Better Together

By Matt Green

The numbers differ wildly depending on the source, but somewhere between 4,500 and 10,000 churches in the United States close every year. A 2021 report from Lifeway Research, based on data from 34 Protestant denominations, pinned the number at 4,500 for 2019—and that was before the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s a number Tampa pastor Aaron Burke can’t dismiss as he looks at the landscape of struggling churches in his own community. Radiant Church, the congregation Aaron planted in 2013 with his wife, Katie, is now a multisite church of more than 8,000, and five of its ten sites are mergers of existing churches with Radiant.

 “I feel like the next season for the church is mergers,” he explains. “If we can figure out ways to approach these struggling churches with tact, grace, inspiration and—obviously—the leading of the Holy Spirit, then we are better together.”

Aaron notes that this strategy has allowed Radiant to bring about $35 million in assets and buildings into the church that they didn’t have to pay for. In most cases, these same facilities and property would have been sold to developers when the churches that owned them eventually closed. For Aaron, that’s a stewardship problem—not to mention that it shrinks the physical footprint of the kingdom in the community when a church is closed.

“Sometimes it’s best for the kingdom of God for there to be two very different thriving churches next to each other,” he admits. “What’s not good for the kingdom of God is a dying church that a developer buys and builds condos on.”

Dying congregations often don’t know they’re dying, he explains. But while their numbers may falter, the buildings and facilities represent a heritage of prayer and investment that should not go to waste.

“ If we can now transfer that into a young congregation, it gives the new congregation life for decades to come,” Aaron notes. “And it helps church planters better honor existing churches that will hand down assets necessary to carry the kingdom of God further in the next generation.”

Three of the churches that merged with Radiant were Assemblies of God, one Southern Baptist and one independent. Two of the pastors retired, and one came on staff with Radiant and is now the campus pastor at the site of his previous church.

This model accelerates a church plant’s ability to find a permanent home in an area with exploding property values and construction costs. It also allows a growing church to decentralize, locating campuses closer to the communities a multisite congregation feels called to reach, but without building an expensive main campus.

“Our ultimate vision is that we want to have a healthy Radiant Church location within 25 minutes of everyone in the Tampa Bay area,” Aaron explains. “And we’re about halfway there. We think within the next 10 years we can have another 10 campuses to cover the greater Tampa Bay area.”

For Radiant, keeping momentum will be no small feat, considering growth trends in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. By 2026, the sprawling metro area is expected to be home to more than 5.3 million people, growing at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the country.

“From the very beginning, my wife and I never wanted to start a big church. We had a vision for a healthy church. We wanted a church that we would love to attend and we would love to raise our children in and that we truly believe would make an impact in the community,” Aaron explains. “So, this is just part of our vision of being an unavoidable presence in the community.”

A REBELLIOUS ENTREPRENEUR

As a teenager, Aaron attended Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. Although his church was the site of the famed revival that began on Father’s Day in 1995, Aaron was rebellious and had little interest in the nightly services that drew an estimated 4 million visitors between 1995 and 2000. That all changed when his mother sent Aaron on a mission trip to Nepal when he was 16 years old.

“It was on the other side of the world God radically got ahold of my life,” he recounts, “and I felt Him just very clearly tell me, ‘If you’ll surrender your life to me, then I’ll do something exceedingly more than you could ever imagine with your life.’”

Upon returning home, Aaron launched a Bible club at his high school and headed to Southeastern University. After graduating in 2005, he went to Sri Lanka to do ministry in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami that had devastated the island the year before, eventually starting his own nonprofit based in Pensacola to support his efforts.

At 23, however, he was in over his head, and Aaron’s father, a serial entrepreneur who had operated car dealerships and radio stations, encouraged him to start a thrift store to fund his ministry ventures. They found a furniture store that was going out of business and took over the lease to launch the thrift store. Within months, however, Aaron was asked by Brownsville Assembly’s senior pastor, Evon Horton, to serve as youth pastor.

“No way,” he responded. “I’m called to missions, to the least evangelized. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Horton was persistent, assuring Aaron he could do missions and serve at the church. Aaron accepted the position, which meant joining the staff of a church that had struggled since the revival that had brought it global attention. The congregation numbered about 300 people, and the church was $10.9 million in debt. The interest payments alone were $84,000 per month, Aaron recalls. He doesn’t assign blame for the state the church was in at the time but notes that most churches that have gone through sustained revival periods don’t survive.

While serving as youth pastor, Aaron continued to take three trips a year to Sri Lanka and ran the thrift store to support the ministry. Along the way, he picked up an MBA at Southeastern and met his wife, Katie, whom he had met during his undergraduate studies at Southeastern. In 2012, they were expecting their first child and had just purchased their first home when God disrupted their lives with what Aaron describes as an Abraham-like calling.

TO PARTS UNKNOWN

“ I’m laying on the floor in Brownsville, in the auditorium, praying,” he recalls, “and I feel the Lord—clearly as I’ve maybe ever heard him in my life—say, ‘This is going to be your last year here. I want you to prepare for what I’m going to do to you next.’”

“OK, God, what is it?” Aaron asked, but didn’t hear a reply.

When he told Katie about the experience, she confirmed that she was sensing the same thing. For six months they prayed and waited for further direction. Then, while they were with the youth group at a conference in Dallas, Aaron saw a booth for ARC (Association of Related Churches) and “discovered” church planting—a concept of which he had little prior knowledge. This led to the couple attending ARC training at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama.

The training opened their eyes to the world of church planting outside their denominational upbringings. “We didn’t have a clue,” Aaron notes. “It was like we’re speaking English and they’re speaking Mandarin.”

Still, they felt prompted to keep exploring—and to follow the advice of Highlands pastor Chris Hodges that “ God will give you a supernatural love for a city. Just pray for that.”

Sensing they were to plant a church in Florida, they began praying for Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa, asking God to make His will clear. While on a visit to Tampa, Aaron experienced a confirmation that God was calling them to the city.

“He said, ‘Aaron, if you say yes to this, I’ll give you the keys to this region,’” he recalls hearing. “‘I’ll let you have this region if you say yes.’ And it was from that moment on, I knew I’ll live the rest of my life in Tampa Bay.”

When Aaron returned home, Katie confirmed she was sensing the same direction, and his senior pastor encouraged him to follow God’s voice in this new endeavor.

“He was like, ‘That’s God. That’s you. Let’s help you,’” Aaron says. “I’ll forever honor him for doing that.”

Along with their newborn baby, the couple packed up and moved to Lakeland to live with family, and Aaron began scouting out the land in Tampa—making connections and looking for a facility.

“Every morning I’d wake up about 5 a.m., get in my car, drive into Tampa, and sit at a Starbucks, Chick-fil-A or a local park. That was the advice people gave me. ‘You go to Chick-fil-A and sit and meet young families,’” he says, laughing in retrospect. “Do you know how much of a creeper you look like?”

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Aaron quickly modified his methods and joined the Chamber of Commerce, attending groundbreakings, ribbon-cuttings and networking events throughout the city—a strategy he recommends to every aspiring church planter.

At their first interest meeting on March 17, 2013, there were 17 people—10 of whom were family members. The team grew to 40, and they launched on September 13 in a run-down dollar theater in a strip mall in South Tampa. Aaron laughs now, noting that they later discovered the building on a Buzzfeed list of the most haunted places in Florida.

“We wanted to be in a high school like all the cool churches,” he says. Instead, they launched in a smelly theater with sticky floors and green carpeting. “ We’re putting scent machines out and pipe and drape—everything we can to make this thing nice, and it’s horrific.”

At the launch, 348 people showed up—including nearly 150 who had to be seated in the lobby when they ran out of room in the auditorium. Aaron attributes the success of the launch to three factors: the grace of God, grit and ARC.

“ I’m a firm believer that you pray like it depends on God and you work like it depends on you,” he explains, describing the launch team’s efforts in distributing fliers and knocking on doors to invite the community to visit the new church. ARC provided $30,000, and Aaron raised another $70,000—most of which came through the sale of the thrift store in Pensacola to Teen Challenge—which now operates three locations in the city.

“The Lord had actually prepared for this six years earlier when we started the thrift store,” Aaron says. “ What I’ve realized with God is you live life forward, but you understand it backward, when you can look back and you go, ‘Oh, that’s why God closed that door. That’s why He opened that door. That’s why that step of faith was necessary. It was all leading us to something.’”

‘DIALED IN’

That didn’t mean the early days of Radiant were easy. After the first service, the attendance dipped to 175, and something had to be done about the theater—a place Aaron describes as “the worst building in the greatest part of town.”

What Radiant lacked in a high-tech, comfortable facility it made up for with its ubiquitous presence in the community. During biannual Serve Days (a tradition for many ARC churches) the congregation disperses into the Tampa-St. Pete area to meet physical needs and make the church’s presence known.

In the early days of the plant, a woman noticed Aaron’s Radiant T-shirt and said, “Radiant—I see y’all everywhere.” When Aaron asked what she meant, the woman replied, “ I saw y’all passing out water bottles on Bayshore the other day, then I saw y’all at the Taste of South Tampa Food and Wine Festival, then someone came to my door and gave me a flyer.”

Since its early days, Radiant has used the theater location for its main campus. It’s taken over the lease of the entire building and renovated it to seat 875 people, with four services and 3,500 attendees every weekend. Five thousand more people attend at the additional nine campuses in the Tampa-St. Pete area.

Aaron’s goal is to “dial in” the multisite strategy in such a way that it can be replicated by other churches, and that begins with a vision for a neighborhood or community outside a 25-minute radius of any of Radiant’s existing campuses. But it also includes partnering with churches that are in decline, often beginning with renting space and sometimes ending with a merger—whether at the initiation of Radiant or the invitation of a struggling congregation.

“ I am heavily involved, and it takes a lot of my time. But it’s worth it,” he notes. “We never go into a relationship trying to think of what I can get out of it.  We always approach those churches to be a blessing to them, whether that means renting it on Wednesday night for middle school or small groups or with a merger.”

One example was a Southern Baptist congregation that had dwindled to eight people, all over the age of 70. They agreed to merge with Radiant on the condition that they would be able to have their own traditional worship. Radiant agreed and set aside a chapel for the older members to worship, but when it comes time for the sermon, they watch Aaron preach on video.

“We made it a win for them,” Aaron explains. “It went from eight Southern Baptist people that were in a dying church to now a campus with 800 people a weekend. That campus alone probably had 150 people get baptized last year.”

Aaron emphasizes that the merger strategy is not one of taking over struggling congregations, but of extending their life. He uses the metaphor of organ donation to describe how the life of a dying congregation can continue through a merger.

“When you’re coming in, you’re not coming in to take over. You’re coming in to cast a vision of what is possible together,” he explains, noting how leaders of churches that merged with Radiant have told him, “We feel like this is God’s answer to what we’ve been praying for a long time.”

Some Radiant campuses remain portable to this day, such as the third campus, launched in a school auditorium seven years ago, which has grown to 850 people and planted two additional campuses out of itself. Radiant’s first owned campus wasn’t purchased until three years ago and came through a merger. Each campus has its own worship team and campus pastor, and Aaron’s preaching is delivered by video.

As he looks to the future, Aaron envisions more mergers and campuses, but all with the goal of more effectively serving the community and honoring the legacy of those who have gone before. This became particularly important from August through November of 2024, as the Tampa Bay area was battered by three hurricanes in the span of 65 days. The members of Radiant sprang into action, cleaning up yards, installing tarps and distributing much-needed supplies to neighbors—whether or not they were attendees of Radiant.

“The church should be the hands and feet of Jesus, where the community sees our good deeds and as a result of it, as the Scripture says, they glorify our Father in heaven,” Aaron says. “We want everybody to glorify God, but we don’t understand that our part is to do good deeds.”

Whether that means revitalizing a struggling congregation through a merger—so a church isn’t replaced by a condo—planting a campus in a new neighborhood or just being present for the celebrations and trials of the community, Aaron is convinced that ministry is all about showing up.

“We’re not going to wait for people to come to us,” he explains. “We as the church are going to go to them. That’s been in our DNA from the very beginning.”