Ahead of the Sunday curve.

I’m sitting in my office with my feet on my desk reflecting upon where crossbridge should be in the next 5 years. I just came back from a lunch meeting I had with pastor Sam and Jeff Springer. Sam is our connections pastor and Jeff is the head of our leadership development team.

A year ago when crossbridge was launched, we used the first 4 weeks to introduce to our people our core values. One of the values we hold is Community. Community huh? What christian church doesn’t hold Community as a value, right? Well, many churches have Community as a value but it’s merely a desired value instead of being an actual one. How so? Many churches will say that they are about community but in reality, their practices reveal just the opposite. Community fits as something they would like to be about but actually they’re really about programs. Just look at where their money goes and where leaders and volunteers are deployed.

I recognize that it’s very hard not to have a program (call it purpose) driven church in America given the fact that individualism and consumerism are so prevalent in our culture. I also recognize that it’s very tempting to build nice programs because programs will attract more people upfront. What they will fail to do however,  is provide the robust christian character that only a small community is able to produce. They also fail to mobilize effectively the church to fulfill its mission to renew the world in the context of a city.

Here at crossbridge we have said from the beginning that we would try to resist programs to the best of our ability and strive to be a community driven church instead. I believe that God has been honoring our commitment. Our latest report shows that we have more people in groups than in our Sunday average attendance. 202 vs. 190. Pretty close but still more. It’s comforting for me to see that not only the discipleship process is working (to move people from worship to community) but also, that the groups are proving to be very efficient in reaching the unchurched. Many have started to attend our Sunday services because they first visited a group. Not to mention the fact that we have been able to mobilize at least 75% of our people to be physically involved in serving the city through some of our ministry partners.

So, if you ask me where I would like to see crossbridge 5 years from now, I would have to say – the same way. More groups of course but ,always keeping them ahead of the Sunday worship curve.

Now, if you would excuse me… I have to go lead a group.

Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 8:56 PM in Pastor Felipe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.