OUR TEAM
Binu Thomas
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Binu Thomas is a passionate discipler and leader who is committed to helping churches grow and reach their full potential. He has a wealth of experience in church revitalization and he is skilled at seeing the greater potential in churches at all life stages.
Binu was born in Kerala, India, and grew up in New York City and Long Island. He graduated from Stony Brook University, Liberty School of Divinity, Fuller Theological Seminary, and in 2020 received his Doctor of Ministry in Contextual Theology from Palmer Theological Seminary. He is on a number of advisory boards, including the All People’s Initiative with the Evangelical Free Church of America and the Church Revitalize Center.
After working eight years in the corporate world, Binu followed God's call into full-time ministry in 2008. He served full-time with Long Island Youth for Christ for several years before transitioning into serving the local church. In addition to being involved in church revitalization, he has helped multiple churches walk through the process of church mergers, church planting, church staffing, and church program development.
Binu's ability to see the greater potential in churches has helped him find unique solutions with the help of an all-star team of pastors, admins, and creative minds that have the necessary skill sets to serve local churches in various transitions. He is passionate about discipleship and raising up future leaders for the global church. He believes that every Christian has the potential to make a difference in the world, and he is committed to helping people discover their unique calling.
Binu is skilled at recruiting and building teams and seeing the big picture and developing strategic plans. His vision is to see a world where every church is a discipling church, and where every Christian is making disciples who make disciples. He believes that The Discipling Church can play a significant role in helping churches achieve this vision.
Binu is married to Nisha, and they have three children, Evelyn, Hannah, and Andrew.
Gabriella Reyes
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Gabriella Reyes is a biracial, first generation American born in NYC, but grew up in Long Island. During high school, she was part of Long Island Youth for Christ and later went off to The Ohio State University where she got her Bachelor’s in Romance languages and minored in music. During undergrad, Gabriella was part of Cru and TBOC (Taking Back Our Church) ministries where she fervently started following Christ. She developed a heart for evangelism, theology and missions in the 10/40 window.
Gabriella currently is a doctoral student at Georgetown University pursuing a degree in Spanish Linguistics. She is a linguist specializing in socio- and raciolinguistics, with a profound understanding of diverse language varieties, people’s language ideologies and their biases, shedding light on racist and xenophobic linguistic tendencies, while also exploring cultural biases. She is very passionate about the nations, she loves learning about people’s culture, language and traditions. She speaks Spanish, French and Portuguese, has studied Arabic and is currently taking Greek at Georgetown. She is interested in Bible translation in the 10/40 window.
Gabriella also has a heart for worship and has been serving on the worship team since 2015. She is a vocalist, plays guitar and saxophone and is passionate about intentionally leading multi-ethnic and multi-cultural worship.
In the summer of 2023, she started Mosaic Music and Media at Edge City Church, a worship program that trains up youth and young adults in different areas of worship such as Vocals, Guitar, Media and Drums, teaching youth God’s heart on diversity in worship. She also spent the summer serving at Mission Basecamp, a program designed to empower underserved students to become future leaders. Additionally, she taught 5th to 8th graders at Camp 252, a non-profit organization that gives students extra academic training before the beginning of the school year in the fall.
After getting her PhD, Gabriella wants to go to seminary and get an MA in theology. She wants to disciple and train up multiethnic church planters and missionaries, provide for them theological education with culture sensitivity training in their respective languages and send them out to the 10/40 window.
