Our Leaders & Legacy
A story of faithfulness, vision, and a lifelong commitment to the health of the local church.
Dr. Wayne Lee & Dr. Sherry Lee
Founders of Church Life Resources
For more than five decades, Dr. Wayne Lee and Dr. Sherry Lee have given their lives to a single conviction: that the local church is the most precious thing Jesus left on this earth, and that it is worth understanding, strengthening, and loving with everything they have. Church Life is the fruit of that conviction, and of a partnership in ministry and marriage that has never stopped asking what a healthy, living church is really meant to be.
A question that became a calling. Their work began in the early 1970s in a single congregation in Lake Placid, Florida. It did not start with a model or a method. It started with an honest question: what is actually wrong with the church, and is there any order underneath all of it? Together they began listing the struggles they saw, nearly three hundred of them, and asking how those needs grouped and fit together. Slowly, the outlines of the essential functions of a healthy church came into view.
Tested in the life of a real church. Through the late 1970s and 1980s at Maranatha in West Palm Beach, the ideas were never left on paper. Wayne shaped and tested the architecture of church health while pastoring, and pursued a doctorate in pastoral counseling. Sherry built a thriving educational and small-group culture, training teachers, overseeing dozens of small groups, and gathering hundreds of women each week. One of them would carry the principles while the other carried the practice. Two unexpected gifts shaped these years: a 1975 box of Ichak Adizes teaching tapes that would translate organizational lifecycle thinking into the language of the church, and a 1984 trip to South Korea that put prayer permanently at the heart of the work.
The writing years. By the 1990s the framework was fully worked out in practice but not yet written down. Across roles as a dean of religion and university vice president, and Sherry's service at the denominational level where she was often the only woman in the room, Wayne finally put the model and its first assessments on paper.
Carried across the country. From Southeastern University in Lakeland, the Church Life Function Assessment became the flagship tool, and vision-team trainings reached roughly thirty-five states and seven to eight thousand congregations. In 2004 they formally established Church Life Resources, and in the years after, deepened their focus from training practitioners to forming consultants.
To the nations. Out of the pandemic season, the Lees developed the Church Life Missional Model and launched Church Life Global, carrying a lifetime of work to believers and congregations around the world.
A shared life and legacy. For fifty years they have built side by side, he with a pastor's heart and an architect's mind for church health, she with a scholar's discipline and a deep gift for spiritual formation. The question that started it all has never changed. The answer just keeps growing.
The Church Life Story
For more than fifty years, Church Life has grown out of one question asked over and over again: what does a healthy, living church actually look like?
It started in a single congregation in Lake Placid, Florida (today Placid Temple Church of God). The work was simple and unglamorous: listing everything that was wrong, naming nearly three hundred "sicknesses" of the church, and then asking whether there was any order underneath the chaos. As those lists were grouped and regrouped, the first outlines of the functions of a healthy church began to take shape, narrowing over time from more than twenty down to the essentials.
The question that started it all has never changed. The answer just keeps growing.
