By Chris Moon
There was only so much pickleball Tom Jones could play in retirement.
The longtime executive director of Stadia Church Planting retired during the past year after slowly cutting back his workload with the organization he had led since 2003. He was looking forward to spending more time with his family, and especially with his grandchildren.
Jones and his wife, Debbie, are both avid tennis and pickleball players. They took to the courts in retirement—but found something was missing.
“You can only play so much of that stuff,” Jones said. “We felt we needed to have a little more purpose.”
Jones recently was hired by NewThing—a church-planting organization founded by Jones’s longtime friend Dave Ferguson—to serve as the group’s director of development. Debbie Jones will serve NewThing’s development team as its development catalyst of Women on Mission.
Tom Jones said he hopes to help NewThing bolster its fundraising efforts. NewThing has helped plant more than 23,000 churches globally during the past 15-plus years.
“NewThing has had a great global impact, but they have done a lot with very little with regards to staff,” Jones said. “That’s why they’ve asked me to help them to put together a development team that will help take the organization to the next level. . . . My focus is I want to serve the organization in a way that helps their future.”
NewThing is a ministry of Community Christian Church, a Chicago-area megachurch. Ferguson, the church’s founder and leader of NewThing, said he hopes Jones’s efforts will bolster the church-planting organization’s budget, which sits at about $600,000 today.
The group would like to have full-time staff in each of its nine global regions, Ferguson said.
“We’ve done a lot with a little bit of money,” he said. “We want to share the opportunity with a lot more folks.”
‘GLAD TO DO IT’
Jones and Ferguson’s relationship goes back decades.
The two met in the 1980s. The Jones family hosted Ferguson and his wife in their home and at the weekend services at Jones’s church—now known as SouthBrook Christian Church near Dayton, Ohio.
At the time, Ferguson was planning to launch Community Christian Church and was soliciting help from local churches. He said Jones’s church later became one of Community Christian Church’s largest supporters.
“We’ve known each other for a very long time,” Ferguson said.
Community Christian Church, of course, has grown exponentially over the years. Out of it sprang NewThing.
And Jones went on to lead Stadia, one of the largest church-planting organizations associated with the Restoration Movement.
After Jones retired, NewThing reached out to him to see whether he would help the organization with leadership and fundraising coaching.
“I was glad to do it,” Jones said.
Jones’s work will involve networking with churches and individuals and helping NewThing with its fundraising process. Jones said he hopes to help the organization form a comprehensive development and fundraising plan.
“I have that ability,” he said. “My goal is to help them with that, and in a couple of years, they would turn that over to someone else.”
He said he doesn’t feel any competition exists between Stadia and NewThing. Both are needed to plant as many churches as possible around the world.
“We wish Stadia well,” Jones said. “Stadia has a fully developed team whereas NewThing is kind of just getting started. One of the gifts I have is starting things.”
A LARGER MISSION
As Jones has transitioned back to the workforce, he said more retirees ought to consider doing the same—at least in some form. He said he wants to challenge retirees to do something like what he’s doing, and he wants to challenge churches to allow them to play a more active role.
“Tons of people—baby boomers like us—what’s next? What’s our next season?” he asks.
A lot of people don’t want to retire fully, but they also don’t want to work 40 to 60 hours per week. Nor do they need to, as they have their retirement income already set.
At the same time, they can offer much to God’s kingdom through their expertise and skills, Jones said. Retirement allows them to “create space for them to make a positive impact.”
“Now that they have more time, how can they take that time and help the local church?” he asked. “There’s plenty of good work to do.”
Chris Moon is a pastor and writer living in Redstone, Colo.
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