The Next Generation Is Ready... Are We?
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
Welcoming Tom Dixon to the For Columbus Team
We've felt the urgency of this moment building for a while now, and we've known it would eventually demand a response.
For decades, God has been building a deeply relational network across this city with youth pastors, campus ministers, Christian school leaders, congregations, and nonprofits earning trust with each other, praying together, and actually collaborating instead of just coexisting. We also have an embarrassment of riches in the leadership and organizations engaging the next generation. And on top of that foundation, we're watching a level of hunger among young people we haven't seen in a long time. From middle school campuses all the way to Ohio State, thousands have heard the gospel, and no small number of them have said yes to Jesus.
Put those two things together — years of relational groundwork and this unusual spiritual hunger — and you can see a city change by the power of the Gospel. So as we've prayed through how to steward this moment, one conviction is clear that God hasn't just shown us what he's doing, he's also handed us the leadership to act on it.
That's why we're genuinely excited to tell you that Tom Dixon is joining For Columbus’ team part-time, through a partnership with Youth For Christ, to help lead our growing next-generation work across Central Ohio.
Tom is not a rookie in investing in the next generation. Over the past 30 years, he has focused on developing leaders and building dynamic ministry teams — 15 years on pastoral staff in Columbus as a teaching pastor, elder, and high school ministry
director, followed by 15 years with Young Life, first as Area Director at Ohio University and then in a regional role overseeing 30 staff and 400 volunteer leaders running clubs at more than 100 schools across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Most recently, he has served on staff with Search Ministries, helping adults grow in their understanding of the gospel and their confidence to share it with others.
To be clear, Tom isn't here to launch a new initiative or compete with what already exists. He's coming in as a connector, collaborator, and a catalyst, someone who helps churches, schools, and ministries see what they can build together that none of them could pull off alone. In a lot of ways, this has been years in the making.
Our Youth Network has, without much fanfare, become one of the healthiest examples of Kingdom collaboration in Columbus, shaped faithfully by Tyler Flynn and Jean Paul Tiendrebeogo. Instead of building a network around any single organization's agenda, they built friendships — real ones, across denominational and organizational lines, between youth pastors and nonprofit leaders who all carried the same burden for reaching young people. Those friendships have produced more than just good meetings. They've built trust, opened doors for sharing resources, and slowly replaced a competitive instinct with a collaborative one.
At the same time, a parallel shift has been happening among college students, as churches and campus ministries serving Ohio State have grown closer together. The more those relationships deepened, the more obvious it became that we needed to stop thinking in silos and start imagining one connected ecosystem that walks with young people from adolescence into early adulthood.
That's the future we believe God is calling us toward, and we believe Tom is the right leader to rally our city to engage the next generation.
Of course, none of this happens without people willing to pray for it and fund it.
When you give to For Columbus, you're not writing a check for one more program or one more event. You're fueling the relationships, leadership, and coordination that let dozens of ministries strengthen each other instead of duplicating each other's work. That's the kind of foundation a gospel movement needs if it's going to take root across an entire city.
If you lead a youth ministry in central Ohio, Tom would love to meet you. Feel free to reach out to him at tom@forcolumbus.org.
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