Paul Lawler

Asbury College: Community and Calling

Paul’s time at Asbury College changed his life. “I went from very little Christian community to community on steroids,” he says. “Between a local church and being in a vibrant Christian community, I began to experience some gracious reinforcement of what God was confirming inwardly.”

Though he struggled to keep up in introductory Bible classes, it was the community and spiritual intensity that transformed him. “People prayed for one another. There were moments when the Holy Spirit showed up. I learned to treasure the manifest presence of God,” he says.

Additionally, Paul immersed himself in Scripture. “I was drinking out of a fire hydrant,” he says. “I was in holy shock about how relevant and powerful the Bible was. I thought, why didn’t somebody tell me this?”

Paul also sensed a deeper calling—not just to be a pastor, but to be a catalyst for church renewal. “The tension theological pluralism presents I knew would not be tenable,” he says. “I had a sense that with my pastoral call, I would be a part of many people who would serve to help bring that to a head and birth a new expression of Methodism.”

When it came time for seminary, Paul chose Asbury Theological Seminary. His decision wasn’t only theological; it was sociological and missional. “The only movements that make an impact in history have a strong identity,” he says. “Asbury had an edge in the sword, it has that kind of DNA.”

Planting, Revitalizing, and Equipping a Movement

While at Asbury Seminary, Paul took a church planting class and began sensing that God wanted him to plant a church. Immediately, he knew he had to act. “I felt like a caged lion. I had to get out and do this,” he says.

He planted a church in Huntsville, Alabama, and served there for 16 years. Later, he led a significant revitalization at Christ Church in Birmingham, where he served for another 15 years. That congregation committed to planting 100 churches globally and ended up planting over 700. “These are organic expressions of church… particularly among the persecuted.”

Paul also helped cultivate a discipleship culture based on Ephesians 4, equipping the saints to minister beyond the church. “They discipled one another and began to disciple outside the church walls,” Paul says. “It was a very fruitful few years.”

In 2022, Paul and his wife, Missy, were unexpectedly called to Christ Church Memphis. Shortly after arriving, he was asked to lead the church through disaffiliation from the United Methodist Church. The vote to disaffiliate passed with over 90% support, and a subsequent vote to join the Global Methodist Church (GMC) passed with 97% support.

Since then, Paul has led the congregation through prayer summits, mission and vision discernment, and ministry goal-setting. He summarizes a significant part of his ministry in an encouragement to other pastors: “Build a prayer engine, align mission and vision, and start equipping people. Love everybody, but move with those who want to move with God,” Paul says. “God will build his church.”

He’s also playing a vital role in shaping the GMC’s future. Christ Methodist Church, as his church in Memphis is now named, will serve as the host site for the GMC’s upcoming podcast that focuses on the denomination as part of a movement. Paul is part of a team developing multilingual tools for discipleship, church planting, and mercy ministry around the globe.

“Movemental Methodism” and the Future

Paul’s heart beats not just to belong to a thriving Methodist denomination, but to be part of a movement of God, a return to the apostolic DNA of the early Church. “The seeds of being a movement are sprouting and in some places are already bearing fruit,” he says. “Hundreds of churches have been planted. There’s a church plant in the Middle East.”

He emphasizes that a movement doesn’t happen by accident. “Where there is much prayer, there is much power. Where there is little prayer, there is little power,” Paul says, referencing an axiom by author Daniel Henderson. “The church is not designed to function in a power of her own. That’s dysfunction.”

As he looks to the future, Paul wants to see a church that is Spirit-filled, Scripture-rooted, and relentlessly focused on gospel mission, especially among the unreached. “There are 2.2 to 3 billion people right now with no access to the gospel of Jesus Christ in an area of the world known as the 10/40 window. That is not okay,” he says. “Jesus gave us very clear instructions… to take the gospel to every ethnic group of the Earth, and this was a part of the originating pulses of Methodism. This needs to be rekindled in our DNA at the level of every local church.”