Forty years ago, Coach Tom Mullins, then athletic director at Palm Beach State College, and his wife Donna, began a church meeting in their home with the simple premise, “Let’s love God with all of our heart and let’s love people at their point of need.” Today, Christ Fellowship, based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida has grown to be the sixth largest church in America with 30,000 congregants gathering for weekly services at 13 campuses and thousands more viewing online, now under the leadership of Pastors Todd and Julie Mullins, their son and daughter-in-law.
The ministry reaches throughout Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, serving the most vulnerable, feeding the hungry and homeless, caring for widows and orphans and showing compassion toward those with special needs. They launched Place of Hope, a residential community for neglected and abused children in South Florida and Place of Hope International, which establishes homes and cares for children around the globe. Todd and Julie serve on the lead team of the Association of Related Churches (ARC), the largest independent church-planting organization in America, and are founders of Church United, a partnership of local churches from various denominations who join together to transform our region. On an international level, they’ve partnered with organizations in alignment with their vision such as Convoy of Hope, bringing humanitarian aid and emergency relief around the globe, and OneHope, a ministry committed to engaging every child in the world with God’s Word.
Todd Mullins, Christ Fellowship Senior Pastor, said, “We believe our faith in Jesus better make a difference in our world. Our community should be better because the church is here serving, caring, meeting the needs, being an expression of Christ to the world and that happens through outreach.”
They’ve most recently doubled down on their ministry to youth, launching the “Get There First” campaign, a multi-year strategy to reach the next generation, expanding discipleship programs and summer camps, investing in leaders through specialized retreats for students, developing partnerships with schools such as Trinity Christian School, and increasing their involvement in public schools through First Priority and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Their Palm Beach Gardens campus is also home to Southeastern University at Christ Fellowship, offering an accredited liberal arts education.
“We realized that in the race for the heart of the next generation, the first one there wins,” said Julie Mullins, senior pastor, referencing the battle in 2Kings: 6. “If you look around at our culture right now, it could be said that the people of God are not winning. But we don’t see culture as our enemy. We see it as our mission field.”
Pastor Todd added, “If we can help them understand who they are in Christ in the first grade and pour into their leadership, by the time they get to middle school, no one is going to tell them who they are. They’ll already know, and they’re going to be the ones influencing others.”
Rob Hoskins, president of OneHope, senior advisor to the World Evangelical Alliance, and chairman of the “He Gets Us” campaign, said “The Mullins family and Christ Fellowship are a missional force, igniting positive change in local communities and worldwide. They make an incredible impact in South Florida through their world-class foster care program and feeding programs, and they continue to invest in helping plant churches across the nation. Through their collaboration with ministries like OneHope, they share God’s Word in the hardest to reach places on the planet, and generously invest in many other international ministries and initiatives totaling millions of dollars.”
Shepherding the shepherds
On a personal level, Hoskins added, “the Mullins have been incredible encouragers to many leaders. Despite their many commitments, they have never stopped being pastors and shepherds. So often I receive a text or call from them, checking in and offering an inspirational or encouraging word. They say ‘I love you’ so freely and authentically, that will be their ultimate legacy — the love they show through their words and actions, a love that I and thousands of others have experienced.”
Jimmy Scroggins, lead pastor of Family Church, agrees. “When First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach (now Family Church) first called me to be their senior pastor in 2008, before I even moved down here, Tom Mullins called just to encourage me, pray for me and let me know that when I got there, I was going to have friends, and that Christ Fellowship was pulling for us. And they’ve been good at their word all these years.” In addition, Scroggins said Christ Fellowship regularly shares their resources with other churches in the area, displaying an extreme generosity of spirit. One way they do this is through their annual Christ Fellowship Conference.
Launched in 2018 to encourage and equip church staff from around the world, Christ Fellowship Conference 2025 will be held February 12th and 13th, 2025, featuring NY Times best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach John Maxwell, who is a member of the Christ Fellowship teaching staff; Charlotte Gambil, an author and international speaker, who serves alongside her husband Steve in building Life Church in the UK and Europe; and the Mullins. The conference, which includes large gatherings and smaller breakout sessions, provides a platform through which they share what God has done at Christ Fellowship, and make tools and resources readily available to others.
Stephan Tchividjian, CEO and co-founder of the National Christian Foundation South Florida, said, “I’ve had the privilege of knowing both Pastor ‘Coach’ Tom and Pastor Todd for many years, and the phrase I would use to epitomize their faithfulness and fruitfulness is ‘a long obedience in the same direction.’ In today’s culture, rarely do we see long term faithfulness and fruitfulness. However, with Team Mullins you do… and that cascades to their spouses, their team and their network. I love their big vision. I love how they execute with excellence. I love how they preach God’s Word without compromise, and I love how they love the difficult to love. Our culture in South Florida has been forever impacted by churches like Christ Fellowship. Lastly, the way Pastor Tom transitioned leadership to Pastor Todd is textbook; I wish more ministries would take note.”
Generational blessing
After leading the church he founded for 27 years, Coach Mullins stepped down as lead pastor in 2011, handing the reins to Pastors Todd and Julie. “In 2009, we stepped in as co-pastors for 18 months before,” noted Pastor Todd. “We went through a long transition, and this is an important part of the journey. I always say great leaders leave room for other leaders to lead, and my dad was a great leader because he left room for us to learn how to lead, didn’t take up all the leadership oxygen and created space for us to grow and get some legs under us.”
Understanding their leadership styles would be different, Pastor Todd said, “My dad is the quintessential coach. Call the shots. This is where we’re going. We’re more collaborative in our leadership. We get to build off a great foundation he and my mom laid, but I feel God has given us more of a way to systemize some of the processes, so we’re able to take what was built and expand it to reach more people.”
Since Pastors Todd and Julie have taken the lead, the church has expanded from five campuses to 13 with the goal of reaching this entire region.
Coach Mullins said he feels the church is thriving due to what he calls a “generational blessing.”
“I go back to the 1890s when my great grandfather went full time into ministry as a circuit riding preacher, which led to my grandfather, which led to me, which led to Todd, which led now to his son, Jefferson.” Jefferson and his wife Cassie both earned ministry degrees from Southeastern University at Christ Fellowship. Jefferson is working in the worship department and Cassie serves in the kids ministry. “So we come from a long line of ministry, which is a generational blessing,” said Coach Mullins, “and I’ve always told Todd, ‘Let’s not mess this up. Let’s keep passing this on. It comes down to you must operate with integrity of heart and keep improving your skills. When they talked about David in Proverbs, he led them with integrity of heart and skillful hands. He shepherded them and we want to do that.”
How it all started
So how did a young couple from Ohio give birth to one of the largest churches in the nation? Tom and Donna first met at a youth camp. But it was Rev. Brooks Lynn, who introduced them to South Florida, offering them a summer internship at a local church in Palm Beach Gardens. Donna had been college roommates with the pastor’s daughter. After finishing their degrees, Tom was offered a coaching position at Palm Beach Gardens High School in the 1970s. He led the team to an undefeated season, ranked number one in the state before Mullins left for a position as head coach at Georgetown College in Kentucky. He later returned to serve as Athletic Director of Palm Beach State College and coached at the Benjamin School before he felt the call into full time ministry.
It was during their first trip to Israel in 1983 on the Via Dolorosa in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that Coach Tom “had an awakening of Christ’s love and sacrifice for us.” He spoke to Donna after that encounter and said, “I don’t know what God is calling us to in this next stage of life, but I want us to be fully surrendered to what that is.” After much prayer and consideration, a year later they began the church in their home, grew to about 40 people then moved it to Grove Park Elementary School where they remained for seven years with little growth.
Looking back, he now refers to the “schoolhouse years” as a wilderness experience when they felt God was testing to see if they could be trusted with little before He could trust them with more. Finally, in 1991, Christ Fellowship purchased a “horse barn” that was transformed into their first permanent sanctuary due to the sacrifice of the founding families, and moved into it in 1992, doubling in size.
Place of Hope
Just a year later, Tom and Donna were on a mission trip to Russia and Romania when they encountered a little girl who had been rescued from a state-run orphanage where kids were literally kept in cages. At the age of five she could not talk, could not walk and had not been potty trained; however, they witnessed her radical transformation after being placed in a loving home environment as the little girl jumped onto the lap of her house father. Shortly after they returned, Donna received what she calls a vision from God during a prayer service and began weeping while reading Isaiah 1:17, which says, “defend the cause of the fatherless.” She pointed to the verse and said, “Honey, we need to do something about the hurting children right here.” That night, Coach Tom announced, “We’re going to build a Children’s Home right here in Palm Beach County,” which became Place of Hope.
Since then, Place of Hope has served more than 30,000 foster children and foster youth living in Neighborhood Family Cottages. They have served human trafficking survivors and partnered with Crime Stoppers to help bring justice and healing for victims. Place of Hope’s maternity home has cared for more than 87 mothers-to-be and helped families find forever families through adoption.
Special needs
In 2001, Christ Fellowship’s ministry to special needs families began to provide a place of belonging and accessibility for those with disabilities and their families. Children with disabilities are assigned a caring volunteer buddy to guide them through the kids’ environment on Sunday mornings, so their parents and caretakers can participate in Sunday service. There is also a special needs shadow ministry for adults with disabilities, a virtual special needs Bible camp and ASL interpretation for the deaf. The ministry even offers a therapeutic horseback riding program where riders of all ages who are physically, intellectually or developmentally disabled experience improvements in coordination, balance, self-confidence and social skills.
And in complete alignment with their ministry to people with disabilities, Christ Fellowship recently partnered with Ability Tree, a faith-based nonprofit devoted to equipping communities to welcome, include and support families impacted by disability. Ability Tree has a consulting branch that helps churches make their physical locations and programs more accessible and trains church staff and volunteers to better welcome and care for families impacted by disabilities.
“Ability Tree has provided training for our Connections staff, and we are working to equip our volunteer teams this fall,” said Pastor Todd. Learn more at abilitytree.org/consultingbranch.
Developing leaders
In addition to their heart for the most vulnerable, Christ Fellowship has a strong focus on developing leaders. They launched Christ Fellowship Leadership College in 2012 to equip spiritual leaders in both ministry and the marketplace. Leadership College is designed for believers who are currently leading others spiritually, actively serving in the church, and sense a calling to grow in their spiritual impact by using biblical leadership principles within their sphere of influence. It is a 10-month program that meets on evenings and weekends to accommodate those working full-time who have a desire to grow.
The also opened Southeastern University at Christ Fellowship in 2016, an accredited Christian college experience on-site in Palm Beach Gardens that now hosts about 110 undergraduate students and about a dozen graduate students in a mix of online and in person classes, combined with experiential hands-on learning and networking opportunities within the church. Areas of study include ministry, education, digital design and business.
Ty McMillan, site director of SEU at Christ Fellowship said the decision to partner with the Lakeland, FL, based Christian university to establish a site at Christ Fellowship came out of an understanding that students raised in church who go away to college have an incredibly high rate of falling away from the faith. “If we can offer an affordable Christian higher education but keep them rooted and planted within the church, we can significantly decrease that number and continue to cultivate their faith.”
What really sets Southeastern University at Christ Fellowship apart is our focus on experiential learning, said McMillan. “We’re giving them opportunities to put their degrees into practice through special serving opportunities at the church and there are unique leadership development opportunities to sit down with incredible leaders like Coach Mullins.”
We asked Coach Mullins what leadership advice he offers to others just getting started in ministry, and here’s what he said.
- Be faithful in the little things. Take what God has placed in your hands and multiply it, like the prayer of the talents, and don’t compare yourself to others.
- Develop ministry partnerships. Don’t stay isolated in your own silo. My philosophy is if you help enough other people win, that’s always going to come back around and help you. He who refreshes others will be refreshed. That’s the principle.
- Empower your people within. Sometimes we think we have to hire a great team when really you just need to build with the team you’ve got. Take your players, empower them, build them, pour into them and God will do great through that.
- Always keep your focus outward. Don’t ever get inward focused. That’s the worst thing in the world because that stops church growth.
“To me, the greatest test of your leadership is the legacy you leave, and how strong are the teams coming behind you?” said Coach Tom. I look behind us and they’re leading from stronger, broader positions and just doing a great job! Not just at Christ Fellowship, but the Church – ecclesia. We look at the darkness and spiritual warfare in our country, but there is a light that is shining so brightly in the Church. I believe we’re going to see a great spiritual awakening. So we just want to run hard until we cross the finish line.”
To find a Christ Fellowship campus near you or to learn more, visit christfellowship.church