Meet Our Pastors
Rev. Dr. Rob Haynes | Teaching Pastor
Rob Haynes (PhD, Durham University) is a church-planter, pastor, author, speaker, teacher, podcast host, theologian, and missiologist. His work focuses on local and global mission and evangelism, forming disciples for missional service, leadership development in new and existing church communities, and fostering new spaces for conversations on faith and culture. Rob is a seasoned leader and continues to develop new ways of engaging in discipleship, evangelism, and mission. He is an ordained pastor in The Wesleyan Church.
Born in Paducah, Kentucky, Rob lived in both Ohio and Kentucky until moving to the Alabama Gulf Coast in 1991. He completed a BSci in education at the University of South Alabama, an MA in biblical and theological studies at the University of Mobile. After seminary training at Asbury Theological Seminary, Rob received a PhD in theology from Durham University in Durham, England. He is a senior John Wesley Fellow, senior Harry Denman Fellow, and a visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Durham University. Rob's publications include Consuming Mission: Towards a Theology of Short-Term Mission and Pilgrimage (Wipf and Stock, 2018), and “‘Come in the Right Way’: Effective Evangelism in Pluralistic Cultures” in E. Stanley Jones & Sharing the Good News in a Pluralistic Society (Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2018).
Rob’s passion is to help individuals and churches join discipleship with witness, mission with evangelism, and personal holiness with social holiness. He is a fan of reading, fishing, football, basketball, and gadgets. Rob and his wife, Beth live in Fairhope, Alabama and have two (mostly) adult children, Joshua and Megan.
Rev. Jeff Spiller | Founding Pastor
Jeff Spiller was born in Chicago, IL, on September 2, 1954, but his family roots are in Alabama! He is a graduate of Huntingdon College in Montgomery, AL, and Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.
Jeff’s first appointment in the Alabama-West Florida Conference was a new church start in Mobile, AL, where he was senior pastor of Christ UMC for 38 years before retiring. Jeff eventually disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church and started Christ Wesleyan Church in 2021. Along with teaching pastor Rob Haynes and a handful of visionary laity, Christ Wesleyan Church was started in Daphne, AL.
This new church, started on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, continues to make disciples for Jesus Christ and does so imitating the model of the Class Meeting. This is the model used by Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, in the 1700’s in England and America.
Jeff Spiller is married to his wife Norma of 46 years and they have an adult daughter, Melinda, and adult son, Adam and two grandsons. Jeff and Norma presently reside in Spanish Fort, AL. Jeff has published three books: “Becoming a Regional Church from the Ground Up,” “Perceptions Volume One,” and “Perceptions Volume Two.”