San Diego Native Is Growing a Connecticut Church by Following Mac Lake’s “Leadership Development Pipeline” Approach

The River Church counted their highest attendance on Easter 2025 when nearly 500 people were present. The crowd was so large that the worship service was held at Glastonbury’s middle school. A dozen people attended their worship services a decade ago. 

The faith journey of George Lim that began more than two decades ago in San Diego around his mother’s holiday dinner table has blossomed, by God’s grace and because of a commitment to innovative leadership development methods, into The River Church, Glastonbury, Connecticut.

After its beginning a decade ago with just a dozen attenders, the congregation grew steadily to sixty by 2020, which was the start of COVID-19. Unlike many churches that struggled to regain their footing after the worldwide pandemic, The River Church has been growing dramatically since Lim met and applied the biblical principles taught by leadership development consultant Mac Lake at “a leadership pipeline weekend” in 2021 at a  camp in New Hampshire.

Creating a Culture of Developing Leaders

Pastors who want to grow their churches according to a proven biblical leadership model without adopting the approaches taken by many executives ensconced in American corporate culture will especially benefit from learning from Lake when he delivers two keynotes and teaches a breakout session at the Baptist Churches of New England’s annual meeting, which has been rebranded the “Nexus Conference” and will be held November 7-8 at First Baptist Church, Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Lake is known for “equipping churches to build strong leadership pipelines.” The Multiply Group, Charleston, South Carolina, that he founded in 2019, posts videos to their Youtube channel and their publications are packed with encouraging presentations and discussion questions that are planned to foster the transformation of leaders like Lim, and give them competence and confidence to oversee a growing, healthy congregation.  

“Creating a culture of developing leaders is critical for the growth and vitality of any church. [An] assessment will help you uncover the reality of your leadership development culture, providing clarity and direction for improvement,” he wrote in a statement on his web page.

Lake spoke on Zoom to a group of New England Baptist pastors on September 10 about “Fueling a Movement of Multiplication.” He introduced the idea of a leadership pipeline system that scales influence, showed participants how to identify and develop a church’s next generation of leaders, pointed out some “critical transitions most leaders miss,” and fielded questions from pastors. “Every organization, every church, needs a pathway to develop leaders,” he told those who tuned in to view the BCNE-sponsored webinar.

Building a Four-Tier Leadership System

A few months after the weekend retreat in New Hampshire at which Lake spoke, Lim and his ministry team took six months to “invest all our energy into building a leadership pipeline and strengthening our team in regards to leadership development.” They had eight or ten leaders at the time, and now they have fifty leaders in four layers in the pipeline process.

George Lim

Their pipeline is a “four-tiered leadership system.” In addition to the “team members,” who aren’t leaders, the pastor has been discipling “team leaders” to guide the ministry and midweek life groups, “team coaches” to be the leaders of leaders, and  “directors” to oversee entire ministries.

When the pipeline planning was finally completed, they expected another “very slow” summer because they “were ready to rest.” Rest is one of the core values Lim chose for the church. The others are relational discipleship, biblical generosity, commitment to God’s word, and what they call “messy harvests.”

The concept of a “messy harvest,” he explained, is derived from Proverbs 14:4 (NLT), which says: “Without oxen a stable stays clean, but you need a strong ox for a large harvest.” The pastor added, “We believe that God has a harvest out there, and it’s going to be messy; it’s going to be hard.”

“It never slowed down that summer,” as the “regular Sunday” attendance surpassed 100. Christmas and Easter were the only other times that The River Church, which rents the town’s Riverfront Community Center, reached the 100-person milestone. “We thought that was unique and strange. We liked it, but we couldn’t attribute it to anything. It was from that point on that we actually never went below 100, and we just kept slowly growing.”

Last winter, attendance was nearing 200, so Lim and the church leaders decided they needed to add a second service. The numerical growth continues, and today it is surpassing 280 attenders and members. In addition to Lim and the requisite Worship Pastor and Children’s Ministry Director, the church staff or “team” also includes a Multiplication Pastor, a Hospitality and Communication Director, a Production Director, office assistants, and a Treasurer.

Rather than focus all their energy and leadership development effort on the growth of a single congregation, they plan to launch a second campus in East Hartford on October 26. Church Planting Residents Arthur and Candy Ornelas are preparing to lead that branch congregation.

From San Diego to Glastonbury

At a family dinner at his mother’s home on Thanksgiving Day 2003, Lim rejected his uncle’s inevitable invitation to church. In fact, he wanted “to mock him in some way. But, for some reason, God had other plans, and when he invited me to church, I accepted.” He attended worship at a then-new congregation, Rock Church in San Diego, initially deciding  to visit the church “because I was interested in seeing if there were any girls I could meet.” He kept attending for a different reason: “because I had met the living God.”

The River Church meets for two worship services each Sunday at the Riverfront Community Center.

A few months after that faith encounter, while driving around Southern California, Lim said, “I just surrendered my life to Christ” on January 16, 2004. That same night, he was baptized in the Pacific Ocean, as is the practice of many churches in beach communities, “and I've been following Jesus ever since.” Twenty-two years later, the San Diego native has invested his life in The River Church, the fellowship he and his wife, Janelle, planted a decade ago.

God had been growing Lim into a Christian leader and revealing what he calls “certain different paths all throughout my life.” After they married, he served as Youth Pastor and a worship leader at a small Calvary Chapel north of San Diego. Then he studied for two years at Calvary Chapel Bible College before earning a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies from Horizon Christian University and a master’s degree in Practical Theology from Regent University.

In November 2011, George and Janelle Lim talked about their ministry’s future. She asked him if he’d ever consider starting a church, and he replied,“No way. I  love what I’m doing. I could be a youth pastor forever.”

Later that same day, Lim had coffee with his Old Testament professor, who asked him “if he’d ever considered church planting,” a term he had never heard before. After his teacher explained the concept, Lim decided to pray about it with his wife. “God began to stir in my heart,” and he decided that “I think we’re supposed to plant a church.” Janelle Lim agreed after she had been praying, and then they asked God for a location, which turned out to be Connecticut.  (A detailed history of the church and Lim’s faith journey is told in an online report.)

Lim said he chose a name for the Connecticut church he would plant while the couple drove around the Nutmeg State, exited the interstate at Glastonbury, and were provided with inspiration from the Gospel of John (7:37-38, ESV): “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

“We had never been to Connecticut. We didn't know anybody there,” Lim stated. Nevertheless, they made the 2,900-mile move. “We had both always desired to live there, and I can even trace that desire back to playing Super Nintendo on Christmas morning and picking the UConn Huskies for no other reason than that desire was in my heart.”