All the "God is Green" stuff has me thinking about spring.
Spring has be thinking about growth.
Growth has me thinking about our church.
OK, that's just an excuse to share some recent thoughts on how we are trying to grow at Connections.
So far we've grown the church and taken next steps in a very "organic" way.
By that I simply mean we've done what comes naturally (organically) to most churches:
- We started a worship service and some of the supporting ministries: Music, Family Ministry, etc.
- We started home groups (What we call Connection Groups)
- We started the basic leadership structure necessary handle some things like finances and administration.
As we've grown these areas of ministry have grown into a team-based approach to leadership.
Now we need to move some of these teams into more organized and intentional systems. What's a system? I LOVE this acronym from Nelson Searcy: a system is anything that
Saves You Stress, Time, Energy and Money.
Nelson has a well thought out structure for church systems as a way of organizing a church. I've adapted his model just a bit to these areas where Connections needs to grow better SYSTEMs:
- Worship (This includes music, media, and all things that happen in the worship service)
- Fusion (This covers a persons experience from being greeted at the door, to how we follow up with any visitors who share their contact information)
- Family Ministry (This should grow to include youth ministries)
- Connection Groups
- Evangelism
- Outreach/mission
- Stewardship (Finances, property, etc)
- Leadership/Discipleship (this could mature into an Elders Team to govern the church)

I like that acronym.
ReplyDeleteI would love to see the outreach system grow to include more long-term (ie: not sporadic) community projects, perhaps partnerships with other organizations that would allow us to build relationships with the community and commit to providing help/relief in a more focused, intentional, long-term manner.