Profiles and conversations with ministry leaders.
A few years ago, Dr. Tom Nees interviewed some "K-Church" pastors, (Nazarene pastors who pastor churches of 1000 or more), in an attempt to understand the effective practices we've adapted that may have contributed to our church's growth. During the next few weeks on this blog, I will share some excerpts from his conversation with me.
Dr. Tom Nees - "What kind of changes have come with your growth from 300 to over 1600?"
Bud Reedy - "Once we clearly established our mission statement and identified our core values, then we began to organize ourselves around those core values. One of the things that we changed was the old program that worked for years; Sunday School at 9:30 a.m., Worship at 11 a.m., Sunday evening evangelical service, Wednesday night prayer meeting, revival meetings that brought people in every night and people participating in leadership, mostly by being on various boards. That traditional Wesleyan Holiness congregational spiritual formation model was no longer working. That's because society had changed so quickly. People's schedules are so much more complex. You often have two working parents, so the church is no longer the center of the community's cultural life; the public school is. And so you have a church that was asking families for 3 to 5 times slots a week, when those times were no longer available.
So here's what we did. We decentralized everything. We have worship services at a variety of times. Our small groups are all over the map. Sometimes they're in people's homes, sometimes on the campus. Some are on Sunday night, Wednesday night, and some Tuesday morning in a restaurant. We spread our small groups all over the place."
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The next excerpt will include my answer to Tom's next question, "What percentage of your people are in small groups?"
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