Grow Your Church

In 2001, Luis Burgos stepped into a storefront in Bridgeport, Connecticut with a congregation of 25 people and a conviction that the city deserved a church that looked like it. City Wide Church was born from a calling and a willingness to figure it out in real time. No denominational plant. No seminary project.

What followed was 18 years of real-church growth. The kind that involves sleepless nights before a board meeting, staff transitions that hurt, facility decisions that could have broken everything, and the slow, faithful work of building a culture where ordinary people become disciples who make disciples. City Wide grew past 900 weekly attenders by learning how to read what God was doing and structure everything around it.

Along the way, Luis navigated a major facility transition that relocated the entire church without losing momentum. He built a bilingual discipleship pathway that serves both English and Spanish-speaking congregants in a single, unified mission. He restructured staff multiple times as the church outgrew old configurations. He launched citywide outreach movements in partnership with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, serving as a regional mobilizer for Greater Hartford. He developed lay leadership pipelines that put ministry in the hands of the congregation, not just the pastoral team.

His credentials include the Pentecostal Ministry Award from Pentecostal Theological Seminary and an M.A. in Leadership and Discipleship. But the credential he trusts most is the one you can see in Bridgeport: a church that is still growing, still reaching, and still producing leaders who go out and plant churches of their own.

When Luis consults with pastors, he is not teaching theory. He is translating hard-won experience into something you can use this week.