Episode 222 - Creating Vision For The Next Season While Honoring The Past with Will Rambo

Will Rambo explains that The Orchard is a 28-year-old church planted as a United Methodist congregation in 1998 before leaving the denomination in 2017, while retaining Wesleyan and Methodist theology and practices. Will has served on staff for 22½ years. Founding pastor Brian Collier remains actively involved, and the two rotate preaching at the original Tupelo campus. The Orchard now includes seven churches, each with its own pastors, staff, and leaders. Will leads a 25-person Tupelo team serving about 1,800–2,000 weekly attendees, while Brian focuses heavily on residency and leadership development.

The Orchard’s core value is to “reach people no one else is reaching,” which means doing things others are not doing and remaining willing to change the methods in the next season. Will says the church is firmly rooted in non-negotiables but holds its mechanisms and vehicles open-handedly. Vick highlights the combination of decentralized, contextualized campuses, shared family identity, live teaching, innovation, and evangelism. Will says the church’s goal is not to preserve one particular model, but to keep finding faithful ways to reach people and extend the kingdom.

Will says The Orchard was not in crisis; it was facing the danger that “good becomes the enemy of great.” Staff were wearing themselves out plugging holes and creating enough groups and circles for new people to belong, without generating the multiplication they wanted. Continuing the same practices and expecting a different result felt irrational. The church could remain faithful and functional, but leaders wanted more momentum and a movement that would send people into ministry at a different pace. Replicate helped them move from a learning-and-training model toward a clearer path for sending people.

The Orchard did not replace its historic vision; it sharpened it. The church’s name comes from John 15, where Jesus appoints his followers to bear lasting fruit, and its building carries the phrase “growing deep and branching out.” Will says the church still wants people deeply rooted in Christ’s love and then sent to share that love. The new language was developed as a continuation of that vision, not a revision. Brian’s support was especially important because he treated the new framework as noncompetitive and encouraged Will to lead it forward.

The Orchard organized its clarified vision around four roles. Under “growing deep” are the intentional follower and the loving friend; under “branching out” are the joyful sower and the kingdom multiplier. Will connects them to Jesus’ commands in John 15: abide in him, love others, act with fullness of joy, and tell others about him. Some people initially questioned why new language was needed when “growing deep and branching out” already existed, while others welcomed something new. Will says responses depended on personality, risk tolerance, and historical loyalty.

Across The Orchard’s campuses, including staff and lay leaders, a little over 200 people completed the Kingdom Circle process in its first year. Will says it moved participants from seeing a thousand possible ministry opportunities to identifying what God was asking them to do and the specific geography or relational circle where they should do it. A person’s calling may remain fairly stable while their circle changes as God moves them. He gives the example of a veteran educator who returned to the classroom with renewed clarity about how to serve her students and began noticing ministry opportunities everywhere.

When Will completed the process personally, he wrote 31 versions of his two-word calling before landing on “fueling velocity.” He realized he is energized by seeing people gain life, momentum, and spiritual energy, then helping that movement accelerate. The Orchard already valued “spiritual velocity” over merely possessing spiritual knowledge: a person may know a great deal yet become passive, while someone already moving can be invested in and encouraged. Will also recognized that he had unnecessarily downplayed his visionary and catalytic leadership while serving beside Brian, one of the strongest visionaries he knows.

Will now tries to approach Monday morning with no more than 70% of his calendar booked. He expects urgent ministry needs and opportunities to arise, including conversations after a Sunday marked by repentance, new faith, or unusual spiritual vitality. Overfilled calendars can leave pastors attending eight meetings while missing the moments that drew them into ministry. Will says some structures are necessary, but he can delegate many responsibilities because he has an excellent team. The margin also forces other leaders to grow and keeps spontaneity from becoming an interruption to the church’s vision.

Will argues that preaching and teaching should be part of the church’s multiplication strategy, not reserved for people with formal theological education. He points to the first-century church and John Wesley’s model of training pastors in the communities where people live. In The Orchard’s residency, many participants have not attended seminary. Will teaches that strong introductions and conclusions are the quickest way to improve a sermon, comparing them to getting an airplane smoothly off and back onto the ground. He also urges preachers to use visual storytelling, following Jesus’ example rather than reducing preaching to technical analysis.

Because churches around Tupelo struggle to find pastors, The Orchard has trained 17 lay preachers at the Tupelo campus who can fill vacant or temporary pulpits; staff members have also received preaching training and served other churches. Will says teaching is a spiritual gift and should not be restricted to a small, formally educated group. The goal is not the advancement of The Orchard but the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. He rejects the fear that sending people elsewhere weakens their home church, saying one participant’s opportunities to preach have increased his love for both Christ’s church and The Orchard.

Will and Brian have moved from discussing Mississippi’s leadership shortage to gathering pastors and churches around a practical response. The Orchard wants to partner rather than compete, offering its experience while learning from churches across the state. The emerging plan includes residencies, leadership-training opportunities, and pastoral cohorts that can identify, train, and deploy a new generation of leaders. Will says The Orchard does not claim to have the solution, but believes a coalition of churches committed to Mississippi could create a tipping point over five to ten years and help more pastors serve the state long term.