At the Other Mars Hill Church, New Co-Pastors Hope to Build a Faithful Future

Since Bell’s departure in 2012, the church has had a series of fairly short-tenured senior leaders and has shrunk in size. Today, about 1,200 people attend in-person and online services, though it is hard to tell how many people are part of the church because of the pandemic.

Mars Hill has also been rethinking its identity in recent years.

“In the past 18 months, the consideration for Mars Hill has been, how do we faithfully be a local church?” said Hatfield.

Starting a new campus in Grand Rapids is helping with the transition. That location is essentially a church plant, said Eiland, and is in a residential neighborhood, which makes it different from the Grandville campus, located in a former mall. The new campus is in a place where people live, while the older location is a place people drive to, said Hatfield. That difference in geography, Eiland said, will reshape the church, helping make it more congregation-centered and less leader-centered.

“I think we’re going to discover new ways of being this church,” said Eiland.

For his part, Hatfield said he has always been drawn to a parish model of ministry, where the clergy have a close connection to their congregation and their community. He is also careful how he describes the church, trying to stay away from any sense of ownership on his part as a leader.

“This is not my church,” he said. “This is Christ’s church. And I have been invited to help lead Christ’s church.”

Mark McCloskey, professor of ministry leadership at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, said collaborative ministry — like co-pastoring — has a number of benefits. Having more than one leader means power isn’t all concentrated in one person. It also means all of the burden of running a church doesn’t fall on one person.

More than that, he said, shared leadership was a common practice in the Bible.

“In the New Testament, you’d have to look long and hard to find a model where there’s a sole senior pastor,” he said. “Basically, you’d have a plurality of leaders.”

That model can make space for different viewpoints and perspectives. But it is not easy, said McCloskey, who runs a program on transformational leadership. Pastors who think they need to have all the answers, for example, have difficultly sharing power.

“I tell my classes, you have to have somebody who can be in charge without being in control, who can be present without casting a shadow,” he said.