Abel and Ganelle Sutton are parents, pastors, teachers, entrepreneurs, leaders, authors, and friends. Abel is Hospice Care Consultant for Community Home Care and Hospice, Realtor, and Pastor of Faithway Church of Jesus in Elizabeth City, NC. Ganelle is Founder, Director, and CEO of The Young Author's Club, English teacher, and author of two books (writing her 3rd). Together, they parent five beautiful and talented children.   

Dr. Beth Felker Jones, earned her doctorate at Duke University, teaches theology at North Seminary. She is the author of books including Faithful: A Theology of Sex, Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically, God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective, and The Marks of His Wounds: Resurrection Doctrine and Gender Politics. 

Brian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. As the lead pastor he is the primary preacher during weekend services, and he oversees the direction of the church. Pastor Brian is a passionate reader of theology and philosophy, an avid hiker and mountain climber, and authority on all things Bob Dylan.

He and his wife, Peri, have three adult sons and seven grandchildren. He is the author of several books, including Unconditional?, Beauty Will Save the World, A Farewell To Mars, Water To Wine, Sinners In The Hands Of A Loving God, and Postcards From Babylon. 

Follow his blog at www.brianzahnd.com.

Chris was born in Raleigh, NC with a severe stutter and unquenchable emptiness. He looked for anything that would calm his nerves and fill his void, which soon led him to drugs. By age 17, he was shooting up heroin daily and selling drugs to continue his habit.

On December 18th of 2010, Chris entered into yet another rehab program weighing 100 pounds, deathly addicted to heroin, and still without the ability to talk. Six days later, he attended a church down the street from the rehab center and heard the Gospel. That night everything changed. Jesus snatched him out of hell and gave him a taste of the pleasure he'd been looking for.

Shortly after that Jesus called him to preach. Over the next few years, Jesus literally healed Chris's voice and began to open doors for him to share his story and preach the gospel on many different platforms.

Since officially launching CDM in June 2015, Chris, along with his wife Kathleen, and the rest of the CDM team have had the privilege of speaking at over two hundred events and have seen thousands of people make a profession of faith in Christ. Jesus uses unschooled ordinary people to do incredible things because He gets all the glory. We love that God is using us, but we are rejoicing way more that our names are written in heaven.

Kurt Willems is a pastor, church planter, and writer. He is also the host of the Theology Curator podcast. He has a master of divinity degree from Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary and a master of arts in comparative religion from the University of Washington. He and his wife, Lauren, have two daughters and reside in Calgary, Canada.  

Dr. Heather Thompson Day is an interdenominational speaker and has been a contributor for Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Newsweek and the Barna Group. She is also the host of Viral Jesus, a podcast with Christianity Today.

Heather is an Associate Professor of Communication at Andrews University. She is passionate about supporting women, and runs an online community called I’m That Wife which has over 200k followers.

Heather’s writing has been featured on outlets like the Today Show, and the National Communication Association. She has been interviewed by BBC Radio Live and has been featured in Forbes. 

She believes her calling is to stand in the gaps of our churches for young people. She is the author of 7 books; including It’s Not Your Turn, and Confessions of a Christian Wife.

She resides in Michigan, with her husband, Seth Day, and their three children, London, Hudson, and Sawyer Day. 

Tullian is a south Florida native. The middle of seven children, he dropped out of high school and got kicked out of his house at 16 years old. After a few years of running from God, God captured him and gave him a burning desire to reach a broken world with God’s boundless grace. He eventually graduated from Columbia International University, where he earned a degree in philosophy, and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, where he earned his Master of Divinity degree.



A grandson of the late evangelist Billy Graham, Tullian was the founding pastor of New City Church in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which later merged with the historic Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in 2009, where he served as Senior Pastor until June 2015.

He wrote a number of best-selling books, traveled extensively around the country speaking, founded a ministry called LIBERATE—a ministry that sought to “connect God’s inexhaustible grace to an exhausted world” through conferences, books, a website, a daily radio program, and a weekly TV broadcast—and then it all came crashing down in late spring of 2015.

As a result of infidelity, his first marriage ended in divorce and life as he knew it came to an end.

In the aftermath of his season of self-destruction, Tullian met his current wife Stacie—a native Texan. They have been married since August 2016, and together they have five children and two grandchildren.

Unlike Tullian, Stacie comes from a long history of family brokenness. Adultery, addiction, and abuse make up just a small portion of the many dysfunctional narratives of her large and extended family. When Stacie was 18, she became an unwed teenage mom. Over the next 17 years, she experienced much pain and loss—infidelity, two marriages, and two divorces. All of those hard and painful experiences taught her much about sin and grace, desperation, and deliverance. And as a result, she developed a huge burden for people who have crashed and burned, people who are recovering from their own damaged lives.

In the years following Tullian’s crash and burn, he was nursed back to health by a handful of seasoned pastors, counselors, and friends, in addition to his loving wife, Stacie. Then in 2017, they started traveling and speaking at churches, recovery places, and other gatherings about how God heals broken people.

In early 2019, after being out of pastoral ministry for nearly four years, a group of people from Jupiter, Florida, approached Tullian and Stacie about the possibility of starting a new church. After months of conversations and meetings, prayer and counsel—and with the unequivocal blessing and support of their pastor and the elders of their home church in Cape Coral—Tullian and Stacie relocated to Palm Beach County to start The Sanctuary.

As partners in life and ministry, Tullian and Stacie are wholeheartedly committed to declaring and delivering God’s boundless love to broken people.

BA, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

Tod Bolsinger joined Fuller Seminary in 2014 as vice president for vocation and formation and assistant professor of practical theology, and he now serves as vice president and chief of leadership formation. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1993, Dr. Bolsinger served as senior pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church from 1997 to 2014. Prior to that he was associate pastor of discipleship and spiritual formation at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

Holding both a PhD in Theology and Master of Divinity from Fuller, Bolsinger taught graduate-level classes in theology for 14 years at Fuller’s regional campus in Orange County prior to joining the seminary’s regular faculty. He has extensive experience in church and nonprofit consulting and executive coaching, and writes infrequent weblogs on church and leadership formation. His faculty role at Fuller includes teaching the Practices of Vocational Formation class and a cohort in Leading Change for DMin students.

Bolsinger has authored three books, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives (Brazos, 2004), Show Time: Living Down Hypocrisy by Living Out the Faith (Baker, 2005), and Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (IVP Books, 2015). Bolsinger has also written a chapter about building community in a virtual world in the book The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ (Crossway, 2008) and contributes essays and articles to journals in the areas of leadership, spiritual formation, leadership formation, and innovation.

Pastor Anthony is the founding pastor of Northpark Church in Raleigh, NC. He also serves as the Ministerial Development & Church Advancement Director for Eastern North Carolina Church of God. Prior to planting the Northpark Church, he served as the State Youth and Christian Education Director in Arkansas. He also served more than nine years as the youth pastor of Tanglewood Church in Kinston, NC. He is a graduate of East Carolina University and received his Masters Degree in Leadership and Administration from Mid-American Christian University. His greatest love is his late wife, Mary Ann, and his greatest joys are his two kids, Blaire & Micah. His greatest superpower is his incredible ability deliver the perfect dad joke!

Chuck DeGroat

PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL CARE AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY

Chuck is committed to spiritual and emotional formation for the sake of mission. His experience is represented in a fluid combination of pastoral ministry and seminary training for 20 years. He has served several church plants as a teaching pastor and has started two church-based clinical counseling centers. Most recently, he was a teaching pastor at City Church San Francisco, where he co-founded Newbigin House of Studies, an urban and missional training center with offerings through Western Theological Seminary.

His academic specialization is in the intersection of psychology and the Bible, represented best in his book Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places (Square Inch) – a narrative biblical paradigm for understanding counseling, care, mission, and formation. His next book, The Toughest People to Love (Eerdmans), focuses on caring for the most difficult people leaders encounter.  Wholeheartedness (Eerdmans) was released in February 2016, and When Narcissism Comes to Church (IVP) came out in 2020. He is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, a member of City Classis (the RCA’s urban, missional classis), and he holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology.

Chuck has been married to Sara for 26 years and has two daughters – Emma and Maggie.