Brandon Watts spent his entire childhood in church. His mother played piano. His father served on the ministerial staff. Sunday mornings were a fixture, and faith was the backdrop of everything around him. None of it, by his own account, had actually connected. It was not until he was 28 years old and a friend pulled him aside in a church parking lot to explain the gospel plainly that something finally clicked. That conversation reshaped how he understood faith, how he built his marriage, and ultimately how he leads Epiphany Brooklyn, the church he planted in Central Brooklyn that now draws lines of young people around the block every Sunday.
How Watts left Verizon to plant a church
Before Epiphany Brooklyn, Watts was moving up the financial division at Verizon Wireless. The career was going well until the company approached him about relocating south. He said it was clear to him that the move was not the right direction. Around the same time, leaders at his church began talking seriously with him about planting a congregation of his own. The two conversations happening at once pushed him toward a decision he had been quietly approaching for some time. He left corporate life, and the business instincts he developed at Verizon did not go with him to the trash. He applies them to running Epiphany Brooklyn today.
What Watts built in Brooklyn with his wife Ty
Watts and his wife Ty have been married for 24 years as of this August and have done ministry together from the beginning. Ty was born and raised in Bed-Stuy, which factored into why Brooklyn became the location for the church. After a period living in Philadelphia, returning to Brooklyn felt like a natural fit for both of them. Watts describes the borough’s 2.6 million residents as an opportunity rather than a challenge, the kind of dense, diverse population that makes a city worth planting something in.
Ty has not simply supported the work. According to Watts, she has shaped and influenced every major decision the church has made. He describes their partnership as mutual and load-bearing, two people who process the emotional weight of leading a congregation together rather than separately.
Why 92% of Epiphany Brooklyn is in their 20s
Watts made a deliberate decision to build Epiphany Brooklyn around younger adults at a time when data consistently showed that generation pulling away from organized religion. His response was to go after them specifically. The approach worked. Currently 92% of the congregation is in their 20s, and three Sunday services are not enough to hold everyone who wants to attend.
He is careful about how he describes that demographic. In his framing, young people are not the future of the church. They are the church right now, and he treats them accordingly. That means giving them real responsibility early. Several of his congregants work at companies like Apple and Google and sit on boards at Fortune 500 companies. Offering them ceremonial roles does not hold their attention. His baseline requirement for leadership is integrity. Everything else, he says, can be worked with.
What Pastor Watts wants people who walked away to hear
Watts does not dismiss the reasons people leave church. He went through a period of genuine disillusionment himself and nearly walked away. His position is that the church is not perfect, has never claimed to be, and that people who left often did so because of a specific community or leader rather than faith itself. For those still carrying that wound, his suggestion is to try again in a different room, under better teaching, with people who take theological questions seriously rather than avoiding them.
Epiphany Brooklyn holds three services every Sunday at 960 Atlantic Avenue at 9 a.m., 11 a.m., and 1 p.m.
