Practitioners, not theorists.
Before Pinnacle was a consulting firm, it was a lived experience. Every person on our team has sat in a church board meeting, navigated a pastoral transition, wrestled with a facility decision, or led a congregation through a financial crisis. We don’t study congregations from the outside — we’ve been inside them.
Derek Henson
Church leader. Strategist. The person who’s been in the room you’re in right now.
Derek brings over two decades of experience at the intersection of congregational ministry and institutional leadership. He has guided three capital campaigns from feasibility through celebration, navigated two congregations through pastoral transitions, and served in executive roles within mainline denominational structures.
What makes Derek’s approach distinctive is the combination of theological seriousness and operational pragmatism. He doesn’t believe churches are just nonprofits with steeples — but he also believes that faithful stewardship requires honest data, clear decisions, and the courage to name difficult realities. Foundation360 was built out of that conviction.
Derek holds experience across United Methodist, Presbyterian, and ecumenical contexts. He understands denominational polity not as an obstacle to navigate but as the fabric of how mainline congregations make decisions together — and he works within it rather than around it.
3 Capital Campaigns Led
UMC · PCUSA · Ecumenical
JT [Last Name]
The legal and financial lens that every church assessment needs but few consultants bring.
JT brings a background in [legal/financial discipline] that is genuinely rare in congregational consulting. Most church consultants come from ministry backgrounds and have to borrow financial and legal expertise from outside. JT brings it from the inside — which changes the quality of the analysis, particularly in domains like facilities decisions, endowment structures, merger and closure processes, and capital campaign feasibility.
His work with Pinnacle focuses on the places where pastoral discernment and institutional reality intersect: Is this building a mission asset or a liability? Can this congregation sustain a full-time call? What does a responsible wind-down actually look like? These questions require someone who can read a balance sheet and understand a congregation at the same time.
[Denominational background / faith community connection — e.g., “JT has been an active lay leader in [tradition] for [X] years, serving on [boards/committees].”]
Legal & Financial Analysis
Facilities & Endowment Structures
We tell you what we see, not what you want to hear.
The most common feedback we receive after a Foundation360 engagement is some version of: “We knew some of this, but we needed someone to say it out loud.” Our job is to create the conditions where honest data can surface, honest conversation can happen, and honest decisions can be made — within the theological and relational fabric of your congregation.
Honest over comfortable
We don’t tell congregations what they want to hear. We tell them what the data shows and what our experience suggests — delivered with care for the relationships involved.
Theologically grounded
We work within your tradition. Polity, governance structure, denominational relationships — these aren’t obstacles we navigate around. They’re the context within which faithful decisions get made.
Your decision, always
We provide the picture. We offer our read. But the discernment belongs to your community. No Pinnacle engagement ends with us telling you what to do — it ends with you having what you need to decide.
Want to talk before you commit to anything?
A free 30-minute conversation. We’ll listen, ask a few questions, and tell you honestly whether we think we can help.