Meet Tom Gerberich of H2O Church

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tom Gerberich.

Hi Tom, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My wife and I started attending H2O Church in 2019. We fell in love with the culture at H2O and the desire to see more people come to know Jesus, especially the students on the campus of Bowling Green State University. After spending a year attending the church, I joined the staff team in the fall of 2020. Over the past 6 years, I’ve been able to become a director within H2O and I now serve as an executive member and pastor at the church. Being a part of H2O has allowed me to see God changing lives first-hand and I am excited to continue to do this for the years to come.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Starting a new job in 2020 certainly had many challenges associated with it. In order to have a church on campus that reaches college students, we raise our own support for ministry from outside of the church. I did this during a global pandemic. It was certainly challenging to find ways to connect with people who wanted to join my ministry support team during this time. Additionally, after I completed this, when the 2020-21 school year started back up, the University was totally different than any year prior. We had to reinvent every single thing that we were doing as a church and ministry. Our traditional outreach methods and ways that we had led in the past were no longer possible. Being together in community is an essential part of being a church, so we had to pioneer new, unique ways to do this because of the Covid restrictions on campus. Getting through this year took a lot of creativity. Additionally, the years following this were challenging as we typically rely heavily on student leaders who know our culture and can lead their peers on campus. However, our culture totally reset and many of our student leaders had graduated, forcing us to start back near the ground level.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Our church plants churches on college campuses. The college campus is a unique place to be for a church because churches rely on the donations of their members to fund their staff and obviously college students don’t have much money to give. Additionally, many college campuses don’t have churches that students who don’t have cars can easily attend. We bring church to these college students by keeping all of our equipment in a trailer that we drive to and from campus each Sunday to make church accessible. We believe that following Jesus is the most important decision that somebody can make in their life and we want to position ourselves to allow college students to have the opportunity to make that decision. We are on 10 different campuses, primarily across Ohio, with our first church being at BGSU, which is where I pastor at. We desire to plant more gospel-focused churches on more campuses in Ohio and beyond.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
In the early 2000’s there was a big shift towards mega-churches that had a high value on performance and quality of the Sunday service. Sometimes this was at the expense of knowing others and having authentic leadership. Currently, we are seeing a push back to those instances and a desire from people to know and be known by the pastors and leaders of the church that people attend. Additionally, there is a desire for authenticity in which you see your peers and leaders flaws, not just as people who appear to have it all together. We expect this shift in desiring authenticity over high production value in the church to continue. Because of this, we lean heavily into small groups, 1 on 1 meetings, and creating spaces where people can be fully known by others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://h2ochurch.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/h2ochurchbg
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/h2ochurchbg/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/h2ochurchbg