Meet Tyler and Crystal Tullos of StoryHeights Church & StoryHeights Montessori in Newton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tyler and Crystal Tullos.

Tyler and Crystal , can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Crystal and I moved to the Boston area 7 years ago with our two children in the car, a mortgage in Baton Rouge and a dream in our heart to start a life giving church in this city that we had fallen in love with approximately 3 years prior. We knew no one in the city at the time, but slowly began to meet people and built relationship with them over coffees, lunches or southern barbecues in the backyard of our apartment in Watertown. Slowly but surely a community formed that eventually launched StoryHeights Church in January of 2012 on one of the coldest days Boston saw that winter in the AMC movie theater in Chestnut Hill (turns out starting anything new, much less a church in the winter in Boston isn’t the greatest idea anyones ever had). Since then we have adopted the “tortoise and the hare” approach to developing our ministry strategy and growing our community, and slowly and steadily a thriving church community has begun. Since that time StoryHeights now meets in two locations on a Sunday mornings hosting a total of three services (Newton Upper Falls and Southie), has the privilege of serving ~230 people that call StoryHeights their church and are able to continue our vision of connecting people’s stories to God’s story so that He can take their stories to new heights.

We believe that healthy things grow and are elated that God has grown our church numerically in the way that He has, but our vision isn’t centered around growing bigger but staying smaller. We call this vision, Vision 26. We see 26 community expressions of StoryHeights in all 23 neighborhoods of Boston as well as Cambridge, Newton and Brookline. These community expressions will not all be Sunday morning church service gatherings, but rather different expressions of our faith and vision that allow us to interact with the community that we love 7 days a week and not just for a few hours on a Sunday morning. From retail store fronts, affordable community housing projects to childcare centers these expressions will take on varied shapes and forms in order to meet the needs of the varied communities these touch-points will be. What makes this different from other similar ventures is that any and all of the proceeds will be redirected toward the hurting, broken and forgotten in Boston and around the globe.

StoryHeights Montessori in Norfolk was started as a first step towards seeing this vision realized in July of 2016. We purchased a property, gut renovated it and began enrolling students in December of that year with the goal of repurposing monies that parents were already spending on their early childhood education needs to meet the needs of other families in similar life seasons but under different circumstances. Now almost two years old the Montessori is nearly 100% enrolled, which will allow us to begin giving back to our community this fall! During the enrollment process the families of our school “adopted” two Haitian orphans through a global missions organization called One Child Matters. Through the tuition of our students these two children are being cared for, fed and educated in their home country not to mention all the cards and letters the Montessori children are able to send their new Haitian friends!

The beginnings of this journey were interesting to say the least, but we look back on the past seven years and have zero regrets! We plan to be here for the long haul and are fully ready for whatever adventure awaits us next!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The best way to describe the journey so far would be “interesting.” We were hungry for adventure, but had no idea what that adventure might look like or how that adventure would play out. All in all we’ve got no regrets, but there have definitely been a fair share of bumps in the road.

Any startup is going to face challenges, but what made our challenges different was that we didn’t have anything to sell. It wasn’t like we had a product that we could put on a shelf, put an ad in the paper and wait on the people to come by and purchase it. So of course that is going to create some challenges. We’ve faced financial struggles, leadership struggles, volunteer struggles as well as personal struggles. When things don’t take off as quickly as you hoped or as quickly as they are for other people in your field you struggle with self-doubt and diminished confidence. We learned quickly how to deal with this by deciding that if we don’t quit we win. So we began what I call the “ministry of the show up” and we would just keep showing up and giving it our best until one day we got some traction and things started to build.

Like I said earlier, we didn’t have a product to sell, but we did have something to offer and that is what we’ve hung our hat on since day one. We do our best to offer what we call a “church done differently” experience. That is not to say that we are the only church doing things differently in Boston, but we did notice there was something missing here when it came to churches and we’ve done our best to fill that gap. We mean it when we say that we sure aren’t better than anyone else, but we are intentionally different. We have a more modern approach to the way we present the Gospel (live worship, relevant life-giving messages and the utilization of technology), but that isn’t what makes us different. Our authenticity and drive to make room for people to be themselves is what makes us different. Crystal and I grew up in the church and felt the unreasonable pressure to portray the image that we’d never had a bad day. We were masters at putting on our “church smile” in the church parking lot knowing full well it was completely fake. We decided that we wanted StoryHeights to be a place where it was okay to not have it all together. In fact, we save a seat next to us (the pastors) for the people who don’t have it all together because as it turns out no body has it all together.

In addition to offering authenticity, we’ve done our best to offer hope for the hopeless, healing for the broken and community for the forgotten. In short form, we offer Jesus to a world that is desperate for Him even if they don’t realize it. We ask God for the people that no one else wants because those are the people that Jesus would have spent His time with, and while we are not the answer to all of life’s problems we believe that Jesus is. So by putting and keeping Him as the weekly headliner in anything that we do, we are offering people real life solutions to real life problems.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about StoryHeights Church & StoryHeights Montessori – what should we know?
On paper StoryHeights Church is a 501 C(3) religious non-profit corporation, but I don’t think we even know where that paper is any more :)!

We specialize in doing what we can to know Jesus more and making him more known! We specialize in telling the greatest story ever told, and no that’s not the story about how the Patriots came back to beat the Falcons in the Super Bowl (although that is also an amazing story that we celebrated pretty heavily when it happened). Everything we do comes back around to the story of Jesus. The story of how God gave up Heaven for a place and eternity for time simply to be with His creation, you and me. That is His name after all. Emmanuel, God with us.

We specialize in making sure that people know that Jesus not only SAID He loved them unconditionally with His words, but also SHOWED them that He loved them unconditionally by giving His life. We also make sure that people know there are a lot of good people throughout history that have done a lot of good things for others, but that none of them can lay claim to the goodness of God. Because out of all of them, Jesus is the only one that gave His life and then three days later took it right back! We specialize in making sure people know that in Christ they can have life eternally when it’s all said and done for them here, but that they can have life abundantly while they walk it out until that day.

We are known for incorporating humor and storytelling into our messages, and for not being afraid to push what is deemed “church appropriate” when those boundaries need to be pushed. It just stopped making sense to not talk about real life issues when people dealing with them are sitting in our congregation. All in the name of decency and religion.

We are most proud of drive and focus on reaching “the one.” In Luke 15 Jesus tells three stories that show us His priority on THE ONE that is lost. We’ve decided that for us “lost” doesn’t mean wrong, worse or wicked it simply means that something or someone is not where they were originally intended to be. We’ve decided that if “the one” has the attention of Heaven that it should also have the attention us StoryHeights. We will never measure our success based on the size of the crowd we gather, but on our ability to reach the one person that is not where they were originally intended to be. In a loving relationship with Jesus their savior.

What sets us a part from others is what has become a unique blend of southern hospitality and the New England attitude. We’ve decided to embrace the good, bad and ugly of both of these cultural extremes and let them work together in harmony rather than in competition. People describe our church as the friendliest place they’ve ever been while maintaining their ability to control their own anonymity within our community.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Authenticity. Hands down. We are real people who live real lives in the real world, and our church is filled with real people and lead by real people.

Crystal and I are intentionally bi-vocational as well. We work as real estate agents with Keller Williams in our “spare time.” We don’t ever want to get so far away from real life that we lose touch with the people that we pastor.

Contact Info:

• Address: StoryHeights Church
  381 Elliot St.
  Newton, MA 02465StoryHeights Montessori
  23 Union St.
  Norfolk, MA
• Website: StoryHeightsChurch.com StoryHeightsMontessori.com
• Phone: (Church) 617-928-6082 (School) 508-346-3427
• Email: Tyler@StoryHeights.com Crystal@StoryHeights.com
• Instagram: @StoryHeightsChurch
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StoryHeightsChurch/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/storyheightsBOS
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/storyheights-church-newton-newton?osq=story+heights+church