Board of Directors

Chris is the Founding Pastor of Experience Life Church in Lubbock, TX, which is now a network of many churches meeting across the nation. He graduated from Southwestern Seminary in 2006 and then started Experience Life in his living room in the Spring of 2007. In the first 10 years of Experience Life’s history, God allowed the church to help over 13,000 people commit their lives to Christ & baptize over 7,000 people.

Toward the end of the first 10 years, the Lord began to give Chris & the eLife Leadership Team the vision of seeing 1,000,000 disciples made in the next 10 years. They knew that their strategy for making disciples would have to change. The story of Experience Life’s transition from a “megachurch” model to a “multiplication” model is detailed in his new book, From Megachurch to Multiplication.

In the last few years, he and his team have helped start many new churches in multiple states & countries, launched hundreds of Discovery Groups with streams down to the 2nd and even 4th generation, and trained over 2,400 disciple-makers & church planters across the country (even several in other countries). He spends a majority of his time training and coaching pastors across the nation that feel the Lord leading them in a similar direction as Experience Life along with helping give oversight to the churches in the Experience Life network.

Since the release of his book, Chris has received many requests from pastors, missionaries, and Christian leaders for help with “tentmaking” to supplement their incomes like he describes in the book. As a result, he created TentmakingPastors.com to offer courses & a coaching program which help ministry leaders supplement or fully replace their incomes.

He has been married to his wife, Emilie, for 16 years and he has 2 children, McKinley who is 14 and Charis who is 12.

Jeffrey graduated from Texas Tech University with a Master of Science in Accounting. He is a Texas CPA currently serving as Vice President of Finance for Atmos Energy’s West Texas Division. Atmos Energy is a regulated natural gas distribution company operating in eight states with over 3 million customers. Jeff has worked in various leadership roles for Atmos Energy since 2003. Prior to being employed by Atmos Energy, Jeff worked in public accounting for KPMG and Arthur Andersen.

Jeff and his wife Tamara moved to Lubbock in 2008 and began attending Experience Life Church. They and their three children are now part of pursuing a disciple making movement in West Texas with the goal of reaching over one million people in West Texas for Jesus. Jeff has served on Experience Life’s financial advisory team and later, its Board of Elders, since around 2010.

Dr. Sam Douglass has poured his life into building the Kingdom of God through planting churches throughout the U.S. His doctoral work was entitled “Merging Diverse Ethnic Congregations to Do Multi-Cultural Missions Projects”. As a seasoned veteran church planter, Sam Douglass has planted many churches in various socio-economic strata and ethnicities. As the founding pastor of Yorktown Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, he ministered there for 13 years. Dr. Douglass is also the founder of Just Coach Me, a ministry designed to coach and mentor church planters and pastors. He currently serves with Dynamic Church Planting International as the Director of Unreached Unengaged People Groups and New Countries.

John has been the Executive Pastor of Experience Life since 2011. John graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary with a Master’s in Theology (Th.M.). He spends much of his time mobilizing workers to go overseas, supporting our long-term teams overseas, and training church leaders overseas and in America in DMM. He was previously the founding pastor of Fellowship of Oso Creek in Corpus Christi. He led Oso Creek for 11 years.

John is also a CPA and was the Controller at University Medical Center prior to going into full-time ministry. Currently John co-owns Rev7 Moving and CaptureIt photo booth. He has been married to Cindy since December 1986. He and Cindy have 4 grown children and 5 grandchildren.

Dr. Stan Parks is a sinner saved by grace and a disciple of Jesus seeking to reach lost people locally and globally. He was born and spent his early childhood in Indonesia where his parents were missionaries, before returning to the U.S. After church planting in the USA, he and his wife Kay have been serving Unreached People Groups since 1994 while based in Indonesia, Singapore, and Dubai. They have 3 grown children and a son-in-law.

Stan is a Church Planting Movements trainer and a coach for leaders of CPMs around the world. He is Co-Facilitator of the 24:14 Coalition which is focused on seeing Kingdom Movements in every Unreached People and place. He has served since 2006 as part of the Steering Committee for Ethne, a global network focused on the Unreached. He is also the VP for Global Strategy for Beyond and Director of the Ph.D program for Bethany International University in Singapore. He has a BA in History, M.Div, and Ph.D in Missiology. Editor and Contributor, 24:14 – A Testimony to All Peoples, 2019 as well as author of multiple articles in Mission Frontiers and other Christian magazines. Author and Collaborator, CPM Training Curricula, 5 Series: 10 CPM Lessons (2008), Simple Steps (2010), First Steps (2010), Next Steps (2011), Strategic Steps (2012). Various portions of these have been translated into 12 languages.

*Note: Stan is not pictured due to his partnership with people in many sensitive locations.