A Church For Forgotten Places
Endnotes
Bibliography
John Mellencamp, “Small Town”
I guess you can take the boy out of the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the boy. John Mellencamp’s tribute to his life growing up in rural Indiana is contained in many of his songs and they resonate with the heartland of America. So does the story of Boston Celtic great Larry Bird, who still lives in rural French Lick, Indiana. Mitchell, Indiana, hosts a memorial tribute to Virgil “Gus” Grissom, one of the Mercury 7 astronauts. Gary, Indiana, was home to the Jackson 5.
My community in Indiana had a similar feel to it. Although it was really a suburb of Indianapolis, Speedway was self-contained. Our claim to fame was the legendary Indy 500, an event that transformed our little community every May. We had our own fire department, police force, schools, parks, library, and shopping center. My dad was on a first-name basis with the grocery store cashier, his barber, the bank teller, and the school superintendent. We would see many of these same people at the ball game or sit next to them at church. It was a great place to grow up. Even though my sisters were as much as 19 years older than me, I had many of the same teachers years later. Sure, there were plenty of people who left Speedway because of college, career, or marriage (I was one of them), but there were plenty who stayed or moved in.
As the years went by, I would often travel back to visit family and friends. The city of Indianapolis sprawled out and eventually swallowed up that peaceful little town. Many things changed, but one could always see evidence of an easier time when things made a little more sense, maybe more the result of innocence than anything else. That little town had to adjust to the changes around it. Those kinds of changes are happening in
I N T R O D U C T I O N “ W E L L I W A S B O R N I N A S M A L L T O W N A N D I C A N B R E A T H E I N A S M A L L T O W N G O N N A D I E I N A S M A L L T O W N A N D T H A T ’ S P R O B ’ L Y W H E R E T H E Y ’ L L B U R Y M E ”
small towns all over America. The U.S. Census Bureau applied the term micropolitan to many of these towns. While micropolitan communities are embracing these adjustments, churches have had a difficult time keeping up with the changes.
Like many of you who are reading this, I was comfortable where I was planted; places like Joplin, Missouri, and Waynesboro, Virginia, in rural Indiana, and now Quincy, Illinois. I’ve spent most of my professional life in them. They range in size from 1,000 to 40,000 and are places that have the familiar feeling of home. But there seemed to be a lid on the growth and influence I longed to see in the churches I served because of limitations of town size and certain obstacles like tradition. Cutting-edge churches had all the things I didn’t have: money, a large facility, a talent pool, and a willingness to change. I viewed the books written and models presented by big-city ministers and churches as being too distant to be adaptable for my situation. When I arrived in Quincy, I was determined to blow away those perceived limitations.
Micropolitan Church is a collection of the adapted ideas and the innovative, original thinking that have contributed to a great church impacting the national stage from a micropolitan town. My hope is you will use this book not as a template, but as a treasure trove of ideas to help make an everlasting impact in the lives of people . . . especially the lost children God has sent us out to find and bring home.
The Crossing’s Micropolitan Story
Even before the word micropolitan was invented, the nation was picking up on the phenomena. It was seen as a place that enjoys the benefits of both urban and rural environments. Quincy, Illinois, is just such a community.
Less than a week before Bill Clinton’s final State of the Union address in January 2000, Quincy officials got word that the president would be coming to town the day after the speech to drive home the agenda for his final year in office. “Why Quincy?” was the initial reaction from many locals. The official White House answer: Quincy’s economic recovery and quality of life are prime examples of the economic prosperity the nation has enjoyed in recent years.1
Quincy is an incredibly beautiful town that sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in west-central Illinois. The architecture is magnificent, representing German craftsmanship going back to the mid-1800s. Quincy has made culture and community a high priority as reflected in its arts programs and beautiful parks. The downtown district, back then, was in the midst of
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ongoing renovation stemming from the flood of 1993. The atmosphere is friendly and outgoing, yet stable and safe.
A couple of years before President Clinton’s visit, my wife and I were being interviewed by the leadership of what was then Payson Road Christian Church. Payson Road was a typical church, with attendance rising and falling between 100 and 300 for the preceding 28 years. At the time, the church had seen some major setbacks. The previous pastor had left under the shadow of moral failure. The staff of four had shrunk to one as a result of the indiscretion. Another by-product: The church population had slipped by about 100, settling at about 230. Also complicating matters, the church had just decided to go mobile, setting up and tearing down for services each week at the high school auditorium. Even with the trauma, the church leadership was serious about moving forward with that plan.
My wife, Allison, and I had been serving a growing rural church for 11 years. Even though the church had tripled in size, I desired to step out of the “business as usual” church for something truly innovative. Although, from the outside, it didn’t look like Quincy was a place where I could fulfill these dreams, something was stirring. There was a sense these leaders really wanted to be aggressive as an outwardly focused church. They wanted to make a difference, and so we decided to make the move.
Issues ran deep in the leadership. There were nine people on the leadership team and at least four opinions on which direction to go. Some liked the outward focus of the mobile church approach and wanted to continue working toward that model. Others wanted to stay put. Their reasoning: We still own our church building and attendance has decreased by 100 people; we can remain in the building and heal. A third contingent wanted to return to the old building but add onto it, in some way, after the church was back on its feet. Finally, some leaders wanted to start over sell the old building and build something new. These multiple visions threatened to cause lasting divisions, especially in light of the open wound of the recent past. Then Tuesday came. . . .
I was just six weeks into my new ministry in Quincy and my upcoming weekend looked intimidating. A leaders’ retreat dedicated to strategic planning was slated to start on Friday evening. The meeting would include
discussion of the direction the church should head in, and some of the leaders had their heels dug in pretty deep. The matter was weighing on my mind as I headed to school to drop off my kids, but once there, I found myself in a conversation with the school administrator. He mentioned, in passing, that some modular buildings at the local community college were for sale. I wondered how we might use those buildings should we decide to move back into our old facility.
John Wood Community College was located on the eastern edge of Quincy. It originally had been Lincoln Elementary School, once the crown jewel of the Quincy Public Schools. But the open learning concept for which it was designed proved to be ineffective with some students, and the building, along with the concept, were abandoned. JWCC had taken over the 22-acre campus and experienced better success; but in surging to 2,300 students, it had outgrown the building. The college had installed modular buildings to accommodate the swelling enrollment, but their upcoming move to a new campus made the buildings unnecessary. When I started asking questions about the modular units, a number of suit-clad administrators showed up and informed me the entire college campus would go up for sale soon. “How much will they want?” (I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.) The answer was $2.5 million a figure that was unthinkable for a small congregation of 230 with no savings. The building could be easily converted, I thought, but that would only add more cost to a building that is already well beyond our means.
I went home and asked Allison to drive over to the college with me. We parked in the front, held hands, and prayed that if God wanted us to have this campus, he could make it happen. I knew it was an impossible dream, but I also knew that we served an unstoppable God who can do impossible things. The administrators had given me some freshly printed brochures designed to sell the campus, and with those in hand, I waited for Friday evening.
At the retreat, when we came to the part about vision and direction, the chairman listed the four options we all were familiar with, and went through them one by one.
“I have a fifth option,” I blurted out.
The leaders looked at me, wondering how there could be another option, especially since I was so new to the area and the church.
I passed out the brochures and shared the story of my conversation from earlier in the week. Something happened over those next 30 minutes. Unity electrified the room and a new excitement spread. The other four ideas were abandoned and the proposal I had just shared with the group was embraced. The leadership believed it could be done . . . that God could accomplish it. The obstacles were overwhelming: We would need to triple attendance in three years just to make the payments; we would have to secure financing; we would have to sell our present building for a down payment; and we would have to lead the congregation to the same conclusion we had reached! This was wonderful and (somehow) terrible, both euphoric and terrifying all at the same time.
The congregation embraced the concept, even though some were strongly opposed to it. It was amazing to see the change on so many of their faces. The pain of the recent past was replaced with exhilaration and excitement for the future. Negotiations brought an even brighter picture. We would purchase the property for $2.5 million, the college would receive a “four times” matching grant from the state ($10 million) to combine with our money for its new campus, and the college would give us a $250,000 credit for our improvements. JWCC agreed to share the building with us as it transitioned to its new campus, and in the interim, 100 percent of our lease payments would be applied to our debt. All the furniture JWCC didn’t take to the new campus would stay with us. And the college held our note at their interest rate, a substantially lower rate than banks would have offered. Our old facility sold for $500,000, and the church received pledges totaling more than $600,000 over a three-year period. College President Dr. Bill Simpson told the local newspaper the deal we brokered with them was his single greatest contribution as president.
While it’s easy to rattle off those negotiated terms today, at the time, each one of them was an incredible test of faith. It took nearly a year to negotiate the deal with the college, and after all that time, we were at an impasse. Our next meeting with their team would be the last. On the eve of that meeting, after Allison and I discussed the situation, she decided to call everyone in our church she could and ask them to pray. The next day, the college’s lawyer
presented a plan that was better for both parties than had been produced during an entire year of negotiations! When we tried to sell our building, zoning limited who was eligible to purchase it. We sold it on the last day before our down-payment deadline! At each pivotal moment, it seemed, God would take us to the edge of the cliff, hold us by our belts, and lean us over the edge! Each moment was a reminder that he alone was in control.
Those events in the fall of 1998 set in motion what was to become a megachurch in Quincy, Illinois. We wondered how we would ever be able to use 64,000-square-feet of building space and 22 acres of land, but we didn’t have to wonder for long! The church began attracting new families immediately. The newspaper wrote feature articles about our growth. By 2001, John Wood Community College was in their new facility and we were able to start fully utilizing ours. We began considering ideas based on what we knew of existing, successful churches in metropolitan areas. The children’s areas were our first priority. We created observation areas for parents to watch how their children acclimated to their church environment, since we knew unchurched parents wouldn’t just blindly trust us. We developed security protocols for child drop-off and pick-up . . . not a new idea in metro churches, but a foreign concept in a micropolitan area. The idea of a café at church was also new for our community. The café included comfortable couches and high tables and chairs an inviting place for people to sit down and get to know each other. A bookstore provided churchgoers a place to pick up a DVD of the service or buy a Bible. Student ministry areas were decorated with chain-link fencing and graffiti-like painted walls. TVs equipped with video game technology lined the walls in the youth area. Students were attracted to the church, and they brought along their parents to their new hangout.
The gym we used as our worship area was soon hosting four weekend services. We knocked out a wall and added 200 more seats to the backside of the stage. We learned to use image magnification to provide a good view regardless of where one sat.
By 2005, the building we thought we could never fill had grown too small. The solution was to add a new auditorium and lobby a pre-engineered steel building capable of seating 2,000 people. By then, our campus and ministries were seen as an asset to the community for various functions, giving us great
first-impression opportunities. The Crossing began touching 2,000 people in weekend attendance in 2007, representing 5 percent of the community’s population of 40,000.
In 2006, before we built the new auditorium, I was researching a sermon series I had decided to call “Dangerous Church.” When I did a Google search of that term, I found a church based in Oklahoma City called Lifechurch.tv that had done a series by that same title. As I explored their website, I realized Lifechurch.tv was in multiple locations and was using technology to connect all of them. Up to that point, I didn’t think a multisite strategy would be a good fit for the smaller towns of the Midwest. People in Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Chicago might be OK with a two- dimensional video preacher, but not west-central Illinois! A visit to Lifechurch.tv changed my mind. I remember going to the video experience at their Edmond, Oklahoma, campus after experiencing worship and live preaching at the primary campus in Oklahoma City, and being surprised at liking the video experience better. Their south Oklahoma City live video campus was only six months old and was already reaching 2,000 a week!
My team went back to our hotel to talk about it.
“We don’t know much about church in metropolitan areas,” I said, “but we know a lot about towns our size.” Then I asked this question of the nine people who were with me: “Where should we go to reproduce what’s happening in Quincy?” Mary the wife of one of our pastors, who was attending graduate school at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois, at the time said Macomb was a dark place spiritually and could really benefit from a church like ours. Macomb is 60 miles northeast of Quincy, and, in the next year, became our first multisite location. The city had a very interesting texture. The major influence in the community was the university. With more than 10,000 students in a town of about 13,000 permanent residents, we knew our church’s impact could be dramatic. Western Illinois University is the community’s largest employer and the university has a huge geographical footprint, as businesses position themselves with it in mind. Most of the city leaders were WIU graduates, as were the folks who served on the planning commission. Like most college towns, there’s a lot of partying in the area around the university. The majority of the student body, about 80 percent, was comprised of students from the Chicago area, and one
could sense the frustration with the small-town environment, as there was little else to do but go to classes. Because of the university atmosphere, the community was inclined toward embracing new things. The economy wasn’t doing very well, the population wasn’t growing, and many buildings on the town’s main street were empty. The religious/church culture was typical of a micropolitan area: Churches were steeped in traditional mind-sets, and the prevailing church models were at least 50 years old or older. In short, it was perfect place to plant an outwardly focused church.
We didn’t know anyone in Macomb, and no one from Macomb was making the hour-long drive to The Crossing . . . but we decided to move forward anyway. We bought a building a grocery store that had been vacant for six years; we paid $750,000, and spent about as much again to rehabilitate it. We loved the building’s location, less than a half mile from the university and right on the town’s main street. The city’s planning commission was eager to work with us, as they were intent on revitalizing that side of town; they offered help in the rehabilitation and made us feel welcome. The Crossing was on the front page of local newspapers six times before we opened. We gave tours of the project to curious residents every day, creating a buzz about this new church throughout the town. We made 12,000 copies of a promotional DVD and mailed it to every home in the area and to the school’s dorms. Volunteers from Quincy considered themselves church-planting missionaries as they scraped, cleaned, and painted the old grocery store, turning it into a beautiful addition to a rural college town. We moved five full-time staff from the original campus to the new one.
On October 9, 2007, about 500 people from Quincy joined about 400 total strangers from Macomb to worship in the new venue for the first time. Affordable technology allowed us to broadcast the sermon live from Quincy, while everything else during the service was local and live. The enthusiasm was deafening. At this writing, The Crossing Macomb is running just under 1,300 people weekly, reflecting nearly 10 percent of the population of that micropolitan community; also of note, more than 80 percent of those who attend have little or no church background. The Crossing Macomb is standing on its own feet financially, and it’s making a dramatic impact as the largest church in the community.
Even before launch day at Macomb, a group of nearly 120 people in Kirksville, Missouri, heard about what we were doing, and about 60 of them started driving the 90 minutes every week to worship with us in Quincy. They were part of our church when we launched in Macomb, and they asked us to consider establishing a location in Kirksville. Our elders didn’t want to talk to them it seemed like our hands were full but the victories were too awesome to ignore. Once again we ventured forth. We purchased what had been a shoe factory on the south side of town for $500,000. The 106,000square-foot building on 19 acres cost us less than $5 per square foot! Once again, we hired five full-time staff members. Once again, we were regulars on radio, television, and in the newspapers. When we launched in Kirksville, nearly 500 people from town were there! Today, Kirksville has more than 600 attending weekly. It is the largest church in its area, and through use of cutting-edge technology, does what once was considered impossible.
Also in 2008, The Crossing began a process of opening thrift stores in its communities. The purpose of the stores is to multiply local and regional benevolence exponentially. Today in eight locations, these stores provide more than 100 jobs, including health care insurance, for many people who might not otherwise have a job opportunity. The stores also provide communities with much needed resources, selling to people who need the items at very low prices. All profits go to local benevolence needs to serve the communities in which the stores operate. The addition of both human and financial resources brought benevolence more into focus as a bridge to people in need and an opportunity to reach out with the gospel.
In January 2010, The Crossing 929 was launched, its name derived from its address in a south-central Quincy neighborhood. It became a campus by accident. We purchased an 1874 brick church and educational building to be used as a long-term discipleship initiative to house men involved in Celebrate Recovery. When the neighborhood rose up against the idea, and our rezoning options began to close, we pivoted to making it a campus. We hoped we might be able to attract enough people to recoup our investment, but our sights were set far too low. We were able to raise all of the funds necessary for the new work in a single offering, making 929 debt-free from its birth. The neighborhood responded overwhelmingly to the innovative church building, and the campus is averaging 500 with an auditorium that seats 140. Our 929 launch taught us something critical about our DNA. We
discovered people will gladly give up amenity for community. Our primary campus with all its bells and whistles was only 10 minutes away from the 929 location, but those who attended 929 were happy to give that up to have a location in their own community. This completely revolutionized our thinking about what was required to plant The Crossing’s DNA at a location, what it would cost, and what locations we would choose in the future.
This new understanding led to two additional launches the following year. The first was in Pittsfield, Illinois, a town of 4,500. We previously had not considered a town so small because we thought a minimum population was necessary for an effective site launch. Our experience with 929 taught us otherwise. The Pittsfield location launched on May 1, 2011, and then moved to a Pike County regional site, where it draws from the three largest communities in the area. It has grown to average nearly 500, thus reaching about 10 percent of the surrounding area.
That same year we launched in Hannibal, Missouri. We previously had not considered Hannibal because it is only 25 minutes from our primary campus, but the growth that has occurred there has been nothing short of breathtaking! After starting and growing quickly in the local YMCA, we purchased and completely restored the 1,000-seat Orpheum theater. The 1922 theater had been in a state of sad disrepair, but now it’s been returned to its former glory. Today, we own the whole city block, and this location ministers to 1,300 people weekly in a town of 17,000.
In late 2012, we experienced our first church acquisition, taking over the The Federated Church of Lima in an extremely small town of 125 about 20 minutes north of Quincy. The church had a beautiful building a tornado had destroyed the previous building but $1 million in insurance had been used to build a new one but was struggling to grow. Its location and lack of consistent leadership had taken a toll. Federated leaders spoke to us about the idea of taking over, and after some discussion, The Crossing had its first acquisition and seventh location. The church has grown from 30 to 155 in a town of 125!
With one successful acquisition under our belts, we were approached by Cornerstone Christian Church in Mount Sterling, Illinois, to consider a
merger with them. Cornerstone was averaging about 140 in a town about 45 minutes from our primary campus. They had a great facility with about $250,000 of debt. Their leaders approached us to explore how merging might make a greater kingdom impact. We took on the campus and refurbished it with Crossing DNA in mind, and their discipleship pastor transitioned into the campus pastor role. And so our eighth location, The Crossing Mount Sterling, opened on April 28, 2013, and is reaching more than 400 weekly in a town of 1,900 more than 20 percent of the population!
Up to this point, The Crossing had locations in two states, but living in an area near where three states come together produced a desire to add a location in Iowa. This desire to reach out was particularly powerful at The Crossing Macomb, our first multisite location. There came an opportunity to purchase a great building interest free in Keokuk, Iowa, a town of about 10,000. In addition to it being our first site in Iowa, it was also The Crossing’s first grandchild a multisite location planting another multisite location. While finances still came from a central source, the staff and volunteers for Keokuk were harvested from the Macomb location. The site launched on March 2, 2014, and averages nearly 500 weekly.
A question started forming in my mind about the limitations of our region, our ability to maintain relationships, and the use of technology to reproduce church. I considered the possibility of starting an Internet campus, a popular idea at many multisite churches but really too impersonal for me. I considered house churches, an idea that is flourishing in the rest of the world, but I was hesitant because of its tribal nature and tendency to get off track. Then I thought about putting those two ideas together. What if you could use technology to convey solid teaching in smaller environments, like houses, and release control to allow these new starts to become anything from Bible studies, to locations, to church planting seedlings? That idea led to Crossing.tv and a path we never saw coming.
Our first breakthrough came in the Illinois prison system, to which we donated the technology to broadcast church services on the inside. That’s what we called it . . . The Crossing Inside. At present, we are in seven prison locations and have plans for many more. The Crossing Inside is connected to our Celebrate Recovery program and helps inmates to transition to CR at one of our other locations. This technology also opened up opportunities to put
our services into group homes using our Apple TV and Roku channels. We call Crossing.tv/Inside our 10th location, but it’s actually lots of locations that we add together.
My hesitancy with an online format was short-lived as I could see literally hundreds of people coming to Christ and being baptized through the format. We responded to this by focusing more intently on improvements to our Internet presence. We now average nearly 4,000 people watching weekly in 110 cities on 6 continents! Our missionaries join with us online as well. We pre-produce a worship experience in a smaller setting, lead decision and a Communion time, and provide an opportunity to give online. A chat room leads people to private prayer rooms where they can receive counseling or answers to questions.
In 2017, an opportunity to purchase a camp in Rushville, Illinois, opened up. The site with 38 acres, two lakes, and 80,000 square feet of buildings is the finest I’ve ever seen. Our church previously had to rent camp space. Under the old system, the costs were extreme, the drive was too long for many of us, and the opportunities were limited. The Rushville facility was a good opportunity, as it accommodates more than 350 campers at one time, with the best amenities possible. We bought it.
As The Crossing looks to the future, we continue to have an “If you can dream it, you can do it!” mentality . . . and we are nowhere near done. At the time of this writing, we have launched tow of as many as seven new campuses from out of our present campuses, reproducing what God has done over and over again. In communities others would consider stagnant, The Crossing has been defining a new paradigm: the micropolitan church. Hundreds of people have come to Christ, more than 4,500 baptisms in the last five years, and the church looks to these new micropolitan multisite locations in a geographic area that reaches people from a 165-mile wide region but stretches to the very ends of the earth.
What Is Micropolitan?
A) a frozen dessert at TCBY
B) a popular magazine for young short women
C) a metro area in miniature
If you answered C, the U.S. Census Bureau would like to shake your hand.2 “Micropolitan” is a label the Census Bureau created in 2003 to describe population centers ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 that fill the gaps on the map between major cities. Micropolitan serves as a new way of looking at rural America and where it’s headed. That direction is something observers are still figuring out. It’s not yet clear whether they represent a new urban environment rising up from small towns or an improved version of rural America.
There are approximately 577 micropolitan communities in the United States. One in 10 Americans calls a micropolitan community home. Their existence and growth reflect a culture longing for something a little less metro . . . a place where the traffic is less insane, schools are better, faces are familiar, and where it’s easier to make community connections. At the same time, these areas offer amenities formerly available only in metro areas establishments like Lowe’s, Applebee’s, and of course, Walmart. Micropolitan communities have become hubs for rural people to shop, eat, get medical attention, or go to community college.
The POLICOM research firm ranks these communities using 23 types of data, including the number of jobs in a community, personal income, retail sales, construction figures, and welfare levels. In the three areas POLICOM ranks, and where The Crossing ministers, the rankings vary greatly. Quincy ranks at no. 158. Macomb, on the other hand, is no. 547, just 30 from the bottom. Kirksville, Missouri, is no. 494. Regardless of ranking or demographics, each community has a fingerprint all its own.
Inside that fingerprint is a virtually undiscovered potential to grow cuttingedge churches that can influence whole regions for Jesus Christ. Although micropolitan communities have limitations, these are easily outweighed by their strengths. It’s those strengths that can be exploited for the growth of the kingdom of God and give the church access to the 30 million or so people living in them that long for something that works for them spiritually.
Micropolitan communities are anything but typical. In Colorado, they might be getaway enclaves for upscale families built around recreation. In Arizona
or Florida, they might be retirement communities. Winchester, Virginia, was a small town of 20,000 in 1980. D.J. Chuang wrote, “Nothing to do except cruising and the purist medium vanilla cone at Pack’s Frozen Custard. Today, there is a new Starbucks just east of I-81. It sits amidst a giant strip mall with dozens of franchise stores. All the big brands are here now: Borders, Olive Garden, Circuit City, Five Guys, Maggie Moo, Target, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Quizno’s, and Red Hot & Blue. Of course, Wal-Mart has been here for years.” 3
Jack Schultz wrote Boomtown USA: The 71/2 Keys to Big Success in Small Towns. As the head of Agracel, an industrial development company based in Effingham, Illinois, Schultz recruits manufacturing and high-tech businesses to small towns he calls “agurbs.” He did it in his hometown of Effingham, a micropolitan area of more than 34,000 people. When the city lost major manufacturers, Schultz led an effort to build the 1.43-mile Effingham Railroad to connect two major rail lines. As a result, Krispy Kreme came to town. “We’re too small to have a Krispy Kreme store, but we’ve got their national manufacturing facility,” Schultz says. “People from large cities have the stereotype of small towns as being backward and not offering any advantages.” I think the advantages are plenty. Cheaper land, cheaper construction, lower labor rates, and a small-town quality of life.4 Of the Thomasville-Lexington, North Carolina, micropolitan community, he writes, “The message coming out of both this community and StatesvilleMooresville [North Carolina] is that both succeeded in the long run because they developed a strong manufacturing base. Companies feel comfortable going there because of the strong work ethic. But communities have to continually reinvent themselves. You can’t rest on your laurels. . . . You always have to proceed as though you are on the bottom of the heap.”
Schultz’s advice needs to be taken seriously by the church. The laurels many churches are resting on have gotten pretty old. Like communities, churches that want to make a difference must constantly reinvent themselves. A micropolitan community is a great place to do just that.5
Several years ago, Leadership Network invited U.S. churches with four or more campuses to participate in a survey. Colleen Pepper, who produced a report on the findings, said, “Given the prominence of churches like these, one might assume that the shift to multi-campus churches is happening only
in suburban areas. However, more than a third of survey respondents were from churches located outside the suburbs, including small towns, rural areas, and urban centers.
“Even more interesting, the survey suggests that churches in these areas may enjoy greater fruit. Respondents from suburban churches with four or more campuses reported an average of 141 percent growth since first going multisite compared with 202 percent growth at urban multisite churches, and a jaw dropping 412 percent at small town/rural multisite churches.” 6 This is good evidence that the percentages are stacked in favor of micropolitan multisite churches.
Ninety-eight percent of churches are not “mega” churches that average 2,000 or more weekly. Many churches are located in areas where “mega” models don’t quite fit. However, we keep buying books that discuss their models. The micropolitan church is a model for the rest of us . . . it’s a model for churches who are sold out to do whatever it takes to make a difference right where they are planted. So, from the heart of the Midwest, here are the steps The Crossing took to become that micropolitan church, along with some pitfalls to watch out for, and a listing of the benefits of taking the risks.
What Is A Micropolitan Church?
A micropolitan church is much more than merely a church that exists in a micropolitan community. It’s a church reflective of its community one which is taking the great attributes once afforded only to metropolitan or suburban churches and marrying them to the micropolitan environment. It’s a church that recognizes its incredible potential because of its location and which leverages its resources to turn its potential into reality.
What’s so special about a micropolitan church? It’s their environment that makes them unique. They really aren’t doing anything all that different than any other growing church. Relevant teaching, progressive worship, deep discipleship, and cutting-edge technology are not new concepts but it’s rare to find them at a church in a micropolitan area. It’s these advancing churches’ locations that make them special. Perhaps what sets them apart is the willingness to ask “why not?” Why not do what metropolitan churches
are doing? Why not be a megachurch in a small community? Why not be casual when everybody else is traditional? Why not establish multisites from one micropolitan area to another? Why not step out in extreme faith and make a huge investment in a distant community?
A micropolitan church, perhaps, is one that doesn’t know its place. There are certain expectations for churches in micropolitan communities. They are expected to be the “Bob Evans” of churches. You know, “The way it was is the way it is.” These communities expect sunrise services followed by pancake breakfasts. They expect hanging of the greens at Christmas. They expect church fans on hot days, carry-in dinners, and Communion to be served in glass cups. They expect the olive-green carpet and those sanctuary lights that look like giant hanging ashtrays. They expect the old lady playing the electric organ, the wooden board with the attendance numbers, and the “Doxology” sung after the offering is collected. You get the picture.
A true micropolitan church, however, is what you don’t expect . . . not here anyway. We’re the church where people come as they are, kids play the latest video game in the student area, and the programs have no established order of worship. We’re the church that helps someone recover from their meth addiction while teaching him to run a camera for worship services. We’re the church that realizes wearing jeans with holes in them doesn’t mean they’re worn out. We’re the church that understands that coffee can be served in more ways than with just cream or sugar.
Who Are Micropolitan People?
There is a reason people live where they do. A lot of it has to do with occupation. Some of it has to do with preference. For many, it is simply all they’ve ever known and they’re comfortable with it. A person a church must look beneath the surface of a community to understand what its needs are. Micropolitan churches need to target with a laser focus. Demographics go only so far in answering this question. Hearing the stories of people in the community, how they got there, their motivation for staying, and their plans for the future give a “feel” or texture for the community.
The stories below shed light on how people find themselves in micropolitan communities and a micropolitan church. For those who live in such communities, a progressive and attractive church is rare. Most micropolitan communities contain plenty of churches. What they don’t have is a church that takes an aggressive stance to reach the 80-plus percent of people in those communities who don’t or won’t go to church.
A company called Gardner Denver is moving Wade and Renee to their corporate offices in Quincy, Illinois. Wade’s career is taking a big leap forward as head of human resources. The rest of the family has a different take on the situation. Their daughter, Ainsley, 14, loves her dance troupe and is rebelling against leaving it . . . and losing all of her friends. Renee has her career in preschool education and her social group. Wade is definitely facing an uphill battle. Quincy has little to offer for a family that’s grown comfortable in suburban Atlanta.
The family is about nine months into the move when Wade has lunch with Aaron, one of the company’s marketing directors. After some surface conversation about the weather and football scores, Aaron asks how Wade’s family has been handling the move. Wade puts up a good front at first, but slowly begins to level. It’s been a tough transition. Renee isn’t complaining, but he can see she misses her relationships. He can feel the distance between them growing and he’s worried. Aaron invites Wade to a small-group Bible study at his home. Wade’s defenses go back up as if by reflex. When Aaron says his family goes to The Crossing, it rings a bell with Wade. That’s the church where their daughter Ainsley has been going. Her new friends at school invited her. The church’s student ministry has become her oasis in the desert. Wade thinks The Crossing could be a place where his family can come together again. It’s worth a try.
When he proposes the idea to his family, Ainsley lights up. Both Wade and Renee have some preconceived notions about church involving slick-haired preachers and women with platinum hair and too much makeup sitting in
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golden chairs asking for money. Their first Sunday is a shock. The building doesn’t even look like a church. The parking lot is packed, but a parking attendant greets them and helps them find a spot. They notice the people are relaxed; they’re wearing comfortable clothes. The couple walks past a place that looks like Starbucks and Renee grabs a designer coffee for $3. The worship experience really sets them back. The room looks more like a theater than a church. The chairs are comfortable. The music is contemporary with a leader in ripped jeans singing against a backdrop of haze, intelligent lighting, and video. The sermon is practical yet moving. Wade looks over to Renee and squeezes her hand. This was unexpected. Ainsley hides a big smile. Wade begins thinking of questions to ask Aaron.
There is a job opening at Pella Windows in Macomb, Illinois. For Ben and Ally, the move from Chicago would be a big one. The salary is pretty good, but the cost of living in Macomb is only a fraction of what they are used to paying. The university is close by, which would allow Ally to finish her degree. They can easily buy twice the house in Macomb as in the Windy City. If they make the move and then become homesick for their friends, it’s comforting to know an Amtrak ticket back to Chicago is only $25. The thought of reclaiming the 90 minutes a day Ben spends in his car going to and from work is appealing. They’re both convinced it would be a great place to put down roots and raise a family. The down side is that there isn’t much in the way of entertainment live theater, good movies, restaurant choices, shopping, and culture at least compared to Chicago.
The tour of Macomb doesn’t take long drive down Jackson Street and you’ve seen a lot of it. Not far from the Western Illinois University campus they pass what looks like a store; it has a big red and black sign that says, “The Crossing.” The Pella rep points at it and says, “That’s where we go to church. You need to give it a try. I wasn’t a church person, but that place is different.” Ally thinks it would be a perfect place to build some relationships; in Chicago, the couple had attended a church off and on.
Their first Sunday wasn’t what they expected. The technology reminded them of home. They could hardly believe a church in Macomb could be like this. They stopped by the connecting point and Ally asked for information
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about a small group. Ben asked about the thrift store next door. The guy manning the connecting point said that 100 percent of the money from the thrift store goes for benevolence in the community. Ben is impressed. The church is exceeding their expectations. Macomb is no Chicago, but maybe The Crossing could help fill in the gaps.
Joey was born and raised in Kirksville, Missouri. It’s been a good fit. He loves being an assistant coach for the high school football team. He’s dating a girl who goes to Truman State University in town. He’s renting a little bungalow close to the college. His parents and younger sister live across town, where they always have. “Across town” is only a 10-minute drive. His first love is guitar, but he’s never really had an outlet for his passion. Erica, his girlfriend, goes to the campus ministry sometimes, but it really didn’t trip Joey’s trigger.
A church called The Crossing bought the shoe factory on the hill on the south side of town. Everybody’s talking about it. The shoe factory had been closed for seven years. How could a church use all that space? People are wondering if they are a cult. It’s big news for a town like Kirksville . . . and the curiosity is more than Joey can take. Certainly it can’t hurt to check it out . . . just don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
There was no way Joey was going alone. Erica would know better how to handle this kind of place; she would run interference if someone tried to “convert” him. Although he liked what he saw when he walked in, it was what he heard that really captured him. The leader on the stage was shredding a vintage Gibson and it was . . . well . . . like butter! A couple of his friends caught his eye, and before he knew it, they were taking him to the worship leader to talk about playing. Erica was content to stand back and laugh to herself at God’s ability to find the one vulnerable place into Joey’s heart. Joey now leads prayer before the team goes out to play, and you can find him “bending the E string” at worship on Sundays.
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This is typical in our area of the country. While metropolitan and suburban areas have megachurches competing for churchgoers, micropolitan communities tend to be places where churches with the attributes of megachurches are hard to find. As a result, people who move into those communities must settle for what is there or quit going to church. Those who already live in those communities aren’t motivated to make a major life change by getting involved in a church that’s been worshipping the same way for decades. Even more alarming are the number of people who have attempted to integrate into a church only to be hurt by things that range from petty issues to child molestation. Studies show that less than 20 percent of people are attending church, and that number is shrinking.
Yet, the potential for the kingdom of God is more than we can imagine! When churches in micropolitan communities get serious about reaching the 80 percent of the people in their areas who are unchurched or underchurched, all sorts of opportunities will open for them.
Who Can Use Micropolitan Church?
The obvious targets of this book are those churches that already exist in the 577 micropolitan communities nationwide. By using and adapting ideas and models from churches like The Crossing, and by developing formerly unchurched people into excited and committed disciple-makers, these churches can become evangelical powerhouses. There is an ebb and flow to America’s population. At this point, the culture is generally becoming more urbanized. I say generally because we have missed the millions of people who aren’t longing for an urban lifestyle. Church growth experts and church planters are concentrating their efforts on following that general subset of the population the people in and around urban areas. However, 10 percent of the population is staying put. The cultural pendulum will be swinging back as it always does, probably in favor of less urban environments in the future. Dynamic micropolitan churches will be ready. In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities right in front of us.
But is the focus of this book too narrow? Is there just not enough market for this new paradigm? I don’t think anything could be further from the truth! Metropolitan communities can benefit from it, as well. I was talking to David
Ashcraft, senior pastor of Lives Changed by Christ Church, a multisite church of 16,000 in eastern Pennsylvania. David and his team want to have 100 locations throughout the state! The problem is that their locations cost about $8 million apiece. David came to The Crossing to see how we were establishing new sites so cheaply and whether we were sacrificing our DNA in the process. Many of the towns the LCBC team want to invest in are smaller and require a resizing of their model. When David brought his team to Quincy and visited the locations, they discovered a way to reduce costs by 75 percent, quadrupling their financial effectiveness!
Tommy Politz brought his team to Quincy for the same reasons. Hillside Church is a church of more than 10,000 based in Amarillo, Texas; it has multisites, as well, but Tommy is looking to get into the flyover towns. Steve Gillen, multisite director and campus pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, told me they were looking for a fresh model for communities around west-central Chicagoland, as people were struggling to get to their South Barrington campus. Steve had gone to college in Kirksville. Hearing about The Crossing’s success there encouraged him to look more closely at adapting the micropolitan model for areas surrounding Willow Creek.
Let’s not stop there. I spent 11 years ministering in a rural community of 900 people. I frequently attended conferences and seminars featuring megachurch speakers from metropolitan communities. It was more disheartening than encouraging. The gap between where they were and where I ministered was just too wide. They had big budgets, big talent, big everything. It just wasn’t adaptable to where I was working. In his book Church Is a Team Sport, Jim Putman, senior pastor at Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho, says he had similar feelings at the beginning of his ministry. Since he couldn’t replicate what he saw at a successful megachurch, Jim was forced to ask himself, “What can I do well?” The journey to find the answer to that question propelled Jim and Real Life Ministries to become one of the fastest-growing and successful churches in the country; attendance is approaching 6,000, and other Real Life churches have been planted in the region that reach another 4,000 weekly! Why do I tell you this? Post Falls, Idaho, is a micropolitan community of 40,000. That means nearly 1 of every 6 or 7 people in that area attends Real Life. Rural churches find it difficult to re-create successful models of metropolitan megachurches because their approach just isn’t adaptable. Micropolitan Church is showing them a model a lot closer to
where they are. If you minister in a community of far fewer than 10,000, it’s not nearly as big a leap to consider a model provided by a church located in a community of 10,000 to 50,000.
Here’s what I’m saying: I think almost any church in any setting can use this model. The benefits are awesome.
What Are The Benefits Of Being Micropolitan?
1. The most profound benefit of a cutting-edge micropolitan church is its influence on the community. Even a monster megachurch of 20,000 has only a marginal influence in a metropolitan area. Churches of that size, in that setting, go virtually unnoticed by the prevailing culture most of the time. Not so with a micropolitan megachurch. They not only have an influence, they are also community shapers. The Crossing’s metric of influence is measured by the percentage of the community’s population that attends the church. Our goal is to reach 10 percent of the population in every community. We are presently at 7.8 percent.
It is truly an eye-opening experience to walk into a McDonald’s and notice two or three people from among the 40 eating there who are from our church. It is that way everywhere in town because our church population is such a large subset of the population as a whole.
Many doors open in a community when the church has such a large footprint. While distance grows between the micropolitan church and other community churches, it narrows with regard to the targeted 80 percent who don’t attend anywhere. Our church is now featured in the guide produced by the Quincy Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. We are seen as an asset to the community. The police department trains in our building, the emergency management agency uses us for a shelter, the high school uses our facility for graduation and football practice, and the largest dance academy does its recitals here. The local bank did a full-page spread highlighting the Macomb staff for banking with them.
Each door we walk through exposes more people to our unexpected atmosphere. We have access to the mayor’s office, the community college
president’s office, the sheriff, the chief of police, and the head of the planning commission. Because smaller communities are tighter knit, who you know is often much more important than what you know. Since our desire is to impact who we know in the community, those open doors make all the difference.
Leadership is sometimes defined as taking people to a place they would never go by themselves. In a micropolitan community, a church like this will get noticed even by the 80 percent who have disregarded the church. It will be noticed (and not be appreciated) by the other churches. We have often heard words like cult and shallow associated with our approach. Such criticisms come almost exclusively from the traditional church community . . . not the 80 percent. Since our desire is to reach the unchurched and underchurched, we disregard it. Our style of church won’t be a fit for everybody, but it is amazing to see how many people do find their way in.
2. Most ideas that are slightly old, as viewed by metropolitan churchgoers, are totally fresh when rolled out at micropolitan churches. Resources from proven programs are plentiful. Technologies that once were quite expensive are now easily affordable and much more user friendly. The disparity between a technologically informed church and a typical traditional church is breathtaking. A church that is tech-savvy is in touch with the culture because it uses tools people in the workplace are using. The community will connect the dots between technological relevance and the church understanding where they are.
Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun. It has always been beneficial to stay informed of what cutting-edge churches in metropolitan and suburban areas are doing in order to glean ideas that we can adapt for use in our setting. We’ve discovered such churches are rarely frugal with regard to innovation, but our creative team has figured out ways to adapt their approaches in an affordable manner. Our first projection screens were canvas drop cloths stretched over homemade wood frames. We saw a circular screen once and duplicated it by getting a used trampoline and painting the mat with white projection paint. We built a 54-foot wide waterfall on stage by using two-by-four framing, drop cloths, PVC pipe, and two sump pumps.
Innovative ideas for video technology, lighting, aesthetics, curriculum, software, and buildings can easily be found. A micropolitan church that’s a step or two behind what a big-city megachurch is doing will be way out front of most of the churches in its area. When we saw the children’s areas at Lifechurch.tv in Oklahoma City, we had to pray to repent of our coveting. Their wall murals had a Disney World feel. A person on our staff knew someone in South Africa who could paint with the same expertise. We flew him over, and after about a month and for a fraction of the cost we had an environment every bit as awesome.
We also saw their church’s computerized check-in system for children. This may be common now, but it was cutting edge when we adopted it. We knew it would make unchurched families feel much more secure about dropping off their children. None of the small churches in our community do anything like this. They trust each other because they all know each other. This isn’t true with the unchurched population the 80 percent. We have to establish trust with those folks, and that takes time. But when a child is crying at pickup time because she has to leave, the mission has been accomplished.
A child was injured in the local McDonald’s play area, and so the restaurant decided to remove the apparatus. Since some of our folks work there, we were among the first to hear about it. We offered to write McDonald’s a tax exemption letter for the play equipment, plus provide the labor to remove it. Now church kids play on it. Wendy’s decided to remodel and didn’t want their salad bar. We got that too. Western Illinois University decided to update its lobby furniture. We bought 71 overstuffed lobby chairs for $1 each. A church that positions itself as ours opens doors for opportunities that cost little or no money. Traditional churches likely wouldn’t give play places, ball pits, salad bars, and such a second thought.
As staff members watch these ideas become realities, they will be filled with ideas to transform certain areas of the building. Although we may not have the ultra-professional look of metropolitan megachurches, there is no competition in our micropolitan area.
3. Micropolitan churches like ours target the unaffected and disconnected. Such churches are an appealing option to people who have been hurt in a previous church experience because the difference is so
apparent. The majority of micropolitan populations are not “connected.” They are not part of the country club set or linked to the old money in the community. They are looking for a place to fit in. While the cultural establishment may not know how to take the micropolitan church, those who find it, love it.
I once heard a commercial for a local church on a Christian radio station. The ad said if you were looking to join a church with stable families, you should try theirs. I still remember how that word hit me. If there is one thing the ministry has taught me, families and individuals are seldom stable. The Crossing wants the unstable. We want the sick to find the Physician, the broken to find the Carpenter, the ruined to find the Counselor and we are serious about that.
All of our campuses have a Celebrate Recovery program. Representatives of those programs are at every service to connect with people who might need to talk to a friend or see a familiar face. Each campus has a thrift store to provide inexpensive solutions for those in need. If the person or family can’t afford anything, we provide a voucher for their needs. We take the time to counsel with them and help them connect with a small group. Every cent of the money received in our thrift stores goes to local benevolence. Each store generates almost $250,000 after expenses per year to help people in the communities. Each store employs about seven full- and part-time employees who need jobs. The stores offer a different way for our church to give besides money in the collection plate. This missional approach gets our people involved in community for Christ and opens their eyes to its needs.
The micropolitan church is also a great place to build connections with others. Most churches do things the way they’ve always done them in a safe and predictable fashion. People know what’s coming next in the service, the words to the songs, and the faces of the people around them. The 80 percent don’t know where to go, what to do, or who the people are. The micropolitan church puts them at ease before they park their car. There is constant reinforcement around every corner and through every door. The people who are new to church don’t feel like intruders; instead, they feel welcomed and appreciated. I’ve seen churches ask visitors to stand up during the service the guests are given no space or anonymity. We choose, instead, to make the regular attender a little less comfortable.
There is no order of worship, the songs change regularly, and no one knows what to expect. We are always thinking of ways to level the playing field. Megachurches figured this out long ago, but churches in micropolitan areas haven’t. It is an incredible opportunity.
4. Micropolitan communities often are economically depressed, so buildings and land can be purchased at bargain prices. The church can revitalize a vacant building and bring new beauty to the community. Plus, planning commissions are favorably inclined to churches pumping cash into a depressed economy.
When The Crossing purchased the John Wood Community College campus, it was a turning point. The community noticed it. Even though it was a prime location, the building was just too large and nonstandard for many uses. It was going to be difficult to sell. The college was very motivated to work with us, and provided shared space, a lease to purchase, help with financing, and even furniture.
When The Crossing extended its reach 60 miles northeast to Macomb, we quickly found an empty 56,000-square-foot building once used as a grocery store. It was on the city’s main street and was very close to Western Illinois University. It had 300 parking places and six acres of property. It had been on the market for six years in the depressed community. There was no buyer and no sale, until we purchased it for $750,000. That’s $13.40 per square foot, not including the land or parking. We spent another $750,000 to turn it into a church. That means a cutting-edge church in Macomb cost less than $27 a square foot!
In Kirksville, we found an empty shoe factory sitting atop a hill south of town on 19 beautiful acres of land. The building was 106,000 square feet, much more than we needed. The property also had more than 300 parking places. It had been sitting empty for eight years. We were able to purchase it for $500,000. We offered a tax break to the owner against the property’s appraised value to get it for that price. Total cost was less than $5 per foot. We spent just under $1 million rehabilitating it. Once again, we secured a cutting-edge building for very little money. Both Macomb and Kirksville had plenty of room left over for our thrift stores.
Both communities were happy to work with us to revitalize these properties; they streamlined regulations and gave us breaks. We used local contractors for much of the work, which pumped money into the local economy. While existing buildings and property in metropolitan or suburban areas can carry astronomical prices, and new construction on purchased property can easily cost more than $200 per square foot, micropolitan properties are a wellspring of opportunity. There also is substantially less red tape. Micropolitan communities are much more likely to take seriously a church that is willing to make such a substantial investment in their area. At the very least, it will make them curious.
In Hannibal, a dilapidated theater that had once been the jewel of the town had fallen into sad disrepair. The structure and its history were a reflection of many lives in Hannibal; what once had been full of beauty and hope had been reduced to a wreck over time and misuse. The revitalization of the building and its use as a church is an illustration of what Jesus can do to a life, making it even better than it was before. Each location tells a story, but all of the stories point to the One who can make everything new.
5. Micropolitan church buildings can be valuable resources for communities. These church buildings may very well be the largest, most technologically advanced, and comfortable venues in the area. People will want to use the building and/or auditorium for dance recitals, concerts, and other functions. This gives the church a built-in way to make a good, nonthreatening first impression. Micropolitan communities often have holes that the church can fill using the arts, music, and culture. Micropolitan churches can become hubs for community activity by offering use of their buildings to fit the community’s needs. We are currently building an indoor sports facility, featuring youth soccer fields, in the unused 60,000 square feet at Kirksville. The local university donated the turf valued at $1 million when they received a grant for new turf. Community life creates a context for conversions and relationships.
When we were planning to introduce our vision to Macomb, we had a difficult time just finding a place to meet. We tried to rent a place before we purchased, but were shut out. These experiences taught us about the absence of good community meeting areas, especially larger settings. Even if a meeting area can be found, technology may be nonexistent. We saw this as
an incredible opportunity. When storms or other natural disasters have occurred, The Crossing has taken an aggressive approach to meeting the community’s needs. In Kirksville, furniture was stored at our church after a tornado hit the town and surrounding areas. Parking lots at many of our locations have served as staging areas for electric companies to restore power. Church volunteers serve food and provide shelter for people in need.
We’ve even allowed other churches to use our facilities, as their bolted-down furniture and traditional environments don’t lend themselves to some functions. We have hosted seminars for insurance and investment agencies and brokers. Our locations have been used for all sorts of community functions. We benefit through charging rental rates while, at the same time, exposing our church facilities to some people who otherwise might never have darkened the door. One local dance academy was so thrilled with our technology and our helpful technicians that they offered to purchase additional equipment that we could keep so they could use it for their recitals.
Once again, we have found common ground with our communities. They have a favorable attitude toward us, and they consider us to be a part of the fabric of the community. They are often surprised because our building doesn’t fit their preconceived notion of what a church should look like.
6. Dynamic micropolitan churches get plenty of free media attention. Micropolitan communities are limited in the number of exciting and new things that are happening. So, if your church is taking part in a lot of newsworthy things, it will receive plenty of free advertising from a curious newspaper or television station. Word of mouth travels fast in micropolitan areas, and the power of invitation is greatly magnified.
Our negotiations to purchase the community college in Quincy was big news. We were interviewed by local television stations and appeared on the front page of the local newspaper multiple times. We are frequently contacted to give a church-based opinion about a current event. When our Macomb location was being renovated, it was on the front pages of local newspapers six times before ever opening. We stationed volunteers at the church to give building tours to curious community members. Visitors are encouraged to ask questions. Word of mouth travels fast across a small town. A church in a
metropolitan area likely needs to advertise to be noticed, but that’s just not necessary in a micropolitan area. Excitement and curiosity for church is built in.
7. Micropolitan churches can make a big splash very quickly. If they break far enough away from the pack of traditional churches, they will quickly stand alone as the church for the 80 percent. Even better, the micropolitan church will hold a monopoly on their new position. That’s because inertia is so strong and overwhelming at traditional churches, where great amounts of time and effort are required even to change small things. Since American culture is reinventing itself every two years, it’s very hard, almost impossible, for traditional churches to catch up.
Macomb launched with nearly 900 people on its first Sunday. About 500 of them were from Quincy. As the Quincy people began to tail off, Macomb declined to about 450 before growth kicked in; attendance reached 800 in less than 18 months. The fact is, The Crossing Macomb launched as the largest church in the area on that first Sunday, and it has continued as both the largest church and the one with the most community influence. Where else in the United States does this happen? Where else in America can so much be accomplished for comparatively so little?
I recently attended a meeting of a church-planting group in Bolingbrook, Illinois. The organizer was looking for some of the large churches in the state to make a big investment in the South Loop of Chicago. They talked about the metro area’s needs and the requirements it would take to establish a church to serve it. I remember the organizer stating that if the new church were averaging 200 within three years, it would be an awesome success. People at the table were asked to commit to supporting the work financially. I already had a better alternative. For the money they were planning to spend, I could place micropolitan churches in four communities and have each of them running at 500 in attendance from day one. It wasn’t a difficult decision for me. While I think it would be great to have another church in Chicago and that the project did indeed sound more glamorous a micropolitan community is a more fertile field . . . and micropolitan areas are still going unnoticed.
A year after that meeting, Kirksville launched with almost 600 in attendance. They bottomed out at about 400 after six months, and now they are running 600 again, as the largest church in their area from day one. This phenomenal establishment and growth is happening in areas that remain overlooked.
Megachurch-minded people like living in metropolitan areas, but those who are hungry to really make a difference, and to do it quickly, need to take a fresh look at a well that is 30 million people deep.
Churches seem to be built with an inability to move quickly. Bylaws and board meetings trump an aggressive approach. There are just too many obstacles to change for those churches to accomplish anything substantial. This is especially the case for established churches in micropolitan communities. I bring this up because it will be hard for many existing churches in micropolitan communities to imitate our success. There has to be a special chemistry for it to work.
8. All that said, a micropolitan church is a reproducible model. It can be transplanted with multisite technology to other micropolitan locations in the region. Soon, a micropolitan church can claim an entire region as its own. While metropolitan areas might tire of franchises like Starbucks, micropolitan communities love a new franchise coming to town. It legitimizes the area as having “arrived.”
Today’s technology and the acceptance and use of that technology in every other area of society has opened incredible doors for the church. Not only is it available, it is affordable. I remember when churches first started having multiple services. It was resisted because some felt each service would develop its own personality and the church family would be split apart. Resistance eventually gave way to acceptance to those who wanted to maximize their facilities. The church-growth movement ran parallel to ideas like that. It lifted a lid to growth as churches transcended time.
The multisite movement is very similar. Instead of transcending time, we transcend space. Through multisite technology, we can be in more than one place at the same time. Conventionally, it has been used for multiple venues
within the same location and to add a church venue in a different part of town.
The micropolitan model coupled with multisite is an exponential leap. It represents a regional approach to doing ministry and can be used to blanket a huge area. Now, in our vision discussions, we talk about which time zone people are in. While many multisites choose to use recorded technology, The Crossing does most of its services live because we feel there is real value in doing that. It makes the multisite venue feel truly connected. And, as will be discussed later, a live broadcast is affordable and relatively easy to do.
Much of what The Crossing does is exportable. We pre-produce all the materials that our other venues need for early childhood, children, and students. Everything they need for teaching, worship, stage technology, crafts, music, and small groups is packaged and boxed. We provide everything to help transform a volunteer into an incredible leader. We share resources and staff as well. It makes for much better use of our resources and maximizes their impact. Many things that work well don’t need to be reinvented. Staff and leaders understand they are part of something that is making a major difference in a large area. There is plenty of coaching and cooperation available. We have discovered that the Scripture, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12), applies to churches as well as individuals.
9. Dynamic micropolitan churches are evangelistic magnets. Progressive worship, relevant teaching, great experiences for children, and the edgy atmosphere are very attractive to the unchurched. People feel comfortable in an atmosphere where everyone is new. Micropolitans are virtually untapped by most modern and postmodern evangelistic methods. Be prepared for perperson giving to be much lower, but victories to be much higher. As Jesus does his work, you will be flooded with stories of transformation. Transfer growth from other churches usually consists of those who share your church’s evangelistic vision but are frustrated because they have no outlet for it. Couple that with a decentralized multisite approach, and it becomes far more tribal and relational.
Since the church is targeting the 80 percent who have no church, those are the folks who come. The micropolitan church has found a tremendous need
in the community, a deep well to draw from, and stands alone to reap the benefit. Over the last five years, The Crossing has baptized more than 4,500 people . . . mostly adults. In America, that is an impressive number. I urge you to go to usa.com and look up Quincy, Illinois. (Usa.com formerly citydata.com is the best demographic resource I have found.) If you scroll down to the religious data, you will see the impact The Crossing had from 2000 to 2010. This borrows from the U.S. Census taken every 10 years. Look at the lines that compare evangelicals and the “nones” (people who claim no religious affiliation). With the exception of The Crossing, the religious landscape of Quincy has remained unchanged for those years. There are the same number of churches, and there are no other rapidly growing churches in the area (besides The Crossing), but look what has happened! The trend has completely reversed! The “nones” are in sharp decline and the evangelicals have risen greatly. I can’t wait to see what these graphs look like in 2020 when we get a picture of the changes in the other communities we are in!
The micropolitan church focuses its efforts in five areas. None of these areas is new, but the way they look in a micropolitan setting needs to be understood. Each one is critical to the DNA of this model. These five components comprise our unique spiritual DNA at The Crossing.
Think Leadership
This is one of my favorite Bible verses on church leadership:
“He chose David his servant and took him from the sheep pens; from tending the sheep he brought him to be the shepherd of his people Jacob, of Israel his inheritance. And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; with skillful hands he led them” (Psalm 78:70-72).
These verses speak to the two most important concepts a pastor must possess: leadership and humility. Humble leadership is an oxymoron of sorts. It takes a certain amount of pride and arrogance to believe one possesses a worthy vision, let alone seek to impose it on others to see that it’s carried out. These verses point out that David’s calling never changed, he just shepherded
H O W T O T H I N K M I C R O P O L I T A N
C H A P T E R 2
a different flock of sheep! Moving from the shepherd’s fields to a palace in Jerusalem was a change in backdrop for the same responsibility. The lions and bears were replaced with invading armies and internal uprisings, but David’s job remained this: watch over and protect the sheep. David chose humility instead of pomp and circumstance, even as he danced before the Lord with all of his might as the Ark of the Covenant approached Jerusalem. David’s attitude was critical for maintaining humility while leading, especially in times of success.
The second part of the text refers to the two most important tools required in a leader worth following: a heart of integrity and skillful hands. For a leader, these two attributes mustn’t be allowed to exist apart from each other. We all know some incredibly skillful leaders who could preach, teach, cast vision, raise money, and motivate people, but who imploded because of integrity issues. Let’s not forget the subject of these verses. David was a leader with skills no one could dispute that fact. He was an incredible decision maker and strategist; he could build confidence in others; he was incredibly loyal and wise; and he surrounded himself with other great leaders. But his failure with Bathsheba set a course for his life that canceled out much of his greatness. Isn’t it amazing how much skill can be canceled out by just one major failure? That is the nature of integrity: it generates so much strength, but it is only as strong as the first big failure. I know some pastors with great character but not a great amount of skill. People may admire them but are unlikely to follow them into the dangerous waters of change or opposition.
Micropolitan communities need great leaders defined by these two qualities: skill and integrity. Humility builds a perfect foundation for integrity. When we get a high opinion of ourselves believing our own press, so to speak it seems we start writing ourselves permission slips for things better left alone.
At The Crossing, I succeeded a skillful leader who had accomplished some groundbreaking things. He was lacking in humility, however, and found himself caught up in compromises of integrity that eventually led him into sexual misconduct. After arriving in Quincy, the first thing I did was rearrange the offices so that anyone coming to see me had to pass by my assistant. I had windows installed in all office doors and established a morality policy that any future employees would have to agree to and sign. When we compromise on integrity, it puts the most valuable things in our
lives at risk. Paul warned the Ephesians, “But among you there must not even be hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (Ephesians 5:3). A high level of integrity is the proper foundation for the skills a leader will need in a micropolitan church.
You probably own a number of great books about this subject. These ideas are nothing new. Just see them in the light of a different setting.
I need to ask a series of questions. How you answer will determine whether or not you have the basic building blocks of a micropolitan church.
Q U E S T I O N 1 : I S T H E R E A L E A D E R ?
Churches in micropolitan communities struggle to find or develop leaders . . . or maybe I should say “true leaders.” There is no shortage of people who wear the badge of leadership. We have pastors, elders, deacons, trustees, superintendents, and committee chairman. Are you ready for a moment of truth? How many of those positions are occupied by “true leaders”? I guess that’s a term we need to define.
“Leadership is taking people to a place they would never have gone to by themselves.” You see, without a true leader, these churches aren’t going anywhere. The people wearing the badges of leadership are dug in and defending their ground. Stated succinctly: “Leaders lead!” Most churches in micropolitan communities are stalled because they have plenty of people called “leaders” filling roles established years ago for the right reasons but which still remain for only one purpose: to maintain what already exists. A definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different result. Churches in micropolitan communities that resist change are staring down the barrel of their own mortality.
While resistance to change is something any church can identify with, it is more pronounced in a micropolitan community. Churches in such settings experience more inertia . . . they feel more resistance to change than those in urban or metropolitan areas. Micropolitan communities that resist change become less relevant as businesses, jobs, and people move out. That brings
decline. The church that doesn’t embrace change stands to suffer the same fate as the community it serves. The change that is so desperately needed in a church requires a “true leader” to bring it about.
If there is no leader to cast a vision, a church can find itself in turbulent waters. When this topic is discussed, we often hear Proverbs 29:18 quoted: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (King James Version). A modern translation says, “Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint.” Consider that word, restraint. It typically is seen as a negative word; its use here, however, suggests that when we forget why we’re doing something, it no longer restrains us. Restraint is a good thing when it holds us to what we’ve pledged to do. We are restrained by our Master to fulfill his Great Commandment and Great Commission.
Paul embraced this concept of restraint by calling himself a doulos, meaning a slave for life and a slave by choice. When our model becomes ineffective, we must remember that we are restrained to Christ’s mission. When many years pass by without any change, we can become restrained to the wrong things and forget the whole reason we exist. In many churches in micropolitan communities, tradition has become the mission. A visionary leader will call attention to the changes so desperately needed to keep the mission primary. The book of Judges offers a sobering commentary on what happens when the people of God are without an effective leader. The book ends with this passage, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit” (Judges 21:25).
Even when a church in a micropolitan community has a true leader, there will be much turbulence ahead. Visionary leaders face many challenges even in healthy environments. Leadership that moves the church to change is seldom comfortable and almost never easy. Policies and structures will be adjusted or abandoned. Key positions will be established, while others will be replaced or removed. It’s best to make changes in healthy times, but institutional inertia and the success of years gone by can make that unlikely; existing leaders tend to take the approach, “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” By the time many churches find the stomach to change, they are pretty far gone. Like a terminal cancer patient, they are willing to grasp for life with experimental treatments.
In his great little book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins discusses the downward spiral that leads once successful businesses to capitulation and death. His research shows that in efforts to reverse the fall, companies make sweeping changes. However, by the time they do so, they are over leveraged in the opposite direction and not healthy enough to manage the massive changes.
Any change is best accomplished in smaller increments. Driving even on a straight road requires constant corrections at the wheel. It may seem you’re going straight, but careful examination reveals a long line of small corrections. By contrast, most of us have been distracted while driving only to be frantically forced into a major correction and a very dangerous situation. Big change divided up into lots of smaller, more manageable adjustments is a healthy strategy for churches.
I’ve heard it said, “Leadership is making people uncomfortable at a rate that they can tolerate.” What does this mean for a “true leader”? If you are in a church in a micropolitan community that wants to change, do you have the patience for it? If you are contemplating going to such a church and implementing change, consider what already exists. Sometimes pastors use the same logic as a misguided fiancée who thinks, After we ’ re married, I’ll get my spouse to change that behavior. It’s not something to bet your marriage or your career on.
When interviewing with a church in a micropolitan community, a minister should find out what the church is, and isn’t, open to changing. Make an assessment of what is needed before accepting a position, and have a frank discussion about specifics with existing leaders. “Can we get rid of the pews, the pulpit, the choir loft, the choir, the choir director, the organ, the organist, the order of worship, the Communion table? . . . What about the bylaws?” Existing leaders will talk a great game about their desire for growth, but when specific changes are discussed, you’ll get more honest answers.
These are reasons The Crossing likes to establish new churches in micropolitan areas. It’s like a painter creating on a blank canvas the absence of established traditions grants a freedom to explore edgy styles and methods. In his incredible book Leadership Pain, Sam Chand explored the relationship between growth and pain. To summarize: There is no growth
without change, no change without loss, and no loss without pain. Leaders are change agents who move their church in the direction of growth, helping them overcome the pain of it.
Q U E S T I O N 2 : I S T H E R E A V I S I O N ?
A prominent church leader told a story about a member who was frustrated with his pastor’s lack of vision. Exasperated, the church member declared, “Just put a target on the wall . . . any target on any wall!” People need to experience purpose in their relationship with Christ, and effective leaders must set goals that reflect their vision and establish that purpose. I’m not saying vision is as simple as filling in a blank. Vision isn’t an afterthought. A leader’s vision for the church is the most important tool he possesses in living out his call to ministry. A vision is something you get married to. It’s going to define you. It finishes statements like, “We are the church that. . . . ” Vision is not building a building or adopting a new worship style or marketing strategy. Vision is revelatory! It’s a God-given conviction that gives purpose to the position of leadership.
I had been in ministry for 15 years before ever going through an Experiencing God workbook and class. I thought I was “doing it right.” If someone would have asked me my vision, I could have come up with a good answer. Outside of simple obedience, I don’t think any particular vision was driving me. But as I plowed through that workbook, something very personal and powerful occurred. I began to realize Christians were going through their entire lives without ever understanding they could have an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
The words stuck inside my heart: intimate personal relationship . . with Jesus Christ. I saw Christian people committed to going through the motions, adept at putting up a front but missing out on deep change. That study started a vision in me to break down every barrier standing between every person and that intimate, personal relationship with Jesus. I knew that couldn’t happen by continuing to do business as usual. It required change.
I cast the vision before the elders of my church. I remember saying, “We have to do whatever it takes to help people find an intimate personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Just considering the kind of changes in the
church that would be necessary to remove those barriers was enough to give the elders pause. After a while, I came to understand it wouldn’t be possible to make the necessary changes to realize that vision at that particular church. But with that vision inside me, I wasn’t going to be able to honor God doing business as usual. If a vision is revelatory, nothing will stop it. For me, it meant moving from an 11-year ministry to a new location in a desire to carry out that vision.
A lot of great things have happened at The Crossing in the years since, and every one of them has been driven by that vision. All I want is to help people develop an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Micropolitan wasn’t, and isn’t, the vision. Megachurch, multisite, missional none of these is the vision. These things are just the means or method of achieving the vision God gave me. They are connected to the vision because they give form and function to it. They are the mechanisms that make the vision a reality. A vision is what sums us up.
If you aren’t passionate about your vision, you don’t have a vision. Passion is what validates your investment into your vision. Passion is why God inspired John to put the word so in front of loved in John 3:16. Passion is what caused the Father to see the prodigal son while he was still a long way off and to run to him. Passion is what holds your commitment to something when logic and reason fail you. Passion is preoccupying. Your mind constantly runs back to it. It takes effort to think about anything else. Passion is personal. It attaches itself to your identity and it becomes self-defining. Passion is emotional. It’s hard to talk about it without inflection in your voice or getting caught up in hyperbole. Passion is powerful. It sends out a wake, as from a great ship, that people get caught up in. When a vision is doused with passion, you’re getting pretty close to creating a roaring fire.
A church service should be filled with passion. I’ve often said, “How can someone be in the presence of God and stay the same?” And yet, there are plenty of people that don’t change at all. Maybe there is unresolved sin, divided attention, or a closed-off heart blocking God’s presence. But maybe
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the fault lies with those of us who call ourselves leaders. Maybe we’ve lost our passion.
Ephesus was a passionate church in the midst of a passionate people. The picture of the church’s elders weeping over Paul in Acts 20 is riveting. If you could choose to be a member of any New Testament church, Ephesus would be hard to beat. They were doing it right, as was revealed so brilliantly in Paul’s letter to them. Paul stayed there two years that’s longer than anywhere else. Later, John used Ephesus as a base of operations for managing all the churches of Asia Minor. Jesus’ mother actually lived there. The church there became a critical metropolitan hub for infant Christianity.
By the end of the first century, however, when the church is approaching 50 years old, something has changed. The church at Ephesus still looks great from the outside, as she obediently goes through the motions, but something essential is missing. According to Revelation 2:4-6, the church at Ephesus has lost her first love . . . her passion. Jesus makes it clear that there really is no point in existing without passion.
What a perfect picture of so many churches in micropolitan communities. They are still healthy, somewhat effective, and obedient to a fault, but many churches in micropolitan areas have lost the passionate vision they once had. Vision has been replaced by tradition, and passion has been replaced by obedient maintenance.
To illustrate this point, I planned a sermon to be interrupted by dimming lights, soft music, a disco ball, and a couple in tuxedo and gown dancing quite formally to “The Very Thought of You.” I acted as if I’d been interrupted and told them to sit down. The couple were lost in each other’s eyes and completely ignored me. As I complained, a church member yelled at me to sit down! When the song was over, the couple strolled away, still holding hands and gazing into one another’s eyes. When I returned to the sermon, I said Jesus desires love that is captivating, preoccupying, and passionate. Passion rekindles the flame in our hearts for Jesus and his mission. As with the Ephesian church, our vision is pointless without passion.
When we were dreaming of starting a Crossing campus in Macomb, Illinois, I took our pastoral staff there to survey possible locations. While there, we sat down to eat at a Mexican restaurant as the place continued to fill up with the lunch crowd: businesspeople, students taking a break from campus food, families, and so on. While we waited for our order to arrive, I told the staff to look around and imagine how many of those people were members of our church and just didn’t know it yet. How many marriages and families were going to be saved, how many victories over addictions, and how many students forever changed were in that room? There was something epic and dramatic about seeing it that way. It was like seeing it with God’s eyes. When leaders are passionately preoccupied with their vision, they always look for opportunities to communicate it.
Vision is effectively communicated when ownership of the vision transfers to those receiving it. An effective communicator will frame the vision in contexts familiar to the receiver. This is illustrated dramatically in the preaching event.
I believe the best sermons people hear are the ones they don’t hear. Let me explain. We all believe the Holy Spirit is working in the Word of God as it is delivered, but I see something more. As I preach, the congregation listens, but each one is listening with their own set of circumstances, challenges, and emotions. As each person listens, something trips in their mind. Maybe it’s a word or a phrase, but then a thought occurs to them. Suddenly, they attach that thought to a personal experience. They aren’t listening to me anymore. The Holy Spirit has taken control. This moment is the richest because something new is attaching itself to the soul of the listener. The experience runs its course, and the listener finds the on-ramp back into the sermon. Before long, another trigger starts the next rich moment.
After sermons, people have come up to me and shared a point that affected them deeply but I never said what they thought they heard. What’s happened? The listener, through the power of the Holy Spirit, has made the sermon theirs. The sermon they heard may not be precisely the one I gave (or the one you preached, perhaps), but that’s not really important. The important
Q U E S T I O N 4 : C A N Y O U C O M M U N I C A T E Y O U R V I S I O N ?
thing is what happened between them and God . . . something intimate, personal, and relational.
The same thing is needed when communicating vision. The listener gets caught up in the power and passion of the vision. The most effective ideas we can communicate are the ones the receiver considers their own. The best leaders have learned to be comfortable with adjustments to means and methods, or with entirely new ones. Remember, the vision hasn’t changed, just the way it is carried out.
Very few things at our church look as I imagined they would. Instead, they look a lot better. While I’m willing to die on a hill for the vision, I get excited about leaders around me who adjust the means and methods and make that vision their own. If the leader has everything figured out beforehand, he likely will fail to capitalize on a great opportunity of developing the leaders around him. Everybody owns the vision through the means and methods they’ve developed to achieve it. Everyone shares in the vision’s success. Everyone realizes that only Jesus works through the body of Christ like this.
A passionate vision is expressed in core values, and these values are critical in aligning the leader and his people with the vision. Craig Groeschel’s leadership podcast on core values is the best resource I’ve found for this.
At one time, early on, I realized our church’s mission had been clearly communicated and transferred, but our core values the means with which we seek to accomplish that mission had not. My mistake was thinking that it was enough that I knew the core values. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As a staff, we fashioned those core values into short, life-giving statements and communicated them over and over. It was amazing how the congregation received them and how it aligned our church in so many ways. Now, when we discuss some new idea or plan, the first question we ask is whether or not it follows our core values. Core values are what we do, not what we wish we did. I would love to add more core values, but there must be honesty in that process. It doesn’t become a core value until after you do it and do it well.
When a vision is communicated effectively, people are drawn to the vision and not just the leader. This is best for the kingdom of God. This may sound like a contradiction, because a passionate vision is personal, but a great
leader gets people to focus on the vision itself. Churches centered on a vision will be much healthier than churches centered on a leader’s personality. Allowing the focus to rest on the leader is ultimately and invariably destructive. Leaders are human, and humans can’t help but make mistakes, be inconsistent, and disappoint. A church that focuses on a vision ultimately is a church that is focused on God, and he alone is consistently faithful and true.
I want to mention one last thing about leaders in micropolitan churches. Leadership in a local church is typically comprised of a group of staff and a group of lay leaders. There probably will be regular staff meetings and regular lay leadership meetings (board meetings). Both of these circles of leadership are critically important. The “true leader” leads through these groups. He has the responsibility of keeping these two circles connected by building great relationships inside of both. He not only facilitates each person in these circles to reach a higher potential, but he also promotes mutual respect between groups as they own each achievement together.
Think Outward
Core Value 1: “We will do whatever it takes to reach people who are far from Jesus.”
An outward focus is absolutely critical to the micropolitan church. Focusing outward means the church’s primary concern is the people outside its walls and influence. It means the church’s assets money, talent, time, and facilities are used for reaching into that group. Every church will tell you it focuses outward. They know Jesus’ Great Commandment and Great Commission are clear about it. The painful reality is that even though churches claim to have an outward focus, their activity, teaching, finances, ministries, and even architecture tell a different story. A force seems to pull the church inward where it focuses on concerns for those inside its walls. Church budgets reflect that most funds are spent to minister to the saved. The building is filled with classrooms used only an hour or two a week. The worship songs are the ones church people know and love. Church boards and bylaws, weighed down with bureaucracy and tradition, are designed to keep things the same. Any attempts to reach out in new ways are quickly
squelched by the status quo. The fact that very few unfamiliar faces appear from week to week is a constant reminder the church is missing the mark. Many of these traditional churches are so afraid of change that they would rather curse the darkness than light a candle. I know I’m being hard on inwardly focused churches, but after spending 11 years pastoring one, I think I understand why they are the way they are.
Virtually everything in society (besides the church) is in constant motion, reinventing itself again and again. People live in micropolitan areas for a reason. Part of that reason is life goes at a slower pace. The church is one of the most stable institutions in the community. Its stability is tied to its resistance to change. Many view that stability like the feel of an old pair of jeans or a comfortable blanket. It’s safe and predictable. The world around you may be crazy, but the church is like an oasis filled with happy memories and generations-old friendships. It’s asking a lot to give that up for people who don’t value what you do. Even so, Jesus didn’t call his children to personal comfort, but to carry out his commandment and commission.
Some might see this approach as out of balance. Aren’t we responsible for taking care of those who come into a relationship with Christ? My experience has taught me that when we concern ourselves with what God has called us to do, he will take care of us. When we focus on our own needs, we not only marginalize our God-given responsibility, we replace dependence on him with independence. We push him out of all the ways we experience him meeting our needs.
The children of Israel were punished to wander in the desert for 40 years because their faith in God was replaced by fear. I think it pushed God over the line when the Israelites grumbled, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder” (Numbers 14:2, 3). The grumbling expressed a lack of faith in God’s ability to take care of them, especially the weakest of them. God responded by granting their request. Every one of them, with the exception of two spies, died in that desert, and their children whom God was considered incapable of providing for were the ones to enter the promised land 40 years later.
When we cast all of our cares on him and expend our energy by being outwardly focused, I believe God will honor it in a mighty way.
An outwardly focused church is not competing with the other churches in the area. The competition, instead, is with every other available use of time. For people who do not have an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Sunday is a great day to sleep in, read a good book, or spend time with family. It’s an opportunity to cross chores off a list or sleep off a hangover. Time is perhaps the most important currency a person has, after all. An outwardly focused church confronts this question: “Why would I give up these other things to come to church?”
Most people have already answered that question, and their answer is based upon a preconceived notion of what church is. Honestly, the church is fighting an uphill battle in American culture. In his book Unchristian, David Kinnaman explores the views of a younger subset of culture (those 16 to 25 years old) to determine how it regards the church. In short, his research reveals an unchurched population that sees the church as hypocritical, not really living out its own rules and ideals. They see the church as having an agenda to “get people saved” without genuine concern or desire for real or long-lasting relationships with them. The church is seen as homophobic, sheltered, too political, and judgmental.7 Though we might want to argue about these perceptions, there is no denying many churches are either shrinking or closing, and many have failed to figure out ways to bridge the cultural gap and remain uncompromising with biblical truth. Prognosticators present a pretty dismal future for the church.
Churches have a hard time engaging the prevailing culture, and with good reason: it’s not easy and certainly not business as usual. First, it’s hard to hit a moving target. Culture is constantly morphing, and so engaging it requires never-ending adjustments and evaluation. It requires exploration of changes that reach down into things that, while perhaps not doctrinal, are nevertheless understood as foundational. Instead of embracing the changes necessary to engage the culture we find ourselves in, we end up competing with each other for those who already attend church. We try to build a better mousetrap, so to speak. That’s why the majority of growth in American churches is not growth at all . . . even in megachurches. It is simply people moving from one church to another.
On any given weekend, about 20 percent of the people in the Quincy community attend one of 85 churches. The religious establishment is German Catholic and Lutheran. While these churches aren’t growing, their roots in the town are deep. There are eight Catholic parishes in Quincy as well as a Catholic University, a Catholic High School, Western Catholic Charities, and the largest church in the diocese. There are Christian radio and television stations. The outwardly focused church doesn’t compete with churches or the religious culture, but instead redefines the mission to the 80 percent who don’t care to go anywhere. It markets itself in non-Christian places. It builds bridges with the community to earn the opportunity to make a first impression. It doesn’t take that first impression for granted.
While these realities hold true for a church anywhere, an outwardly focused church in a micropolitan community can really find an advantage. Change is difficult and potentially very dangerous, but churches that can master outwardly focused changes can find a sweet spot in a micropolitan community. Traditional churches resist change, and chances are there hasn’t been a church in the community to break out of the mold. A micropolitan church stands a good chance of creating a monopoly with a new and fresh approach.
The Crossing has done just that, created a monopoly. After 20 years, and with 3,000 people attending just the campuses in Quincy, no other church in the area has even made an attempt to follow our example. Whether it was having services in well-known community venues leaving a perfectly good facility behind just to find some common ground with people or producing TV spots and buying key time to show it, the goal has been to draw in that 80 percent. We held Easter services in Quincy’s largest venue to have an opportunity to make that first impression on neutral ground. Reading books like The Purpose Driven Church provided our leadership with an adaptable template for change that fit us. We moved in the direction of attractive, market-based megachurches. We visited them and set up meetings with our counterparts to benchmark ideas we thought would work. Using these tools, we set up an evolving model for our weekend experiences.
G E T T I N G I N T O T H E S H O E S O F T H E 8 0 P E R C E N T
One of the key things The Crossing learned from the megachurches we visited was to create an environment where the 80 percent felt free to let their defenses down. The church, and especially its leaders, have to make a daily commitment to get in the shoes of the 80 percent. We can’t lose touch of how the world looks and feels in their shoes.
If you are a Christian, you may have never had an Islamic experience. How would you feel driving into an Islamic center’s parking lot? What would it be like walking through the door? How would you be viewed? Where should you go? How should you conduct yourself? Some of these same questions are going through the minds of the 80 percent when they enter your building. Their defenses are up, without a doubt. We wanted to create an environment that would disarm their defenses.
The 80 percent also have a set of presuppositions of what a church looks and feels like. We took away the “churchy” feel by removing hymnals, pews, stained glass, the pulpit, choir loft, etc. We put in comfortable chairs, controllable lighting, a good sound system (and turned up the volume), used a computer and video for worship, and left the suits and dresses at home. By removing the pulpit and dressing down, we broke through hypocritical preacher stereotypes. Turning down the lights provided anonymity to the 80 percent. Raising the volume allowed people to experiment with singing without others hearing them. We extended the invitation time and gave people the opportunity to come forward and do business with God without anyone bothering them. Although walking forward is likely discomforting for a person unfamiliar with church, it becomes profound as people connect movement with life change. Defenses come down and Jesus comes in. For us, a new dynamic emerged out of that process.
The people in the 80 percent whom we connected with liked church well enough to risk inviting their friends. I think we forget that those of us who have been Christians a while have probably already invited most of the people we know. Once your church breaks through into the 80 percent, big things are going to start to happen. Very quickly, I was hearing compliments like, “Helluva sermon today, Jerry!” or “You really kicked a** today!”
Discovering what you have attracted is a moment of truth for the church. It
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tests the resolve of your commitment to the Great Commandment and Commission.
Programs started reflecting the needs of the 80 percent. The needs were many and varied. The unchurched and new Christians come with lots of baggage. They aren’t givers. Our tracking shows that giving lags at least 18 months behind attendance. Committed Christians have to dig deeper, put up with approaches that don’t fit them, and lose their comfort zone . . . and for what? . . . to watch a person change right before your eyes as Jesus touches them! Wow! That’s my bigger yes! I will give up what is comfortable and usual for that. If a leader can keep that vision that “bigger yes” in front of the church, and if the people are buying what he’s selling, God will move!
It’s an interesting sensation: Gravity is pulling you backward but your heart is feeling the calling and it is pulling you forward. The tension of those two forces pull all the slack out of your life and ministry. I know what you’re inclined to say. You’ve heard all this before. It’s the inch-deep, mile-wide church . . . a church full of consumers instead of disciples. But when you think about it, that’s how we all start out, physically and spiritually. All a baby knows is what it needs. “Feed me, change me, burp me, hold me, love me.” Why should it be any different spiritually? It’s a tragedy only if it stays that way. If we have a plan to attract people but no method to disciple them, we miss the whole point. Jesus didn’t call us to win converts, but to make disciples. We’ll discuss that later.
Interestingly, traditional churches are guilty of the very thing that they accuse outwardly focused churches of being. They are full of consumers . . . they are just consuming a different product that is unappealing to the 80 percent. Traditional churches hold on to their traditions because it’s what they like! How is that not self-serving and consumeristic? The difference is that they disguise tradition for truth, stand on it like a soapbox, and justify virtually the same behavior.
While plenty of options exist in metropolitan or suburban environments to find the “just right” church feel, micropolitan areas don’t have nearly as many choices. There is an incredible field of spiritual harvest all around us if we have the courage to recognize and respond to it. The micropolitan community is especially fertile and fruitful because of the absence of those
options and the preconceived notions of the 80 percent. We started down this path more than a decade ago and have yet to see any church in our community even attempt to duplicate it. Thousands of people later, there is no indication we have gotten anywhere close to the end of its potential.
Think Downward
Core Value 2: “We will gladly give up the things we love for a future generation we love even more.”
The church has a daunting task in its effort to minister to anyone who walks through the doors. The concept of targeting any particular age group or need at the expense of another isn’t very palatable for most. No one wants anyone to be left out or marginalized. We rest in Paul’s words and “become all things to all people” (1 Corinthians 9:22), but that Scripture often is misapplied. It’s really all about outward focus as evidenced by how each phrase of that section of Scripture ends: “I became like one under the law . . . so as to win those under the law” (v. 20); “I became like one not having the law . . . so as to win those not having the law” (v. 21); “I became weak to win the weak” (v. 22). Paul becomes all things to win as many as possible. When a church looks at approach, it quickly hits the dilemma of how to effectively minister to the needs of its people across the board, and the truth is, each church is going to do some things better than others. Church boardrooms are filled with arguments about the group it should target . . . the group it should seek to be relevant with. Flowing from those arguments are decisions about how to spend money, the type of music to play, sermon style, and the type of clothes the preacher should wear. If the goal is to please the people who are already there, the decisions will reflect that target. This is the basis of most of the business of the inwardly focused church.
Many people in their 60s and 70s can’t accept the completely different approach we see in most attractional churches. As a matter of fact, every generation finds a different style or approach comfortable. Haydn Shaw, in his book Generational IQ, describes the five generations living today. It’s a great book because it isn’t a hit piece about the generations we might not like; instead, it simply describes each generation’s unique approach to life and church. It’s a breath of fresh air that helps us to sharpen our focus . . .
especially downward. Outward-focused churches have taken the spotlight off what people on the inside want, choosing instead to zero in on the needs of the 80 percent who are outside the church. There is an equally important dimension to downward focus. I call this philosophy of downward focus “the dot.”
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Whether it happens intentionally or accidentally, every church fashions a product that is more effective with at least one subset of people. Every church has a target. It may not be a deliberate target, as traditions tend to take on lives of their own, but it’s there just the same. Consider the style of your music and worship. Who is attracted to it? Scan the church budget. Who gets the most money? Study the use of the building. Who gets the most space? Assess the style of the building and its furniture. Is it antique? Do the color choices reflect the 1970s or present day? Your church will tell you whom you are targeting.
Now look at who is sitting in the seats. Don’t figure in preteens, as they have to go wherever their parents drive them. If junior or senior high worship elsewhere, leave them out. What is the average age of those in the room? Don’t speculate! Do your homework and give an honest answer. At my church, we create cards with empty boxes on them and send them down the rows with pens. We ask people to write their age in a box and pass it on. We take up the cards, add up the ages, and divide by the number of participants. We do this for each location and each service. When you put all that together, you will know whom you are targeting. You may not like the answer, but you need to face it. That is your dot. Next, find an age range of about 10 years, with 5 years on either side of the dot. That 10-year span with the dot in the middle we call “the sweet spot.”
Is the average age in the early 30s or the late 60s? It’s good to get a hard number for this. Have you got it? Great! Now, if you want to do ministry the same way you have been, you’ll continue to be effective with that group of people as it ages. How close are they to dying? If your dot is at age 55, it means that your church has about 25 years to live if it continues on its same course. If the church continues doing the same thing, in 25 years it will be relevant mainly to people who have died or will soon die. That’s a sobering
thought, but one that’s very important to understand. Many churches wonder why they are getting older and smaller. That’s the reason.
Time relentlessly marches on, and as it does, the dot will move with it. As long as we continue to be most relevant to the same people, the dot will continue moving to the right until the church dies. The only way to change this is to change the target. If the church can apply enough pressure to the right side of the dot, time won’t slow down, but the dot will. If you can stop it from moving, your church is no longer mortal . . . at least for the time being. If you apply more pressure, the dot will move to the left, meaning the church will get younger. Our goal at The Crossing is to stop the dot from moving.
I know a church that has continued doing things as they did in 1980. They were on the cutting edge 30-plus years ago. They sang their hymns faster than anyone, projected words on a screen, had a moveable pulpit, and used chairs instead of pews. The building was filled with young families in their late 20s and early 30s. It worked so well, they stuck with it.
Today, they are still doing the same things in virtually the same ways. The only difference is that those who were once in their early 30s now are retiring! They love the church, but no one is accusing them of being on the cutting edge anymore. The church has few young families, but they have plenty of money. The more time they delay necessary changes, the farther the dot goes to the right, and the more difficult corrective actions become.
How does a church get the dot to stop moving? You can’t stop time . . . but you can stop the dot. To do this, the church must continually look to be the most relevant to the people who are approaching where their dot their “sweet spot presently exists; the church can adapt over time if it continues to focus on that target that age of folks, that dot and not on the folks who are there right now and who will continue to grow older. In doing this, the church keeps looking at the changing culture and adapting to it. The church need not compromise doctrine or vision, just the means and methods of how doctrine and vision are delivered. Stopping the dot means a church must embrace new forms of technology and styles of music and worship, hire younger staff members, and spend more money on and expend more energy in programming in that direction.
When the church continually focuses on their target, their unmoving dot, and that is coupled with a willingness to be relevant, the church sets itself up for immortality. If the dot isn’t moving, even though people in the church are getting older, the church isn’t getting older. By focusing on this target, a steady stream of the 80 percent come into a relationship with Christ because they are attracted by the relevance defined by the dot.
You might ask, Aren’t we neglecting the people on the right side of the dot by focusing intently on the left side? What about their needs? How can that be right? Look a little closer at the dynamic. As people approach the age range on either side of the dot, everything becomes more and more relevant for them. The church enjoys the maximum impact of its work. Things begin to make more and more sense for people as they land in that 10-year age range, the sweet spot. This is the place when our hearts are the most open, we’re the most teachable, and discipleship traits like worship, ministry, prayer, and Bible study really rev up. Those 5 to 10 years are absolutely critical to discipleship. The church must establish proper priorities, values, and a Christian worldview in the hearts of people in that targeted age range.
People in the sweet spot learn how important an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus really is to him and them. They begin to value spiritual change in others more than personal comfort, and they develop disciplines to that end. They commit to being part of the solution; they discover their ministry gifts and put them into practice. It’s a brief but critical time, and before long, people are moving out of it. We can’t stop the march of time in our own lives.
The goal is that the people for whom church is becoming less personally relevant will begin to trade in their own needs for the “bigger yes” of seeing the effectiveness of the church and their own gifts put into practice on those coming up. As people incorporate their gifts into the rest of the body, the mature and established members join together to reach into the lives of those hearts coming into full bloom. If the church has done its job, there really isn’t a problem for the people on the right side of the dot. It’s not about “us” anymore. It’s about growing in Christian maturity. And guess what else is happening? The church is becoming immortal because, while time marches on, the dot is either moving left or holding steady.
I can’t overemphasize just how important it is to communicate this philosophy to the leaders and congregation. Communicating this goes beyond explaining what we’re doing to answering the question of why we’re doing it. When we know why when everyone knows why it gives substance to the church’s purpose. The church is making a difference that will outlive us. When we take a hard look at it, we realize it’s better to refrain from self-centeredness. The church grows in depth (and definitely can’t be accused of being an inch deep and a mile wide).
[Let us fix] our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:2, 3).
The joy set before him was sharing eternity with us. Let’s find our joy in sharing eternity with his lost children.
Focusing on the sweet spot of our targeted age range is what makes the church attractional. These attributes are magnified in a micropolitan community because they are more likely to exist in a religious vacuum. The countercultural dynamic in this type of church makes it magnetic. Other churches won’t follow suit because the investment is too great or the change too severe. Micropolitan communities have a major appetite for this because of the lack of alternatives. Then the 80 percent those people who are outside of a relationship with Jesus will become your exclusive territory.
Some folks in the church will find the changes uncomfortable and will look for a church home that is more comfortable for them. That’s OK! You will always lose people with change, but a church that incorporates this plan will also experience an exponential gain. Remember what Sam Chand said: “There is no growth without change, no change without loss, and no loss without pain.” Losing people is rarely a positive experience, but losing them for this strategy is a worthy trade. Losing the saved to another church to win the lost isn’t a bad deal, because whether a Christian attends your church or not, the saved are still saved. Those who oppose this kind of aggressive strategy will find plenty of other comfortable places to worship. It is important to communicate that plenty of other churches exist in the
community where one can worship, but that we (the church incorporating this strategy) feel called to this “bigger yes” of the 80 percent who are lost.
Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is for frustrated people to stay. Micropolitan churches must be gracious in showing the door to those who are more internally focused. The Crossing has been a blessing to churches around us; we have helped them grow through Christians uncomfortable with our chosen strategy transferring from our church to theirs . . . and it certainly hasn’t slowed us down.
Think Relevant
Core Value 3: “We will do fresh things in fresh ways to reach those no one else is reaching.”
As I discussed earlier, every church is relevant, in some way. Every church is reaching a target, whether accidentally or on purpose. The question is, to whom is the church relevant? A good understanding of the present target will go a long way in determining growth, influence, and the general effectiveness level of the church in its environment. For instance, if a church is targeting people over the age of 65, they will think about using technology to make services accessible for the hearing impaired more so than replacing the hymnals. They might consider changing the length of the service more from a consideration of how long people in the audience can sit in the pew than an evaluation of the average attendee’s attention span. They might resist small groups in favor of Sunday school classes, as empty nesters have downsized their homes and enjoy their peace and quiet.
If a church is targeting 18- to 25-year-olds, choices will again reflect a relevant approach. Smaller, more relational, environments would be ideal like a café conducive to meeting new people, self-expression, and establishing intimate relationships. This target group will expect excellence but will not generate the offerings to achieve it, so smaller or rented facilities work best. Many in this age range will struggle in ministry commitment, as they maintain their mobility, still searching for that perfect fit or career path. Programming will need to be simple and transferable to fit into that mobility. Ministries to children, teens, or families would be a low priority.
So the challenge for the church that wants to have maximum effectiveness in a micropolitan community is to find the sweet spot of that community. Jorge is a student pastor at Christ Fellowship in Miami, Florida. The population in that metropolitan community is primarily Hispanic. I was listening as some of our student pastors were sharing with him at dinner. Jorge related that student ministry in a Hispanic community requires a far different approach than in a primarily white community. Hispanic families in his community are very close-knit, sharing most experiences together. When Jorge plans a student event, he plans on parents attending and participating. In the Midwest, by contrast, student pastors and students zealously work to keep distance between kids and their parents in most programming. When the target changes, the definition of relevance and the approach that follows must change.
Since most churches in micropolitan communities are holding on to their individual or denominational traditions, people who wish to attend them are required to adjust their expectations accordingly. The majority of the community, the 80 percent, doesn’t care about those traditions and will just write off those churches as out of touch. A micropolitan church that wishes to reach the 80 percent must ask questions and carefully determine what changes it must make to become more relevant to those in the community who have little or no relationship with Christ.
Many Christians have become “institutionalized.” It isn’t that we don’t want to be relevant to people outside the church; we’ve just been out of that world so long, we don’t remember it. Many churches in micropolitan communities are growing only through the children their young families are having. Being born in the church has some great advantages, but one disadvantage is a lack of understanding of the world of the 80 percent.
When the Macomb campus was being planned, we considered partnering with a local campus ministry. I met with several of their board members to cast the vision for our church and what we might do cooperatively. I was particularly excited because the campus ministry was almost completely made up of students coming out of area churches who wanted a spiritually safe environment on a secular campus.
One of the board members was vocally resistant. He said the campus ministry was by students and for students, and he wasn’t in favor of having students ministering to people outside that target. I asked him what he felt like he was accomplishing for the kingdom of God. He said the ministry was training up lay leaders for the church. I remember thinking, These would be the worst leaders for tomorrow’s church. Their ministry focus was primarily self-serving; it completely disregarded the much more than 80 percent on that campus who had no relationship with Jesus.
Pragmatic actions, rather than philosophic study, are what helped The Crossing find its sweet spot of relevance. We found it in the success of the megachurch. Say what you want about the depth of the megachurch, their ability to attract people is indisputable. Since attraction and introduction are the first steps toward an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus, I considered megachurches the experts on the subject. They had struck a relevant chord in a very large percentage of those 80 percent. Instead of holding an unreasonable expectation that the 80 percent would suddenly and miraculously become interested in a church that was doing things the way it had always done them, megachurches set out to find relevant means and methods to package timeless truth.
We chose to look at megachurches simply because they had found ways to get the 80 percent in the door. They are relevant to today’s culture. The American megachurch is almost exclusively an urban and suburban phenomenon. Although these churches are greatly varied in church affiliation and denominational roots, their approach is similar. They are defined as having a regular attendance of more than 2,000 each weekend. The megachurch’s front door is wide open and people are walking through it in droves.
A Hartford Institute study says the megachurch movement shows no signs of slowing. Almost 90 percent of megachurches are growing, many of them at exponential rates.8 We had to figure out, “How do they do it?” There have been plenty of books and models over the past few years that seek to answer that question. Churches that followed approaches developed by pioneers like Bill Hybels and Rick Warren were growing. Books like Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary and The Purpose Driven Church became staples of a megachurch approach. Over the years, cultural prognosticators
and religious commentators have forecasted the demise of the megachurch, but statistics indicate the megachurch movement is showing no signs of slowing. At The Crossing, we were looking for a way do it in a micropolitan setting. There weren’t any books about that. Here are some of the attributes we saw:
Virtually every part of a typical megachurch has a marketing flavor about it. Parking lots are well marked and filled with volunteer attendants eager to help. Lobbies are inviting and feature the smell of designer coffee. Conversation areas, information kiosks, and sign-up stations line the walls. Carefully placed posters describe the next big event. Bathrooms are easy to find, have plenty of room, and are spotlessly clean. The bright and inviting children’s areas are theme-based, have an amusement park look, and have Discovery Zone-style play areas. Security systems are in place to ensure the welfare of the children. Check-in stations are computerized. Auditoriums have a theater feel with comfortable seats. The technology is cutting edge with intelligent lighting, smoke machines, and multiple video screens. The music is contemporary and highly professional. Images are magnified on the screen with easy-to-read words to the worship songs. Some buildings have amenities like workout rooms, art and dance classes, bookstores, and snack shops.
There are plenty of ways to get connected. You can join a motorcycle club, Moms in Prayer, a divorce recovery group, or a girls’ night out. Opportunities abound to make a difference in the community with literally hundreds of ministries to fit every passion. All of these things and so much more are available, and all they do is take a freewill offering. Is there a better deal out there?
Not only is the atmosphere attractive in megachurches, but people there also work hard to break down barriers that many traditional churches have grown comfortable with. Most megachurches have a “come as you are” mentality. The “no dress code” look is modeled by staff and volunteers. Megachurches don’t espouse rules and regulations; they don’t draw lines between
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committed members and first-time attenders. They have done away with service components that would alienate newcomers. There are services at different times of the day and week that can accommodate busy schedules.
By resisting spiritual jargon, megachurches seek to level the playing field. They don’t use terms like “the lost” or “unbelievers” to define people who don’t yet have a relationship with Jesus. Megachurches don’t stoke arguments about differences between Christian denominations; instead, they are always looking for common ground or a point of connection to build a bridge rather than to burn one. Megachurches connect sermons to cultural catchphrases and to topics that are very practical in nature. Programming targets people with specific needs.
Megachurches radiate a feeling of joy. In fact, research indicated that joy is the No. 1 attribute used to describe megachurch worship, followed by a sense of God’s presence, a thought-provoking atmosphere, and a welcoming environment.9 All these build an excitement that fuels a desire to attend. People are afraid they will “miss something” if they take a week off. The American megachurch is a great thing to share with friends. It’s very exciting to take the chance, invite a friend, and then see their approval.
Megachurches present their people with a missional view about the world around them. Making a real difference can be incredibly exciting to people who are stuck in the grind of a 40-hour workweek. A person can escape that grind by volunteering with the church’s food pantry or taking a short-term mission trip to a developing nation. Every week there is something new. The freshness of a megachurch is in sharp contrast to the perceived staleness of a traditional church, and that’s why some people choose to transfer to the more exciting church.
So how does a micropolitan church capitalize on the megachurches’ success and put their ideas to work for the kingdom of God?
First, all of the things that megachurches offer are now expected in metropolitan and suburban areas. Our culture is demanding excellence in
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everything. Consider, there are an infinite number of restaurant choices. Just think of all the kinds available. As a youngster growing up near Indianapolis, I remember the amazing selection.
As I recall, Caves and Caverns had a prehistoric theme. A restaurant named Illusions came with a table-side magic show. There were great jazz clubs, comedy clubs, and dance clubs. The Spaghetti Factory and Hard Rock Café were there. Among the choices were restaurants known for food specialties, their ethnicity, and their atmosphere. There were restaurants that had decades-old reputations and others with brand-new ones. There were restaurants that cooked food on wood fires and flaming grills. There was even one that had acrobatic knife-handlers who cooked on hibachis.
That is not the case in Quincy, Illinois. Although there are some great places to eat, there really is no comparison. The point is, people expect that kind of selection in Indianapolis but not in rural America.
Churches in metropolitan communities are similar to their restaurants . . . there’s something for everybody. But when a church in a micropolitan community begins acting like a megachurch, it is unexpected and exciting. In towns where there aren’t many “latest things,” churches like The Crossing will always stand out. Rethinking the church in the micropolitan community and adapting the proven methods of the megachurch to fit that setting has proven to be a powerful approach. The two main reasons for this are institutional inertia and the lack of competition in the micropolitan area. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it needs only to be adapted to a smaller setting, staff, and budget.
All of this is easy to say but much harder to do. But take heart. Another beautiful thing about a micropolitan church embracing these ideas is that the community rarely has anything close with which to compare it. There is a lot of grace in that. If you’re using volunteers to run programs and equipment that most megachurches pay staff to run, there are going to be plenty of mistakes. No problem! There’s nothing local to compare it with.
John Maxwell said something that has always resonated with me: “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” He illustrated that point by saying that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. The high
school is probably named after him now. We never start at the top of our game. No, our game develops as we adapt, overcome, and evolve. A micropolitan community will give you the room to make mistakes that a metropolitan area won’t. People in a metropolitan community can just go down the street and find something else.
Now don’t get me wrong. The main reason the megachurch model appeals to me is its power of attraction. While that’s not everything, it’s a great thing to have! An attractional church grows by keeping the front door open wider than the back door. The difference between those two numbers those who are entering and those who are leaving constitutes the church’s rate of growth. That is why a megachurch is primarily a metropolitan occurrence. Since the population is so large, there is always a source for plenty more people to come in the front door.
Here is my problem with this: Growth is not the point! Christianity is all about making disciples. Attractional churches are bringing in consumers and nothing more. The important and lasting thing is what happens after they are brought in. Throngs of people came to Jesus when he performed the miracles of healing the sick and feeding the hungry, but when the crowds were called to commitment, they left. Jesus did more to change the world with 12 committed guys than he ever accomplished with those huge crowds!
Recently, Buffalo Wild Wings came to Quincy. I didn’t even try to eat there that first month. It was crammed with people and there was a long line of folks waiting to get the next open seat. My patience paid off. After a while, the newness of the restaurant wore off and it was just another place to eat. If a micropolitan church puts all of its effort into being attractional, eventually the newness will wear off and little will have been gained.
Greg Hawkins, who wrote a book called Reveal about a Willow Creek Community Church study, has worked with many churches doing countless surveys to figure out why people go out the back door. He looks at “mature Christians” leaving and tries to determine why they don’t stay. But a person isn’t mature just because they have gone to church for a long time, participated on committees, or involved themselves in ministry. Any rural pastor could tell you that. Maturity comes when “it’s not about you anymore.” The worst kind of believer is the one who is convinced he’s
mature when he’s really just a consumer with a developed taste. Micropolitan churches don’t have the luxury of keeping the front door open wider than the back door because the population well is far shallower than in a big city. And besides that, it’s just plain wrong. The only reason I can tolerate people going out the back door is because they have made a conscious decision to step away from our vision or doctrinal values.
I embrace attraction, but I have to remind myself that it has a shelf life. Something more substantial must replace attraction or it will eventually wear off. Attractional approaches last longer in micropolitan communities than in metropolitan areas simply because of the lack of options, but unless we follow it up with a great discipleship approach that works, we may be doing more harm than good. Unless we define maturity properly, sophisticated consumers will misunderstand where they are, and when the church doesn’t consider their continuing needs a priority, they will leave. A micropolitan church takes advantage of the relevance of megachurch models to attract the 80 percent who don’t attend church, but then connects with these folks through intentional, relational discipleship. Attraction is just the beginning of a great adventure.
Think Innovative
Core Value 4: “We will take big, faith-filled risks and never insult God with small thinking and safe living.”
Traditional churches could easily be defined as places of small thinking and safe living. This is certainly not the case in the church we read about in the book of Acts. The early church was an extreme church. The first sermon accused all of the listeners of murdering God . . . that’s pretty risky! What was the effect? The church baptized 3,000. It wasn’t long before the apostles were being hauled in by the authorities, threatened, and later beaten. Not too long after that, we read about the first martyrs, Stephen and James. It was definitely an extreme church. Not too long after that, the church’s No. 1 enemy became its greatest evangelist. How risky was it not only to forgive a man who had brutalized and killed church members, but to unleash him as the international spokesman for the movement?
I think you get the point. The church was designed to be a risk-taking enterprise. But people resist risk because they fear failure. I find it interesting the church has become averse to risk when, as I see it, risk is essential to doing anything great for God. The only time I have ever really been concerned about The Crossing and its future is when we decided we needed to slow down, take a breath, and get our bearings before moving forward again. I am amazed at how quickly we become sedentary and neglect the urgency of our mission.
Debt is risk, hiring is risk, change is risk, eliminating programs is risk . . . it’s all risk. Risks are worth it when you are doing them for the right reasons. But understand, even if you do things for the right reasons, there will be times they still will blow up in your face! Regardless of success or failure, God is still God and we all are serving at his pleasure.
Not all of our launches at The Crossing have been successful. Our second location was launched in Mossel Bay, South Africa. We had hired a South African couple to lead our children’s ministry and after three years of serving in Quincy, they decided they wanted to launch a Crossing location back home. We were excited at the prospect and, a year later, the church had more than 200 meeting in the local elementary school. They did their baptisms in the shark-infested waters of the bay . . . talk about dying with Christ and being raised to walk in new life! We visited the work and immediately fell in love with what was being accomplished through ministry as we were the only racially integrated church in the area. After a couple of years, we learned that two staff members were having an affair with one another. It was heartbreaking. We tried to salvage the ministry, but the couple refused our help and also refused the intervention of another family that went over to coach them. After another year, the church was gone. I can still see the wonderful faces of the committed volunteers who were giving their all for Jesus, just as I do, and it still hurts.
Years later, we launched a location in Paducah, Kentucky. We had a great location, the best staff, and some great ministry partners, but after 18 months of trying everything to gain traction (and getting nowhere), we had to call it, bring back the staff, and shut the campus down. Those staff members still feel the effect of that failure even though they gave everything they had.
We’ve hired people, believing they were both gifted and ready to take up the mantle of ministry, only to watch them blow up, burn out, or disqualify themselves with some moral failure. We’ve wondered if we missed something or somehow set them up for failure. We’ve had key people whom we have depended on for years become uncomfortable with our growth; some have tried to hold on to the past or retain personal control over everything in their sphere of influence; some have decided to leave and others were asked to leave. The risks are always there, and where there are risks, failure will not be far behind.
But it hasn’t stopped us. We keep taking risks while maintaining our faith in Jesus to build his kingdom. We keep learning from our mistakes and adapting our approach to take new ground. We often consider the risks of trying something new, but it’s interesting how seldom church leaders consider the risks of not trying. At The Crossing, we see it as an insult to God that we are failing to place our faith and trust in him if we do only things we believe we could accomplish without him.
Think Making Leaders
Core Value 5: “We will develop leaders who honor God and inspire people, and they will change the world.”
Since I’ve always considered myself to be an evangelist, I’ve always viewed small groups more as a necessary chore than a great opportunity for me. I’ve found it difficult to get them going and even more difficult to keep them going. Small groups require constant vigilance with regard to whatever book or study has been chosen for them. It isn’t easy to get people to lead them or host them. Individual relationships within the groups can be challenging. Successful groups can tend toward exclusivity not inviting new people in, and not wanting to spin off people and leaders to establish new groups. My problem was that I considered myself a leader, but I hadn’t been committed to making them. Great groups are made by raising great leaders.
My friend Jim Putman evaluated The Crossing’s discipleship ministry approach and shared this observation with me: “You’re a flock shooter, Jerry. A flock shooter is a lousy hunter with a gun and no plan. When the flock is
scared into flight, he just shoots as many rounds as he can into the flock hoping he’ll hit something. Usually, he just wounds a few, if he hits them at all. A good hunter picks out a bird, leads it, and pulls the trigger.” In other words, Jim was saying that preaching to the crowd is like shooting the Word of God into the congregation and hoping that you hit something. It wasn’t the way Jesus did it, nor was it the way the early church operated. Again, Jesus accomplished far more with 12 committed guys than he did with any of the large crowds he attracted. As Jim explained to me a different and better way of discipleship, I began to realize how we had missed the mark. To achieve real discipleship, three things must be present: an intentional leader, a relational environment, and a reproducible process.
An intentional leader is someone who has made it his business to reproduce disciples for Jesus. He does this by watching and listening more so than by teaching. Jim compared it to a coach interacting with a player during practice: The coach corrects the player and then watches him try to carry out his instructions over and over again; the coach adjusts and readjusts how the player does things until the player is able to follow the coach’s instructions perfectly. The attractional model, by contrast, reduces potential players to spectators or fans people who come out to watch the professionals play. Micropolitan communities are full of potential intentional leaders, both inside and outside the church, who have never been coached to coach.
A relational environment is one that fosters the kind of individual attention that leads to meaningful one-on-one dialogue between a group member and a coach. Just as in schools, a smaller class size is preferable, because a teacher can provide more individual attention and monitor progress better when there are fewer students. At Jim’s church, small groups work because they are set up as relational environments where intentional leadership and coaching can happen. The expectation of individual attention is greater in a micropolitan community. In fact, people in micropolitan areas forego metropolitan amenities because of their desire for a culture that is more tight-knit.
A reproducible process allows for coaching that features a measurable, leader-making process. Developing a metric to track spiritual growth has been elusive in the church. We tend to put lots of options in front of a congregation and hope each person finds something that suits them so they can grow, but this really is no way to raise up a leader.
Great leaders come from great coaches. Coaching occurs in relationship. Coaches engage in dialogue with prospective leaders, listening carefully to questions and comments and then drilling down deeper and on a more personal level, using additional questions and conversation. The answers the coach hears will help him identify the leadership phase of the prospective leader. That can’t happen in a preaching environment. The coach is being intentional. His intention is to discern where the new leader is in order to move him forward.
When a micropolitan church focuses on raising up leaders, the back door begins to close. As people move through “the dot,” the discipleship process which is reproducible transitions them from self-focused to othersfocused. The people don’t leave, because a new set of selfless priorities has replaced the priorities that attracted them. Further, there is a greater sense of unity as the staff aligns to meet shared goals: numbers increase and there is growth in maturity. In maturing Christians, personal wants take a back seat to whatever is most effective to get people through the sweet spot. The result is a healthy, growing, deepening, and unified body. Leaders thrive in this environment.
Think Growth
Core Value 6: “We will never stop measuring, changing, and moving for growth because nothing matters more to God than people.”
Ask any church and they’ll say they want to grow, but that word has limitless definitions. We know growth was important in the first-century church because the New Testament mentioned it constantly. On the Day of Pentecost, someone counted the number of baptisms . . . 3,000! The word added describes the growth of the church in its early days. We read about the number swelling to 5,000 and then the word added is replaced with multiplied. Some might resist counting or sharing attendance numbers, but the early church seemed to consider such things important.
At The Crossing, we measure as much as we can because we want to fulfill our commission we want to make disciples. We know that a person who attends church isn’t necessarily a disciple, but their attendance definitely
presents an opportunity. As we see it, on a given weekend we have 8,000 opportunities to move a person closer to Jesus. (Our 4,000 weekly online viewers also represent opportunities, though we have fewer touch points for moving them toward discipleship.) Our children’s check-in system indicates the average attendee checks in their child two times a month, so we probably have opportunities with close to 16,000 individuals a month. We also know that our “dot” (average age of those in the auditoriums) is about 41 years old. Knowing these numbers enhances our ability to move these folks from merely an opportunity into a more committed relationship with Jesus.
We also measure baptisms. There is no guarantee someone who decides to be baptized this week will even be interested in Jesus next week, but we know that a willingness to be immersed in water is a true reflection of a genuine desire to be closer to Jesus. A person who decides to be baptized is inviting us to become a bigger part of their life, and to follow up and push for even greater and more specific commitments. We’ve averaged nearly 1,000 baptisms each of the last five years. That means more than 10 percent of our people are on the cutting edge of their newly found faith, and that’s exciting!
We measure the number of people who come to a given location and compare it with the population of the community. We do this as a measurement of influence. Our goal is for each location’s weekly attendance to reach/influence 10 percent of the community. By this metric, we presently influence 7.8 percent of our communities. If we view it monthly, it’s nearly twice as high. Our giving and our small group attendance reveal deeper levels of commitment.
These numbers all serve as tools to measure our impact. I came to The Crossing in 1998. The U.S. Census collected data in 2000 and 2010. A search on usa.com reveals the impact The Crossing made over that 10-year span. While nearly every community in Illinois saw a precipitous rise in the “nones” those claiming no religious affiliation Quincy saw an increase of 15,661 evangelical Protestants and a decrease of 7,730 “nones” in a town of 40,000! I can hardly wait to see the statistical inroads we’re making in the other cities we serve when the 2020 data comes out!
We want to make our presence count, and we do that by measuring, setting goals, evaluating processes and programs, and changing accordingly. We are
not the ones who make the church grow. Only God can do that. We plant, water, cultivate, and harvest . . . but the miracle is the growth. Growth is the fingerprint of God.
Think Oneness
Core Value 7: “The church is the hope of the world, and we can accomplish infinitely more together than apart.”
A couple of years ago, Allison and I went to a meeting in Monterey, California. We stayed an extra day, so we decided to spend it walking through Big Basin Redwoods State Park because neither of us had ever seen the giant, ancient trees. The forest was breathtaking; it looked like a setting from Jurassic Park or the Forest Moon of Endor from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The air was thick with oxygen; the foliage on the ground made the walk nearly silent. There was plenty of information available about the coastal redwoods, how they grow so old and incredibly tall, and what keeps them from falling over. The trees’ roots actually are quite shallow, but they extend out over a very wide area. The secret to their stability is that they grow in circular families, interlacing their roots with the trees around them. They actually call them families or fairy rings. After reading that, we could plainly see the repeating growth patterns throughout the forest. Allison took pictures, and we talked about similarities to our church and how it functions at all its locations.
Like the trees, our church families gain strength from each other as God empowers us. God has used the strengths of our relationships to take new ground we could never have taken alone. That has been true for individuals in our church, in small groups and families, and in campuses. God never intended for us to do anything alone. We are better together. That’s reflected in how Jesus designed the church. Church is a word for assembly or group, and its intended to work in unity. Jesus prayed,
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent
me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one I in them and you in me so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (John 17:20-23).
I believe in this next generation. I think their influence can be far greater than ours. I want and we need their joy, their team spirit, their willingness to learn and share, their nonjudgmental attitude, their leadership, and their fresh new ideas. I see Jesus reflected in them. I see Jesus in the other generations, as well, even as we all bring unique qualities to the church: the gen Xers and their missional living, the baby boomers and their optimism, and the traditionalists with their loyalty, tenacity, and self-sacrifice. Remember, when it’s not about us (and only us), we will capture the power that comes from our unity.
The micropolitan model is more philosophy of ministry than practical application. The methods we use bring those philosophies to life in a real setting. This section investigates how to minister in a micropolitan community (and not why) in an effort to help establish or change parameters for effective ministry.
The Science Of Balance
Balance is an even disbursement of weight that produces stability. Much of what a church is, and much of what it does, is directly connected to this definition. Balanced churches are stable churches, and to keep them that way, we have to understand how balance works. Stability occurs when there are 3 points. From junior high geometry, we might remember that there are points, lines (the distance between 2 points), and planes (3 points). If geometry wasn’t your strong suit, think about a unicycle, a bicycle, and a tricycle. A unicycle is extremely unstable because it is connected to the ground at only 1 point. The rider must stay in constant motion and make continual corrections just to stay upright (and few can do it). A bicycle is much more stable because it’s connected to the ground at 2 points, but it is stable only when in motion. A kickstand establishes a third point, making it
C H A P T E R 3
M A K I N G I T W O R K
more stable. A tricycle is almost always stable, whether at rest or in motion, because it is connected to the ground at 3 points.
In the same way, the church is most stable when it is connected to the ground at 3 points, and when those points correspond to the thinking of the people who lead them. Each point is a model for church. But when a church is connected at only 1 or 2 points to the thinking of the people who lead them, it will be far less stable. For the sake of this illustration, I will present three examples: a factory, a television, and a tribe. This idea was developed from a TED Talk with Seth Godin from his book Tribes. While Godin seeks to promote the tribe as the superior church model, I think a balance of all three is what makes it stable.
T H E C H U R C H A S A F A C T O R Y
Henry Ford’s greatest invention wasn’t the automobile he didn’t invent that it was the idea and implementation of mass production, which completely revolutionized America’s economy. On an assembly line, anyone could be trained to do a particular job. Mass production enabled far more people to enter the workforce, exponentially increased the speed of production, and greatly reduced costs by using a large volume of standardsized parts . . . interchangeable parts in many cases. The parts went in and products went out.
That is what factories do: Raw materials enter on one side and finished products come out the other. You can see how this might be a model for the church: Broken, sinful people enter on one side and polished disciples come out the other. It might sound great, but a closer look reveals inherent flaws.
A factory-modeled church is good at putting people to work, evaluating productivity, incorporating great systems and procedures, measuring efficiency along the line, and using materials wisely. But it lacks individuality, exportability, and conscience. People fall through the cracks or get pigeonholed into dead-end ministries. People can really feel “used” and unappreciated in this model. Monolithic churches are very expensive to run and there can be mission drift from one department to another and breakdowns in communication and understanding. We can end up
refurbishing rather than producing in this model, with growth coming from transfers instead of evangelism. Most megachurches could be described as factory churches in many respects.
T H E C H U R C H A S T E L E V I S I O N
Early on, television was able to take a live event and reproduce it for as many people who owned televisions and could access a network. The image on the television screen was (and is) just a small representation of an event. The entire process overcomes distance and exclusivity. As time passed, technology improved and the medium developed into multiple channels; and now people can access virtually anything via the Internet.
So how does the television model connect with the church? The beauty of the television model is in its clarity: It reproduces precisely the same message an infinite number of times. It’s adaptable to people’s interests and allows them to be in charge. Its effect is to make the world much smaller, it connects with an exponentially wider audience, and the filmed event can be polished in post-production. It is cutting edge and relevant to today’s world.
We see this manifest itself in the church model through use of multisites and online campuses and services. Think about what Bobby Gruenewald was able to accomplish with creation of the YouVersion Bible app, which reproduces Bibles of many translations and languages and is available via download worldwide to anyone who has a smart device! Literally billions of free Bible downloads have occurred because of it!
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But what about television’s drawbacks? It’s nonrelational, it creates false celebrity, there is no guarantee of its accuracy or honesty, it can be consumer-driven and selfish, and it can impose little or no responsibility upon those who view it. Most multisite churches and churches with Internet-based campuses deal with these same types of issues.
T H E C H U R C H A S T R I B E
Tribes are defined by their ethos. They have a language, a well-defined territory, super high levels of intimacy and communication, and lots of empathy and value for each person within them. There are very clear lines separating those inside the tribe from those outside of it. People in relationship within a tribe defend each other and police each other. Because there are a limited number of relationships within any particular tribe, they tend to stay relatively small. People within a tribe definitely belong.
The vast majority of churches in America are tribal. Most are attended by fewer than 100 people who have known each other most, if not all, of their lives. Tribal churches tend to have strong leaders who defend the tribe’s ethos, worship, building, relationships, and purpose. If someone tries to change things, the tribe might go to war. The tribal model has very real benefits deep relationships, incredible stability, a great handle on all the “one anothers” of the Bible but it also has serious deficiencies. Tribes can be highly resistant to change and averse to an influx of new people from outside; tribes can be susceptible to being led astray and have low levels of trust toward outsiders. Much of this can be said of many small churches and house churches. They often can be a closed group that isn’t committed to evangelizing a lost world. Since there is no plan to change or willingness to change, these churches tend not to grow, and typically die when the tribal leader dies.
While not all churches are predisposed to one of these models, I believe the most stable churches exhibit all three in equal measure. You might consider an exercise with staff or leaders about which model they connect with and how they feel about the other two. (A leader tried to convince me once that the other models would fit into the factory model.) Here’s the genius of a balanced church: The shortcomings of one model will be compensated for by the qualities of another. While factories are impersonal, tribes can be very personal. While tribes can head down rabbit trails, television churches keep the message pure. While television churches can be two-dimensional and plastic, factories keep metrics and production at the forefront . . . and so on.
B A L A N C I N G A L L T H R E E M O D E L S I N T O O N E
A micropolitan church’s work begins with leaders, a mission, core values, and a solid model. After that, right actions are needed to build, maintain, change, and rebuild. Here are some of the actions necessary for making it work.
Cast Vision
If the church is going to gain any traction in becoming micropolitan, someone must cast a vision that leadership, staff, and the congregation can buy into. It has to be a God-given vision or people won’t, and shouldn’t, follow. The vision must make sense because people won’t follow what they can’t understand. It has to be a vision that makes a big difference because passion and excitement fuel vision. It has to be a vision that is achievable because it will lose steam without clear progress. It has to be a vision that can be broken down into “wins” because progress needs to be measured.
The lead pastor is the only person who can effectively cast such a vision. He must be the “visioneer.” As lead communicator, he gives voice to the vision. If the lead pastor isn’t able to cast that vision effectively, the church needs to give up the idea of being micropolitan, or it needs to find a new pastor.
I will caution again, many churches don’t have the stomach for change. I don’t mean these churches can’t do meaningful ministry, I just mean it will be for a finite amount of time. Many pastors are just that . . . great pastors. They can preach and teach from God’s Word, visit the sick, and love people with the best of them, but they can’t cast a vision. Without that ability, and without the confidence of his leaders, moving in the direction of micropolitan could be devastating to both pastor and church. Visioneering requires alignment, and a visioneering leader must have the support of his leadership. Leadership moves from the top down. I believe that if the pastor casts the vision and the rest of the church’s leadership and staff move with it, there will be unity that the church will follow.
When The Crossing decided to buy the John Wood Community College campus, some members balked. Some wanted to focus on the failure of the past minister, some wanted to just go back to being what we were, and some were just sour to the idea. These balkers needed someone in
leadership to take up their cause . . . a negative visionary, so to speak. That was something they couldn’t get.
The vision for The Crossing that I communicated to the elders was solid. They were all in. The elders of our church stood in front of the congregation as I shared that vision. Each one, in turn, offered reasons they supported the move. One elder had been courted to stand with the opposition. I will never forget him standing before the group of elders, tears streaming down his face, sharing his passion for the lost. His testimony solidified the unity of the leadership, and the faction who didn’t want to buy the college campus soon dissipated. The vision and the alignment to that vision have remained constant. It was the driving force behind our desire to launch multisite campuses more than an hour away.
Visioneering requires redundancy. Leaders must figure out ways to say it over and over again. Each time the church is reminded of the vision and the “wins” it has experienced during its journey to achieve it, the vision is refreshed. Many of you have seen or used cardboard testimonies as part of your worship services. If you haven’t, just check out “cardboard testimonies” on YouTube. These testimonies were extremely effective tools for communicating our vision through how Jesus changes the lives of people who develop an intimate, personal relationship with him.
We extend our decision times to give people plenty of time to come forward and get on their knees, wash their hands in the water flowing over the baptistery, or find someone to pray with. I usually stand off to the side, and some might come to me to share something. The point is, everyone sees people doing business with God. It gives them permission to take action themselves, and it reminds them exactly what we are all about.
We videotape the baptisms at every service at every campus and play it back at subsequent services. It takes only a couple of minutes, but it reinforces the vision . . . and the joy displayed is awesome; when we started this our baptisms more than doubled instantly!
Like many churches, we devote a series of sermons each year to help realign our people to our vision, celebrate our wins, and redefine our
purpose.
Remember, the vision never changes, but there are always new means and methods for keeping the vision fresh and for moving “the dot” to the left. Visioneers hunger to find new ways of releasing that vision. When we listen to staff with an open and changeable attitude regarding means and methods, everybody wins.
Benchmark
A church leader from a micropolitan community who visits a metropolitan megachurch will almost certainly be disheartened. It begins in the parking lot. He looks at the architecture and thinks to himself, I can’t do that!
I remember driving onto the campus of Willow Creek Community Church the first time. There was a beautiful diamond pattern on the manicured lawn. It was morning, the sun was shining, and the beautiful building reflected off a picturesque lake. The closer I drove, the better it looked. I walked through the doors into a light-filled atrium with coffee bar, food court, and bookstore all set against a wall of glass. There wasn’t a stain on the floor. People were drinking designer coffees and talking while seated in comfortable conversation areas. Some were reading or working on laptop computers. There were small groups seated at eight-person tables, their Bibles open in front of them. It was awesome! It felt like community! The gap between this and what I would be heading home to was getting wider and wider. The diamond-shaped auditorium had glass on two sides. Motorized shades came down to dim the room for the worship experience. I sat in a comfortable theater chair and scanned their bulletin. Their weekly financial need was twice my annual church budget. The technology looked something like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. For me, the bar was set very high.
But that was there . . . not in my little town. There were a number of things I could learn from this church to incorporate into mine without breaking the bank. The fact was, even small inexpensive changes would set us apart in Quincy.
Going to a megachurch and adapting what we learn there is something we call benchmarking. Benchmark churches have come up with many creative things a micropolitan church can adapt and use.
When our church was running 500 in attendance, I planned a trip to Indianapolis to benchmark four churches that ran between 1,000 and 2,500. They were happy to take some time out of their day to meet with us. First, we wanted to tour their building. A tour allows you to see how another set of creative minds do ministry. The size of the church is important, as monster megachurches are so far removed in size that practical applications and adaptations might be difficult. The Indianapolis churches were just right. All sorts of ideas and discussions were born just out of those tours. Second, we scheduled one hour to sit down with our counterparts and ask specific questions about ministry approach. After our meetings, our team got together and talked about what had inspired them. Changes on our campus came quickly after that. Doing this as a team was critical, as it is hard to communicate something that someone else hasn’t seen. It’s that “you had to be there” syndrome.
It is incredible what something as simple as black paint can do. Painting the ceiling black makes it disappear, giving a room the feeling of an auditorium. Painting the stage black makes the worship leaders and band pop visually. Leaving a square of white in the middle of the back wall, framing it, and then projecting images on it costs nothing. Great projectors are fairly inexpensive only a couple thousand dollars and so are PAR can lights. An entire group of technically savvy people in the church finally had a place to honor the Lord with their passion. Comfortable, stackable chairs allowed us to change seating configurations.
The impact of these things versatile seating configurations, auditorium style, some well-placed lighting, and projection technology serve to immediately set apart a church in a micropolitan area. It’s really a mix of two things: stuff that comes in the door and stuff that goes out. Getting rid of the pulpit takes away something that divides the preacher from the congregation. Eliminating it gives the minister an air of vulnerability and approachability. Losing the Communion table and chairs tells people
Communion is more about looking inward instead of the strictures of how it’s administered.
Jim Collins tells a story about a Brazilian company that wanted to pick the brains of the CEOs of American companies involved in businesses similar to theirs. The company sent out 10 requests, but only one CEO responded: Sam Walton, founder of Walmart. The Brazilian executives flew to Bentonville, Arkansas, and were met by Sam, his famous pickup truck, and his dog. They had lunch at his house, after which Sam washed the dishes in the kitchen sink.
While he was washing the dishes, Sam began probing the Brazilians with questions about their business, their culture, their approach, and their goals. The point is, Sam wasn’t entertaining these guests just to impart his Walmart wisdom. He was learning. He was always looking for opportunities to learn how to do business better; he realized those revelations come from unlikely places. Great leaders love learning, and one of the best ways to learn is to discover successful models and adapt their ideas. The whole purpose of this book is an attempt to throw The Crossing’s hat into the arena of ideas. Who knows how many conversations will result that will give more traction to the cause of Christ?
Break Out Of The Pack
If you do something outrageous in a micropolitan community, people will notice. Just because you have a building doesn’t mean you have to meet in it for worship. I know that sounds silly, but it speaks volumes to the 80 percent who don’t attend church when you are willing to go to a secular environment and set up and tear down equipment each week, just to get to know them.
When The Crossing first ventured into Iowa, we met for worship in the convention center at the Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington. The first questions some might ask would be, “Why is a church meeting in a casino?” The location might offend churchgoers, but it would certainly interest the 80 percent! And since nonchurchgoers are the target, it’s a perfect location. Just imagine all the free press! The Burlington idea is a
great example of breaking out of the pack by being willing to do something no other church would even consider.
There are some great mobile church models out there. Check out Lifechurch.tv or Seacoastchurch.com for some awesome insights into technology, children’s areas, and other information. Our local paper has done scores of articles on our church. It happens every time we do something outrageous . . . like when we gave everyone 10 bucks and told them to invest it in God’s kingdom . . . or the time we canceled worship and organized an outdoor Memorial Day service at the local veterans home . . . or the time we started a high school party alternative to help stop underage drinking . . . or when we opened our thrift store . . . or gave backpacks to all of the children who couldn’t afford one . . . you get the picture. Micropolitan communities are small enough to feel it when we reach out. The 80 percent see churches as spiritual fortresses with high walls. We want to show them we are missionally mobilized members of their community.
The Crossing opened a second campus in Quincy with the specific mission of benevolence in mind. We took an unusual step even for us by purchasing a 140-year-old church building in a residential area rampant with drugs, alcohol, and crime. We initially wanted to use part of the building as a residential addiction discipleship program for men. We also had plans for Celebrate Recovery, a soup kitchen, a benevolence triage program, and a ministry for single moms. We also planned to use the auditorium for an extension of our services. When the neighbors heard about our in-house recovery program, they balked. Local media covered the story with gusto the showdown between the church trying to do something about addiction problems in the community vs. prospective neighbors.
We held an informational meeting to hear the neighbors’ questions, comments, and concerns. They all were happy with us coming into the neighborhood and with our other ideas, but the addiction program was going to be contentious. The last thing we wanted to do was alienate the community we were trying to help, so we took that proposal off the table. The neighbors appreciated being heard. We now have a campus in the heart of a hurting community that ministers in all sorts of ways.
Since that time, three businessmen have stepped up to build a new in-house recovery facility on our original campus. These and other efforts help The Crossing stand out in our micropolitan community. They give us the opportunity to build trust and to be considered a partner. We’ve earned a reputation as a church that makes our city a better place to live without compromising our gospel message.
Keep A Balance
Engaging the 80 percent requires keeping a balance between purity and proximity. In John 17:14-18, Jesus prays about his followers being in the world but not of it; it’s something that’s truly difficult for a church to put into practice. Purity without proximity is judgmental, separatist, sheltered, and conceited; such a church becomes a hotbed for self-righteousness and finger pointing. Churches bent in this direction love to curse the darkness and talk about the good old days with longing affection. These churches may try to satisfy the requirement of proximity by being a “sending” church. And we might define sending as a predominately traditional church that is comfortable with the usual and predictable . . . a congregation committed to taking care of its own needs and giving to established mission works. The church fulfills the “obligation” of proximity from a distance with their checkbook.
A church that practices proximity without purity is indistinguishable from the rest of the world. They really have nothing spiritual to offer, as they have sacrificed life change for worldly relationships. Many of today’s megachurches have resorted to proximity tactics like shock to attract an audience. One church printed billboards advertising a sermon series called “My Lousy Sex Life.” XXXchurch.com interfaces their parachurch ministry with churches using a program called “Missionary Positions.” While these and other provocative ideas might attract people, tongue-in-cheek phrases might blur the line between spiritual and worldly so much that the unchurched won’t be able to distinguish a difference. Some might water down clear teachings from God’s Word in an effort to bridge the gap. Paul admonishes us in Romans 14:22, “Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves.”
This tension between purity and proximity reveals itself in our personal lives as well. Some choose to homeschool their children in an effort to protect their purity; others send their children to public school with an expectation they will shine their light and influence the culture around them. Within this tension lie our movie and entertainment choices, our spending priorities, our closest friendships, and our time commitments. Many Christians have found their best solution in pretending; I mean, they act one way in church environments and another in their social or work life. This solution neither honors God nor fools the world.
Jesus taught about this tension when he discussed his and John the Baptist’s ministries in Luke 7:31-35. When John arrived on the scene, his nocompromise approach directed listeners to repentance, and this struck a chord of revival in their hearts. He established proximity by the power of his message, and people flocked to him. While sinners came to John, Jesus went to sinners. Jesus called Matthew from his tax-collecting table, Zacchaeus from his tree, Simon from his boat, and Lazarus from his grave. Jesus never compromised purity in his proximity. Even so, the perceptions of some were skewed.
For me, the most perfect picture of the balance between purity and proximity is Jesus on the cross. It reminds me of the time I was standing in the Sistine Chapel looking at the famous depiction in the center of the ceiling. Both God and Adam are reaching out for each other with a small, unpainted space between their outstretched fingers. On the cross, Jesus closed that gap, one hand nailed in the direction of God, and the other in the direction of man. I see him there with his body in tension, holding two worlds together in proximity and purity.
As the micropolitan church breaks out of the pack in pursuit of the 80 percent, it must remain ever mindful of this tension and keep a balance. We must remember that God’s perception is the one we must be concerned about. We must avoid lazy ways of building proximity at the expense of purity as we venture out into the deep water of our culture.
Streamline Decision-Making
Churches regularly wrestle with a lack of speed and agility in decisionmaking. This is especially true with churches that utilize a church board and are not exclusively staff led. Everyone has an opinion, some are informed and others are uninformed. Staff members or lay leaders are no different. Everyone fits in the body of Christ, but Paul teaches us that our location and function in that body vary. There are some things we do better than others, and vice versa. There’s nothing wrong with that . . . as long as everybody knows that, depending on the subject, some leaders’ opinions are more informed and gifted than others.
God designed the church to run more like an organism than an organization. And Christ expects his body, the church like the human body to operate each according to his gifts and abilities. The problem is that in the church, typically, a decision is made by a committee after it hears opinions that are all given equal weight. This may sound fair, but it isn’t the way Christ designed the church to operate. Leaders rarely get to shine as brightly as they should because everyone wants to weigh in on the subject. This not only slows down the process, it also confuses it because opinions that aren’t beneficial to the body are voiced and debated.
To shine some light on this, we did a leadership exercise early on at The Crossing. Before our annual strategic leadership retreat, I asked each elder to write down what he considered to be the greatest strengths of the others who were there. I collected these papers ahead of the retreat so I could compile them. At the retreat, we sat in a circle, and elders took turns sitting in the middle of the circle. One by one, I read what the others had written about the elder seated in the middle. It was wonderful and humbling. After the comments were read, all of the leaders gathered around the elder and prayed. Each elder broke down as he humbly received praise.
Two very important things were brought to light by the exercise. First, the leaders could see that each leader was especially gifted in one or two areas. Each elder began to realize that they had a specific role inside the leadership and that their opinion was vital in those specific areas. This didn’t mean their opinions in their weaker areas were useless, it just meant God had provided the team with another person with a more gifted opinion
in that area. Working like an organism instead of an organization would help with decision-making speed and also affirm each leader’s contribution.
The second revelation was that, when viewing ourselves as a body instead of a committee, we could see God had given us great talent in nearly every necessary area. God had provided everything we needed to make great, highly competent decisions, and that was an awesome realization. This helped to streamline discussions, as leaders deferred to those who had expertise in specific areas.
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden often said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry!” Operating as a body helps the church to be quick to move, to pivot, to adjust, to release resources, and to trust each other while doing it. And it enables the church to accomplish things without feeling frantic as deadlines approach or feeling insecure because insufficient time was spent on a particular subject.
Finally, as leaders, we gave each other the freedom to fail. In the church, there are failures and then there are failures. Moral failures involving sexual misconduct or misappropriation of funds are epic. Failures in these areas can negatively redefine the church and handicap it for years. The church must have safeguards in place to protect leaders from even being tempted in these areas.
The failures I’m referring to the ones we are “free to fail” at are ministry ventures that fall apart because they were bad ideas, or perhaps they were decent ideas but were executed poorly. There have been plenty of times we’ve attempted an idea only to have it blow up in our face! It’s not terribly important that it fails; it’s what we do after the failure that is most important.
Let’s face it, if we try new things, we’re not going to have a perfect record of success. In the micropolitan church, a steady supply of new ideas and approaches will be tried . . . and some will fail. Micropolitan leaders need to have the freedom to attempt things that may not work.
When it became clear that The Crossing needed more worship space, we enlisted the help of a local architectural firm to do our drawings. We insisted that the most we could spend for the project was $3 million. The firm repeatedly assured us everything would be fine. When the bids finally came back, the average was right around $6 million. Adding insult to injury, the firm billed us $250,000 for drawings of a building we couldn’t afford to build. I think this would qualify as a failure.
Instead of losing our composure, we adapted the plans and used some elements from them, but opted for a pre-engineered steel building instead of the fancy one they had drawn. In the end we got a great building that was finished earlier than expected for well under our original budget. We failed, but we failed together, and we failed forward.
Sometimes ideas might look like failures, but we just need to allow a little more time. The Crossing decided a Saturday-evening service might reach a new group of people in the community. The service didn’t take off right away. We tried to enhance the service with food. We tried to make fellowship more special. We tried to encourage Sunday attenders to try it. Some in the church were ready to give up on it because it was a drain on volunteers and resources. There were a lot of reasons to give up. We stuck with it, and today it is as vibrant as the rest of our experiences.
Create A Culture Of Change
A micropolitan church needs to experience change in small increments, especially on the front end, because each “win” increases the tolerance to change. As the church stacks up the wins, it gains confidence and boldness to approach new ideas with enthusiasm instead of fear. The volume of previous successes decreases resistance to certain high costs of the occasional failures. Change in a church is like a bank account. Each win is a deposit, and the costs in resources and people are the withdrawals. Failures are also a withdrawal. In order to manage change, a church must make sure it isn’t overdrawing from its account.
Resistance to change comes from a number of areas. For churches in micropolitan communities, the primary resistance comes from cultural
inertia. “We’ve never done it that way before” is a mantra inside those churches. The threat or fear of losing people is a second source of resistance. Leaders fear losing fellowship with people who have history in the church, plus they worry about how the church will operate without their money or involvement. A third resistance comes from a desire to be true to the faithful people who have entrusted the care of the church into the present leaders’ hands. The financial, social, and perceived spiritual implications of change are daunting.
Churches that want to go “micropolitan” need to strategically think about ways to lower resistance to change and raise levels of confidence. As discussed earlier, resistance to change is lowered when small successes are stacked up. Resistance is lowered when the right people favor a change. The pastor is the visionary, but lay leaders are needed to give credibility to the vision.
Congregational members can marginalize the pastor’s desire for changes; he’s often considered to be a hired hand who is influenced by his desire for personal success at the church’s risk. They might question his motives and worry that if his grand idea fails, it will damage the church, but he can just go elsewhere. When respected leaders who are part of the mosaic of the community unify behind the pastor’s vision, they give it credibility and resistance is lowered. A third way resistance is lowered is when the church is trying to reverse a downward spiral. A crisis may not be a great experience, but it is a powerful environment for change. Changes are dangerous in these times because the church is in a weakened state. But if times are desperate, then desperate measures might be necessary. It’s been said, “Never waste a good crisis!”
The Crossing was in a crisis in 1998 when the pastor left after a moral failure. Attendance dropped by 100, nearly one-third of the total number at that time. Leadership was focused on the rearview mirror, as pieces of a shattered vision were all around them. Purchasing a community college campus was not a small change. Change is always better in small increments. But desperate times called for desperate measures. The risks were very high, but the need for a new vision, mixed with the desperate feeling the crisis created, helped to lower resistance. It wasn’t just a novel
idea either, as the elders really felt the presence and direction of God in the move. Leaderships’ unity in support of the purchase of the campus gave credibility to the new vision, which served to lower resistance.
As the church grew, the “wins” engendered confidence in the vision and in the leaders. Today, The Crossing has great agility to change because it maintains a high balance in that bank account . . . not with money but with confidence. The congregation embraces new approaches because the wins have greatly reduced their fears.
In 2009, The Crossing was faced with a failure I will discuss in the multisite chapter of this book. Three of five staff members at one of our locations left. No doubt about it, this failure made a big withdrawal from our confidence account. A perfect storm or maybe an imperfect one created the situation: financial vulnerability (because we had stretched out into a new community), a poor decision in hiring a campus pastor, and the financial meltdown of the national economy. These things caused our leaders to lose a good deal of their confidence to take risks. Even though the recovery came quickly the location rebounded with staff and attendance in about four months the sting of that failure lingered.
During the experience, Nathan, our multisite discipleship pastor at the time, gave me a little book to read that I referred to earlier: How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins. I could clearly see my error in the second step of capitulation . . . that is, “hubris brought on by success.” I had developed so much confidence in our model that I became arrogant and cut corners in the hiring process. I didn’t think it was possible for our model to fail. Dependence on God for wisdom had quietly been replaced with arrogance.
I look back at the experience and consider it to be “failing forward.” While it was painful and took its toll through that withdrawal from the church’s confidence account, God also used it to prepare our hearts for greater things that would require a greater dependence on him.
It is human nature to resist change, but it gets easier when people are resigned to its necessity. Let’s say you are working at your job and the boss comes in and says that, as an exercise, he wants you to write your name
with your left hand. (I’m assuming you are right-handed.) Your signature probably looks pretty pathetic. Then he tells you he wants you to write that way for the rest of the day. Uncomfortable as that might be, you might tolerate it. But what if he said he wanted you to write that way for a week, a month, or even a year? At what point would you reach your breaking point and say, “That’s enough! This is not the way I was designed. I’m much more comfortable using the hand I’ve always used!” That makes total sense if you have full confidence in the status quo. But let’s say there’s been an accident and you’ve lost the use of your right hand or that its function has been greatly impaired. Even though mechanically it’s going to be just as difficult using the opposite hand as the exercise the boss wanted, the perception of the change will be completely different, which will make easier to accept the new behavior. Now, each time the awkward action is repeated, it becomes a little less awkward. While change is never really easy, it will be much more palatable in a culture of change.
Don Wilson, retired senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley, a multisite church of more than 25,000 in the Phoenix area, was leading a breakout session at a conference that I was also speaking at. He quoted from Sam Chand’s book that there is no growth without change, no change without loss, and no loss without pain. That was the first time I’d heard it. The stark truth of those words resonated with me. It was an editorial on my ministry. I’ve noticed that many leaders reach a pain threshold that either slows or stops their willingness to push the envelope for growth. Recognizing the reality on the front end can help defuse the disappointments that will come along with change.
Empower Volunteers
I believe micropolitan people are more community-minded and work harder to hold their communities together than metropolitan people. Why? It’s all part of the texture of a micropolitan community. People are closer knit. These people like knowing the name of the cashier at their favorite grocery store. They like being on a first-name basis with the high school principal. They sign up for the PTO or the Pinewood Derby.
People who live in urban or suburban areas, by contrast, are less connected to the diversity of their social context. With job security at an all-time low and corporate buyouts and reorganizations the norm, people can’t help but keep their social root system shallow. While this context has advantages and disadvantages, micropolitan communities tend to be more stable. Social ties are so strong and important that the families who live in these areas will make drastic economic adjustments to stay there.
In the 1970s, Motorola closed its Quincy plant, displacing 3,000 employees in a town of 40,000. It was economically devastating, but the city reorganized itself from a manufacturing town to a more service-oriented community. Most of those employees adapted to other employment or opted to commute so they could stay. The city is doing as well now as it was back then, perhaps even better.
Micropolitan people are predisposed to sign up and show up. They get involved in volunteer efforts, take ownership, and love doing it. While metropolitan churches, funded by wealthy donors, more typically pay for staff to cover ministry areas, micropolitan people step up themselves. Their spirit of volunteerism is part of the fabric of the community. Whether it’s Little League, Scouting, tutoring, service organizations, or Big Brothers Big Sisters, volunteers take ownership of the needs of their community. This is fertile ground for the volunteer structure necessary in a micropolitan church. I’ve had plenty of conversations with visitors from large cities who are amazed by how many volunteers we have. We are capitalizing on one of the intrinsic benefits of being micropolitan.
Simple grace is the first requirement for developing a great volunteer base. We allow plenty of room for people to make mistakes. Have you ever seen and heard a church children’s choir perform? One little girl always lifts up her dress, at least a couple frown and refuse to sing, some just won’t pay any attention at all, and one or two sing loud enough for the whole choir. Have you noticed the parents and grandparents? They don’t care at all. Video cameras roll, people smile broadly, and ovations are boisterous. Why? It’s because who their little loved ones are is more important than what they’re doing. Micropolitan communities have a lot more room for that kind of grace. They know that the person singing on stage or operating
lights is their neighbor who works at the local hospital or factory. They can see the who as much as the what.
The second requirement in raising up volunteers is setting them up for success by balancing excellence with empowerment. A typical church hands over ministry to a volunteer by getting them to say yes and then handing them their tools and a schedule. But failing to properly train a volunteer is just setting them up for failure. At The Crossing, we expose a volunteer to a ministry area in stages. It begins with low impact involvement, such as parking cars or handing out bulletins. In the children’s area, we initially might ask them simply to observe or help with preparation. As they acclimate, we praise their contribution and challenge them to take another step forward. In the lobby, they might start off as a floating problem solver, helping people check in, drop off their kids, find a good seat, or take a tour of the church.
A volunteer’s ability to engage others in conversation is important. In a small group, a first step might be providing a home for hosting. Responsibility increases with excellence, and success empowers the volunteer to entertain other areas of ministry. Our volunteers are constantly moving and exploring. The Crossing has shattered the 80/20 rule by giving ministry away and balancing excellence with empowerment in the micropolitan setting. Each week at The Crossing, hundreds of people put on their lanyards and smiles and help make church happen. We couldn’t do it without them.
Hire Micropolitan
While micropolitan communities might be great places to raise families and grow churches, they don’t tend to be magnets for ministry professionals. Those who are highly gifted usually look for roles in metropolitan or suburban settings. Many view a smaller setting as career suicide. So how does a micropolitan church compete for the best and brightest? Here are some ideas that have made the difference for us:
H I R I N G F R O M W I T H I N
The church at large relies heavily on Bible colleges, Christian colleges, and seminaries to provide for their professional needs, but not everyone who enters ministry feels called before the age of 18. For the most part, the church has abdicated her responsibility to raise up ministry professionals or, at least, deferred to the halls of higher education. In most churches, the best biblical education available is in a Sunday school class or small group. Any church educational program is going to fall short of what a college can offer. As with other churches, The Crossing had no systematic educational plan or path of study leading to practical application. Many who have come to Christ on one of our campuses find him after normal college years. They have a career, a spouse, children, a mortgage, and a dog. Conventional college just isn’t practical anymore. Some have opted for online opportunities offered by various schools. While this is an option, costs usually are prohibitive. When a credit hour costs $400 to $800 per hour, an “educational opportunity” is a pipe dream for many.
It has always frustrated me that it costs so much for people to learn God’s Word at this level. I think it’s the church’s responsibility to “teach them all that I have commanded you.” And I hate the thought of a church failing to harness the full potential of the human capital that God provides. A church fails when it wastes God’s resources. Out of that frustration, Ministry Development Institute was conceived.
The Crossing created Ministry Development Institute as a tool to develop people God has raised up internally for ministry. It takes its cues from Jesus and the way he developed leaders. At least 11 of the 12 apostles were outsiders to prevailing religious culture. They were, for the most part, uneducated and unconnected. After Jesus ascended to Heaven, the Jerusalem religious leaders were amazed at the apostles’ knowledge and courage, realizing they were “unschooled, ordinary men” (Acts 4:13). The apostles were outsiders to religious pedigree, but they were insiders to Jesus. “They took note that these men had been with Jesus,” Luke explains in that same verse. The apostles didn’t have a formal education in the conventional sense, but they had the invaluable experience of being with Jesus day and night for three years.
As in this biblical illustration, there are people in our churches with incredible potential who have completely bought in to the church’s DNA and approach. They don’t need to be convinced or taught how we reach out or do ministry, they just need to couple it with some formal education to add some credibility to their ministry. Who would have picked Simon Peter as the inaugural leader of first-century Christianity? And who would pick someone with a resume like Matthew to be a biographer for Jesus? When I consider these types of things, I always think about God calling an 80-yearold Moses out of exile to deliver his people out of Egypt. When Moses questioned God’s call by asking, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?” God’s response was simple. He asked, “What is that in your hand?” (Exodus 4:1, 2). Maybe we should be asking the same question. Maybe God has already resourced us with much of the human capital we need. Like Jesus, we just need to unlock their potential by coupling their desire with great training.
I met Jim in 2002 when he moved back to town and started attending The Crossing. He was making a six-figure salary working as a regional sales manager for a national company. He had a business degree from Southern Methodist University and had owned or run businesses over the years. He was in his mid-40s, and success was starting to give way to a desire for significance. He had been a high-functioning alcoholic for many years and was in recovery. Because of his past addiction and lifestyle, he had blown through a lot of money and three marriages. I would never have guessed he would give it all up for an opportunity to serve in ministry.
Let me provide a glimpse of what God had put inside this man. Jim had such desire to give his life to full-time ministry, he raised much of his own salary support to come on staff. He brought Celebrate Recovery to us. It would be impossible to calculate how many lives have been affected just by that. He rode his bicycle past an old church in downtown Quincy, took notice it was for sale, and it became The Crossing 929 campus. I made him its first campus pastor. After growing that church to nearly 500, I asked him to run the multisite team. Today, he is campus pastor of our primary campus, a location with nearly 3,000 in weekly attendance.
Chris was managing a local restaurant. His life was complicated by a drugaddicted wife, whom he had divorced, but he was raising their two children. He met his present wife while they were both employed at the restaurant. She encouraged him to attend church with her, but he put up a fight a fight he lost. God’s plan for him was different than running a restaurant. Chris took a position as assistant children’s minister at The Crossing. Over time, he developed into the lead children’s minister. Then he was promoted to discipleship pastor, and then campus pastor. Today, he heads up the children’s ministries of all of our locations. He oversees and strategizes what we do with our camp, along with handling numerous other creative things.
I could tell these stories about our staff members and students of Ministry Development Institute all day long. They are but a few examples of the internal hiring we have done. MDI gives us a tool to provide an education that is nearly equivalent to what a Bible college can offer.
MDI is the brainchild of Dr. Alan Rabe, a Crossing church member who used to be the dean of the graduate school of Hope International University in Fullerton, California. He shared my passion for raising up ministry professionals and servant leaders from within the church. He has developed a plan of study that takes 18 months and emphasizes both the Old and New Testaments, interpretation, and application. What does it cost? The 18month course of study costs $240 . . . total.
Through MDI, people whom God raises up within the church can pursue a comprehensive path of biblical knowledge and achieve a high level of competency. Whether the knowledge and abilities result in hiring for a professional position or is used in volunteer ministry, MDI drives spiritual roots down deep. It’s an entirely online (and basically free) option to develop Bible college-level understanding of key biblical issues for the purpose of ministry. We began offering MDI to staff only, then branched out into elders, volunteer ministry leaders, and church members.
I can hardly wait to see the long-term effects of MDI on this church. It has increased our staffing options exponentially. My hope is that our success will serve as a template for other churches who wish to assume the
responsibility of educating the leaders found within their walls to greater levels of understanding and more effective ministry.
H I R I N G E X T E R N A L L Y
We require The Crossing’s DNA be a part of our most critical hires. It’s not that other ways of ministry aren’t valid, but our model requires ministers with a high level of alignment in order to be successful. We always try to look at relocating a present staff member when launching a new campus, knowing that a common understanding of “our way” is absolutely critical for success. The one time we deviated from this path was disastrous for us. But moving people into new locations would sometimes stretch our staff to the point of breaking.
Trying to hire from other churches didn’t work well for us not only because of alignment differences, but also due to big gaps in compensation. Most other churches pay more than we do, and we couldn’t compete financially. Those whom we have hired from other churches have had to endure substantial pay cuts to work on our team. One good thing has come of this: We’ve been able to weed out people who choose ministry as a career. We prefer to hire those who feel a calling. I’m not saying that people accustomed to making more money aren’t called, but I have seen a substantial increase in Bible college students looking at ministry more as a job or career, which is less than it should be.
The Crossing likes to partner with people who see their role as a mission more so than a ministry. A missionary embraces all sorts of potential barriers to follow his calling: financial challenges, language and cultural differences, inadequate resources and facilities, and little or no structure . . . all these things are typical on the mission field.
We consider our micropolitan approach as missional. The term missional, in my limited knowledge, is often defined in the context of “less people.” Emphasis on the casual conversation at the coffee shop, the house church, or random acts of kindness seems to promote a “do your own thing” mentality and abandons any approach that is more organized or larger in scope. I understand the concept of getting beyond the walls of the church to
minister to people where they live, but we have so much more potential impact when we exploit the strength of our numbers and unity.
With almost all of our growth coming through first-time public decisions for Christ, we certainly do not reflect the manner in which many American churches grow, which is via transfers of membership. Our target audience are not folks who are completely unchurched, but they are certainly underchurched. Our emphasis on benevolence and addiction recovery takes in many of the same folks. The poor and addicted usually are not big givers, so money is in shorter supply. A church thinks more creatively and adapts when money is tight. Here is the staffing situation we face: How do we find and develop a staff that knows and shares our DNA, is highly gifted in a particular area of ministry, and can be brought on board without breaking the bank?
I must admit, the Bible also contains great illustrations for hiring externally. The apostle Paul was the consummate insider to professional Judaism but a complete outsider to the church. As a Jew with Roman citizenship who was trained under their best rabbi, Gamaliel, Paul was on his way to superstardom in Judaism. He was a persecutor of the church until Jesus redirected his life on the road to Damascus. As a Christian evangelist, he had access to areas of ministry that others could only imagine, but to the church, he remained an outsider. It took someone like Barnabas to build bridges between Paul and the other Christian leaders. In time, they were able to harness and direct Paul’s formal education and gift of persuasiveness to establish churches all over the known world. And who went with Paul as he started on these ventures? Barnabas. The insider stayed alongside the outsider until there was no further doubt that Paul was the real deal.
The Crossing has dealt with hiring externally by creating a farm league. Our farm league consists of interns whom we hire for two-year periods to learn from a staff leader in specific areas of ministry. We concentrate on five areas: campus leadership, worship, youth, discipleship, and technology. Youth is broken down into student, children, and early childhood. These interns may have already received the majority of their formal education, but they lack an understanding of The Crossing’s DNA and ministry approach. They may also co-op with our MDI program for their education.
We desire to couple what they already have with what they will need for successful ministry alongside of us.
We pay our interns a full-time salary but limit the duration to two years. A person who wishes to be in our Devel-up program applies and is interviewed. We’re working with 20 interns at all times. Initially we recruited them, but now they seek us out. Our investment and coaching can sharpen the focus on our DNA, our mission, and our vision to our interns. We have the opportunity to observe them over a substantial period of time in a controlled environment where expectations are lower. We can see if they have the necessary buy-in for our vision, the proper chemistry for our staff, passion for our approach, the gifts to make a difference, and the character to hold it together. We learn whether they could be comfortable in a micropolitan church and region, and they become a great source for future hiring for new or existing campuses. There really isn’t a downside. If they don’t work out or if they fail to adhere to our internship rules, it’s not terribly painful to let them go. If we do choose to hire, the negotiation and hiring process is easy and we are able to use our precious staff dollars to their greatest effect. Without a process like this, it would be virtually impossible to continue expanding with new Crossing locations.
H I R I N G F A M I L Y
A third well The Crossing draws from is one that most businesses intentionally avoid. The Crossing breaks “conflict of interest” rules on a regular basis. Most businesses have rules to protect them from the potential sticky situations that can result from hiring family members or close friends. The Crossing is willing to take this risk. We lose out on many hiring opportunities because of our location: a micropolitan community that doesn’t have nearly as many amenities as a big city. Since much of America is trending toward urbanization, church professionals might look at metropolitan environments as places where they could have the greatest impact. The church financial picture appears less healthy in most micropolitans, even though the lower cost of living in such regions helps make up for it. This too can make the micropolitan church less attractive. For these and other reasons, churches in such areas struggle as “good fits” for many highly gifted professionals.
The Crossing has taken advantage of relationships its staff has with relatives and friends to hire out of those pools. Since we generally hire younger people, in keeping with our desire to keep “the dot” stationary or moving left, many of those who are hired are single and find their mates in the communities they serve. That keeps them from moving. Since we hire family members, it creates inertia for them to stay as they enjoy the proximity of the relationship.
When I ministered in west-central Indiana, I had a farmer friend who worked with his father and brother. There were days they would drive each other crazy, but most days he loved it. He used to say that working with family meant higher highs and lower lows. I think that is great insight. If we can be up-front with the potential negative issues that can arise, and they will arise, we can dip into a well of great potential for the church.
You might notice there was a lot of nepotism around Jesus. Most of his closest relationships were with people who either were related to him or each other. It would have been a shame for Jesus to say yes to Peter but no to Andrew, yes to John and no to James. No one would think of disqualifying John the Baptist simply because he was Jesus’ cousin.
The Crossing has hired wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, best friends, and so on. We’ve hired elders into paid staff positions. We are careful in the vetting process, realizing that sometimes the dynamics won’t work or are too dangerous, but we enjoy the freedom and opportunity to hire inside these relationships with the absence of disqualifying policies.
In the history of The Crossing, there have been several instances of what Henry Blackaby calls “a crisis of belief,” or, more properly in our case, “crises of belief.” These forks in the road and the decisions made in response redefine us personally.
Blackaby’s teaching is sobering. In Experiencing God, he relates, “When God tells me what He wants to do through me, I will face a crisis of belief.” Blackaby’s statement is made as if a forgone conclusion, something that is not up for debate. These are crises because our Father calls us to God-sized things that require faith. Blackaby then makes an even more sobering statement: “What you do in response to God’s revelation reveals what you believe about God.” Blackaby defines faith as “the confidence that what God has promised or said will come to pass.” He connects personal experience with ministry, saying, “Our world is not seeing God because we are not attempting anything that only God can do. Let the world see God at work and that will attract people!” These teachings from his book are some of the most powerful I have ever experienced! I took these concepts into my heart and life and God used them to change the way I approach my mission. God took me from leading a church of 300 to leading a church of nearly 8,000 . . . from managing a staff of 2 to more than 200 . . . from one location to multiple locations . . . from local to regional.
C H A P T E R 4 T E A C H I N G O L D D O G S N E W T R I C K S
Robert Frost’s timeless poem “The Road Not Taken” is a perfect picture of my life and of all those who don’t resign themselves to the usual.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
As with my personal story, the church also has found itself standing at Robert Frost’s “fork in the road” again and again. One path is familiar and predictable. The other is not. But when we take the risks necessary for making an impact when we step outside our desire for personal comfort the invisible God becomes more visible to us as we find ourselves leaning on him . . . often in desperation.
The success or failure of any church is based on how they handle the crisis of belief. God will confront his church over and over with the things he wants it to accomplish. He won’t leave us with these challenges to figure out on our own. The church is his responsibility. If we don’t sense that our church is regularly in a crisis of belief, I would question whether God is still
working through that church. We shouldn’t expect God to do anything fresh in the church if we say no to the unpredictable path never previously taken. God asks the church to do things it would be incapable of doing without supernatural intervention; that way, any accomplishment is rightfully credited to God (and not purely human effort). God’s purpose in this is much more than merely fulfilling a mission. He wants us to experience his unmistakable power and presence.
The micropolitan church throws its arms around these game-changing experiences. We don’t want to waste our time attempting things anyone could do. We want the supernatural presence of God to be the norm. We want to be the church people attend to see God at work. We accept the challenges God puts before us to reveal our dependence on him.
Churches in micropolitan communities that resist these challenges may not truly want to honor traditions so much as hide behind them. Blackaby relates another truth in his book: Unbelief is very costly. Les Christie told a parable that illustrated this truth.
A Christian man died and went to Heaven. He walked through Heaven’s gates and Jesus was waiting for him. The man was overwhelmed with wonder and love as Jesus took his hand to share what he had prepared for his child. But before showing the man into his new home, Jesus said he had something to share with him. Jesus reached behind a curtain and pulled out a huge work of art. It was a charcoal rendering on paper displaying scene after scene in black, white, and various shades of gray. The man, upon close inspection, could see the images on the paper were all scenes from his life. They were the moments he had honored his heavenly Father and brought fame to the name of Jesus. Scene after scene washed over his memory as he thought of Jesus, the Artist, recording them with his own hand in sweeping lines and shades. He fumbled for words to voice his appreciation.
Then Jesus said, “Before we go on, there’s something else I want to show you.” Jesus again reached behind the curtain, only this time he pulled out a work of art much larger than the first. Instead of paper, the larger surface was of stretched canvas. The scenes were captured in the vivid color and texture of oils. The man was taking in the beauty of this creation when he
noticed the same scenes from the previous artwork were there, but there were also hundreds of others he neither remembered nor recognized. The man asked Jesus about the additional scenes, and Jesus replied, “This is what your life would have looked like if it had been fully surrendered to me.” At that, the man cried, and Jesus wiped the tears from his eyes.
We too often let our unbelief get in the way of the wonderful things God wants to do to us and through us. On my first trip to Israel, the Dead Sea was one of many sites that surprised me. Since youth, I had formed a picture of what it must look like. I imagined leafless trees with broken branches, the odor of rotting fish, and scum floating on the water’s surface. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was the most pristine body of water I had ever seen. Nothing near it was dead or dying. It suddenly occurred to me that for something to die or decompose, it first had to live. The reason the Dead Sea is so pristine is because absolutely nothing lives in it. Without life, there is no death or decay. The Dead Sea has no outlet. The Jordan River flows in but not out. On its southerly trek, the Jordan first flows into the north end of the Sea of Galilee and then exits the south end; then there is a 75-mile section before the Jordan enters the north end of the Dead Sea. The Sea of Galilee is teeming with life. Visit there, and it’s easy to picture the apostles hauling in their miraculous catch of fish. Churches can be like these two bodies of water. We’re so afraid of death that we banish life altogether. There is a huge cost to unbelief that often goes unnoticed. The people of the church miss out on opportunities and never experience victories when we choose not to listen to God. This moves us to a crisis of belief.
Anytime we are facing a game-changer at The Crossing, we know we are going to lose people. Anything God-sized is going to take us out of our comfort zone. Remember that definition: “Leadership is making people uncomfortable at a rate they can tolerate.” The micropolitan church is determined to stay uncomfortable. It has chosen experiencing Christ over comfort.
Debt
I am reluctant to write this section because I know it flies in the face of so much teaching in the church today. We have all gotten a steady dose of teachings about how to handle finances from Dave Ramsey and the late Larry Burkett. Their overarching message is this: “Debt is bad!” How many people would I offend, I wonder, if I said, “Debt is good!” I don’t think I’ll venture quite that far into this minefield, but I will say that taking on debt has definitely been a game-changer for The Crossing. Debt is considered a necessary evil, and it’s certainly no fun making huge interest payments, but we must accept that there is a cost to doing business. When I look at the financial picture of The Crossing, I see many business costs, and I don’t consider debt related to buying, constructing, or renovating a building any differently than other types of debt in the church.
A church uses about half its income to pay its staff. It is the largest expense, by far, in virtually every America church. Let me ask you: Should staff costs be considered debt? If a church commits to hiring staff, isn’t it responsible for paying a debt for service rendered? The employee is in debt to the employer, according to the agreement between them, but the employer is also in debt to compensate the employee. If a church overextends itself and tries to compensate by reducing staff or laying them off, isn’t it defaulting on a debt to which it has committed? Having a staff is just part of doing business. Without them, there would be no way to accomplish the tasks that make a church effective.
Church programming also has costs attached to it. There are materials that are furnished, utilities that are used, and supplies that must be replenished. We want the building to be warm on cool days and cool on warm days. We want lights to turn on at the flip of a switch. We want to have a bulletin to pass out. All of these things cost something, and in order to do business, they need to be provided.
The reason capital (or building) debt stands out is the interest attached to it. We look at interest costs and it feels as though we’re just throwing that money away. If we could raise all of the money for a capital project up front, then we would have so much more money to spend. The problem is we can’t do that . . . not if we want to make the investment to attract the 80 percent. You would be hard pressed to find a church that is growing
significantly that doesn’t or hasn’t incurred debt. Interest is simply the cost of using someone else’s money. It’s a very key component of the American economy.
I love to use kingdom principles derived from the Bible, and I know the Bible is often quoted as a template for staying out of debt, but there are big differences between the Jewish and American economies. Jewish law used the tithe as a tax. The political and religious structures were connected. Jewish law placed limits on debt to seven years and land laws respected only renting, as land would eventually revert to the original owner. These are just a few of the big differences. I have heard countless referrals to “the borrower is slave to the lender.” It’s true. However, it is also true that the lender is slave to the borrower, if that’s how the lender makes his living. If the apostle Paul waited till he had raised all the money necessary for his missionary journeys before leaving, I wonder if he would have ever gotten out of Antioch.
The Crossing has used up to about 20 percent of its general fund to manage its debt repayment. Today, that number is below 8 percent, and I envision a day when debt will no longer be a tool we need to use. As with any home or business, we don’t want to leverage too much of our funds to pay capital debt. However, being debt free isn’t our goal either. The man who was entrusted with one talent hid it and gave it back to his master. The master expected, at the very least, that the man should have earned some interest with it. When the master received the talent back, he gave it to the man who already had 10 talents and he threw the formerly one-talent man out of his sight! If I may inquire: Do we esteem the man who was cast into the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth because he was debt free? I have no desire to focus on money any more than I desire to focus on the building it provides.
God is looking for us to produce and multiply in his kingdom, but we must understand that God’s currency is people. Isn’t it interesting that he gave the one talent to the servant who had 10? I think in God’s kingdom, more is better. The effectiveness of the use of God’s resources is measured by the amount of people we influence for him. The servant with 10 did the most
with what he had. I think God is interested in us doing the most with what we have.
If we can do that most effectively without incurring debt, great! I haven’t figured that one out, especially when I am trying to grow the church by attracting the 80 percent a segment of the population that isn’t predisposed to giving. At The Crossing, we see that giving lags about 18 months behind attendance. If our numerical growth slows down, our per capita giving goes up. If our growth speeds up, the opposite occurs. Attraction is expensive, and so is an outward missional focus.
Churches that want to be micropolitan will need to find ways of funding the changes necessary to be attractive. While there are less-expensive alternatives to the ways megachurches in metropolitan areas do it, it can’t be done for free. Funding change that increases attractiveness while still honoring God requires forward-thinking leaders to step out in faith in the areas of acquiring money and using money. Without a vision, and without a leadership willing to stand up and make the hard decisions necessary to fund our approach, The Crossing would still be just another church in Quincy riding the attendance elevator up and down between 100 and 300. Negotiating for the purchase of the college campus incurring that debt changed our game.
H O W T O G E T A L O A N
Banks loan money to people, businesses, and agencies that as determined by the banks have a very high probability of paying them back with interest. A bank’s financial interest is secured by the value of what it is financing. With churches, banks can find themselves in a potentially bad position. Local banks want to be seen as a part of the community; they want to be viewed as making the community better by funding projects that improve the quality of life while, at the same time, turning a profit for their stockholders. This makes it risky to fund a church. Repossessing a church is really bad PR. Banks don’t really understand church giving dynamics. It can make the loan process difficult.
After the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, our government set up church extension funds, a mechanism for churches to secure loans through their denomination. Extension funds are nonprofit parachurch organizations into which church members can invest their money for great returns, and churches can use that money for building construction. These organizations can facilitate ministry partnerships that carry tremendous benefits. But, regardless of where you look to secure a loan, here are some prudent steps that will help you in the process:
1. Develop a paper trail. If a church can show a healthy financial position, a history of giving, a plan for making timely payments, and a projection of growth, it will make a big difference to a loan official. At The Crossing, one of our church leaders also happens to be a gifted accountant, and that has been a great personal asset as the church approaches potentially gamechanging decisions. It has given me a good sense of the church’s position and risk exposure. Since church boards will always question the financial sense of a pastor, a reputable, conservative leader will really help create buy-in among leadership. Some denominations have internal funding agencies for church loans. The Crossing eventually moved its debt to one of these. Fund officials told us they had never seen a church with such detailed financial information.
2. Use existing church relationships. Every time we have secured a loan, we have known someone in the bank, or we’ve known someone who knew someone. Much banking business is done within relationships that have been established between banks and business/community leaders. Churches have access to some of these. Banks might ask for wealthy people to act as guarantors or cosigners of the loan. Until the church is more established, this may be necessary.
3. Get substantial financial commitments for the project ahead of time. As with all loans, the bigger the down payment and income stream, the more confident the bank will be in the church’s ability to repay.
And here are some ideas for raising money:
Fund-raising in churches today occurs in two basic ways: capital campaigns and regular giving or tithing. I’ve worked with a number of companies that conduct capital campaigns, and we have done some campaigns on our own. They are all basically the same. The key thing is to enlist as many church people as possible in the actual process. If someone is on one of the various project committees, he or she is more likely to give to the project.
Capital campaigns usually become the primary focus of a church for at least four or five months. In the enlistment phase, leaders are assigned and the church is recruited to serve. It is followed by a working phase, where committees plan advance commitment, various mailings, a brochure, a special all-church giving event, and follow-up. The “intensive period” is usually four weeks of sermons about pledging, testimonies sharing individual commitments, and a banquet where pledge cards are turned in.
Companies provide a consultant who coaches enlistment, provides encouragement and templates for mailings and brochures, and just generally oversees the process. He is valuable, but expensive. The cost of a consulting firm is usually calculated against the size of the church. As a church of less than 1,000 in attendance, we paid about $45,000. The cost is incorporated into the project, but it is by no means small. But the fact is, we’ve always raised a substantially higher amount when using a consultant.
More recently, capital campaigns are an uphill battle. Many of the tax benefits to large donors have been greatly reduced and lately, the goals promised and set by the consulting organization are harder to hit. This can be a momentum breaker for a church on the rise. One thing to remember about capital campaigns: the hardest money to raise is the money you’ve already spent. People get excited about a new building or something they can see happening. They don’t tend to get excited about debt retirement. Some pastors are great fund-raisers and just love opportunities like this. I’m not one of them. I don’t like telling a congregation how much I’m giving; I don’t like the slick salesmanship associated with the process. I don’t like making fund-raising for a particular project a four- or five-month church focus, but I do love having the tools to make the vision happen.
Teaching tithing and regular giving is the best way to handle the ongoing expenses of the micropolitan church. Tithing is one of the last things to which new believers commit. Tithing is a foreign concept to the unchurched, and that is a reason for the lag. Let’s face it, a tithe is a substantial amount of money for anyone. Most people coming to Christ in their adult years don’t have their lives set up to give like this initially. Median household income in our area is just under $40,000. That’s about $750 a week, or a little over $3,000 a month before taxes. That money will cover housing, car payments, and grocery bills. The Crossing attracts many people who are going through rather unstable times. Their finances may be complicated by child support, bad debt, legal trouble, school loans, and so forth. We attract a disproportionate number of people in their 20s and 30s, and they don’t tend to have much in the way of disposable income.
The Bible teaches us to trust God to take care of us and to show our dependence through the tithe, but a steady diet of preaching on giving will lend credence to the idea that “all the church wants is my money!” Giving at that level is a big lifestyle change for someone who is new to Christ. With that said, one of the biggest game-changers for The Crossing was to go all in on tithing. We used the book The ABC’s of Financial Freedom by Barry Cameron. Our giving nearly doubled . . . and that has been sustained. Doors that previously were closed opened up to us. I developed a boldness like never before to realize that a pastor is responsible for shepherding every area of a Christian’s life, not just the easy ones. Stewardship is definitely a key area. The ABC’s helped me get past a blind spot to be bolder in teaching tithing as a matter of simple obedience.
It takes money to fund the game-changers so necessary in the micropolitan church. I can’t remember a time that The Crossing has been “comfortable” financially. While we have longed for that feeling, we also realize that being “comfortable” can be much more dangerous than being “in need.” I wish it weren’t the case, but both individually and corporately, we seem to focus more intently on the Lord when we are in need. In fact, the greater the need, the tighter the focus.
I think about the parable of the man who buried his talent. He never took a single risk with that talent, and he returned it as he had received it. The
master’s response was harsh (to say the least). God wants us to take what he entrusts to us and take a risk with it that it might generate a return. This does two things: It keeps us in a constant state of dependence on God, and it also generates returns for the kingdom.
I tell people to be assured that if they give their money to The Crossing, we won’t hold it, we’ll spend it. We have often been criticized for “stealing sheep” from other churches. It is true that about one-third of our growth is in people who have come to us from other churches, but I also see it as God moving his people to a place where their time, treasure, and talent is going to be reinvested into the kingdom. It’s just like the master taking the one talent from the person who did nothing with it and giving it to the one who had 10. We usually spend four weeks each year teaching the biblical concept of giving. We wrap it up in interesting ways in an effort to be sensitive to those who are new to our church.
Facility
The micropolitan church attracts people by being countercultural, as in being something people don’t expect. One of the most important ways this is accomplished is in the look and use of the facility . . . the first impression it makes. The simple fact that we bought a place that very few would have purchased made us attractive. It created a sense of partnership with the community that we took something they needed to sell and turned it into a jewel in the community’s crown. Our facility choice was a game-changer.
G O O D B U Y S
Before The Crossing stepped in to buy it, the campus property in Quincy had become a black eye to the community. That was quite a change, because when it was built, it was to be the best and most beautiful educational environment in the city. No expense was spared. In 1970, it was a sight to behold. Its design won architectural awards. Its technology was unsurpassed. There was only one problem: The teaching technique it was designed to accommodate, the open-learning concept, soon fell out of favor and was abandoned for more conventional approaches. The building was abandoned, along with the concept, but the tax increase that paid for the
building continued to impact the community. After a few more years, a local community college decided to use the campus. Once again, a tax was leveraged to cover the cost. Now the community was paying for this white elephant a second time. When the college outgrew it, we came along.
Quincy appreciated not having to buy it a third time. Our deal with the community college allowed it to receive four times its sale price in state matching funds. The college built a beautiful campus just down the road. It is one of Quincy’s greatest assets today. Our cooperation made this possible. Since the building had been used by the public for years as both an elementary school and a college, people were comfortable coming into it. It wasn’t perceived as a church.
People expect to see a gabled roof, a steeple, stained glass, pews, and all that other church stuff. It wasn’t to be found at The Crossing. By creating an unexpected environment, we kept visitors off-balance. Changing their expectations left them open to something new. It is amazing how something as simple as a worship space can lower defenses. The people who had churchy expectations were not the ones we were looking to attract. The countercultural approach has proven to be very productive in reaching the 80 percent. It also opens up lots of existing vacant buildings as potential church sites. Micropolitan communities have some great options at bargain prices. When we looked at the community college in Quincy, we initially thought such a purchase was out of reach, but because the school was so motivated by the promise of matching funds, they bent over backwards to make it work for us.
The building we purchased in Macomb had been empty for six years. One side of town was growing, and the city fathers were looking for opportunities to revitalize this other, rather overlooked side. A former supermarket made a great open space for church. With 57,000 square feet of space under roof and 300 parking places on a six-acre corner lot, the facility looked pretty good. It sat on Macomb’s main thoroughfare, only a few blocks from the Western Illinois University campus. The asking price was $1.3 million overpriced for the location but we bought it for $750,000, which was a great deal.
At more than 100,000 square feet under roof, the former Kirksville shoe factory was so large, the number of potential buyers was very limited. It sat on 15 hilltop acres just south of town. The asking price was $895,000. After negotiation, we bought it for $500,000. Because it was appraised at more than $1 million, we helped the seller recoup some of his investment by taking the difference between the sales price and the appraisal, and legally classifying it as a donation. This gave him a substantial charitable tax break.
We took a minimalist, industrial approach to the build-outs at these three locations; these included clear-coated concrete floors in the lobbies and hallways, carpeting and stackable seating in the auditoriums, and exposed and painted ceilings. We placed a big emphasis on color choices, which is an inexpensive way to create an edgy space. Lighting was also a priority not the various fixtures, but the effect lighting produces. It added warmth to a naturally cool space without great expense. Incorporating a coffee bar as a major component was also inviting. We built most things ourselves. There is no doubt, our furnishings and flourishes don’t look as professional as the ones we’ve seen in high-end churches. Ours is more of an amateur look, but in the absence of competition, what we manage to create stands out (in a good way) and the costs are minimal. We do focus more resources on children’s areas, student areas, and in technology. We also splurge on our baptistery.
Since those first three sites, we have learned we can effectively communicate our DNA at a much lower cost in diverse spaces. We have effective ministry in a theater, a 140-year-old church building, a repurposed elementary school, and a pole building. Each site has its own unique flavor.
I foresee a future when dead or dying churches will learn to effectively communicate, and partner, with vibrant churches through mergers or acquisitions to launch new ministries. I recently spoke with Mark Jobe, who is doing this all over urban Chicago. Micropolitan communities are littered with these dead or dying churches, and I believe there will be a growing desire to turn these facilities over with little or no debt to churches who have a proven track record of growing churches and reaching people for Jesus.
A new facility or a complete overhaul of an existing facility can be a huge game-changer in a micropolitan community. It is something people can see from the outside, and it speaks volumes to them. It says the church is not satisfied with the usual. It says you are going to forgo some personal comfort in an effort to build a bridge to new people. Changes such as this are big news in micropolitan areas. People will be curious about it, and talk about it, and want to investigate. Each physical change further redefines your vision and passion to the outside world and to the church. And take heart that it doesn’t always have to be ultraexpensive.
E M P H A S I S O N C H I L D R E N ’ S A R E A S
All of our children’s areas have wonderful painted wall murals. When we were at Lifechurch.tv, we were blown away by their attention to the children’s areas, and we sought to reproduce the effect here. When we investigated their sources and realized we couldn’t possibly afford it, we sought out our own artist. He was a friend of our children’s minister and lived in South Africa. We arranged to fly him over and commissioned him to paint and do some construction. His labor was only $5,000, just a fraction of what Lifechurch’s source would have been. Later, we flew him over to do our Macomb location. When we acquired Kirksville, we contacted him, but he was unwilling to come back again so quickly. We got a lead from someone else, and a different artist came in and did a wonderful job. We installed bubble machines in our early childhood areas. It’s a $100 item, but it is incredible fun for the little ones.
We also made security and parental supervision a priority. Parents in the unchurched 80 percent our target group won’t necessarily trust the church with their kids. Sexual misconduct has made the unchurched wary of strangers and the church environment. Our job is to put them at ease. We do this by letting parents sign in with their children if they wish. Once they’re comfortable enough to leave them, we have observation areas with closedcircuit TV so parents can monitor their children’s progress while taking in the worship service. Once parents trust us, they feel comfortable leaving their children. We also take security very seriously. All children are signed in electronically. Only the guardian who signs them in has access to pick them up. We do this with computer check-in, identification tags, and
numbers. Custody issues and pedophilia are rampant in our culture, so security is of utmost importance. This is critical for churches that are focused outward and downward to the younger ages.
Along with the murals and security, we installed indoor play places that are strategically placed in full view of the lobby. I found our first play place on eBay. I had visited James River Church and was impressed by their use of a play place. The cost was prohibitive, so I put it out of my head, but I decided to regularly search for one on eBay. Sure enough, one in Chicago became available. No one bid on the play place, so I contacted the owners to see if they might be willing to donate it to us as a tax write-off. I learned that they were also a church that happened to be meeting in a community college; their pastor had grown up only a few miles from our church. They ended up just giving the play place to us. Some churches would have balked at using such key space for a play place, but it’s worked like a magnet for us.
Parents arrive with reluctant kids, but their mood instantly changes when they see it. Its presence declares that children are a priority with us. Since then, we have incorporated play places in all of our locations. Many micropolitan areas are small enough that there is no indoor play area in town. Mothers and children have used our play places for get-togethers during the week. It’s been one of our best investments. The play places’ maker and designer now attends our church, and we would be happy to provide information about this.
An emphasis on children is another major game-changer. Nothing is more important to young families than their children. Just watch people filming at recitals; tally the costs incurred for dance costumes or the amount of time spent following a traveling team. When the church makes kids a priority, it captures their parents. It’s as simple as that.
A micropolitan church doesn’t need to spend nearly as much on technology as a church in a metropolitan area. The entire technical package that goes into our locations can range from $15,000 to $150,000. While it might be
T E C H N O L O G Y
inferior to what’s found in some megachurches, most micropolitan churches have never seen anything like it. Time, advancement, and application have a large impact on the specific equipment we use, but I will explain the strategy behind our technology.
Our technology fits into a space that reflects our desired target. Since we are pushing the dot to the left trying to attract younger folks (or at least trying not to age) our services and our technical abilities will be edgy and countercultural for a micropolitan community. Our worship spaces are simple, windowless rectangles so we can control lighting. We put the stage on the long wall in order to bring the crowd forward. We have steps along the entire length of the stage to allow for people to come forward, and we leave enough space between the stage steps and the first row of chairs to allow for at least three rows of people to kneel. We put connecting points in the back corners of the auditorium for people to pray with others, ask questions, or receive counsel. We place obstacles around outside doors to encourage people to leave through the center ones. This helps create more conversations and ministry opportunities.
Unlike many churches, we have only one style of worship. This tightens the focus on our target and helps people to adopt our philosophy of “it’s not about me.” We adjust the lighting to complement the various elements of worship. When singing, we use intelligent lighting that moves to the music and is enhanced by hazers. House lighting is down for the music, up some for the sermon, back down for decision times, and up for announcements. Lighting control and good lighting instruments are essential for these effects. Sound is controlled from the rear of the auditorium and the stage. Sound configurations differ by location, but it is something one feels as well as hears. Volume and equalization are both determined with our primary target in mind.
Video technology at The Crossing incorporates live feed technology to our other campuses. One might think that cameras, projectors, screens, presentation software, computers, and live technology would be cost prohibitive. But it’s not . . . at all. We route four camera feeds into a video switcher, choosing new shots every few seconds. We do layovers for titles, Scriptures, and lyrics.
While broadcasting live via the Internet worked for us when we used standard definition, our locations and the lack of Internet infrastructure affected us greatly when we switched to high-definition. After searching and testing and failing, we finally opted for live C-band satellite feeds. These days, satellite technology has matured and it’s extremely stable . . . almost zero glitches. While it carried a pretty large price tag, that stability was key to us. We chose C-band and over Ku-band because it is less likely to suffer rain fade. Broadcasting live via the Internet requires only about 2 MB of continuous bandwidth. Our satellite time costs us about $60,000 per year, regardless of how many locations we have, so that opens up a world of possibilities for us. Many micropolitan locations would be fine using an Internet platform, especially as stability is continuing to improve.
We’re not breaking new ground with technology. Large metropolitan churches are way ahead of us. The important differences are twofold. First, we are doing something that is new in our communities. Nothing local compares to it. It may remind the average person of an experience they had at a major event or perhaps at a big-city church, but our location is what makes it unique.
Second, we have figured out how to do it without spending truckloads of money. Technology costs can be ridiculous. I was speaking with a prominent pastor from a large metropolitan church during a retreat. I had drawn a crowd while talking about how little we paid for virtually the same product most of them had. This particular pastor was unimpressed and began touting the virtues of the HD technology his church had purchased. Just one of his cameras cost more than our entire video package. I told him the world’s most well-defined picture is not always beneficial, as neither of us has the prettiest face to zoom in on. Sometimes a little less definition is better! In any case, with respect to technology, there is no competition in the micropolitan community, so that bar can be set a little lower, freeing up more money for necessities.
Technology is another game-changer for the micropolitan church. It helps a church set itself apart from others by speaking the language of the world without compromising the message of the Lord. It opens up doors to new venues and frameworks of ministry. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are
watching The Crossing’s worship services. We have people tuning in from almost every state. Keeping up with technology is going to be a major tipping point for churches in the future.
Worship
From our first days as a micropolitan church, the worship experience we produce has been the first impression that has defined us. We are looking to attract the 80 percent, and we won’t get many second chances, so we craft our experiences with that in mind. The 80 percent don’t like to see exorbitant amounts of money spent on aesthetics any more than church people do. Simplicity and creativity speak to them. Our buildings, lobbies, and worship areas reflect this principle; they put people at ease since they aren’t intimidating. We seek to reinforce that “come as you are” attitude with our conversation areas, coffee bars, and information kiosks.
We level the field by having a constant influx of new songs in worship. Most of our songs have a relatively short shelf life. We lower the lights enough for newcomers to feel inconspicuous. The music is loud enough that their voice won’t stand out if they choose to sing. Everything around them is contrary to their preconceived notion of what to expect in a church. The stage has no permanent furniture no pulpit or choir loft. The performers dress down, giving tacit permission to everyone to “be yourself” and be comfortable. The sermons are more “how-to” than “ought-to”; they are both funny and encouraging. They are hard-hitting when appropriate and don’t compromise biblical truth.
Newcomers typically are nervous because they don’t know what will happen. We do our best to let them know we aren’t going to embarrass them. A church trying to appeal to the 80 percent must recognize the newcomers’ need for personal space.
Recently, I attended a church where, during the invitation time, men stood around the stage to assist people in their decisions. If someone came forward, a man or men escorted them to a room somewhere in the back. If I were a visitor, there’s no way I would go up there. It was far too intimidating. Where were they taking people? What were they doing to
them? Later, the church sought to recognize visitors by clapping and asking them to raise their hands to receive a brochure. There’s no way I would have raised my hand. The church’s leaders clearly did not put themselves in the position of visitors.
The worship service sets the parameters of expectation. Confrontational moments need to be carefully measured and communicated for the benefit of the 80 percent. The two most confrontational points in our experiences are the invitation and Communion. We clearly tell people during the invitation that if they come forward to pray, no one will bother them. The moment is between them and the Lord. If they wish to share it with someone, pastors stand way over on the sides and are available. No one stands front and center looking longingly at people as they come forward. If a person has questions or wants someone to pray with them, we direct them to the connecting points in the back corners of the auditorium.
Communion can also be confrontational. We post instructions on the screens with the 80 percent in mind while we share Communion together. We emphasize discipleship, and so we do not consider worship to be our primary teaching time. We want to accomplish teaching and discipleship with an intentional leader in a relational environment. We do, however, consider worship to be our primary attractional method, so we use it to connect people to small groups. We do that in the sermon, at the connecting points, and with the announcements. Our primary kiosk is for small group sign-up.
The one thing we splurge on that may seem like a throwback is the baptistery. Our baptisteries are so big we could fit an entire family or small group into the water at the same time. Each has a zero edge, so water continuously flows over the edge like a quiet waterfall. Each has a stone appearance that imitates the mikveh in Israel’s history. They have become a focal point in our services. Every baptism in every service is filmed and produced into a short video. We show the previous week’s baptisms at each service. Other than that, we don’t give the congregation much to focus on from a design or architectural standpoint.
I believe there is no substitute for witnessing a person change right before your eyes. Every time I share the story of a person standing next to me who is willing to let their faith in Jesus be known, it reminds everyone there what we are all about. It’s the same with the stories people share about how they came to Christ as they stand in the baptistery. I think this is where someone sees Christ most vividly. I love to see people on their knees at the steps, reaching for the Kleenex during the second worship set of our service. Our church becomes a launching pad for hope and victory. This image reminds us all that the facility or the technology will always take a back seat to what is truly important.
Worship is the most infamous game-changer in today’s church. It has opened a virtual Pandora’s box of issues and arguments. Every week we get feedback telling us to turn down the volume, to sing more familiar songs, to target a wider audience, to use less technology, and so forth. I have to continually remind the church and myself that we have a “bigger yes” and that’s paid off in people. The Crossing isn’t one of the largest and fastestgrowing church in America because it’s trying to be like other churches. Our methods are working because we have made the lost children of God our biggest priority. We apply constant pressure to that dot by keeping our eyes outward and trusting in Jesus to meet our need from his boundless supply. Our unapologetic approach to worship fits this strategy.
Music is a big part of most of our lives. We have expensive radios in our cars to fit our musical needs. XM and Sirius XM radio give us more options. Apple products and various alternatives keep our favorite music at our constant disposal; for many, iTunes has become their new record store. Music moves us emotionally; it connects with us on a deep level. Musical taste is one of the most subjective areas of our lives.
Some churches provide different worship experiences designed around different musical tastes. I don’t necessarily think that approach is wrong, but I do think it to be rather schizophrenic. We just never wanted to be a church with multiple personalities. This makes us better at doing that one approach, but it sacrifices any attempt at better connecting with a person’s individual taste. Since we teach that personal taste is something that is sacrificed on the altar of the mature in Christ, a single approach serves us
better. However, it probably is the most powerful negative for people who walk in and then walk right back out. Make no mistake, the price of singlemindedness is very high and needs to be measured in each environment.
The Perfect Marriage: Multisite And Micropolitan
It won’t work! Not in the Midwest! I could see it happening in Chicago or Los Angeles, but not in the heartland of America, especially small communities like ours. Who would want to look at a preacher on a screen instead of seeing him live? Couldn’t you just stay home and watch church on TV? I disregarded the concept of video venues before the term multisite was being used to describe a new way of launching churches. Geoff Surratt met a similar attitude when Seacoast Church first began experimenting with the multisite concept:
When Seacoast started our first campus, everyone thought we were crazy. I seemed to have an endless line at my office door of staff saying this will never work, and other churches told us again and again that video teaching was a dumb idea. Seven years and 7,000 new attendees later it seems like everyone wants to open multiple campuses.11
The Crossing had been experiencing a great deal of growth and space was a constant concern. The stopgap measures we had taken on the way to a new auditorium reaped some unexpected benefits. I personally learned one critical concept when we were forced to use cameras and image magnification.
We had completely run out of space in our auditorium and couldn’t figure out a way to add another service. We were making crazy, seven-minute transitions from one service to the next; the worship team just continued playing without a break while one group exited and the next group arrived. We decided to break out the back wall of the stage and use that space to place an additional 200 chairs. That meant some people were behind me while I preached. To keep the 200 who were behind me from having to
focus on my backside, we introduced cameras and image magnification so those folks could see an image of me from the front.
Two things happened. First, it taught me how to preach with a camera. Second, and most important, it taught me that people are actually very comfortable with looking at the screen instead of me. I remember trying to make eye contact with people in the first few rows, but many of them were looking away from me to the screen. It actually made sense. You could see facial expressions and follow the sermon better.
That was something the entertainment industry had discovered years before, according to Chris Mavity of North Coast Church. Unless people are in the first few rows of a live event, they often watch the game or the concert on a large video screen simply because they can see better. The same is true at most large churches where the speaker or worship leader is shown on a video screen.12
The lack of space and the use of image magnification served to open my heart to more innovative approaches; I began to explore other ways of introducing people to an intimate, personal relationship with Christ. Earlier in this book, I shared about our visit to Life.church, an incredibly effective multisite model in Oklahoma City and several other cities. At this writing, Life.church is the largest church of any kind in the country. As of 2009, they were averaging almost 27,000 in attendance in their many locations and were the 13th fastest-growing church (that was nearly four times as large as they were in 2005, when we went to check them out). Their growth has continued. Today, they report more than 100,000 attendees! However, the multisite strategy is almost exclusively a metropolitan phenomenon. Trying it in a micropolitan community is completely different.
While The Crossing had been growing at an awesome rate in Quincy, in the back of my mind I felt we might arrive at a time when we had so saturated the community, there would be no one left who hadn’t already tried us out. That would never occur in a metropolitan city. That is just one contrast between metro and micro cultures. The Crossing became a big fish in a small pond relatively quickly. As I’ve discussed, there just weren’t any other marketable alternatives in Quincy, which gave The Crossing a virtual
monopoly on innovation and relevance. In the metro culture, the body of water is more like a lake than a pond. There are many more people to pull from, but the competition is also greater, with many innovative church options. Think of church options like restaurants: Big cities have much more variety.
The idea of reaching an end to our explosive growth and no longer connecting with an ever-widening circle of people for Christ pushed me into the unusual and risky idea of multisite. It would require a major shift in virtually every organizational structure and ministry at The Crossing. Not only that, the congregation would have to buy into something very uncomfortable . . . outside the norm. Our leaders had never before thought in these terms.
I call multisite a “quantum leap” for a reason, especially in a micropolitan setting. It’s human nature to be self-serving. It’s difficult for most churches to transition to becoming outwardly focused. It is just easier to sing the songs we already know, worship in a space we’re used to, and stand next to the same people we stood with last week. But going multisite is a leap unlike anything most churches have ever experienced. Most church folks can get motivated to work with youth, give to a new building project, or hire a new ministry position but the idea of exporting lots of money and energy to a community where the church has virtually no connections . . . well, that’s something else. Many multisite churches exist in metropolitan areas where people have to drive an extra 15 or 20 minutes to get to church. They exist where the “mother church” lets a few hundred church members start in a new location. They have a built-in financial base, a core of people, and proximity to the parent campus.
The micropolitan church that becomes multisite takes a quantum leap because it goes into a far-off community where it can’t simply shift over a core of people from the parent church. Without that core, the new work loses a guaranteed amount of money and the security of proximity. It must be outwardly focused on another level it’s like swinging on the trapeze without a net to catch you. In one sense, it is “enhanced” church planting. The challenge is to help leadership see not only the need for a church in another area but be willing to put the resources behind it at a substantial
level. This requires a high level of commitment and risk to the forward movement of the gospel, even if we never personally receive any expected benefit from it.
Biblical Example: Men From Cyprus And Cyrene
An often overlooked Scripture passage captured my heart as I was considering the prospects of going multisite in a micropolitan way.
Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the word only among Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord (Acts 11:19-21).
It is easy to read over this Scripture passage without recognizing the weight of it. These men from Cyprus and Cyrene with no recorded names are some of my biggest heroes of the New Testament and serve as our multisite example. Find a map and look at how far Cyprus and Cyrene are from Antioch. Cyprus is more than 100 miles away from Antioch and Cyrene is a whopping 1,000-plus! What would cause these men to walk away from familiar settings and their families and enter a foreign country to start a church? Weren’t there needs on the island of Cyprus? Didn’t North Africa need the gospel as well? What would cause them to reach across culture, language, and religion to establish this new work?
We usually call the trip Paul and Barnabas took in Acts 13 the first missionary journey. I would submit that such a journey might never have happened if it weren’t for these nameless men in Acts 11. The church they established broke through the barrier of Judaism in advance of Paul’s efforts; after the destruction of Jerusalem, Antioch became the new capital of Christianity. Antioch was where Barnabas brought Paul to cut his teeth in
ministry. Paul spent a year there in a supporting role to the work of the men from Cyprus and Cyrene. I’m sure much of Paul’s DNA for reaching outside the Jewish culture and going out into the world was shaped by the work of these special men. It was where we first wore the name “Christian,” and it was the base from which Paul launched out to reach the whole known world for Christ. It was truly a missional church, born out of the simple desire of these men from Cyprus and Cyrene. There was something of them in every subsequent victory and every new church that was established. I believe that when we are moved to do something that is truly selfless as with these men the Lord’s hand will be with us. If we can embrace the humility of the nameless, God will accomplish the most and receive the greatest glory.
8 Multisite Hurdles
When The Crossing went to Macomb, we were expanding our strategy from Acts 2 to Acts 11; we were trying to catch the same fresh wind that filled the sails of these men so long ago. We had no template to build from, no model other than what we had seen at Life.church in Oklahoma City. Although some multisite strategies were out there, we weren’t aware of them, and the type of micropolitan setting we were entering hadn’t been done before. Below are some steps we have taken that couple micropolitan and multisite strategies. As our stories confirm, these steps never occurred in a neat order. They are arranged this way only because it seems logical. But remember, since the church is more organism than organization, as the Holy Spirit directs the process, flexibility is key.
We chose Macomb as the location for our first multisite fairly quickly. We realized the venture would require very deep involvement, especially with regard to labor; the site needed to be close enough that work crews and staff from Quincy could help get things going. The site also needed to be far
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enough away, however, that people would attend there rather than coming to the original campus.
On a map, we drew a circle around Quincy at a 60-mile radius; we wanted to see what micropolitans were available. Macomb came to the forefront through a process of elimination. We had no desire to locate in a micropolitan community that already had a progressive church like ours. Unfortunately, there were no churches like ours within 60 miles, so that didn’t narrow down our choices. With a population of 13,000 and a student body of 11,000, Macomb was an evangelistic opportunity. No church in the city averaged more than 300. We liked that Macomb was the home of Western Illinois University. We felt a university atmosphere would likely be willing to embrace new things. Macomb was somewhat economically depressed, so it provided an opportunity to buy property at a lower cost. We also were drawn to the challenge of Macomb’s reputation as a spiritually dark place.
The decision to start a site in Macomb led directly to a decision to launch in Kirksville, Missouri. A few families from Kirkville heard what we were doing and came to check us out. They attended Macomb’s launch and proposed to our leaders the idea of a Kirksville site. Kirksville is a somewhat smaller micropolitan; its population is 17,000 with an additional 6,000 students who attend Truman State University. There was no church of any size or progressive approach. There was a new highway between Quincy and Macomb, but to get from Quincy to Kirksville necessitated a challenging 90-minute drive on a two-lane road. We also had to consider that we would be crossing into another state and what ramifications that might have, especially with regard to live technology.
Our vision has developed into one church that meets in 10 locations in 3 states with an attendance of nearly 8,000 weekly in communities ranging in size from 125 to 40,000, none of which is growing. We are unveiling a plan to launch 7 additional campuses in the next 2 years. We search out communities that have no church footprint similar to ours, and for lowercost locations so we can spend the majority of our money on our greatest asset . . . people.
It’s exciting to dream regionally and not just locally. I encourage you to assess the region within a 120-mile radius of your church; consider the communities that are represented. You might eliminate some communities because there is already great ministry happening there but if it’s a micropolitan region, there probably isn’t. Which of the closest communities are outside of your local influence? Do you have resources, or potential resources, in those areas? What are the religious footprints in those areas? Is one (or more) of the possibilities a spiritually dark area? Imagine the potential impact a micropolitan church could have for the families and individuals there! Your church could change the face of a community and the lives of those who live there! The demographics on citydata.com will be a tremendous help in evaluating potential locations.
When selecting a community for a new church site, first ask yourself what kind of kingdom impact your church could have there. Micropolitan churches with similar approaches shouldn’t be competing with each other for members. If it’s your first multisite location, it should be close enough to maintain a hands-on approach.
We considered Macomb our great experiment. Its success was crucial to our leaders and congregation if we were to cast a vision to go anywhere else. Your choice might be more obvious than ours. It might be clear the Lord is leading in a certain direction. An obvious person to lead that site someone from that area might already serve on your staff. A perfect facility might become available. A core group from that area might rise up within the church, buy into the vision and approach, and want to make a difference in their micropolitan community. It’s obvious that The Crossing didn’t and doesn’t have a cookie-cutter method of selecting communities; instead, our process has been a highly organic.
An extension campus (unlike the multisite campuses we’ve been discussing) is designed around a specific need of ministry in a micropolitan community with an already existing micropolitan church. If you have a
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specific need that your congregation is spiritually tuned to, an extension campus might be a great option. The costs will be a fraction of a full-service campus. The benefits to both the original campus and the target group could be amazing. It might be an age-targeted ministry (perhaps to seniors or those in college or entering careers). It might be based on culture or language (Hispanics or Asians, for examples). It might be more economically targeted (like ours). Whatever the case, an extension campus builds a bridge to accomplish the church’s vision and creates fellowship with specific groups who might otherwise be kept apart because of certain barriers.
Our fifth campus was launched out of our desire to connect with and serve people in some sort of need. Quincy is small enough to need only one Crossing, but we saw an opportunity to reach out to a population group we were only marginally serving. We found an old church building in inner-city Quincy with the potential of reaching a subset of our population we were struggling to connect with for economic, cultural, and transportation reasons. The building was very affordable. We were able to fund the purchase and pay for all necessary improvements with a single offering on a single Sunday.
Multisite is now a standard method of growing a church, but it is failed strategy if there is not a compelling vision behind it. That means getting the proper people to head the effort. “The biggest challenge is finding the right leaders for campus pastors,” Geoff Surratt said. “Churches who select strong, entrepreneurial leaders tend to see a great deal of growth at their offsite campuses; churches who simply choose managers or administrators tend to struggle. Multisite is not a shortcut to recruiting, mentoring, and releasing strong leaders.”13
I have to say that this step selecting the right person is the most critical component to the success of the multisite strategy. The campus pastor must lead from the second chair. He communicates the senior pastor’s vision while being the vision’s main cheerleader on the campus where he’s planted.
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Campus pastors need to be great leaders with the skill to manage all the needs of a new group of mostly strangers; they must recognize their gifts and devote those gifts to the ministry. The campus minister is responsible for managing a new staff, keeping a unified attitude to the overall vision, counseling, establishing and managing small groups, and working toward campus viability. New campuses rely heavily on the campus pastor, which creates a great deal of stress for the person in that position. Simply put, the campus pastor is a human picture of the campus itself. The success or failure of the campus and the pastor are intertwined.
The first and most critical requirement of the campus pastor is that he possess the same DNA as the church he represents. His vision and the church’s vision must be identical, as his position is the critical link that binds the multisite campus to the church as a whole. At The Crossing, we believe this person must be hired internally. There is just no way to instill that DNA in an outsider. A person who is hired externally would have to work in a ministerial role inside the church for a long time, and convince our leadership team of their sold-out commitment to the church’s approach, before they would ever be considered for such a critical role. Let me illustrate this with two stories one of success and one of failure.
While planning our Macomb multisite campus, we began to watch and pray for God to reveal the right person to lead it. We were using interns in some of our ministries. In fact, two guys were traveling six hours one-way each weekend to work in our youth ministries; one was serving primarily in teaching and the other was helping with worship. After their graduation from Bible college, they continued on with us in full-time roles. Clayton was the first intern to graduate, and he began teaching and ministering fulltime as an associate at the Quincy campus. Ben continued his internship and was hired full-time as the new campus was preparing to launch. We knew Clayton had incredible potential as a leader, but he was young, single, and had little experience. The demographic of our target in Macomb matched him perfectly, however. The median age of the town was 23 because of the presence of the university. About a year before the launch, we decided to offer him that job. Clayton has since admitted to thinking (before ever being offered the job): I wonder who the chump is who is going to take that job?
He saw it as a meaningless, second-fiddle role. Upon receiving the offer, he had mixed emotions.
Due to his initial feelings, Clayton had to think long and hard about what it was going to be like living in Macomb; he would have to give up on, or delay, his dreams about becoming a lead pastor at his own independent church. Looking back, Clayton would tell you his decision to become Macomb’s campus pastor has been one of the greatest of his life.
After his graduation, Ben came on as Macomb’s worship pastor. Eleven years later, The Crossing Macomb is a passionate, growing congregation consisting of mostly new believers excited about their burgeoning relationship with Jesus and living it out in daily life. Clayton has replaced himself by discipling a new campus pastor, while Ben has replaced himself with a new worship pastor. Both Clayton and Ben have moved on to larger leadership roles in which they are developing and reproducing leaders at all of our locations.
The church now meets its own financial needs and is a true partner in ministry. They are raising up internal leadership and aggressively pursuing their discipleship strategy.
How many 20-somethings have the opportunity to be in charge of a church of 1,000 people with a 56,000-square-foot campus building? Being connected with the Quincy campus and the rest of the staff members is like working with a net. Things that would have taken years to accomplish have been reduced to weeks and months because of our connection. The fact that Macomb has exactly the same DNA as the church as a whole has been the critical piece in the campus’s success.
I consider the role of campus pastor to be the critical link in the multisite micropolitan model due in great part to past experience. The lessons I learned from doing it wrong have been a great benefit. The Crossing literally has failed forward. Our vulnerability came from an unlikely place . . . success. As we watched and participated in Macomb’s incredible success, we became arrogant. We thought our multisite model was bulletproof. We
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developed a “just add water” mentality and believed failure was impossible because of the inherent positives of being micropolitan. We thought, No big deal! Let’s do it again! when approached by the core group from Kirksville. We did most of our homework right, but we made a defining mistake when looking for a campus pastor. No one was being raised up from the Quincy campus at the time.
We later found our flaws described in Jim Collins’s great little book, How the Mighty Fall. The first flaw was hard for us to see as a church. Collins calls it the insatiable pursuit of more. The desire to grow the kingdom of God and bring people into an intimate personal relationship with Christ can hardly be considered a flaw. Yet when the pursuit of more is combined with the wrong attitude one which fails to ask the best questions internally it can lead a church down paths that are not of God’s leading. We looked at the families who were regularly driving 90 minutes one-way for more than a year, and at their desire to be a core for a new work in Kirksville . . . as a kind of Macedonian call. The biggest problem with the pursuit of more in our case was how quickly it led us to our second flaw, hubris born out of success.
Truman State University had an active campus ministry. That ministry’s director contacted us to ask about our church-planting plans. A short time after meeting with him, he expressed a desire to lead the new campus. He was well-loved and connected in the area, had 25 years of ministry experience, and had stated a desire to be part of our team. I saw it as God meeting our need; in thinking this, I was heavily relying on my belief that our model was so great that nothing could diminish its effectiveness. In my arrogance, I pushed the hire forward without properly understanding the critical nature of our DNA. We really did very little to train him. Before long, he was on staff and making recommendations on other local staff hiring. Of the other four positions, we allowed him to push two forward. Before we ever launched, we could see serious issues in all sorts of areas and ways we didn’t match-up: work ethic, management, passion, unity, staff polarization, and gifting. We attempted to repair the situation by moving him to a role that better suited what we perceived as his gifting. Our attempts failed, and an infant church family was forced to endure the
resignation of three of its five staff members and the loss of about 100 people.
It was in the midst of this train wreck that we came to understand one of the greatest positive inherent components of the multisite system. Because all of our campuses reflect a single church, we were able to compensate for the staff loss by positioning existing staff temporarily in Kirksville. I went to Kirksville to preach and explain our situation, and our elders took a more visible role. The campuses helped to compensate for the heavy financial losses that came from reduced giving. What could have been a mortal wound eventually amounted to a loss of momentum and a reinstitution of The Crossing’s core values into the Kirksville campus. Attendance losses were recovered within four months and staff replacements aided in spiritual health. We moved the former youth minister into the campus pastor role. It was amazing to see just how much safety and security exists in a cord of three strands not easily being broken.
In reflecting upon what I’ve learned from the experience, and other mistakes, I’ve concluded I’m a natural optimist, like a lot of visionary leaders. We tend to want to look at everyone through the rose-colored glasses of their potential. That may sound great, but it can lead to certain debilitating circumstances if fueled by a dismissiveness brought on by arrogance. It’s the same unrealistic attitude that results in pastors being hired into churches that are bad fits. Sort of like a bad marriage, we think that by sheer force of will, we can change the nature of a church or a staff member. The founding pastor of a megachurch on the West Coast considered his unrealistic and overly optimistic view of those around him to be his greatest professional flaw. It certainly can lead us into some very painful and messy situations. If we couple that optimism with a successful model, it can make it easy to cut corners in a process designed to produce a great result and protect a great idea.
I believe it’s better to hire a campus pastor from an internal employment pool. That doesn’t mean we don’t have professional training, it just means they need to have served in the church in some capacity for a reasonable amount of time. There is just no way to teach our core values, our DNA, in a short period of time or to expect that through a series of interviews or a
relationship outside of the church, a good fit is guaranteed. This decision, above all others, keeps the multisite concept working well within a harmonious and united church. The campus pastor is the local face of the church as a whole, so his personality weighs heavily on the hiring decision.
These five questions encapsulate the main areas of required effectiveness that we look for in a campus pastor.
1. Can he be a leader and still give up his personal will for a greater good? A campus pastor must cast the vision of the church to his people, but he must realize it is a shared vision and not exclusively his own. It is possible for pride and a personal agenda to get in the way. The campus pastor must be able to effect change, set attainable goals, and be innovative with ideas that make the vision work in his local setting. He is required to make quick and effective decisions, equip and empower leaders under his authority, and maintain a comprehensive evaluation process. Someone with these skills might be more inclined to pursue a ministry without so much interconnectivity. Recognizing the benefit of a larger, more regional church and working in a more participatory rather than primary role in its leadership is a big step. It’s the difference between pastor and campus pastor.
2. Can he be a pastor to his people? Certain responsibilities that are considered the nuts and bolts of ministry fall under the heading of pastor. These include counseling; performing weddings, funerals, and baptisms; hospital visits, teaching, and benevolence. A campus pastor can develop and train ministry leaders in these areas to relieve himself of many of these responsibilities, as these are transferrable, for the most part. However, as pastor, he is responsible for how competently these are carried out.
3. Can he be a great cleanup pitcher? In The Crossing’s paradigm, the campus pastor is not responsible for preaching on a regular basis. He is, however, responsible for making a personal invitation at the end of a sermon and to connect it to his local setting. A campus pastor is given one series a year to preach. This gives him an opportunity to address, in a comprehensive way, a spiritual need that might apply only to his campus. He must be able to communicate effectively in facilitating the weekend
service, other important local meetings or ministries, and in any printed or electronic format.
4. Does he have the management skills to run his campus? The campus pastor oversees the professional aspects of his and the church’s ministry. He is responsible for running an effective office environment by managing the staff, budget, and the delicate balance of time for ministry and family. He does this by establishing boundaries in time, morality, and priority for his staff. He should lead by example in his own life and in his spiritual walk. He is encouraged to lead with his strengths and look to fill weaker areas with new hires or volunteers.
5. Does he have the people skills to motivate his congregation? As the recognized leader of a local congregation, the campus pastor regularly manages and resolves conflict both biblically and gracefully. He encourages his people to take on more responsibility. He builds respect as he leads and as he follows. He makes it a priority to effectively lead from the second chair as he submits to the authority of the senior leader and/or leadership. He encourages, shows appreciation, and provides positive feedback at his campus.
Put all of these ingredients together and simmer them in the DNA of the church for a while. Take your time on this one. Even though multisite strategy has some grace associated with it (thankfully), it shouldn’t be relied upon. Willow Creek multisite pastor Steve Gillen and I recently spoke about a proposed new multisite launch they had been planning for some time. Just a few weeks before launch, leadership decided their choice for campus pastor wasn’t going to work out. When they scuttled the project, it was disheartening, especially because of the investment of time and energy, but it was better to pull the plug before launch rather than after. I shared our Kirksville story with Steve, and we saw a lot of commonalities. The major difference was the timing of figuring out the problem. Although Willow Creek’s experience could be considered a failure, it was a far easier way to deal with the situation. Develop competencies that you are looking for in a campus pastor and be willing to take the time to measure a candidate against them. A new campus can take a lot of time and effort to start, but the campus pastor is the anchor point.
A multisite ministry location can look like almost anything. It can be a multimillion-dollar facility, or it can be something more like a small-group gathering. Dave Browning of Christ the King Community Church which has locations in six states considers a campus to be anywhere he can form a group. Christ the King has even conducted GPS church. They simply put out a meeting location’s GPS coordinates and people find it themselves. It might change to a different public place from week to week. This has the lowest impact from a facilities point of view.
Facilities in micropolitan communities tend to differ from those in urbanized areas in several ways, including cost, availability, and visibility. We’ve found facilities designed for other functions can be adapted for church use. It’s not unusual for big-box companies to have closed grocery, home improvement, and furniture stores. Smaller Walmarts, which have been abandoned for Walmart Supercenters, are sometimes available. These simple boxes with posts can easily be adapted for church needs. They include great, well-lit parking lots and exposure to main roads. They are often in areas of town that city planners would like to revitalize, and typically have adequate existing plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems. A church that embraces an industrial look can minimize upgrade costs. One need only look at what’s available with an open and creative mind.
A bigger question, perhaps, is this: How big of a splash do you want to make (and who do you want to get wet)? Starting a site in a different community miles away may mean your church will have little or no name recognition, so brand exposure will need to come from different means. A strategy of revitalization can create buzz in a community, which can potentially be a big plus in a micropolitan. City fathers always want to improve their community. Revitalizing a property serves to create a partnership with a community, can help ease zoning issues with a city planning commission, and might even open up financial help via other opportunities (such as enterprise zones).
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The only roadblock to this approach we have met with is this: A church’s tax-exempt status causes the city to lose out on some tax revenue. Box stores usually occupy prime real estate on main thoroughfares . . . and generate big tax revenues. But if a city is faced with an empty building for an extended period, it might sacrifice that revenue for the betterment of the community.
While some areas are booming and there might be some financial and zoning prohibitions, revitalization may free up a church to explore more opportunities. Revitalizing a location will tighten your ministry focus as well. Economically depressed locations might open up a ministry to benevolence. Locating in ethnic areas might present cultural or bilingual opportunities. A church’s location might also close some doors. Choosing to locate in an affluent part of the community might generate better giving numbers and a healthier bottom line, but it could limit opportunities in key ministry areas. Affluent areas will also come with more restrictions, greater costs, and a more difficult launch.
Here is an example of the power of this concept. The Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan was sold in 2009. The arena had more than 80,000 seats and sat on 127 acres of land. It cost taxpayers $55.7 million to construct in 1975. How much did it sell for? Only $583,000! Think about how much ministry could have been done at that location. A church could have made quite a splash!
The largest church in America is Life.church, a multisite pioneer that started in a former bicycle factory. Life.church has embraced the concept of making a splash. It averages about 100,000 in weekend attendance. Their south Oklahoma City site is located in a former Walmart and was averaging more than 2,000 within six months of opening. These are metropolitan examples, but there’s a lesson we can learn from them. The church made a big splash that paid off. Adapt the idea for a micropolitan area and a church stands to make a comparatively bigger one.
A great thing about micropolitan areas is proximity: Everything is close to everything else. These include people, ethnic groups, and economic social structures. Because of this proximity, certain location issues that are
common in metropolitan areas are unimportant, even irrelevant, in micropolitans. Curb appeal and traffic access have much lower priorities. People in micropolitan areas appreciate financial responsibility and a church’s willingness to invest in their community. People connect with this high level of seriousness and selflessness.
If a multisite location is close enough to the parent church, it’s possible to leverage that reputation and branding, which helps it make a splash. This can also decrease the need to try to impress in terms of size and expense at the multisite facility, which can open up options for smaller venues.
One might want to determine the cost-to-decision ratio. Establishing a church of 800 in a facility that costs $1.5 million might sound great, but starting a church of 300 in a facility that costs $150,000 is a much better ratio. The cost-to-decision ratio is nearly four times higher in the first location compared with the second: $1,875 vs. $500! In order to maintain brand excellence, there must be a certain level of space, staff, quality programming, technology, and amenity. Watering-down the brand too much just to keep costs down diminishes impact and damages the church’s valuable reputation. This applies especially to an extension campus in the same micropolitan that focuses on a specific ministry while relying on the parent campus to be the full-service location.
The costs of multisite locations are often back-loaded. There are high upfront costs, and leaders allow for some time before expecting a “return on investment.” The parent church needs the wherewithal to cover the initial costs of the facility, improvements, and staffing, not just for the launch, but also for a substantial period of time after that. Our “turnaround time” for a multisite the amount of time before we expect a location to begin covering its own expenses is about two years. Other multisite leaders have confirmed this to be a proper expectation, providing there are good cost controls in place. The offerings at a campus start-up are usually less than half of what is needed. We figure costs of construction/rehabilitation and staff, and then calculate the diminishing deficit for the first two years of
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operation. The parent church needs to be healthy enough financially to manage this effectively.
If it’s cost prohibitive to purchase or raise capital debt, then consider leasing. Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California can’t afford to purchase property for its multisites because of the extremely high real estate costs in that area. For them, leasing is a great option. It is a good solution for reducing capital debt and build-out costs. Many multisites lease facilities like schools or community centers. While this might be cost effective, it definitely reduces the splash in a micropolitan area. It seriously limits the church’s “market value,” since it can convey to the community that the church might not be here to stay. If purchasing is the best option, then securing funds for that purchase is the next step. (Please refer to the “debt” section in Chapter 4.)
Our process from conception to campus takes about a year for large campuses and about six months for extension campuses. Developing a launch calendar with specific targets moves the process forward. Responsibilities for meeting those targets need to be divided between present staff and leadership. After funding is secured, a construction manager develops a floor plan (with the help of leadership) and presents it for cost analysis. A volunteer with expertise in construction has often performed this function for us. He develops his own targeted calendar within the larger one, blending permitting, subcontractor schedules, and various completion dates. Our tech team examines the location and develops a production and information technology plan. We determine the available options with regard to bandwidth for live multisite technology. Later on, we determine the calendar dates from construction start to expected completion.
Another team begins the process of searching for staff members for the new campus, and then we start the hiring process. A launch date should represent the best possible time during the year to get maximum exposure in the community. Leadership constantly reviews the progress to make sure the critical target dates are being met or remain achievable; in some cases
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certain dates will need to be changed to minimize confusion. Another team reviews the best approach for marketing the new location to the community.
The Crossing has taken a number of different approaches to marketing our church. The best part of the approach is simply exploiting the fact that it’s micropolitan. A town of 20,000 people is interested in what’s happening in the community. As soon as we take possession of a property, we make people available to lead tours, which takes advantage of the community’s natural curiosity. During each impromptu tour, we take the opportunity to cast our vision and share our excitement for our church and the community. We host community functions like carnivals and hog roasts in our parking lot during construction, meet new people, and develop relationships.
In a micropolitan, direct contact is far better than direct mail. As people come through, we gather email information to send them updates on our progress. We use local contractors, through which we develop valuable relationships; this has proven to be a valuable evangelism tool. Newspapers and other media outlets in a micropolitan region consider a new church site to be legitimate news. Our projects have been on the front pages or the lead story on newscasts many times. The micropolitan strategies and setting reduce the cost of and enhance our marketing.
I will once again refer you to the sections earlier in this book that apply to hiring internally and externally, and to the section earlier in this chapter about the critical role of the campus pastor. Each time we start a new campus, we look to our existing staff first to see which workers might have a passion to go. This is a great opportunity to fix problems or present options to staff members who may be struggling with chemistry. It may provide a staff member with an opportunity to explore passion in a new area. Many of our staff members now work in a far different ministry than the one for which they were hired. We simply discovered their passion for a different area of ministry and made a place for them. We believe in exploiting passion to its greatest extent, realizing that it can become viral and spread to every person with whom that staff member comes in contact. Releasing the passion of an existing staff member in a new ministry area is
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exciting and rewarding; hiring a new staffer to fill their old position is a small hurdle.
We also look at volunteers who show the potential to be staff members. We poll our staff to see if they know any professionals who might be interested in our new location. We incorporate interns into roles under the eyes of the newly forming staff. As we move through the process of interviewing, creative thinking, and praying, God begins to show us the right direction.
In the multisite, local staff chemistry is essential to effective ministry. Chemistry is more important to us than ability. In sociology, the term emergence is used to describe what we look for. It means a group is more than the sum of its parts. Something rises up out of a group engaged in unified effort. You can see it at a ball game, worship service, mission trip, or in a great staff. A multisite staff is like a family: Its members are dependent on one another for success, encouragement, and support. When the chemistry is right, the organization produces more than just the sum of their work.
The order of hiring is important because it helps establish chemistry and loyalty. We always seek to hire the campus pastor first, and we involve him in the initial steps of the new launch. He is involved in each additional hire. The second person hired and the second most critical person at the multisite is the worship pastor. The campus pastor is the most critical link, but the worship pastor is the face the multisite congregation sees the most. Since each location conducts its own worship, the worship minister’s style shapes much of the local DNA. We also hire a children’s pastor prior to launch, but don’t start a student ministry until a few months after the launch. (Our style of worship connects with students, and that’s why we can hold off for a time on starting a ministry for them.) Children newborns through age 12 however, are very high priorities at launch. If possible, we stretch volunteers from existing campuses to work in the new campus until we can sign up new volunteers. We do this for two reasons:
1. We have a certain importable way of doing ministry in these areas that our present volunteers are familiar with.
2. We want the young church to develop as a family in worship together for the first few months.
Our fourth hire is the one who holds everything together . . . a full-time administrative assistant. We who call ourselves pastors would simply be lost without them. Finally, we hire a technology specialist who is responsible for running certain aspects of services and helping with IT. More recently, however, we have been able to do smaller launches from a staffing standpoint that didn’t require an administrative assistant, since the vast majority of that sort of work has been handled by central services. Technical responsibilities, also, have been managed by our worship leaders and volunteers.
Launch is the culmination, the last target date on our calendar. It is the formal introduction of the church to the community; it’s critical to make a great first impression, so it has to be our best effort. We always encourage a large group from existing campuses to attend the new campus for the first few weeks to help instill our DNA into the new congregation. Since the micropolitan paradigm is a completely new and unfamiliar approach to doing church in the community, the members of the existing locations teach the new group the parent church’s approach by showing them how to sing, celebrate, worship, and respond. Newly attracted people are unfamiliar with church boundaries and need permission to express themselves. The launch also familiarizes them with their surroundings. Checking in their children gives them their first experience into the various facets of this new ministry. The whole experience of walking in, meeting and mingling with new people, finding familiar faces, and experiencing worship is completely fresh. The environment helps to lower defenses as attenders find something they didn’t expect.
The launch is the first impression and, as such, is absolutely crucial to establishing hundreds of first-time relationships. It gives the church the opportunity to expand its information database through children’s sign-ups and various other ways of gathering names and addresses of people who attend. Compiling and managing that data over the first few weeks gives the
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staff an opportunity to see how the new congregation is shaping up and to make any adjustments necessary.
There will be plenty of questions and feedback requiring responses as a church establishes itself and its brand. It needs to be a time of clarity, and not confusion, with regard to DNA. There will be several things that don’t go exactly as planned and which will require staff from other campuses to troubleshoot; this frees up the local staff to focus on developing relationships. We have had computer check-in glitches and toilets backing up, but these are the last things a campus pastor needs to worry about during a launch period.
If you’re like us, your multisite will use the preaching of a single pastor from a single location. We plan a sermon series to complement the launch. When we launched Macomb, we began a new series called “Dashboard Jesus” that centered on moving our faith from a plastic, iconic religious duty to a full-time, meaningful relationship. It was really a multi-week examination of our vision to help people find an intimate personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The bumper music was Jon Bon Jovi’s “Lost Highway.” The praise music was hard-hitting, included a guitar solo, and was unapologetically loud with video, lights, and haze. The experience defined the new location and staff as micropolitan a complete change from church as usual. The service focused primarily outward and downward.
That first church service will repel some people, but most of those who are repelled will be churchgoers already, so they’re not the primary target. Those people who are attracted will want to share their new discovery with everyone they know. The launch is not a time to be afraid of mistakes, as there will be nothing else in the community to compare it with . . . nothing that even comes close.
H U R D L E # 8 : M E T R I C S
In a multisite strategy, the church must use metrics to measure individual programming components and the new micropolitan as a whole. The specific programming choices need to fit the local setting. Multisites have
both a local and regional personality, so some aspects of measurement will already be established, and others will need to be developed locally. Our first campus pastor mentioned recently that his site’s most important metric the first two years was simply to survive.
As a new church paradigm, the multisite strategy is very young; comprehensive information about failures is mostly anecdotal, but they remind us that the risks are high. Life.church builds a multisite model that needs to run 2,000 to be sustainable. Our micropolitan model for standalone campuses in a community is about 300 to 600 in weekly attendance, or even less in rented spaces. Below that, the local body will still be on some measure of life support. Viability models can run the gamut with regard to size of congregation expected, amount of paid staff, technological sophistication, and square footage necessary. Since we want to project the ambiance of a megachurch, we believe certain minimums in these areas need to be present, and these numbers achieve it.
We measure viability with four key metrics:
1. Attendance. Since we export people from other campuses during startup, early attendance figures are a bit inflated. Before long, the numbers level out to provide a clearer picture of what the new campus actually looks like. Having good numbers for worship creates opportunity for multiple services, an adequate volunteer ministry pool, a pool of talented local musicians, and a spiritual energy level to fuel continued attraction. Attendance is the primary generator and first measurable number for the rest of the metrics, so we focus on it early.
Attendance speaks volumes about quality in areas like attraction, invitation, and barriers that need to be addressed. Any growing church will face “lids” to growth. These are most often seen as a leveling out of attendance. A site may encounter lids because the organization is maxed out or a ministry leader has reached his level of incompetence (as defined by the “Peter principle”). Lids may be encountered because the church is just taking a breath, getting used to itself. They also may occur when there is sin in the church, particularly among leadership.
Some of the most obvious attendance lids we have encountered have turned out to be related to sin. Make no mistake, launching a church carries high expectations it’s a high-stress experience and staffers will be burning the candle at both ends. Spiritual weakness can creep in because of these high levels of stress; it can be very dangerous. That’s why high levels of accountability are critical during stressful times.
In every launch, there will be some failures. It would be naive to think we can avoid them all. It’s what we do after failures that determine what we will be. Some failures will result in counseling. Other failures are too damaging for simple counseling; these extreme failures require termination. Any time a major failure presents itself, Satan takes a calculated risk. He expects the church will try to minimize damage by covering up the failure and letting it go away quietly. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Nowhere is that truer than in the church. When sin is exposed to the light, Satan has gotten all he is going to get. If the church takes the way of truth and handles it with grace, God will lift the lid and the church will continue to move forward.
2. Finances. There is synergy between attendance and giving when a measure of time is added to it. At our multisites, our break-even numbers typically are $20 per capita in weekly giving. Our expectations in this regard may seem low to other experienced ministers, but being so intentional about reaching into the unchurched world and focusing so heavily on an economically challenged part of the community mean giving will start off lower. We find it takes 18 months to 2 years for general fund giving to catch up with attendance. An offering of $8,000 to $9,000 per week will support a $1.5 million debt retirement, four to five full-time staff, and typical ministry expenses.
In our experience, giving at multisites has started out somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of need. As the congregation begins to take ownership of the location and begins investing their time and talent in ministry, giving starts to rise. The parent church needs to realize there will be a period of time that the location will be in deficit spending as it finds its footing; the church needs to budget funds accordingly. If a lid is encountered with giving, the cause is likely the same as with the attendance
lid. Giving is a spiritual discipline, and as such, will not be among the first things a new believer learns. An outward focus will slow this process at first, but later it will catch up, as long as expectations remain realistic. Reaching the giving metric and establishing the leadership metric at the same time, around the two-year mark, has worked best for us. Once a congregation’s giving exceeds its need, it wants to have a voice in how and upon whom that money is spent.
3. Ministries. A stand-alone campus is defined here as one that is not intended to continually require support as a mission or be specifically targeted like an extension campus. It is a primary church location for a micropolitan area that looks to meet not only its own needs, but to partner with other viable campuses to continue the movement into new micropolitan areas. Because it stands alone in the community, it is required to have all necessary ministries represented and running well. This applies to all age-related ministries from early childhood through senior high, an aggressive discipleship program of small groups, and volunteer ministry teams for services.
The Crossing runs on its ministry volunteers. They comprise virtually all the necessary teams that meet a church’s responsibility, a family’s needs, and a newcomer’s first impression. The staff would be ineffective without them. The multisite metric is measured as volunteers from other campuses are peeled off and replaced with local volunteers. When there is a healthy rotation of local volunteers to prevent ministry burnout, the multisite has met its viability metric.
4. Leadership. Unlike exclusively staff-led multisite models, The Crossing believes in a leadership partnership between paid staff and local lay leaders. Paul instructed Timothy to appoint elders in every church and gave him guidelines for how to choose them. And so, like Timothy, each multisite campus pastor begins targeting potential leaders from that first weekend, looking for folks who will carry the wonderful burden along with him. This process of finding local leaders takes longer than the rest of the metrics; it takes time to begin to feel confidence and to get a better sense of whether potential leaders meet biblical criteria and also have the chemistry needed
for unity. Your leadership structure may be different, but a metric of leadership is necessary nonetheless.
When two leaders are considered fit for leadership, the campus pastor will make a recommendation to the existing eldership. The candidates are presented to the congregation for any spiritual objection. If there is no objection, they are voted on and installed as part of the eldership. We have a single eldership that represents all of our stand-alone campuses. Once these elders are installed at the local campus, the metric has been met. The Crossing organizational structure is represented in two intersecting circles. One circle is made up of senior staff and the other is comprised of church elders. The senior pastor is the link between the eldership and the staff. One of his primary responsibilities is to maintain the confidence between the two groups. Campus pastors are part of the senior staff and they are invited to meetings of the eldership. This structure has served us well as we have moved forward with multisite. People have a sense of representation and communication. This model is critical to The Crossing being one church in multiple locations. It also protects against a feeling of minidenominationalism that can be inherent with the multisite model.
Distinctiveness. While distinctiveness is not a metric we look at for viability, it is something we consider and address. Not long after establishing our first multisite campus, staff members there began to complain about not having the same bells and whistles as the parent campus. This problem was compounded when we started additional campuses. Staffers and volunteers would see something in a ministry area at our original site (or another site) that they didn’t have and question the fairness of it. We needed to convincingly explain that our sites don’t need to be exactly the same. Certain factors and qualities will lead some communities to be more invested in a particular ministry than others. Sometimes the facility itself dictates that there be a difference in resources. Sometimes the success of a particular program means more resources are required. It’s easy to see why there might be some hard feelings.
We constantly face budgeting issues that force us to prioritize the many good ideas, programs, and capital improvement needs. Much of our branding or DNA has a certain look and ministry package, so we strive for a
certain amount of distinctiveness. There just needs to be clear communication of why one location might receive something that another one doesn’t. Campuses can be like children, each calling the other “the favored child” depending on the circumstance. Getting the senior staff and elders on the same page with regard to prioritization is vital for the senior pastor of a multisite church to consider.
Multisite Benefits
Our experiences over the years have taught us four benefits of the multisite church:
Micropolitan communities with generally stagnant population statistics are hardly a place to expect exponential growth, but when a ministry approach connects with its people, the unexpected happens. Multisite strategy increases that growth potential. The church has known for a long time that adding multiple services in one location dramatically increases attendance. Now imagine adding a multiplier of 2, 3, 4, or 5 to that potential. Launching campuses and adding new experiences have propelled our growth. When I attend our multisites, complete strangers regularly remind me how powerfully God is working through those locations.
Risks are high and challenges are plentiful, but every time we reach out with a new venue, the victories make it all worth it. The Crossing has been the fastest-growing church among all independent Christian churches, and according to Outreach magazine, at one time was the 27th fastest-growing church of any kind in America. That is a reflection of how multisite strategy turbocharges growth and impact. Remember that growth has occurred in predominantly stagnant communities (in terms of population growth). Just imagine what might happen in the communities around your church, especially if population growth is occurring.
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As you explore different means and methods in the pursuit of a vision, and those ideas become realities, new opportunities form that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. When we chose to become a multisite church, it never occurred to us that we would become a regional one. A micropolitan multisite church has learned to think beyond the influence of a single community. As sites are added and church growth multiplies, a relationship forms around the spheres of influence of each site as they intersect one another. It is exciting to think how a church can increase its influence by strategically placing campuses (and by establishing local small groups) in a specific region so as to blanket an entire area . . . all within an easy driving distance of a central location.
While we didn’t envision a regional church, we were excited when we realized what was happening. Creating a map that shows population concentration and how it relates to present multisite locations can go a long way toward identifying future locations or extensions.
The multisite model forces multidimensional, nonlinear thinking. Recently, 23 Southern Baptist pastors from the state association visited The Crossing to glean ideas. One of the pastors took me aside and asked, “Why would you even want to do this?” It seemed more like a headache to him than anything else. I explained to him my passion to reach beyond the limits of one community, but he was at a loss. I don’t blame him. His reaction epitomized two-dimensional, linear thinking. Multisite ministry requires exponential thinking; it is not limited to addition and subtraction but expands into multiplication and division.
There are a number of ways multidimensional thinking and the multisite church interface with one another beyond the establishment of new sites. Multisite churches attract the attention of churches at all stages of development. Those churches might be trying to get a good start, struggling to grow, concentrating on self-preservation, or dead in the water. When those churches hear about the multisite church’s rapid growth, spiritual health, advanced technology, and willingness to reach out to help with their
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needs, they might be open to some sort of defined partnership. This is a great opportunity for a kingdom-minded multisite church to impact needy churches for the greater good, and it is an awesome opportunity for any church willing to learn.
The Crossing approaches these partnering opportunities five different ways:
Resourcing. We believe that whatever we develop belongs to the entire kingdom, so we are happy to share for free access to all of our resources from sermon series, small group material, youth ministry material and ideas, structural concepts, and training means and methods.
Consulting. We are happy to speak to other churches, and encourage discussions with all of our departments, via phone, Skype, email, or a scheduled face-to-face visit as it fits into various schedules.
Coaching. Coaching is for those who simply want a second opinion or an outside set of eyes to evaluate their church and offer some ideas about possible changes. We have a “Crossing” way, but coaching is not designed to turn a church into us. Coaching helps a church evaluate programming, staff, leadership, facilities, culture, services, mission, vision, core values, volunteer base, evangelism, discipleship, retention, technology, and giving.
Partnering. Some may want their campus to look and feel like The Crossing, but still retain their name and leadership. We can conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis of the above church components and help a church formulate an action plan to manage the changes.
Merging. This is for churches who want to become a Crossing campus. This requires a release of control of all aspects of the campus as we work together to create a positive transition.
These are just short definitions of different forms of partnership we are exploring; the particulars of each of these are much more in-depth than described here. However, you can see there are all sorts of possibilities when we don’t limit ourselves to linear thinking.
Different forms of partnering open up all sorts of potential opportunities for a multisite micropolitan church. In the kingdom, people are managing all sorts of unused resources like buildings and land and are just looking for a way to bring new life into their community or church. Consider all the underutilized resources in the kingdom of God that could be coached, consulted, redirected, or acquired to again make a difference, but in a fresh, new way! Multidimensional thinking lifts lids of limitation in any church that is willing to not only think outside the box but envision themselves in all sorts of ways.
I’ve never worked with a church that didn’t have a foreign mission budget. My personal experience with mission budgets has entailed line after line of token support to mission works all over the world. I think most churches like the idea of having some measure of impact however small in as many places as possible. This takes a degree of pressure off the local church a mission can lose that church’s support without it decimating the mission’s budget but it adds pressure on the missionary to maintain contact and visit a great number of churches when stateside. In the last few decades, some churches have moved to more substantial support of fewer missions, and even considered going “living link” as the primary supporter of the missionary or a particular aspect of the mission.
The multisite approach can take the mission emphasis of a church to a completely new place of ownership and involvement. If the church has already decided to be a primary supporter of a mission, it isn’t a big financial leap to consider a higher level of ownership of that mission. Simply adding the name of the supporting church to the mission creates ties to the congregation. It builds in the church a desire to see the mission prosper and receive whatever is necessary for greater effectiveness. It also develops a greater sense of accountability within the mission. As I will discuss in the next chapter, the saying “out of sight, out of mind” applies to many foreign missions. A stronger connection using multisite tools aids a mission in staying on task.
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Language and culture can be barriers in many ministry areas, but resourcing, ownership, and accountability would take on new meaning if an outreach were perceived as a mission campus. While some aspects of our operation really wouldn’t work internationally finances, for example advantages available through technology are transferable and translatable.
Think about the mission points that your church supports and the amount of impact that is untapped because of the distance. One of the greatest assets of modern technology is how it makes time and distance less relevant. Harnessing technology for the kingdom of God is an awesome thought.
The church’s mission is all around us, in every moment, every experience, every idle word, and every mundane task! I believe we must redefine the word mission in the singular because we cannot let go of our personal responsibility to make a difference in the lives of others. The micropolitan community indeed every community where we live and serve shows us a mission field every day, but do we see it?
I know of churches with great mission outreach to places all over the world, but which do very little to serve their immediate neighbors. I wonder, do we prefer to keep our hands clean by writing a check rather than extending a hand to lift someone up? After all, it is much easier to write a check and to take the short-term mission trip to travel to a troubled area and then come home (thankful for the distance) than to be up close and personal with a hurting person on a continuing basis. It should give us pause. A commitment one cannot walk away from is much more intimidating it can potentially “mess-up” a well-ordered life.
I can certainly understand why many see the church as being somewhat irrelevant in this area. Many churches today have grown cynical about the hurt around them. As I mentioned before, a church in our area ran an ad on a Christian radio station in Quincy. The ad encouraged people to try out the church if they would like to join with other “stable families.” The ad
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infuriated me from the first time I heard it. My many years in ministry have taught me there really is no such thing as a “stable family,” just people who hide their pain better than others. Churches turn away from this pain, jaded by those who play the system.
Recently, one such person took advantage of several elderly folks in our church. The woman had a propensity for writing bad checks. She was facing charges in the court system when she arrived at our church. Two particular couples stayed with her through her sentencing, prison time, and were waiting for her upon her release. They helped her get settled in her own house, found her multiple jobs, and worked to put her life back together. After all of that help, she extorted more than $13,000 from her new job and went back to prison, probably for the rest of her life. It was easy to grow cynical about reaching out after that negative experience.
But we cannot turn away just because, at times, others will take advantage of us. Jesus taught us that God will judge us based on our “hands-on” compassion. That standard of measurement is clear from Luke 6:37, 38. Jesus says, “For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (v. 38). If we are cynical to the hurt around us, God will use our standard of cynicism to judge us. Matthew 25:31-46 teaches that ministering to the hurting people around us is no different than ministering to Jesus himself. Jesus paints a verbal collage of tragedy defined by the hungry and thirsty, strangers and the ragged, the sick and incarcerated. We know many broken people in micropolitan communities have figured out how to play on tender hearts as they go from church to church; they will con and deceive for a meal or drink in an effort to survive.
Crossing The Bridge Of Pain
Pain is a powerful teacher, albeit a difficult one. The idea of mission is in many ways born out of pain and the needs it produces. Those who are experiencing the fullness of life in Christ presuppose a spiritual pain that comes from an empty place within that is satisfied only when filled with Jesus. We see ministry to physical, mental, or emotional pain as a bridge to cross in order to minister to the deeper spiritual pain. We all are aware of the poverty, disease, and ignorance that fuel our desire to reach out and
embrace mission. But pain is not limited to the starving that requires a $20 monthly sponsorship. It takes many forms and produces opportunities close to home as well as overseas.
The micropolitan church has an incredible opportunity to reach out to hurting people in a manner that sets it apart from the rank and file. Ministering with our own hands to struggling people, especially those outside the church, connects us to how Jesus did it. He certainly didn’t need to combine his spit with dust to create mud to rub on a man’s eyes. He could have healed a leper from a safe distance. He could have spoken to a tax collector in the street rather than inviting himself over for lunch. The depth of Jesus’ compassion was made known in such up-close interactions.
It obviously is a good thing to support missions on a foreign field, but I think it should mirror the mission we are accomplishing in our own backyards. First John 4:20 says, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” This includes all people near and far, whether or not we see them (or avoid them) every day.
The pain we experience all around us gives us an opportunity to share with people who are hurting in meaningful, tangible ways that help them see the relevance of a relationship with Jesus Christ. Proximity is beneficial to a micropolitan. The smaller geographic area means the mission is right in front of us or just down the street. When we get close to this kind of pain, it evokes a response that either moves our hearts to minister or repels us. The attitude we exhibit reflects what might be going on in our hearts.
I remember Susan, a woman who had been raped and abused most of her life. The first time I met her in the church lobby, she did her best to avoid me (and everyone else). When I approached her to welcome her, she kept her head down and mumbled a few words in response. I later learned she was ashamed to speak because her teeth were missing. As her story unfolded in Celebrate Recovery, I learned her ex-husband had knocked out her teeth, just the latest in a seemingly endless string of abuse. Our men’s ministry heard the story and because men were responsible for most of the
tragedy of Susan’s life decided to take responsibility and pay for dental implants for her. I will never forget the day she came up to me after the procedure. Her smile lit up the lobby! She later told me that when the oral surgeon handed her a mirror and she saw her new smile, she felt God take the pain of all that abuse out of her heart. Stories like Susan’s are certainly inspiring, but it takes more than inspiration to make missional the norm for a church.
Pain Moves Us All
What does the micromissional field look like? In a church that targets a younger crowd, personal pain might center on addiction, single parenting, or divorce. In an older group, it might involve ministries that target issues like illness, loneliness, and death of a loved one. Just lift up your eyes . . .
Don’t you have a saying, “It’s still four months until harvest”? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together (John 4:35, 36).
There are so many stories that flood my mind as I think of how God has used pain to open a heart to a relationship with him. This is just one of them.
Angel and Ryan sat on the front row when they started attending The Crossing. Ryan worked for Jeff, who owned a car business. Jeff had come to The Crossing years before looking for relief from the pain of his addictions and trying to reconnect to the faith he had earlier in his life. Angel and Ryan were a great-looking young couple; they smiled and presented themselves well. Most of us are very good at this discipline of public hypocrisy. Angel and Ryan were experts at it! It didn’t take long, however because of our membership’s constant encouragement that people be transparent that the young couple started trusting others and sharing their personal stories. They weren’t married but were living together; they both were recovering from previous failures related to various addictions; and they both had left a trail of hurt people. Their life
situation was made more difficult by their financial situation. It wasn’t that they didn’t earn money, it’s that the money they made had to cover the costs of their past poor choices.
Two years before meeting Angel and Ryan, our custodian brought me a box that had been left in our women’s bathroom. Upon opening it, I found a carefully written note and beautiful women’s engagement and wedding rings. The anonymous note told of the pain of a failed marriage and expressed hope that someone else could use these rings for God’s glory. I remember the pain attached to that note as I placed the little box in my desk drawer. Angel scheduled an appointment with me to discuss her life’s difficulties. The conversation shifted to their finances and the fact that she and Ryan were convicted that they should be married but he was unwilling to ask her since he couldn’t afford a proper ring. I started smiling, realizing God was answering a silent prayer from two years before. I told Angel that God had provided her ring rings, actually that they were in my desk, and that Ryan should come in and get them. She began to cry. A week later, Ryan came in to get them. A couple of weeks after that, Angel and Ryan decided to give their lives to Christ and be baptized. While waiting to go into the water together, Ryan got down on his knees backstage and proposed to Angel. We baptized an engaged couple that day.
That’s not the end of the story. Ryan came up to me some time later and handed me a box. I opened it and saw two rings very similar to the ones I had given them. Ryan said they considered Angel’s engagement and wedding rings as a gift from God, but they wanted to pay it forward because God had turned their lives around in such a powerful way. Pain gives us an opportunity to reach otherwise unreachable people and share with them the love and healing of Jesus.
Pain also changes us. It forces us to take a fresh look at all the “settled” things in our lives and brings priorities into focus that may have been comfortably marginalized. Pain not only draws hurting people to a sensitive church, pain also opens us up to invest in previously neglected ministries.
It was the pain of personal tragedy that moved Bob Buford. He was a highly successful media mogul, but the death of his son and only child was the
turning point in his life that God used to move him from success to significance. Bob founded the Buford Foundation and Leadership Network, an organization that seeks to accelerate the emergence of effective churches. He also wrote Halftime, a book that helps those moving through exhilarating and potentially dangerous shoals of midlife by focusing on significance instead of success. He wrote about being at his son’s graveside:
“God,” I began, “you have given my life into my hands, I give it back to you. My time, my property, my life itself . . . knowing it is only an instant compared to my life with you (and with Ross) in eternity.” With palms down, I concluded, “Father, to you I release the cares and concerns of this world, knowing you loved me enough to give your only Son on my behalf. I’m a sinner in need of a Savior and, once again, I accept what you have done for me as sufficient. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”14
Bob’s personal pain moved him to impact thousands of lives for Jesus. Similar situations may open our hearts to ministries we never considered before as God uses the tragedies that a fallen world hands us to turn others and us toward him.
Micropolitan + Missional = Micromissional
As mentioned before, a great positive of being in a micropolitan community is people’s proximity to one another. Another positive is that an aggressive approach to ministry has a much greater impact in a smaller community. Nowhere have we experienced more profoundly the power of these two assets than by connecting micropolitan culture to the concept of missional.
Missional might be a word that fringe groups have attempted to highjack, but I think it’s a great word to connect to micropolitan. We are indeed called to be the church, not just go to church. The mission is not just to venture to the other side of the world, the mission is actually no further away than our next conversation. Mobilizing the micropolitan church and its resources in an environment where there is real potential for lasting change is more than significant. Being micromissional can help the micropolitan church take
huge strides in knowing and doing the will of God intimately and personally.
The Crossing’s Micromissional Story
The Crossing’s micromissional emphasis was another ministry approach we seemed to back into rather than intentionally seeking it out. Like most churches, we have always budgeted monies for local needs. If someone lost his or her home, we would step up to help. The occasional transient would need bus fare or gas money. A person occasionally would need shelter for a few nights or we would provide a gift card for a person or family to buy groceries. We would be taken advantage of as often as not so in our cynicism, we appropriated only $18,000 annually to this purpose. A ministry team was in charge of the disbursement. Even at this meager amount, we were one of the largest providers of local benevolence in Quincy.
A first step toward change was for God to soften our hard heart via Celebrate Recovery. Our Celebrate Recovery program brought us closer to the very real pain all sorts of people were feeling in our community. When we started investing in people that a program such as this attracts, we began to hear more and more heartbreaking stories about hurt, pain, and addiction.
I need to back up a moment and tell you about hiring Jim Dennis. Hiring Jim raised some eyebrows at our church. He definitely had two sides to his résumé. On the positive side, Jim was a 52-year-old former executive who was brought up in Quincy. He had been a basketball player on the high school’s championship team. His family owned a lucrative business that set them up in the country club scene. He was a graduate of Southern Methodist University and had a lot of experience in the business world. On the negative side, for most of his adult life, he was a highly functioning alcoholic; he had been married and divorced four times; and he never stayed with anything very long. However, even with those past failures, God had his hand on him for greater things. God had taken most everything away from Jim, humbling him, all the while shaping him for what was to come.
I have already shared that we hire people, not positions. We do this based on concepts in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great. Our primary concern is to get the right people on the bus, and then we figure out which seat is best for them. Jim Dennis was definitely one of those hires. Jim had accepted Christ at The Crossing in the midst of the breakup of his fourth marriage. He had already gotten his alcoholism in check when I met him. His privileged upbringing and sports connections helped him transcend many racial and economic lines. Those bridges would prove key with regard to God’s plan for him.
We didn’t hire Jim immediately, and he moved out of the area, but we kept in touch. He often shared his desire to serve in full-time ministry. When there was a small groups ministry opening, we began to talk. He came to The Crossing with a compassionate heart for hurting people. It wasn’t long before he approached me about Celebrate Recovery, and soon it became his ministry focus. I could see he was in the right place. God does awesome things in people’s lives around here, and Jim’s ministry with Celebrate Recovery is one of the most vivid examples. Many have undergone the breathtaking change from the ugliness of addiction to the incredible beauty of redemption. The work of the Holy Spirit and the daily battle with principalities and powers is in sharp focus in that ministry. In my mind, micromissional really started here.
The real game changer didn’t happen until we took that trip to Post Falls, Idaho, to visit Real Life Ministries. Jim Dennis was one of the four staff members who went. He told me later he felt like a fish out of water on that trip. We were getting discipleship coaching from Jim Putman and instruction on how to reconstruct our ministry around it. Our Jim remained mostly quiet, which was unusual for a person of such quick wit and colorful metaphors. We learned of Real Life’s benevolence outreach and how they used a thrift store to fund it. That was not why we were there or so we thought but Jim Dennis said he wanted to go see what that involved while the other three of us stayed on task. He went to the thrift store, spoke with the staff, connected with their Celebrate Recovery pastor, and learned about how they meted out benevolence. When we reconvened, Jim his heart full started to share with the rest of us.
Society usually defines poverty in an urban context. But the truth is, there are poor in micropolitans and they deal with even more neglect because of the lack of local funding from government and private sources. It’s the same old story: Micropolitans don’t have as many options. The poor, the homeless, and the broken go as unnoticed as possible.
Jim shared what he had seen and learned, and an idea began forming to introduce a new group of people to an intimate, personal relationship with Christ. We had space available for a thrift store in our Macomb location. How much would it take to open one? How would we keep it stocked? Who would run it? Where would we find workers to operate it? How much revenue would it produce? What would we do with the revenues? Real Life gave us a great template for a solid start as we dreamed about how many relationship opportunities God would bring through it.
What we had seen in Post Falls was not an easy vision to carry forward. Even staff members were skeptical; many saw it as more of a distraction than something to really focus on. One elder/staffer took it to heart. Bruce Freeman had been an elder for years but only recently had joined the staff part-time to serve in pastoral care and benevolence. He was responsible for investigating needs and making decisions on who would be helped financially or otherwise. Bruce took the ball from Jim and started the process of opening a thrift store in Macomb. When we asked the church to clean out their closets, basements, and garages and bring items to the church, our people filled entire semitrailers with items. We hired our staff from among our Celebrate Recovery folks and paid them minimum wage. We had no idea just how successful the idea would become. Our revenue, after expenses, increased our benevolence opportunities exponentially. It wasn’t long before we opened our second store in Quincy. Both of these stores are generating close to $180,000 annually for benevolence, after expenses! We employ 14 people from Celebrate Recovery programs in Quincy and Macomb to run the stores. Donations and revenue stream have never slowed down. All shirts are $2, pants are $3, coats are $3, shoes are $2. Furniture, appliances, and housewares are very inexpensive.
Here is what is happening: We are providing a new opportunity for people to give to the church. We are becoming the community leader in
benevolence for the poor. We are providing jobs for many people who otherwise might not be able to reenter the workforce. We are providing clothes and other needs for the needy at an extremely low cost. Clothes that go unpurchased are placed in a free bin for whoever wants them. Unclaimed free-bin clothes and toys are crated up and sent to our location in South Africa where they are distributed in the townships. What’s the down side? The community now sees The Crossing as not only a cutting-edge church, but one with a compassionate heart.
The Crossing now has a ministry that connects those in need with people from our church who provide counseling. They do an evaluation that includes virtually every area of their lives. Not only do we help them financially, we enroll them in Financial Peace University, connect them to a small group, and set up ongoing counseling. If someone has immediate needs, we can provide them with a voucher to the thrift store. Our benevolence ministry is interfaced with many gifted people in our congregations. Through this, we can provide services like haircuts or childcare. It is simply the church being the church. . . .
“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:4447).
The micromissional influence of The Crossing is still growing. I’ve been amazed how quickly God has responded to obstacles and provided whatever we’ve needed. Later, Jim came into my office with another idea. He had driven by an old church building for sale in an economically depressed part of the community. He thought it might be a great place to have a resident discipleship program for people desiring a stable environment to recover from addiction. We also saw the facility as another location for Celebrate Recovery meetings, after-school programs, VBS, a soup kitchen, and weekend services. The process started moving forward. Celebrate Recovery
folks went door-to-door in the neighborhood to let them know what we were thinking. The neighbors liked the idea of a church like The Crossing moving in, but some were very opposed to the resident program for addiction. We had a neighborhood town hall meeting to hear their concerns. It was amazing to me how many people there were themselves in the midst of addiction. On the weekend, I preached that if God closed the door to this opportunity, he surely had something better for us. When we realized the city was likely to side with the desires of the disgruntled neighbors, we took the resident program off the table, trusting God to provide.
Three wealthy men contacted Jim. One wasn’t even a member of our church. They said they wanted to fund the resident program. One of them had a pre-engineered steel building he had purchased for another project that was never constructed. He wanted to give us the 8,500-square-foot building that had cost about $80,000. We now have not only a facility to do benevolence in the middle of a community that needs it, we also have a building that can house more than twice as many men who wish to recover from their addictions than we had envisioned. Other business leaders have stepped up to provide jobs for the men to get them on their feet.
We are excited about the impact of these buildings and programs, and also for the doors that might open if this model is adopted in other rural communities. We wonder if God has put us in this situation to teach us new ways to use resources to reach into even more areas with the gospel. If we can be satisfied with adding multisite campuses in micropolitan communities that average 500 to 1,000 in attendance while accruing $1.5 million in debt each time, would we consider reaching into a rural community with a multisite model that costs 10 percent of that figure (about $150,000) while reaching about one-quarter the number of people (125 to 250)? Benevolence has been an incredible game changer that is opening our minds to entirely new ways of accomplishing our vision without worrying about accruing huge amounts of debt in the process. The Crossing is impacting the world micromissionally through the establishment of campuses, practicing proactive benevolence, and the pursuit of meaningful and lasting relationships that come by walking through newly opened doors.
Forgottonia . . . would you believe that it’s a real place? The place is real, but the name was more of a publicity stunt. It was adopted by 14 counties in west-central Illinois that were intentionally neglected by the state and federal government with regard to interstates and rail service in the early 1970s. Without interstate highway access, the region was denied decent transportation for commerce as other towns and cities benefitted from them. Businesses and not-for-profit entities dried up or left the area and calls for fair treatment with tax dollars for infrastructure fell on deaf ears in government.
So, one man, Neal Gamm, came up with a stunt to get the country’s attention. He started petitions in 14 Illinois counties to declare Forgottonia’s independence from America and become an independent country. He did this to declare war and promptly surrender, making the area eligible for foreign aid under the law. Gamm even went so far as to declare a capital, Fandon, Illinois (a near ghost town), and a flag (white, for surrender).
For a time, Gamm received some attention with his stunt, but after a year, little had changed, as tax dollars still flowed unabated to the larger cities.
E P I L O G U E A C H U R C H F O R F O R G O T T E N P L A C E S
Over the last 40 years, west-central Illinois and northeast Missouri have been slowly receiving the attention that produces the infrastructure that other regions have long enjoyed, but it has never quite caught up.
All of this has created an interesting region in west-central Illinois, northeast Missouri, and southeastern Iowa. It’s a landscape filled with rich farmland and dotted with small towns and villages, urban clusters, and micropolitan communities. It’s a place where the soil is as rich as the history, a land where Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Walt Disney, General John Pershing, and J.C. Penney spent their formative years. It was the place Barton W. Stone chose to move after leaving Cane Ridge, Kentucky, and where he died. It’s also a place that proved to be fertile for The Crossing, a church that not only claimed a community, but the whole region by leveraging its multisite approach.
Our campus pastors truly are a band of brothers. They come from various walks of life: police officer, casket salesman, restaurant owner, medical office manager, Applebee’s waiter, bank vice president, safety manager, and so on. Today, they are the linchpins to a network of churches reaching out with the gospel and the Restoration plea. They take new ground every day at their locations and come together on a regular basis for instruction, encouragement, resources, and fellowship. All the campus pastors have their own locations and staffs, but they are also part of something bigger, something that is making a difference in their part of the world.
What a journey it’s been launching multisites these last 12 years! Here is how it measures out. Our original campus now represents only 33 percent of our total attendance, but all of our attendance can be attributed to the people of that campus and their willingness to think outside of their own needs and their own community. Our regional influence is 165 miles wide. We’ve baptized nearly 4,000 in the last four years by the grace of God. In our communities, 7.8 percent of the population attends a Crossing location our goal is 10 percent. The church has a half-million square feet of building space under roof, and we are about two years from being debt-free. The Crossing runs eight thrift stores that employ nearly 80 workers, with all of the proceeds going to local benevolence.
What some people might see as nothing more than miles and miles of countryside dotted with economically depressed communities of static or shrinking populations, we see as an empty canvas of opportunity just waiting to be filled with clusters of believers living out their faith and sharing it with others. With 10 present locations, The Crossing has plans to start at least seven more in the next couple of years. New towns have been identified and leaders are being raised up in this often-forgotten region in the middle of the flyover states of the Midwest.
1. Kinnally, Nancy. “Clinton Chooses Quincy as Example of U.S. Economic Recovery.” Great River Development. IDC News (January 2000).
2. “Small rural towns get new name-and new attention-Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area Definitions.” Montana Associated Technology Roundtables (June 2003).
3. Chuang, D.J. “Winchester Virginia Becoming Micropolitan.”
www.djchuang.com (May 28, 2007).
http://djchuang.com/2007/winchester-virginia-becoming-micropolitan/.
4. Nassar, Haya El. “Small Town USA Goes ‘Micropolitan.’” Money magazine (June 2004).
5. Ibid.
6. Pepper, Colleen. “Multiple Everything Insights from Churches with Four or More Campuses.” Leadership Network. www.leadnet.org (2008).
7. Kinneman, David. UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity . . . and Why It Matters. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007.
8. Thumma, Scott and Warren Bird. “Changes in American Megachurches: Tracing Eight Years of Growth and Innovation in the Nation’s LargestAttendance Congregations.” Leadership Network and Hartford Institute for Religion Research (September 12, 2008).
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/Changes%20in%20American%20Me gachurches%20Sept%2012%202008.pdf.
E N D N O T E S
9. Thumma, Scott and Warren Bird. “Not Who You Think They Are: The Real Story of People Who Attend America’s Megachurches.” Leadership Network and Hartford Institute for Religion Research (August 2008).
10. Rowland, Darrel. “The Multisite Phenomenon: Here to Stay?” Christian Standard (August 30, 2009). 4.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Buford, Bob. Halftime: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.
