Chris Hodges (born June 21, 1964) is an American pastor, author, and ministry leader from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
He is the founding pastor of Church of the Highlands, a multi-site megachurch based in Birmingham, Alabama, that grew from 34 people in a high school auditorium in 2001 to more than 60,000 weekly attendees across 26 campuses in Alabama and Georgia, making it one of the ten largest churches in America.
He co-founded the Association of Related Churches (ARC) in 2001, established Highlands College as an accredited ministry training institution, and built GrowLeader, a coaching network serving more than 15,000 churches in over 100 countries.
In February 2025, he stepped down as lead pastor and shifted his primary focus to Highlands College as its chancellor.
Chris Hodges At a Glance
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Chris W. Hodges |
| Born | June 21, 1964 Louisiana, USA |
| Age | 61 (as of 2026) |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Tammy Hornsby Hodges (m. 1986) |
| Children | Sarah, Michael, David, Jonathan, and Joseph |
| Grandchildren | 10 |
| Residence | Birmingham, Alabama |
| Education | |
| Background | Bethany World Prayer Center ministry training (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) |
| Ministry | |
| Role | Founding Pastor; Chancellor, Highlands College |
| Church | Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, Alabama |
| Church founded | 2001 |
| Lead Pastor until | February 2025 (succeeded by Mark Pettus) |
| Tradition | Non-denominational Evangelical |
| Weekly attendance | 60,000+ across 26 campuses |
| Website | christhodges.com / churchofthehighlands.com |
| Career | |
| Books | Fresh Air; Four Cups; The Daniel Dilemma; What’s Next?; Out of the Cave; Pray First; Jesus the High-Road Leader (with John Maxwell) |
| Founded | ARC (2001); GrowLeader; Highlands College (2011) |
| Net worth | Not publicly disclosed |
Name Collision: Chris Hodges the Pastor vs. Chris Hodges the Basketball Player
There is more than one Chris Hodges in public life. If you searched for “Chris Hodges the basket baller,” you are looking for a different person, not the Alabama pastor this biography covers.
Chris Hodges, the founding pastor of Church of the Highlands, was a youth pastor and minister from his early twenties, not a professional or collegiate basketball player.
This biography covers the pastor and author based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Early Life and Background
Chris Hodges was born on June 21, 1964, in Louisiana. He grew up in the Baton Rouge area and entered ministry young.
In 1984, at age 20, he began working as a youth pastor at Bethany World Prayer Center, a large charismatic church in Baker, Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, that was influential in training and sending missionaries and ministry leaders across the country.
Bethany was not a small starting point. Under the leadership of Roy Stockstill and later Larry Stockstill, it became one of the most recognized church models in America for cell group ministry, mission sending, and church health.
Hodges spent formative years there absorbing a practical approach to church structure and discipleship that would later define how Church of the Highlands was built.
He married Tammy Hornsby in 1986. The couple eventually had five children: Sarah, Michael, David, Jonathan, and Joseph, and as of his most recent public bio, ten grandchildren.
Tammy has been a consistent figure alongside him throughout his entire public ministry, and Hodges has credited her directly in interviews as foundational to the stability of both his family life and his ministry work.
Early Ministry Career and the Road to Birmingham
After his years at Bethany World Prayer Center, Hodges served in pastoral roles in Colorado before eventually relocating to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2001.
He has described the decision to plant a church in Birmingham as God-directed rather than strategically chosen. Birmingham was not the most obvious destination for a high-growth church plant, it already had no shortage of churches, but Hodges felt called there specifically.
On January 7, 2001, he gathered a core group of 34 people in the auditorium of Grantsmill Elementary School. That is a smaller starting point than it sounds.
Most church plants that begin with 34 people stay small. Church of the Highlands did not.
Building Church of the Highlands
Church of the Highlands grew faster than almost any other church plant in American history. Within a few years, it had outgrown its original school location and expanded to multiple campuses.
Its growth model was built on three consistent priorities: small groups as the basic unit of community life rather than Sunday services alone, a culture of volunteer engagement that gave ordinary members genuine responsibility, and a preaching approach Hodges describes as making biblical truth practical and accessible for people who don’t already have church fluency.
By 2018, CBS News listed Church of the Highlands as the 16th largest megachurch in the United States, drawing roughly 18,965 weekly visitors.
By the early 2020s, that number had grown to 60,000 weekly attendees across 26 campuses spanning Alabama and Georgia, establishing it as Alabama’s largest church and one of the ten largest in the country.
Seventy-five or more worship services are held each weekend across those locations.
The church has also given more than $162 million to missions and charitable causes worldwide, a figure Hodges and Church of the Highlands have cited publicly as evidence of their commitment to outreach beyond their own congregation.
Association of Related Churches (ARC)
In 2001, the same year he founded Church of the Highlands, Hodges co-founded the Association of Related Churches (ARC) alongside a small group of pastors who shared a vision for planting life-giving, non-denominational churches in communities across America.
The ARC provides funding, coaching, relationships, and a proven launch model to new church planters. It has since become the largest independent church-planting organization in America.
By the early 2020s, ARC had helped plant more than 1,150 churches across the United States and trained more than 1,000 new church planters per year.
Todd and Julie Mullins of Christ Fellowship Church in South Florida serve on the ARC lead team as well, reflecting its reach across multiple states and ministry networks.
The ARC has faced significant public criticism in recent years. Multiple sexual and financial scandals involving ARC-affiliated or ARC-connected pastors, including Dino Rizzo, Micahn Carter, and Robert Morris, have raised questions about how the organization handles accountability for its leaders and whether it restores leaders to ministry too quickly after significant moral failures.
Hodges, as a co-founder, has faced indirect pressure from critics who argue ARC’s accountability structures are insufficient. He has not publicly addressed these criticisms in detail.
Highlands College and GrowLeader
In 2011, Hodges founded Highlands College, a ministry leadership training school that has since become a fully accredited two-year institution based in Birmingham.
The college is built on what Hodges calls the “academy model”, students receive hands-on ministry training within a functioning megachurch environment rather than in an academic setting disconnected from day-to-day church life.
More than 1,300 graduates have been placed in churches and ministries across 38 states and 21 countries.
He also founded GrowLeader, a coaching network serving more than 15,000 churches in over 100 countries. Through sold-out conferences and roundtables in America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, Hodges and his team have trained pastors in the church growth and health model developed at Church of the Highlands.
The annual reach of GrowLeader events regularly exceeds 4,000 pastors per year.
Books and Publications
Hodges has written several books, all built around the same core conviction: that the Christian faith works, and that ordinary people can live it out with more freedom, purpose, and joy than they currently do.
His notable titles include Fresh Air (Tyndale House, 2013), which became a flagship resource for his teaching on spiritual renewal; Four Cups (Tyndale House, 2014); The Daniel Dilemma (Thomas Nelson, 2017), which addresses how Christians can hold convictions without becoming combative in a polarized culture; What’s Next?, a guide to spiritual next steps for believers; Out of the Cave, drawing on the life of Elijah to address emotional exhaustion and burnout; and Pray First: The Transformative Power of a Life Built on Prayer, his most recent solo release before stepping down from the lead pastor role.
He also co-authored Jesus the High-Road Leader with John Maxwell, reflecting his long-standing professional relationship with Maxwell through EQUIP, the global leadership training organization Maxwell founded, where Hodges has served on the board of directors.
Personal Life
Chris and Tammy Hodges have been married since 1986 and have five adult children: Sarah, Michael, David, Jonathan, and Joseph.
Their son David worked briefly as a youth minister at Hillsong Church in Los Angeles, a connection that placed the Hodges name in reporting about Hillsong’s financial and governance controversies after 2022.
Their sons Michael and David have both spoken at Church of the Highlands campuses in the past.
There is no documented scandal, crisis, or significant life event involving David Hodges that explains the volume of search interest in his name beyond his Hillsong connection and his father’s public ministry.
Reports circulating online suggesting otherwise are not corroborated by any credible source.
The family lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where the church began. Hodges has described Birmingham not just as a location but as a community he and Tammy are deeply invested in, and his decision to stay there through decades of growth rather than relocating has been a consistent part of his public identity as a local pastor as well as a national ministry figure.
Theology and the Church’s Position on LGBTQ
Church of the Highlands holds to a traditional, conservative evangelical position on marriage and human sexuality.
The church teaches that marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman, and does not perform or affirm same-sex marriages.
It does not ordain or appoint LGBTQ individuals to pastoral or leadership roles that require alignment with its doctrinal statements on sexuality.
This is a common position among non-denominational evangelical megachurches of comparable size in America. Church of the Highlands describes itself as welcoming to all people while maintaining its stated biblical convictions about sexual ethics.
For people searching specifically about LGBTQ inclusion at Church of the Highlands: the church is not affirming of same-sex relationships or gender transition, consistent with the theological position of the vast majority of evangelical churches in the United States.
Controversies
The 2020 Charlie Kirk Social Media Controversy
In June 2020, during the national unrest following the death of George Floyd, a Birmingham high school English teacher named Jasmine Faith Clisby posted on Facebook that Chris Hodges had liked multiple social media posts by Charlie Kirk, the conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA.
Kirk’s posts, which had dismissed concepts like white privilege and systemic racism, were seen by many as culturally insensitive in the context of a national racial reckoning.
The response was swift and significant. Birmingham City Schools voted to terminate the church’s leases at two local high schools, where Church of the Highlands had been paying approximately $288,000 annually for campus space.
The Housing Authority of the Birmingham District voted to end the church’s volunteer programs in public housing communities, services that had included mentoring, community support groups, and clinic work through Church of the Highlands’ Christ Health Center across nine public housing sites.
Hodges issued multiple public apologies. In a letter to congregants, he wrote: “I realize that I have hurt people that I love deeply because I ‘liked’ multiple insensitive social media posts.
Each one was a mistake. I own it. I’m sorry.” He also stated plainly from the pulpit that “white supremacy or any supremacy other than Christ is of the devil.”
He acknowledged becoming aware of “unconscious bias and privilege” and committed to forums for listening and learning.
Critics including former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the city’s decisions religious discrimination. Church of the Highlands subsequently paid $817,000 to the Birmingham school system and built its own facility in the Woodlawn area to replace the lost school campuses.
The church continued funding some services even after the Housing Authority severed the relationship, and Hodges pledged to maintain community investment in the affected neighborhoods.
Hillsong Connections and ARC Controversies
In 2019, Hodges and Paul de Jong, a New Zealand pastor, were appointed by Hillsong’s global board to review allegations of sexual misconduct against Hillsong founder Brian Houston involving a female parishioner at a Sydney hotel.
The same year, Hillsong made payments of $10,000 each to Hodges and de Jong, listed in financial documents as “Senior Pastor Donation Expenses.”
In 2023, Australian independent MP Andrew Wilkie described these payments as “curious” during a parliamentary session on alleged Hillsong financial irregularities.
Church of the Highlands declined to comment when AL.com requested a response from Hodges.
Hodges also served as a member of the Evangelicals for Trump Coalition, which drew additional scrutiny in the context of the 2020 Charlie Kirk controversy.
Through his co-founding of ARC, Hodges has been tangentially connected to a series of pastoral misconduct cases involving ARC leaders and affiliates.
Stovall and Kerri Weems, former co-founders, filed lawsuits alleging defamation, conspiracy, and racketeering relating to ARC leadership decisions.
Gateway Church founder Robert Morris, who served as an overseer at Church of the Highlands until June 2024, resigned that role when allegations surfaced that he had sexually molested a young girl decades earlier.
COTH trustees stated they were unaware of “this part of (Morris’) past.” Questions remained publicly unanswered about what leaders close to Morris may have known and when.
The February 2025 Departure
On February 2, 2025, Hodges announced from the pulpit that he was stepping down as lead pastor of Church of the Highlands, naming Mark Pettus, a 23-year church veteran, as his successor.
Hodges framed the transition as a long-planned shift toward his “ultimate calling” of training the next generation of leaders through Highlands College, saying he wanted to flip his time from spending 80% at the church and 20% at the college to the reverse.
The announcement drew immediate scrutiny. His photo was removed from the church’s website, he was no longer listed as an overseer or trustee, and the speed of the transition, announced to staff only the Thursday before and to his family at Christmas, was atypical for a planned megachurch leadership succession.
The Roys Report, which had been investigating multiple ARC-related controversies, reached out for comment and received no response from Hodges or the church.
Former ARC co-founder Stovall Weems publicly characterized the timing as suspicious, noting it came as his legal cases against Hodges and ARC were advancing.
Hodges’ stated reason for the departure remains his most recent public statement on the subject.
Net Worth and Financial Information
Chris Hodges’ personal net worth is not publicly disclosed and no verified figure exists. Church of the Highlands does not file a public IRS Form 990 because it qualifies as a church under tax law, which exempts it from that disclosure requirement.
Hodges’ income sources would include his pastoral salary from the church, speaking fees from conferences, book royalties, and compensation from GrowLeader events.
Online estimates range across a wide spectrum with zero sourcing and should be treated as speculation.
Interesting Facts
- Church of the Highlands began with 34 people in a school auditorium on January 7, 2001, and grew into one of the ten largest churches in America within two decades.
- The church has given more than $162 million to missions and charitable causes worldwide since its founding.
- Hodges has served on the board of EQUIP, John Maxwell’s global leadership training organization that has trained more than 6 million leaders in 196 countries.
- He co-founded ARC the same year he founded Church of the Highlands, in 2001, meaning the church planting network was built in parallel with his own church rather than after it had already succeeded.
- After Birmingham City Schools ended its lease relationship in 2020, the church paid $817,000 to the school system and built its own facility in the Woodlawn area rather than abandoning the community it had been serving there.
- His son David worked briefly as a youth minister at Hillsong LA, placing the Hodges name in multiple strands of the broader Hillsong financial controversy reporting from 2022 and 2023.
Timeline of Key Life Events
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1964 | Born June 21 in Louisiana |
| 1984 | Begins ministry as youth pastor at Bethany World Prayer Center, Baton Rouge |
| 1986 | Marries Tammy Hornsby |
| 2001 | Founds Church of the Highlands (January 7) with 34 people; co-founds ARC |
| 2008 | Begins attending Hillsong Conference in Sydney annually |
| 2011 | Founds Highlands College as a ministry training school |
| 2013 | Publishes Fresh Air (Tyndale House) |
| 2017 | Publishes The Daniel Dilemma (Thomas Nelson) |
| 2018 | Church of the Highlands listed as 16th largest megachurch in the US by CBS News |
| 2019 | Appointed by Hillsong to review allegations against Brian Houston; receives $10,000 payment from Hillsong |
| June 2020 | Social media controversy; Birmingham schools and housing authority sever ties with the church |
| 2023 | Hillsong payment mentioned in Australian Parliament; ARC lawsuits from Stovall Weems become public |
| June 2024 | Robert Morris resigns as Church of the Highlands overseer following sexual abuse allegations |
| February 2, 2025 | Steps down as lead pastor; names Mark Pettus as successor; transitions to Highlands College chancellor |
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to Pastor Chris Hodges?
Chris Hodges stepped down as lead pastor of Church of the Highlands on February 2, 2025, after 24 years in that role. He named longtime staff member Mark Pettus as his successor and transitioned to serving as chancellor of Highlands College, the ministry training school he founded in 2011. He said publicly he was not retiring and had more energy and vision than ever, framing the shift as his “ultimate calling.” The abruptness of the announcement, combined with ongoing ARC-related lawsuits and unresolved questions about the church’s relationship with disgraced Gateway Church pastor Robert Morris, has fueled ongoing public speculation about the real reasons behind the timing.
Does Church of the Highlands support LGBTQ?
No. Church of the Highlands holds a traditional evangelical position: marriage is between one man and one woman, the church does not perform or affirm same-sex marriages, and LGBTQ individuals are welcome to attend but are not affirmed in same-sex relationships or gender transition, and cannot serve in leadership roles that require doctrinal alignment. This position is consistent with the majority of large non-denominational evangelical churches in America.
Who is Chris Hodges?
Chris Hodges is an American pastor and author who founded Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2001. He grew it from 34 people into one of the ten largest churches in the United States, with 60,000 weekly attendees across 26 campuses. He also co-founded ARC, established Highlands College, and built GrowLeader, a pastor coaching network serving 15,000 churches globally. In February 2025, he stepped down as lead pastor to focus on Highlands College.
Who is Chris Hodges’ wife?
Chris Hodges is married to Tammy Hornsby Hodges. They married in 1986 and have five children together: Sarah, Michael, David, Jonathan, and Joseph, along with ten grandchildren. Tammy has been a consistent partner throughout his ministry career, and Hodges has credited her publicly as foundational to both his family life and the stability of his ministry.
What happened to Chris Hodges’ son David?
David Hodges is one of Chris and Tammy’s five children. He worked briefly as a youth minister at Hillsong Church in Los Angeles, a position that placed his name in AL.com reporting about the broader Hillsong financial controversy in 2023. No verified scandal, crisis, or significant public incident specifically involving David Hodges has been reported by any credible outlet beyond that connection. Search interest in this question appears to stem from people finding his name in Hillsong coverage and looking for more context.
What books has Chris Hodges written?
Chris Hodges has written several books including Fresh Air, Four Cups, The Daniel Dilemma, What’s Next?, Out of the Cave, and Pray First. He also co-authored Jesus the High-Road Leader with John Maxwell. His books are published through Tyndale House, Thomas Nelson, and other Christian publishers and focus on practical discipleship, spiritual renewal, and church leadership.
What is Chris Hodges’ net worth?
Chris Hodges’ personal net worth is not publicly disclosed, and no verified figures exist. Church of the Highlands is structured as a church under tax law, which exempts it from filing the public Form 990 that would reveal compensation details. Online estimates are speculative and unsourced.
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