Catch and Release

With Adam Mesa

His father, Diego Mesa, planted Abundant Living Family Church nearly 29 years ago in the living room of the family home in Fontana, California. The congregation that began with 12 members is now 12,000, and now Adam serves as the lead pastor. With campuses in Rancho Cucamonga and Pomona, an online campus and a third physical campus launching soon in Norco, ALFC continues to extend its reach with a new generation of leadership.

Married for eight years, Adam and his wife, Ashlee, have two young boys, Matthias and Thomas. With a background in technology and marketing, Adam continues to do consulting in these areas and serves on the global leadership council of Pray.com, the world’s No. 1 app for faith and prayer.

“We’re just passionate about people and we’re passionate about the gospel, and we’re passionate about equipping people to be the best versions of themselves,” Adam says, “whether it be leadership, in their faith or in their homes.”

AVAIL Journal recently sat down with Adam for a conversation about leading in a post-Christian context, the elusive demands of relevance and how the church can engage business leaders.

AVAIL: Can you talk to us about how your leadership journey started?

Adam: I got saved when I was 17, but I had always had an entrepreneurial spirit. My first business was bagging up Sour Patch Kids and putting them in Ziploc bags and selling them for a dollar a baggie at school. I had a teacher in high school who had a refrigerator and freezer, and he never used his freezer. So I told him, “Hey, let me rent your freezer to do something with it.” And he wrote a fake contract that said, “Adam agrees to pay me $20 a month to rent my freezer.” I filled it with Otter Pops and sold them. I finished out my senior year with a few thousand dollars from selling Otter Pops. When I got saved, I really fell in love with God and the word of God. So I went and studied the Bible, theology and apologetics. During that time, I also ran a marketing company because that’s what I was good at, and I had to pay for my living expenses in college. I’ve always been really good at telling the story of a business and had a gifting for being able to translate their message to people—which ultimately, I guess, makes you also a good pastor in the long run. Being able to take a message and translate it.

AVAIL: How did you end up serving at your dad’s church?

Adam: I came back, and I said, “Hey, all I want to do is serve my dad. I want our church to succeed.” So for that time I became a youth pastor, young adults pastor, creative pastor—whatever position there was in the church. As the church began hit 25 years, we really started hitting a wall. They say that’s really where you start to either decline or start to see people get older. My wife and I began to lead a Sunday night service that blew up. We raised over 250 volunteers for that Sunday night service. We had everything volunteer, from the band to the audio people. We led the whole thing with volunteers, and it really shifted the trajectory of our church. It was at that time that my dad really felt like God had put on his heart that I would be the person that would lead the church when he retired. We had a long discussion of what that could look like, and over the past six years it’s just been a joy developing that culture together and releasing and reaching the next generation. That’s what was big for my dad. He didn’t want to just reach his generation, and he felt the only way he could do that is by partnering with his sons to do that—to lead with him hand in hand.

AVAIL: Can you speak a little bit about the unique challenges of young leaders in this season and this time?

Adam: Whether it be in companies, or definitely in tech, the average leader is a millennial. So, we’re really seeing Gen Z start to unfold. Millennials have been able to be—especially as leaders—translators for the generations above them and below them. They’re the last generation that understands what it was to grow up and play outside, to have fun but also to have an Xbox or a Game Cube. They empathize with the older generation and the younger generation. You have this new generation of people that are about 26 and younger who have been raised in the chaos of what has happened in America—from 9/11 to the financial crisis of 2008 to the tech boom with social media. They have learned to value things very different. They’re looking at how something gives them peace or happiness, whereas a Millennial looks for a rewards-based system. For someone who is younger, their first question isn’t necessarily, “What is my insurance package? What’s my pay package?” The first question that they often ask is, “What does vacation time look like? What gives me as much freedom as possible?”

AVAIL: So, it’s a totally different motivation with this generation.

Adam: It’s a totally different threshold and game. As a leader today, you have to pivot the way that you lead. You have to pivot the conversations that are being had. In the past we really had a big honor for titles, and someone had their name and then they had seven degrees following it. That really meant legitimacy. We have employees that are 19, 20, 21, and they don’t care who you are. They don’t care what you’ve done because they’re so jaded from social media where everyone is impressive. What motivates them is very, very different than in the past. You could motivate someone by saying, “Hey, I need you to do this because I said so and because I’m your boss.” Nowadays, you actually have to include them more in the conversation, more into the vision, and you also have to let them have a say. You have to move from the dictatorship to the democracy. I grew up with those pastors who were dictators, and a lot of those leaders aren’t thriving today. If you want to be a great leader today—in terms of leading the next generation—they have to have a voice. At the end of the day, it’s still your final say, but as long as they feel like they got their piece in there, they’re happy. Actually, I’ve had learn to celebrate those uniquenesses and those differences, in order to hopefully be able to reach more people by allowing their voice to speak into it.

AVAIL: So how do we engage this next generation?

Adam: Involve them as much as possible. I know we always criticize the younger generation because we don’t understand it. I remember growing up as a Millennial. I’d go to stuff, and we were just dogged on all the time. Now I go to stuff, and I hear about Gen Z: “They’re so emotional, they’re so this.” But actually, they are such a gifted and talented generation. They can edit videos on their phone, they can edit podcasts on their iPads. They can build websites in 20 minutes or less. Start developing and releasing this next generation. Whatever you’re looking to do next, get a room of 19, 21, 23 year olds, and be like, “Hey, I don’t understand TikTok, but I’ll let you guys put me on TikTok, and we’ll do whatever we’ve got to do.” Our podcast, Beyond the Letter, is completely run, edited, all the content is gathered by people who are under 23 years old. People tell me all the time, “My kids that are 18 and 19—they watch your podcast They don’t watch anything.” The reason is because the ones who produce it are their kids’ age. So, really release responsibility, but also have a covering, and give this next generation a voice. You’ll start to reach your vision, your goals and dreams by engaging that next generation.

AVAIL: You and your church really love challenging cities and environments to plant churches in. What are some of the challenges culturally that you’ve faced in the Southern California region and that you’ve seen elsewhere?

Adam: We have progressively become very tribalistic, and social media really helps us with that. You only see the things that you want to see. And if you don’t want to see something, the algorithms completely ignore it. If you grew up in the ’90s, 2000s or even beyond, your source of information and dialogue came from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and you’re reading the whole thing, you’re seeing all sides of the spectrum, all sides of democracy. You’re reading about Republicans, and you’re reading about Democrats. Nowadays, I’m basically pushed into whatever I like, whatever makes me interested or feel good. That is the only stuff that I see. You just find yourself unfriending people all the time. “Oh, I didn’t know that person was like that. Let me unfriend them.” You’re increasingly narrowing your circle or your approach, which also means that you have less grace with people, less patience with people. Definitely, in our context of Southern California, we’re seeing people become more and more tribal in their thinking. And they’re pushing churches and pastors to come out and become part of a tribal thing.

AVAIL: So, what has your response been?

Adam: We just consistently told our church, “Hey, we believe in reaching people for the gospel. We believe that we’re here to teach the Bible. So, if something’s in the Bible, we will speak on it. If it’s not, independently, all of us have our own opinions on things, but unfortunately you will not have us come out and feed into this tribalism.” People will come and ask us some of the most remedial things to decide whether they’re gonna like us or not. Back in the day, someone would be part of a church, or even a business, and there would be things that you disagreed with, and you would still stay connected because you’d say, “Oh, it’s fine. I’m not gonna agree with everything.” Today, they’re gonna get a job that they believe ought to be perfect. They’re gonna join a church that they believe ought to be perfect. You have to agree with me 100% on everything. Why? Because every time I go on my phone, everyone agrees with me. So surely in real life, that’s how it ought to be, and it’s not the case.

AVAIL: That’s an illusion.

Adam: People need to understand that not everything in life is black and white. Not everything in life is a heaven or hell issue. And not everything in life should cause you to disconnect. Whether our church makes a stance on something and someone says, “Oh, I’m not gonna be part of your church because I don’t like that you guys took a stand on that,” we just say, “I’m sorry, we’re not always gonna be able to fulfill whatever it is that you think we ought to do.” That’s just one of the biggest challenges: this idea that people join and then the moment that tribe does something they don’t agree with, then they just try to go find a new one, and a new one, and a new one. So, as society, we’re just putting so many walls around ourselves, and it’s drawing out our empathy—the idea that I understand what you’ve gone through and who you are, even though I have not experienced it.

AVAIL: In light of some of these challenges, some people say the church and Christianity are irrelevant to us or to our cities in 2022—soon to be 23. So, how would you define this term “relevance”? Do we want to be relevant?

Adam: It could be a matter of semantics, but I think my emphasis, and what I emphasize with our team is that we want to endeavor to be transformational and not necessarily relevant. Sometimes relevancy is like a dog chasing its tail. You’re just gonna continually run in circles because relevancy always changes, fashion always changes, music always changes. We do want to be able to contextualize our messaging. I’m biblically trained, and my emphasis is teaching the Bible, but I also have this passion for marketing and messaging. Sometimes I hear from leaders, “Hey, that’s of the flesh—to market Jesus.” One of my responses is that if you went to an indigenous place in South America or a tribe in Africa, one of your first questions would be, “How do I contextualize the message of the gospel so that this, this tribe understands what I'm communicating?” Well, contextualization is a fancy word for marketing. When I look at this idea of relevancy—but really transformation—especially in the American context, it’s how do I understand where culture and society are in the way that they think and in the way that they approach God? I want to be able to take the messaging and translate it in people’s language and in people’s time.

AVAIL: One area you’re working to bring transformation is in how churches and business leaders engage. Can you tell us about that?

Adam: We are working with Mike Kai out of Hawaii as part of the Inspire Collective. So it’s our goal to partner with churches to help them reach their marketplace business leaders every single Sunday. I think we unconsciously tell our marketplace leaders that if they really want to live their fulfilled life in Christ, they have to serve on Sundays or some other day in the church. To me, that’s been a huge miss because you have people who are in the marketplace who are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week to build a business that could potentially be used to pour into the kingdom or to be activated in the kingdom. When they come to church every Sunday, we say “You’re not living God’s plan until you give up some of that and you come help our kids’ ministry”—or whatever else it may be. But we really need to reverse that and say, “Hey, no, you are exactly where God has called you”—just like Lydia in the Bible, who was a success businessperson who used her gifts and her talents for the Lord. We have Lydias all throughout our churches in the body of Christ. The Inspire Collective Business Network is meant to help churches connect with their business community through events, through discipleship models, through encouragement models.

AVAIL: Thanks so much, Adam. It has been awesome talking to you.

Adam: Thank you so much for allowing me to be a part.