When Your Church Feels Stuck by Chris Sonksen

Author:Chris Sonksen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Church Growth/Pastoral;REL108010;REL108030;REL074000
ISBN: 9781493407804
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

Please note: Observe how easily this flows and the clarity it provides. Come to church, go to Discover, take the next step of serving or growth groups. It’s not messy. It provides clarity, movement, alignment, and focus. We are not bombarding newcomers with tons of programs and events for them to be a part of. There is one first step: Discover. There are two major options for the next step: serving and growth groups. It’s a clear system and like I always say, “If you work the system, the system works.” This brings us to the third portion of the strategy, and that is the deep end of the pool.

Deep—Under this heading you could write two phrases: “spiritual growth” and “leadership development.” These two represent the deep end of the pool for us.

Spiritual growth—We want to make sure that people have the opportunity to experience God’s presence in bigger and fuller ways. Our weekend services are specifically designed to be bilingual (for the churched and the unchurched); that limits what happens there. However, we will create times throughout the year when people can come and experience extended times of prayer, worship, and study of God’s Word. This might happen periodically through worship nights or other activities. Recently, for example, one of our campuses took six Wednesday nights in a row to have extended worship and prayer. The attendance for this was huge. The point is that we know what our weekend services are designed for and they fit perfectly into our mission, but we also know that we want to provide other avenues for people to go to the deep end of the pool. We are not just interested in building crowds; we want to build disciples. We believe both are important. We work hard to build the crowd on the weekends, filled with those who call our church their home but also filled with people who are wanting to check things out in an environment that is safe and accepting. We also work just as hard to move people into the deep end of the pool so that their journeys with God continue to grow and strengthen. One is not more important to us than the other.

Leadership development—This is the other portion of the deep end for us. We strive to build a leadership culture. We want our staff, leaders, and volunteers to have an appetite for personal leadership development. For us this is part of each person becoming everything God intended for them to be. Our staff is constantly reading books and learning. We spend time each month coaching our campus pastors and helping to bring out their fullest potential. But one of the most effective ways we produce leaders among our volunteers is through apprenticing. This is a culture we continually strive to build in our church. My friend Dave Ferguson wrote a book about this called Exponential. I highly suggest you pick it up. He is the one who has helped us in this area. Each

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