to walk with Jesus as king as every dimension of your life is like a pretty radical idea. And it can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. So we do a lot of work trying to address that. The other piece that is quite challenging is that, and but also a tremendous opportunity is that the subject of identity is probably the number one conversation that we're having on a day-to-day basis with our students.
Rob Chartrand (44:25.404)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (44:49.522)
Who am I? And the good news is the gospel has a lot to say about who you are in Christ. And there's a really incredible message of hope and good news there. The challenge is that students have in many cases adopted a false identity. It might be the identity as a victim. That is certainly a prevalent identity. I'm a victim. I'm a subject of my...
Rob Chartrand (45:11.668)
Okay, yeah.
Robin Wallar (45:17.718)
you know, I'm just a product of my circumstances. And as a result, many of them believe they don't have any agency. For example, we've observed that a lot of the conversation around mental health has actually been net negative for students. As we've driven mental health conversations to the forefront culturally, many students believe that they're just trapped now in their identity as somebody who has a mood disorder or what have you.
Rob Chartrand (45:45.608)
Right, yeah, yeah.
Robin Wallar (45:47.218)
And so trying to disentangle their self-perception from perhaps the challenges of their life can be really difficult. And there's a fragility that comes with that. And a lot of far smarter people than me have written a fair bit about that subject. And then of course there's the identity rooted in sexuality and gender identity.
And man, that is a quagmire that we have to carefully and wisely navigate every day. But it's also a tremendous opportunity because the gospel, again, speaks so beautifully and profoundly to the subjects of sexuality and gender identity. And so I think in a way, what's happening is that the world is starting to speak really clearly in a way that is anti-gospel.
uh, to a lot of these core subjects in a really loud way, but it's also being found out that the world solutions don't really work. And I think the gospel really truly does offer freedom. And so where there's challenge, there's opportunity.
Rob Chartrand (46:57.296)
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right on that last point. I mean that, you know, Christian Smith in his work, and he talks about moralistic therapeutic deism, you know, and which is your route of, you know, you kind of alluding to in your first point there is this, you know, this gospel of self-promotion in many ways and finding the best, you know, creating the best version of yourself.
that one's a little bit more insidious, right? And it attaches itself to the gospel and it kind of runs underground and you don't see it. Whereas what we're seeing now is the new paradigm of identity and whatnot is so blatantly antithetical to the gospel, right?
Robin Wallar (47:25.294)
Totally.
Rob Chartrand (47:37.244)
And it's much more easily to identify. However, I mean, it's also more antagonistic to the gospel. And so you're dealing with something very different, which is, I mean, if we talk about identity and we talk about the new identity in Christ, you can get a lot more pushback on that. Whereas the other one, you're gonna have to peel back the layers and say, okay, well, here's why moralistic therapeutic deism, the oprified gospel.
we talk about that, you know, it's so much different than the gospel where Jesus calls us to come and surrender our lives to him fully and die to self and receive him and make him king over our lives rather than our own selves. So anyway those are those are some real challenges you guys are facing. So much we could talk about so much there but we're I want to make the best use of our time here. Let's get on to the timeline again. Okay I remember I interviewed you for my doctoral dissertation way back in 2018.
And a lot has happened since then. So you started shifting towards a discipleship-making movement, a DMM strategy. And you've kind of told us a little bit about the shift. But I mean, can you tell us a little bit what's happened since then? And maybe even just talk about some of the things that you're celebrating about the shift.
Robin Wallar (48:52.798)
Yeah, so, you know, I've alluded to a lot of 2018, we made some big changes, but we actually made the biggest change in 2020, right before COVID. It was really the end of several years of discovery and learning and experimentation. And what we did was we, we basically officially moved from, we were kind of running a hybrid, we had these
by vocation or professional people that were starting new house churches in different cities. And then we had our old, attraction style churches. And we basically led by professional clergy, as it were. And we basically moved all of our old clergy led church plants to by vocational led church plants. And we transitioned that whole team into different roles. And
Rob Chartrand (49:45.556)
Okay. Wow. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (49:51.902)
In one shot, we basically like reoriented a leadership structure where we placed, I think it was something like nine directors of regions of house churches all at once right before COVID. And I'm so grateful we did that because essentially what it did is it set us up to run a decentralized house church network.
led by a bivocational team and then COVID happened. And we couldn't have been better positioned. And there was some challenges because making a big change like that and being unable to navigate those, some of the questions people had over coffee or in person meant that there was some relational fallout that did happen, but overall it was incredible. And what it did is it changed the perception of
Rob Chartrand (50:24.488)
Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (50:28.18)
Wow. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (50:50.326)
what it means to be a church planter. Instead of a church planter being somebody that was highly skilled, professional, maybe had a really comprehensive gift mix, it meant that any of our house church leaders could theoretically be a church planter. And it started with a really simple question for us. We were studying the book of Acts, and in Acts eight, there's a little verse that completely rocked our world. And it says,
In those days, a severe persecution broke out against the believers and, uh, and they were scattered and then jumped on a verse four and it says, as they were scattered, they went on their way preaching the word. And if you fast forward to act 11, you find out that group of people, some of them landed in Antioch and were the first people to figure out how to communicate the gospel to the Gentiles. And so.
Rob Chartrand (51:30.097)
Hmm.
Rob Chartrand (51:38.396)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (51:46.886)
It was these untrained, unnamed, ordinary disciples of Jesus who were running for their lives that planted the first churches to the Gentiles. And what that did is it led to us asking a question. And the question was, if we were to take anyone in our church that had come to know Jesus in our church, and we moved them to another city, anywhere in the world, and we gave them 10 years,
and just left them alone for 10 years, would we come back to find a thriving church movement in that city? And that became the calibrating question around everything we did, was that what we were gonna do was we were going to, to the best that we could, and by the grace of God, raise people that could answer yes to that question. And people started to put up their hands to say,
Rob Chartrand (52:19.952)
Right. Yeah.
Robin Wallar (52:40.938)
I'll go plant a church over there and I'll go plant a church over there. And some of them, you know, some of it didn't work. We, we, some of them shut down, but many, all, but one of them are still going. Um, and, uh, there's a groundswell now with people saying, I want to go plant a church, uh, because they're looking at their peers going, well, my friend was an engineer, my friend's a nurse, my friend's a veterinary technician, and they're a church planter, maybe I can plant a church too.
Rob Chartrand (52:48.786)
Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (53:06.384)
Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, we have an account in the New Testament of the church plants that made it. We don't have an account of the church plants that didn't make it right. But I mean, they had there had to be some that failed. And that's required if you're going to try and do stuff, right? Start, start new things. You know, every entrepreneur, every church planter, I mean, what's the average they fail seven times before they get it right. I mean, that's not on common. Wow. So you got
Robin Wallar (53:13.686)
For sure.
Robin Wallar (53:28.098)
Totally. Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (53:34.768)
I have to think, like, did COVID almost reinforce the core paradigm that you're working with? I mean, because COVID for so many of us across the board shut down Sunday mornings. And those churches that had small groups or other forms of discipling communities seemed to do a whole lot better during COVID than those who solely relied on the Sunday morning experience. But in your case, I mean, you were... It's almost like COVID.
could have reinforced that model in your context?
Robin Wallar (54:06.802)
In a lot of ways, I would, I never want to go back to COVID, but I am grateful for the opportunity that it provided for us to cement some things into our DNA. I think that the changes that we were trying to make would have been very difficult in the absence of COVID. And as a leadership team, we had been talking about how nearly impossible it would be to move our largest locations to think this way.
Rob Chartrand (54:11.182)
No.
Robin Wallar (54:36.714)
because they were so cemented in their old way of thinking, but COVID basically forced them to get on the bus. Because it just made the most sense to structure how we were structuring. And so coming out of COVID, that major location here in Hamilton, where I am, has become our largest sending force. And the leadership out of that location has just become
absolutely incredible at raising church planters and new leaders, but a lot of that's because of COVID. So, because we just had to, we had to think as a decentralized house church movement. We're really a hybrid. Like we still have large format gatherings. So we're like half house church, half not. So.
Rob Chartrand (55:15.912)
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Chartrand (55:20.996)
Yeah, yeah, it's like Hugh Halter's the book, And, right, where he talks about, because he was so tangible kingdom, strongly missional communities. But he's, you know, he kind of backtracked on that and said, you know, both are really important. You still got to gather and scatter. Yeah. And that's
Robin Wallar (55:35.426)
Totally, totally. It's the two forces that I was alluding to, the sending and the gathering, the force for togetherness and the force for sentness. We need both.
Rob Chartrand (55:40.688)
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Hey, what would you say to leaders today who are listening who are involved in more traditional church structures? I mean, how would you encourage them? How would you challenge them towards creating disciple-making movements?
Robin Wallar (55:58.122)
Yeah, I think my biggest encouragement would be to start at the top and work down. And what I mean by that is for whoever the senior leader is to start by making sure that you're doing life on life discipleship out of your home. And then require all of your staff and senior leaders to be doing it. And elders and your deacons.
Rob Chartrand (56:05.509)
Okay.
Rob Chartrand (56:16.029)
Mm.
Rob Chartrand (56:21.264)
Yeah. Elders.
Rob Chartrand (56:26.927)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (56:28.974)
and then your team leads and work down, versus I think sometimes what we do is we try to mobilize it from the bottom. We try to mobilize everyone to do the work of discipleship, but they're not seeing it modeled, or they're seeing exceptions. Like the classic exception that I've seen, and I've worked with quite a few churches on this question over the years, is that
Rob Chartrand (56:40.592)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (56:52.102)
They don't want to hold their most talented competent people to the expectation of disciple me. Well, I lead the worship team and I'm doing it with the worship team or I lead the preaching team and it's like, if you're not doing this, that discipleship and evangelism in your personal home, then there's a problem. And so, and what it will do is it'll very quickly expose who's on the bus and who's not on the bus.
That would be my starting point. And then the other one is I think getting really clear on what is discipleship. It means something different to everyone. And obviously there's a broad sense of like, okay, it means following Jesus. But what does that mean? And I think what we've tried to do is be really clear on this is what we mean with discipleship. We're not saying that we have the answer, but we have an answer, and we're gonna build our strategy off of that answer.
And so the systems and structures and understanding of what is discipleship need to be supported by a clear understanding of what is discipleship. And so we worked really, really hard to define an answer to that question.
Rob Chartrand (58:07.836)
Yeah. Would you say, I mean, accompanying that, they need to have a clear definition of what is a disciple? Because that's what you're trying to replicate, right?
Robin Wallar (58:14.346)
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what is a disciple? What is disciple making? But I think sometimes churches suffer from being too abstract. We have visions and values that are inspiring. We have statements about what it means to be a disciple that might be inspiring in a sense, but lacks enough clarity and definition to be useful in any kind of accountability. And so...
Rob Chartrand (58:27.826)
Yeah.
Robin Wallar (58:45.896)
And so it took me, like I wrote a book on discipleship and what we mean by this, it took me like a hundred thousand words to define it. Now maybe that's more of an indication of how hard it is for me to say things succinctly, but there was a lot there for us to unpack around what it meant to be a disciple making people.
Rob Chartrand (58:48.722)
Yeah.
Rob Chartrand (58:53.949)
Ha ha ha!
Rob Chartrand (59:03.452)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And we wanna put that book in the hands of our listeners too and we're gonna make sure we have links to that in the show notes. Something that's available on Amazon, I'm assuming.
Robin Wallar (59:14.39)
Yeah, there's two books, Everyone Sent to Multiply Everything, which is sort of a leadership book and then Living Sent, which is a life on life discipleship book. They're both available on Amazon.
Rob Chartrand (59:26.044)
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and we certainly want to encourage our church leaders. We know there are lots of different paradigms and ecclesiological structures that you can use for the church, but at the center of it all, I think we want to see a disciple-making movement move across this country, because as you say, the church has plateaued and in decline, depending on how you look at the data in Canada. And so our old strategies fit for a great time. And...
in space, but I mean, we need new strategies for the future going forward. Robin, go ahead, go ahead.
Robin Wallar (01:00:02.594)
I'm just going to add that I really believe that if we put disciple making at the center of our strategy, there's no commandment to plant churches in the New Testament, but there is commandment to make disciples. Healthy churches are the overflow of the work of discipleship. If we put disciple making as a priority, we will have healthy churches. That's the biblical paradigm. I don't see a downside.
Rob Chartrand (01:00:27.184)
Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, that's a good word. Well, let's leave it at that, Robin. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing with us today. Some of our listeners interested in knowing a little bit more about what you're doing besides the book and getting involved, how can they be in touch with you?
Robin Wallar (01:00:47.018)
Yeah, so we can reach out through our website, lyfchurch.ca. I'm not really on any socials, our churches, so you can find us on the socials. And so, yeah, lyfchurch.ca, everything's there. Our books are listed there. And flip me an email, happy to chat, and hop on a call, serve as best I can.
Rob Chartrand (01:01:07.276)
Awesome, awesome. All right, well hey, brother, thanks for your time.
Robin Wallar (01:01:11.286)
For sure, my pleasure.