(RNS) — Two decades ago, Vance Pitman and a pair of friends from the Bible Belt went out west to start a church in Sin City.
They launched a Las Vegas congregation, known as Hope Church, two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and it grew beyond their wildest dreams, becoming a multicultural megachurch with congregation members who speak more than 50 languages.
During the summer of 2021, Pitman and his wife began to think about the future. Rather than focusing on building up Hope Church and Pitman’s platform there, they wanted to spend more time with their grandkids and on helping other churches get off the ground.
In December, Pitman resigned as senior pastor of Hope Church — a rare move for megachurch pastors in their prime — to take a new role as president of the Send Network, the church-planting arm of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board.
Pitman spoke to Religion News Service in March, not long after starting his new role. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why step down as senior pastor at your church to take this new job?
About 40% of the unchurched population in America lives in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, which is about 75 million people. We had a dream to start 300 new churches, and currently, we’re about 80 churches into that process. Last summer, my wife and I just spent some time before the Lord and we began to ask,”Lord, what have you made us to do?”
There was a shift taking place in my heart that for the next season of ministry, rather than be focused on Hope Church, it was going to be focused on the “big C” church and the kingdom. Also, I get about five calls a year from senior pastors across the country who are retiring or getting ready to finish their ministry and looking for their successor and asking if I’d be interested in taking over. I got burdened that we don’t do a good job of developing the next generation of pastors and church planters in North America. I felt like this was the right time for us to make this step.
Will you still be a member of Hope Church?
For now, I’m going to live here and be a member of the church here. My family will still serve here and I’ll preach occasionally — four or five times a year — but we are sent out full time. We raised up a team from within that’s already taken the mantle of leadership, we passed the baton and so the church is doing great.
What have you learned in Vegas as a church planter that you think might be useful in this new role?
I believe what is happening a lot in church planting today is just starting church services and not starting churches — by that I mean churches being born as a result of engaging cities with the gospel and seeing disciples made in those churches as byproduct. We call starting church services “church planting” when a guy moves into a town, sends out a mailer, opens up a storefront and immediately invites people to attend a church service.
Vance Pitman speaks for the first time in his capacity as Send Network’s new president at an orientation for 165 of the organization’s newest church planting missionaries March 7, 2022. Photo courtesy of Send Network/Kent Mallett
You can do that strategy in Memphis or Nashville or Atlanta or Birmingham, where you have Christians waking up looking to go to church on Sunday. In Las Vegas, when I moved here, 95% of our city was non-Christian and 60% was nonreligious. You can send out mailers all day long but nobody’s looking to go to church.
