11/09/2026
Honouring Dr Ian Jagelman — a remarkable life and an extraordinary legacy.
Today we honour and give thanks to God for the life of Dr Ian Jagelman — pastor, theologian, author, lecturer, leadership thinker and a man of great integrity. Our love and prayers are especially with Ian’s beloved wife Jeanie, their sons Josh and Dan, and the entire Jagelman family.
Long before many of us knew Ian as a pastor and Christian leader, his life had already taken him across nations and into significant professional responsibility.
In his earlier years, before marrying Jeanie, Ian lived and worked in Papua New Guinea.
Later, during his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ian rose to a senior management role in international tax. His work with PwC also took Ian and Jeanie to Fiji, where they lived and worked.
Eventually Ian left that professional world to pursue theological study in the United States, beginning another remarkable chapter in his life.
In January 1984, after theological training and serving in Bible college leadership, Ian and Jeanie started Christian City Church Lane Cove.
Just a year later, in 1985, Lane Cove became one of the four churches that came together at the beginning of what would become the C3 Church movement.
What followed was genuinely pioneering — and well ahead of its time.
Ian developed within C3 an innovative multi-congregational approach to church. Rather than simply building one larger congregation, he created an environment where leaders could be identified, developed, trusted and released to lead new congregations.
From that pioneering work emerged C3 Lane Cove, C3 Carlingford and C3 Ryde. But the story didn’t stop there.
Those churches planted churches. Those churches raised leaders. Those leaders planted more churches. And succeeding generations continued the multiplication.
When you trace the sons, daughters, granddaughters and subsequent generations flowing from these churches, their combined influence reaches into hundreds of C3 churches in Australia and around the world.
That is an extraordinary legacy.
Ian was also a pioneer in biblical and leadership training. He understood early that pastors needed not only ministry skills but a deep understanding of leadership, people and healthy organisations.
He became an author, lecturer and significant leadership thinker, helping bring serious leadership education into the development of pastors and Christian leaders.
His books, including The Empowered Church and The L Factor, influenced a generation to think differently about leadership — particularly the importance of identifying, developing, empowering and releasing others.
Ian possessed a rare and formidable intellect.
He brought together theological depth, disciplined scholarship, practical wisdom and decades of leadership experience. He had an unusual capacity to see emerging questions before many were asking them — and then to think carefully, biblically and constructively about what might come next.
But perhaps the greatest measure of Ian’s life is not what he personally built. It is what continued through others. Ian didn't simply build a church.
He built people. Those people built churches.
Those churches built people. And those people built more churches. The multiplication continues.
Today, across the C3 movement, we honour Ian and give thanks to God for a remarkable life faithfully lived.
And we honour Jeanie, Josh and Dan, whose loss is far deeper and more personal than ours, and surround them and the entire Jagelman family with our love and prayers.
Dr Ian Jagelman — a pioneering leader, a distinguished Christian thinker, a man of great integrity and a remarkable servant of Christ and His Church.
What a life. What a legacy.
