About Our Team
About Paul Nixon
PAUL NIXON served around twenty years as a pastoral leader in growing congregations, nine of those years at Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church on the Florida Gulf Coast. During his Gulf Breeze years, the church grew from 2000 to 4000 members, and from one to three campuses, receiving about 1300 adults as new members by profession of their faith in Christ. In 2007, Paul moved to Washington DC with the purpose of planting a missional community focused on the needs of urban young adults. This new community, Sunday Night @ Foundry, took root in the life an amazing 200-year old congregation, located 8 blocks from the White House. SNF and the larger Foundry community is committed to rallying people of different races, different faith backgrounds and different sexual orientations together as a Christian community and social change movement.
Paul has coached and consulted with hundreds of Christian leaders. Among the new churches he has coached, one of his favorites has been Urban Village in Chicago, which took the playbook that he started with in DC, and tweaked it to produce a multiplying missional church that between 2010 and 2012 grew from a first worship service in downtown Chicago to five services a week on four campuses all across the city. (Trey Hall and Christian Coons are the lead pastors of Urban Village.)
Paul presently leads two organizations: Epicenter Group and Readiness 360. Epicenter Group is a leadership training and coaching organization based in Washington DC, working in an ongoing partnership with about 100 church leaders a year (many of which are church planters). Epicenter is now establishing partnership with a network of seminaries and extraordinary churches of multiple denominations, starting with Chicago Theological Seminary and Urban Village Chicago in 2013, where Paul will soon begin teaching an online master's level course on church planting, accessible to students around the world.
Readiness 360 helps local churches assess their readiness for risk-taking mission to new groups of people. Paul Nixon works in partnership with Christie Latona in developing Readiness 360. This new organization is committed to helping thousands of congregations from the East Coast to the West to multiply their impact on the world, while creating an unprecedented data base for research on the DNA of thriving churches in the mainline context. (www.readiness360.org) Paul also serves as a new church strategist for The United Methodist Church, with the goal of helping them to plant 1000 new faith communities between 2012 and 2016. (www.path1.org)
Paul is author of six books and a best-selling author for The Pilgrim Press, the oldest Christian publisher in America. His latest two titles are We Refused to Lead A Dying Church: Churches That Came Back Against All Odds, published by Pilgrim Press, 2012 and The Surprise Factor: Gospel Strategies for Leading Transformation in Faith Communities, written in partnership with Kim Shockley and published by Abingdon Press, 2013.