Nic Gibson
Lead Pastor for Teaching and Vision
I came to High Point in 2010 after serving for seven years in the Florida Panhandle, and for several years in Chicago before that. Alexi and I married right out of college, and went right to Trinity seminary in Chicago in 1999 – 2003. I came to faith at a Christian camp in the Adirondack Mountains, and I date my conversion to when I was about 14. However, really grappling with letting go of worldliness and finding who I was in Christ took real time. I started leaving ministry in college at SUNY Oswego in New York. The next year I met Alexi, my wife, and we minister together for about three years after she came to faith in her first two weeks at college. My dad passed away within three months of my transition to Florida, and the birth of our first child Abigail. We labored in Florida for seven years. I cut my teeth as a pastor, learned how to put blunt New York culture together with more gentle and discrete southern culture, and somehow that prepared me for the Midwest.
Through undergrad and seminary I had trained to serve in a very secular university town. As I looked for a place to be a senior leader in 2009, High Point emerged as something that might fit me very well. I love the idea of coming to a large church building that had few people left in it. I wanted to reach people, and I didn't want to do building campaigns. I found the High Point congregation incredibly responsive, and we have been making slow progress that has made a real difference for 15 years. Alexi and I have four children, the oldest is in her 20s, and the youngest is in sixth grade. We have two disabled children, both of whom have deeply changed us, and our family, and taught us about pain and infirmity in the midst of normal in the midst of abnormal.
From beginning to end, I have envisioned the church like Jesus, filled with people whose roots grow deep not just the knowledge, but in spirituality and obedience. The people who really are humble, ferocious in their brutality against indwelling sin and the worldliness that would choke them, and ferociously loving towards the body of Christ, their neighbors and their enemies. I believe as much as I ever have, that God has work he is doing in Madison, that he has chosen many in the city, and that we still can increase and not decrease as the church in this place.