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A Conversation with Gregory Gibson…   157 

 

A Conversation with Gregory Gibson, Co-

Founder and Global Team Leader for SALT  
 

Interview conducted and edited by Karie Riddle 
 

 
 

In this conversation with Gregory Gibson, the co-founder of SALT, we learn about how his 

organization was upended by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. SALT is, and has remained, a 

network of pastors in pursuit of leadership development, but many of its members' day-to-day tasks 

have shifted. Pastors in Ukraine and other parts of Europe began caring for refugee families and 

bringing supplies to the front line, and the global network paused their regular operations to raise 

funds and provide logistical, emotional, and social support to this work. While they continued meeting 

online to discuss church planting and leadership development, the organization also pursued a 

"ministry of presence" to physically walk alongside those whose lives had been disrupted by the conflict. 

This ministry is inspired by the incarnational Jesus, who showed up to dwell among us.    

 
“SALT exists to train pastors to plant churches that 

serve the nations through gospel-driven leadership” 
(SALT Movement 2025). Its primary area of interest is 
Ukraine. According to its co-founder, Gregory Gibson, 
the organization is “Protestant and loosely ecumenical.”  

SALT’s work, while never wavering from its 
original mission, took a sharp turn following the 

Russian invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022. In 
the conversation that follows, we learn about SALT’s 
work before and after the invasion, the principles and 
practices that have helped them to thrive even in the 
midst of war, and their advice for other organizations 
trying to serve communities that face violent disruption. 
Karie Riddle asks the questions, and Gregory Gibson 
provides the responses. 

 

Can you tell me about how you got started in 

this line of work? 
In 2019, I was invited to visit Ukraine for the first 

time by Timofe Dovgalyuk to participate in church 

planting work and training efforts for the church there. 

Timofe had been working in Ukraine, serving families 

who have children with disabilities for decades, and 

because of his work there he was building partnerships 

with organizations and local churches. 

When I returned [to the United States (US)], there 

was a pebble in my shoe that I couldn’t shake, and I 

really felt a desire to engage more with the work and 

with the people in Ukraine as I built relationships there. 

And as I saw the need for leadership development 

training, I saw how my skill set and my passions  

 

overlapped with this particular part of the world. In 

2020, Timofe and I partnered together to launch 

SALT.  

 

How would you describe your organization’s 

goals? 
Our mission from the beginning has always been 

to train pastors to plant churches. We do this through 

what we call gospel-driven leadership development. So 

we’re coming alongside pastors all over Ukraine, and 

our strategy is what we call our SALT DNA. We really 

have four quadrants we work in when we come 

alongside the church (SALT Movement 2025). 

 
The first quadrant is healthy leader. We want to 

see all leaders, whether they are pastors or church 

planters, or businesses with a mission, or those who are 



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A Conversation with Gregory Gibson…   158 

in the non-profit space, we want to see them healthy. 

The second quadrant is healthy teams. Very rarely 

across the world have I seen healthy teams led by an 

unhealthy leader; it’s usually a one-to-one correlation. 

So our whole goal is to come alongside a leader to 

define health, in a principle that really can be trans-

local. We’re not defining a healthy leader in our context 

vs. a different context, such as America or Ukraine, but 

looking at leadership through the lens of universal 

leadership principles, and really doing the hard work of 

creating these irreducible minimums that define healthy 

leadership regardless of context. We’re bringing that 

into teamwork, how high functioning teams work well 

regardless of context. Is there nuance? Absolutely! Is 

language creating different barriers and hurdles to 

overcome? Yes, but I would say that those two 

principles are universals. 

Then from our teams, in quadrant three, we build 

healthy culture; not just one person, but many people, 

creating a healthy culture for their organization, 

whether a church, a non-profit, or a business, and we 

work together to define what a healthy culture is. The 

last quadrant is healthy systems. Systems become the 

trellis that support the rest of the vine work of culture. 

For us, we take that process and infuse it into the leader.  

 

Did you get into the leadership development 

space within church planting because you felt 

like that was a gap, or a need within the 

church? 

That is exactly right. From my understanding it’s 

common across mission organizations that the reason 

people leave the vocation of pastor or leave the mission 

field is not necessarily because they stop believing in the 

work; a high percentage leave because they are not 

healthy. Clearly, there is greater impact if the leader and 

the team are healthy.  

That’s a little bit how we got into it. When I visited 

Ukraine for the first time, my question as I was building 

relationships with pastors was for them to tell me how 

things were going, not what they needed. By no means 

did I want to present our work as the answer; it was just, 

“How are things?” “Tell me about your ministry”; “Tell 

me about your church.” And the gap that we kept seeing 

revolved around leadership development principles, in 

regard to healthy leadership, teams, culture, and 

systems. 

 

Were your original goals, related to leadership 

development for church planting, disrupted 

by the Russian invasion of Ukraine?  
Now, the war was already happening as I went for 

the first time in 2019, and as we started an organization 

with headquarters in Ukraine, but the effects of the war 

weren’t quite like they were after February of 2022. 

Because of that, our organization pivoted [in 2022] 

from training and leadership development to awareness 

for the work that was happening: pastors that were 

caring for their communities, pastors who cared for 

refugee families, pastors who were already working in 

areas now even more affected by the war. That really 

put us front and center in this conversation. We didn’t 

plan to engage in areas that were directly impacted by 

this particular crisis, but because of unfolding events we 

found ourselves there. And just by conscience and 

conviction, we continued into this space, because we 

thought it was the right thing to do. 

But the mission itself never changed. When 

February 2022 came about, our measurements and lag 

goals, or lag impact, began to change. For a couple 

months, we paused everything. It’s hard to come 

alongside the leader of a non-profit or a church when 

the tyranny of the urgent is just survival, to talk about 

how to build a healthy team. We thought to ourselves, 

“Let’s pause and do what we can do, and we began to 

focus on bringing awareness to the plight of what’s 

happening here. Let’s begin to ask a lot of questions, 

“what do you need,” “how can we close the gap on your 

fleeting resources during this season?” 

But because we’re a training organization, 

leadership training soon continued. We began to see 

pastors, business leaders, and non-profit leaders in 

Ukraine lean into what we were talking about even 

more, because now there’s even more weight to the 

work they are doing. Now they are not only pastoring 

their local congregations, but also caring for refugee 

families, sending medical teams to the front lines, 

officiating funerals, and serving families who have lost 

loved ones because of those crises. When I say it 

definitely flavored our leadership development training, 

it began to flavor it in ways that I personally never 

imagined. Now everything is affected and colored by 

what Ukrainians are currently experiencing in their day-

to-day lives. 

We are now having active conversations along the 

lines of: How do we train pastors to plant churches in a 

healthy way, let’s say in Lutsk, Ukraine, on the western 

side of the country, that’s not necessarily affected by the 

frontlines, although the whole country is seeing the 

effects of the violence? But how does this church and 

this team now work to create healthy workplaces closer 

to the front lines? That requires both meeting 

intentional needs and working towards sustainability.  

 

Can you say more about SALT’s processes 

and how some of those shifted after February 

2022? 
Because of the impact of February 2022, there is a 

Ukrainian diaspora all over the world, especially 

throughout Europe. We were surprised to find that we 

were working with pastors and leaders who were 



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working with Ukrainians in Poland, Germany, the 

Netherlands, France, really all over Europe! The 

primary headquarters is kind of from Warsaw to Kyiv 

in our work, but we’re starting to see spokes extend all 

over Europe. Practically, what this looks like is what we 

call the SALT Hub. Every Thursday morning we have 

a meeting of about 100 pastors and leaders, at 6 am 

Eastern time. That hits some good time zone marks in 

the places where we work. It is amazing to see that 45-

minute Zoom meeting happen and grow. Again, we are 

talking about leadership development principles. And 

people keep showing up and bringing more people. 

 We then have what we call SALT labs, which are 

less lecture and more laboratory environment, and this 

is also hybrid. We have pastors in Poland and Ukraine 

right now who create these gatherings in real time, and 

who bring pastors, non-profit, and business leaders 

together. I keep saying those three categories on 

purpose because leadership development is cross-

industry. It seems like these are the groups who are kind 

of leaning into what we are doing. And they are forming 

these different groups all over both Ukraine and 

Poland, working through these things in real time.  

We have many churches who partner together to 

send mission teams or medical teams to the same place, 

for example the Donetsk region, or Luhansk, and they 

are sending teams to the exact same place over and over 

again. They are serving both the military men and 

women who are there, but also civilians who decided to 

stay regardless of the conflict. What we have seen is 

these churches who can come together and go to the 

same place over and over again, and we are starting to 

see the ultimate win of our organization, training pastors 

to plant churches. It might not look like a church in a 

traditional sense, but what’s happening is that these 

communities are beginning to be formed in these areas 

that are on or near the frontlines; these communities 

have become life-giving communities to people who live 

there. 

To me, as a pastor, I see what’s happening, … and 

I’m like whoa, there is not a lot of difference here 

between what’s happening in the book of Acts in the 

early church, and how these communities are forming 

in a non-traditional kind of church planting sense, right? 

We are seeing a lot of celebration, if we can call it that, 

and wins for partnerships. 

 

You have these weekly online meetings and 

also these face-to-face collaborations that are 

happening with your team in Eastern Europe. 

Can you say more about what you and others 

in the US have been doing in terms of 

traveling to some of these war-torn places? I 

know you really want to be there with the 

people you partner with if you’re an 

international organization, but you also have 

concerns for your own safety, and if something 

happens to you, the organization fails at its 

mission. How do you balance those things?  
That is a challenging question, which really gets to 

the heart of any organization working in these areas 

disrupted by conflict and violence. As a new 

organization, we do not have a lot of overhead, and 

when February 2022 occurred, we found ourselves not 

only stewarding all these old relationships that we have 

had for several years up to this point, but now we’re 

stewarding hundreds of thousands of dollars being 

given to our organization for this relief work. Now, 

suddenly, Ukraine is front and center all around the 

world, and SALT has been given an opportunity to 

steward these resources.  

We thus committed as an organization to giving as 

liberally as we possibly could, and to meeting the needs 

that are currently arising, regardless of whether our 

giving leads to sustainability. In this moment, we’re 

giving to the current need. We are also asking about 

what happens to our in-person work. When the war 

ramped up, we moved our headquarters from Kyiv to 

Warsaw and started flying to Warsaw and driving across 

the border in Ukraine. The invasion happened in 

February, and the first time I was in-country was April. 

We decided then as an organization to continue to go. 

We’re going to use both faith and wisdom at the same 

time. Every time we entered into the country, we made 

a decision the day-of, but we decided from the 

beginning to continue to engage relationally.  

Engaging relationally is one principle that has kept 

our work going. SALT could have ended when the 

conflict ramped up, but because we committed as a 

young, new, and growing non-profit during this time, 

there’s a handful of us who decided to continue to 

engage, and that’s what we have done. We have now 

gone dozens of times; I can’t even give you a number, 

from myself to the other leaders of SALT. Our whole 

goal during that time was to practice what we call a 

ministry of presence.  

It’s one thing to show up on Zoom; it’s quite 

another when your sister or your brother is 

experiencing suffering and you show up alongside. 

When we committed to that, it created a whole different 

kind of trust for those that we partnered with on the 

ground.  

We have kept that same principle, even though it 

was not a core value we started with. But you can see 

the growth of our organization through this time, and 

we have kept that principle that we are going to practice 

a ministry of presence as much as we possibly can. We 

have gone all over Ukraine—to the front lines, to citizens 

impacted by the war, Kyiv, and to cities that have 

become refugee hubs. That kind of relationship, that 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  
 

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kind of presence, created a deeper relationship with our 

partners over the last couple of years. 

 

Can you tease out more how religious values 

guide your work?  
Our organization is very much shaped by our 

statement of faith, or what we call our gospel statement. 

It drives who we are, and there is so much to that that 

creates what is behind our motivations for the work, for 

myself personally, for our team. I mentioned this idea 

of a ministry of presence, which is an incarnational 

principle we see modeled by Jesus. In John chapter 1, 

he came and dwelt among us. This principle of 

presence is a biblical principle we practice as an 

organization.  

When it comes to the driving engine of our 

organization, it is Jesus’s command in Matthew 28 to go 

and make disciples of all nations. For us, the Greek 

term “ethny” means countries without borders. It’s 

literally people all over the world. And I think it’s a 

beautiful partnership when an organization centered in 

the United States and pastors and non-profit leaders 

and businesses throughout Eastern Europe come 

together and commit to Jesus’ command for the 

Church, to make disciples. 

The impact of that is what we are talking about 

here; the impact is that it’s Christians, regardless of their 

occupation, who care for their neighbor, who care for 

the needs of their community, who try to live their life 

the best way they know how, as salt and light, regardless 

of context. You are seeing the impact of that. Whether 

it is churches and pastors coming together to serve in 

places impacted largely through conflict and violence, 

or medical teams serving, or pastors putting on chaplain 

hats because there are men and women serving in our 

country’s military, I feel compelled to serve them, 

because I was first served by Christ. I hope all the action 

of our organization is driven by people who are first 

changed by Jesus to live in such a way that it makes a 

difference in whatever context they find themselves in. 

 

I want to pick up on that idea of context, 

because that is a huge challenge for a lot of 

international organizations, particularly if your 

headquarters is in the US and you are trying 

to work cross-culturally or cross-nationally. 

Many organizations think so much about this, 

but still struggle with it. I hear you saying, yes 

there is nuance from context to context, but 

there are still these universal principles, and 

there is still the universal love of Christ that 

can inspire everyone regardless of where you 

are. Have you encountered cross-cultural, 

cross-national kinds of challenges, and how 

have you worked through those?  
Context is going to create a chasm in whatever 

partnership you’re trying to develop until trust is built. 

It can be context from Washington, DC to New York 

City; it can be context from Washington, DC to Rivne, 

Ukraine. One of the things we have learned is that, 

going back to this idea of being incarnational and 

working on being as present as possible, when you do 

those things in a consistent way—you continue to show 

up, and continue to let your yes be yes—what you begin 

to find is that, over time, trust gradually builds. That’s 

what I have found in this work. In the beginning you 

learn from one another, you learn a new language and 

a context that’s created largely by language. You learn a 

way that another person or group views the world. Yet 

when you begin to partner on mission, that common 

mission begins to create a bond, and over time it 

strengthens into trust. It is not perfect, by any means. 

But we’re trying to come in with a learning posture as 

much as we are in a training posture. When we do that, 

it is amazing to see the trust that builds, and then the 

fruit that comes from a relationship that is built on trust.  

 

It seems the ideas of partnership and learning 

are really key to your success. 
We definitely come from trying to be as far from 

Toxic Charity or this kind of Helping Hurts idea 

(Lupton 2012; Fikkert and Corbett 2009). It takes 

intentionality, a mindset that we are not coming to do 

anything better. When you come in with the idea that 

our training is through the lens of a relationship, then it 

truly does become a laboratory where we work it out 

together, instead of “Come listen to my Ted talk” as it 

were. That simple posture has really been the ethos of 

everything we have done. Have we failed? Yes. Have 

we learned from it? Have there been times when we 

have apologized? Yes. Have there been periods in our 

relationships, which we’ve been building for half a 

decade now, when we’ve had to work through tension 

and conflict together? Yes. But on the other side of 

those things, there’s even deeper trust. 

 

I’m also wondering about the US political 

atmosphere and how American politics is now 

divided on the war in Ukraine. What has that 

meant for your organization? 
I have felt that tension, and here’s the journey that 

we’ve been on: 

In February of 2022, Ukraine-Russia was kind of 

central worldwide news. In several following months, 

we’re raising awareness and stewarding resources that 

are going to our partners on the ground. Then things 

begin to shift towards political ideologies. We saw the 

impact of that, and when you’re a largely Christian 



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organization that has an almost 98% donor base that 

would also be identifying as Christian, and then you 

begin to divide your donors based on political ideology, 

it became a hurdle for us.  

But it has not been insurmountable, because as an 

organization we try to stay above that, by remaining a 

main issue organization, which for us is how the gospel 

leads us into this kind of work. It is a struggle to see 

good organizations and good work in these areas that 

have been disrupted by US political spaces, and I don’t 

know the answer to that … Our part to play is that we 

continue to be faithful to our mission as an 

organization, regardless of what is happening politically. 

As we have done that, yes, it ostracizes people who want 

us to be vocal one way or the other, but that is okay for 

us. Our goal is not to speak towards any kind of political 

ideology. Our goal is to come alongside our partners. 

 

In closing, could share some advice with other 

religious organizations working in sensitive 

areas?  
Three things have worked really well for our 

organization in responding to violence: 

1. Showing up consistently. When you show that 

you are there, and you’re not there for a 

marketing piece, or a promo piece, or a social 

media piece, and you keep showing up, that 

creates those relationships built on trust.  

2. Tell, with permission, the stories of others. Tell 

stories of those you are partnering with and 

what they are going through. Tell about their 

successes and about their wins. It allows other 

people to have awareness of the work. 

3. Give others opportunities to engage. This can 

be as simple as a Zoom prayer night. We did a 

Zoom prayer night the first week of March 

[2022] and several thousand people joined. 

These are people from all over the world who 

will probably never praying together for the 

Ukrainian people on Zoom ever again. But it 

was very powerful. 

 

We also provided tangible ways for people to 

engage and to give. So, we figured out how much it costs 

to send a truck from Switzerland all the way to Warsaw, 

and [we could tell our audience] this donation sends 

one truck full of supplies. Ways like that have worked 

well. And the thing that keeps us going is that it helps us 

to overcome compassion fatigue.  

Some organizations probably have mission 

statements that aim right at areas like this, but when you 

are a training organization like us, and you happen to 

be in an area impacted by conflict and violence, you 

yourself can experience compassion fatigue, but you 

also see that those around you can experience 

compassion fatigue. News cycles change; things happen; 

there are many situations to engage with, be a part of, 

and give to, but when you do those three things a lot 

and often—show up consistently, tell stories, and give 

opportunities to engage—we see a consistent, steady way 

that we can partner in a healthy way with those still 

impacted by conflict and violence in these areas. 

In general, be as incarnational as possible, do it 

with an open hand, and be willing to partner with other 

organizations. Maybe the skeleton or aim of your 

organization might have been created differently, but 

the impact of what you’re both looking for may overlap 

and be very similar. I am a firm believer in this 

incarnational principle, whether it’s through church 

planting work or non-profit work or whatever it is. It 

creates a cross-cultural relationship in which the trust 

and the substance of the relationship are central. 

 

 

References 

 
Fikkert, Brian and Steve Corbett. 2009. When 

Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without 
Hurting the Poor. . .and Yourself. Chicago: Moody 

Publishers.
 

Lupton, Robert D. 2012. Toxic Charity: How 
Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, 
And How to Reverse It.  New York: HarperOne.  

SALT Movement. 2025. “Our Mission.” 

https://www.saltmovement.org/mission  
 

 

Gregory Gibson serves as a United States Navy Officer 

and Chaplain, and he is also the founding pastor 

of Nations Church in the Washington, DC 

area. Most importantly, he is married to Grace, and is 

the proud father of Cora and Iver. They reside in the 

Washington, DC area. 

 

Author email: greg@gibsonleadership.com 
 

 
 

https://www.saltmovement.org/mission
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mailto:greg@gibsonleadership.com

