What does it look like to experience the unique gift of a profound awareness of God’s presence?
Geoff Rinehart, the recently named President of Communitas International, has felt a unique and profound sense of God since he was a young boy when he nearly drown off the coast of California. Taken out by a rogue wave, his mother and father presumed him dead and Geoff, not knowing if he had been gone for two seconds or two years felt as if he was in the most exquisitely beautiful, peaceful place he could ever imagine, what he sensed then was being absolutely in God’s presence and it has not left him since.
Even with this profound awareness of God’s presence Geoff still has navigated doubts, heartache and loss. He headed off to college to play football but was injured, leading to a very low point in his life, one where he questioned his very existence. As he sat in his apartment struggling with what his life was supposed to be about, he received a call from his mentor Kurt, asking him to speak at his youth group unaware of the current state in which his old disciplee Geoff sat. Similar to his near death drowning, Geoff felt a profound reconnection to God. “I have been saved for a purpose,” Geoff said, and ever since then he has been in either volunteer or vocational ministry.
One of his vocational ministry stints was serving as Executive Pastor at Lake City Community Church. “I had a white board in my office and on top of that white board I had put ‘make disciples’ in sharpie so you couldn’t erase it,” Geoff says. During his time he watched the church grow from 350 attendants to 2500 in just 4 years. The church decided to build an amphiteater to hold their growing church but Geoff disagreed. “That’s when I really started thinking and experimenting about being the church and not just doing church,” he said. After completing the amphitheater, the housing crisis hit in 2008 leaving Lake City with difficult financial decisions. After a lot of rejected ideas, Geoff finally offered to resign so the budget could be met. Geoff left Lake City grieving. “I was driving by Lake City Community Church and in a prideful prayer, said something like ‘oh dear God may these people’s eyes be opened to the reality of you and not just the show of you,’” Geoff remembers. “I’m about 2 blocks down from passing by this church and I hear as clear as day ‘don’t you dare grieve where my Holy Spirit is at work’ and I thought oh my gosh, you’re right. I was grieving for me but then projecting it on Lake City. That was a really really important thing for me to hear and I think it gave me a generous outlook to say, ‘God’s Holy Spirit is at work in multiple forms and multiple ways, even if they wouldn’t appeal to me.’”
Geoff had been on the board of a startup tech business and was offered the role of president after leaving Lake City Community Church. “I was always very entrepreneurial,” recalls Geoff. He had worked in high tech at the start of his career in California and when he moved to Idaho was surprised that high tech was a booming business there as well. The teaming aspect of a start up had always appealed to Geoff. “Every start up was a team of people that had a vision and a purpose and working together to get it done, I love that aspect of being one part of a combined effort to create this product,” Geoff said. “When we can share a common vision and see what can happen when we work together towards a common goal.”
That journey towards the common goal is often overlooked. “We [as people] get too preoccupied with the outcome, we need to focus on who we are in the performance and the outcome will take care of itself.” One performance Geoff looks back on fondly was during his time as a high school football coach. The high school was 20 years old and had never had a winning season—in fact over the previous ten seasons the team had only won two games. During Geoff’s tenure, one season, he led the program to an 8-2 record and won the league championship. In one game Geoff was able to put in some of his last string players, a quarterback and a receiver who had not seen much playing time. Throughout the season Geoff had a front row seat watching these two young boys work hard and show up which culminated in a thrilling moment in one of the final games of the season. The quarterback threw the ball to the receiver and he caught it and Geoff was jubilant, leading the team into joyous celebration of this unlikely event. “It was absolute joy seeing people growing, learning and having success,” Geoff remembers fondly, “and getting to celebrate their joy and their success. I learned in that experience how really good leadership can create unity toward a common purpose and absolute dedication to wholeness and love and righteousness, football just happened to be the vehicle.”
Geoff has a unique background to lead Communitas International into the next chapter of its story. The melding of entrepreneurial, coaching and pastoral leadership has brought a great person to lead the charge. Perhaps the most important and influential marker of Geoff is his profound awareness of God’s presence. He leads by example. He advises, “Be consistent with being obedient, be consistent in God’s presence and find joy in God’s presence.”
