Heart & Mind
Matt Hammett had long felt called to meet an emerging generation afresh, to embark on a new voyage in God’s employ. Finally, with a mere whisper, God affirmed what Hammett knew all along.
It was 1998, and Hammett was the high school pastor at College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego. During a morning service, he perceived God’s unmistakable prompting, a “divine whisper” he calls it: I am going to use you to begin a new movement of worship. Immediately Hammett went to work casting his vision. His passion for God’s directive was contagious, and two years later Hammett and crew threw open the gates to a new ministry, an extraordinary fount today known as “Flood.”
First few drops
Hammett’s experiences hanging out with high school kids gave him a clear picture of relational ministry. This background, married to his Bethel education, was a heavenly match. Hammett credits Bethel Seminary for equipping him with “a solid evangelical education that wasn’t narrow or boxy,” the kind that “lets me get my hands dirty” in ministry. He says Bethel has “expanded my desire to learn and grow, and exposed me to new perspectives, thoughts, leaders, and teachers.”
A self-proclaimed Lakers fanatic, Hammett may not seem the typical pastor. Employing occasional sarcasm from the pulpit, and long awkward pauses, he is bold in quoting from pop culture movies like Meet the Parents and Lord of the Rings. He may lead the charge in a God-sized movement, but Scott Wildey, Flood’s community and care pastor, testifies that Hammett leads from where he lives: “What you see is what you get. Hammett is genuine and is the same outside the pulpit as he is in it.”
Hammett heard God speak through Joel 2:28, the verse that would inspire Flood’s name: “I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.” The Flood leadership team dreamed of a place where all who entered would be flooded with the Spirit that God promised to pour out on all His people. The result? Generations would experience the messages, dreams, and visions God promised. And ultimately, that “a fountain [would] flow out of the Lord’s house” (Joel 3:18) into all of San Diego, bringing with it the cleansing, refreshing, living water of God. Hammett leads the team in prayer “for men and women who grasp the depth and width of this vision. We’re looking for young and old who want to influence a generation for Christ.”
In his book The Present Future, Reggie McNeil writes that only four percent of the United States church population falls into this 18-30 age category, a generation that considers itself deeply spiritual but disinterested in organized religion. Of particular interest to the Flood team are McNeil’s observations that:
• The younger the generation, the less it goes to church. There is a decline from 52 percent of “builders and seniors” to only 36 percent of “genXers.” And rather than launch an all out effort to reach this generation X and Y, many churches write them off, opting to wait until they “grow up and learn to like what the church has to offer.”
• Dawson McAllister, national youth ministry specialist, reports that 90 percent of kids active in high school youth groups no longer attend church by the time they are sophomores in college. A third of these will never return.
McNeil also reports, “A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because they have lost faith. They are leaving the church to preserve their faith…”
Hammett knows the importance of pursuing this generation; he began following Christ in his late teens. “I was not raised in the church,” he recalls. “When I was 17 a few of the guys on my high school basketball team kept inviting me to check out their youth group. I was hesitant because I just did not know what to expect, and I was afraid that someone would ask me a question I would not be able to answer.”
Hammett also understands the significance of community in this endeavor. “I know how important it was for me to have a faith community (Bethel Seminary) that welcomed me and allowed me to belong before I ever understood what it meant to truly believe,” Hammett reflects. Recognizing that people don’t all learn and grow in the same ways, Hammett and team offer a variety of community environments in which folks can grow towards God: Sunday night’s worship invitation; community groups meeting throughout the city in clusters of 20 to 50; smaller, same-gender growth groups; and interest groups built around running, photography, and hiking for example.
The average “Floodster” is 24 years old, belonging to a group more influenced by culture than most would like to admit. Wildey observes, “In dealing with a postmodern culture, there is a need to focus more on the substance of belief rather than the institution. We do this through the giving and receiving of relationship.
“As a culture, we don’t treat the Bible in its context very well,” Wildey continues. “This generation needs a core understanding of the historical Bible. We want to teach the truth, but we have to start somewhere. Basic Christian principles aren’t that basic (in our society) anymore. One of the primary goals of Flood is to create an inclusive environment, conducive to building relationships.”
Under Hammett’s leadership, Flood has become an overflow of the Spirit of God into a generation of dry and weary souls.
Drip, sploonk, whoosh!
Hammett speaks at three worship gatherings every Sunday that serve more than 2,000 regular attendees, and continues to lead the staff in carrying out Flood’s vision. He sees the hungry coming by the masses, and he humbly acknowledges this as an opportunity not to be wasted; God has given Flood favor with this audience.
Though Hammett has seen tremendous success with Flood, he and the pastoral staff remain humble. “We’re not pretentious,” Hammett says. “We don’t have this all figured out; we want simply to journey with this generation towards God.” When churches around the country call asking Flood “how do you do it?” the team replies that they know very little advice to offer. This pervasive sense of humility runs throughout the ministry, evidenced in ever-shifting strategies to get the work done. Yet God continues to move in major ways. Says Hammett, “We partner with the living God in the dramatic work of soul change.” At a recent service, a young man (early 20s, mohawk haircut) approached Hammett lamenting that he hadn’t been to church in 10 years. “This is not what I was expecting church to be like!” Flood continues to quench the dry land.
In leading the Flood team, Hammett sees the beauty of how God engages broken people to use their talents for the kingdom. Through Flood, both leaders and participants are discovering that God not only offers freedom and salvation through Christ, but also the opportunity to use their unique strengths and talents for His glory. Hammett’s grace-filled style of leadership gives the pastoral staff the freedom to try, fail, learn, and succeed. Wildey likens the visionary Hammett to Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, Mel Gibson’s role in We Were Soldiers: “He is the first to get off the helicopter and implement vision, and the last to get back on. He says that he is going to be on the forefront, and then demonstrates it.”
So Flood flows on. God uses Hammett in a new movement of worship. And an emerging generation of Southern Californians trumpets a ministry that began with a whisper. This is an extraordinary fount indeed. •
Troy Gronseth is the area director of Young Life in the Minnesota Valley. In 11 years of working with high school students, he has seen the great need for authentic relational ministry among today’s 18-30-year-old generation. Gronseth resides in Burnsville, Minnesota, with his wife Mary and their dog Tabby.