In our Innovation and Impact series, we tell the stories of five churches that are effectively reaching their communities by strategically and systematically implementing new ideas—from an urban neighborhood in downtown Denver to a traditional small town in rural Mississippi.
In northeast Mississippi, alongside a section of the Tombigbee River, sits a small, traditional Southern town called Amory. Established in the late 1800s as a railroad town, Amory’s population was 7,316 as of the 2010 census. It is perhaps the last place you might expect to see a burgeoning, contemporary, nondenominational church of 750 people, like Cornerstone Family Fellowship—but if you head to the corner of Walls Lane and Cotton Gin Port Road in Amory, that’s exactly what you’ll find.
Before Greg Huguley became lead pastor at Cornerstone in 2012, God gave him a vision. Huguley had been the youth pastor at a church in Alabama for nine years when he approached his pastor about something God had put on his heart: the vision of a large, contemporary church in the small-town South.
Huguley recalls, “I spoke with my pastor and I said, ‘Do you think a church like that would go over in a small town?’” His pastor responded that he didn’t think a small town could handle a church like that. “I walked away from that, but I still had the dream and the vision in me,” he says.
Soon after, Huguley got his opportunity when he was offered the lead pastor job at Cornerstone. At the time, Cornerstone only had 90 members and resembled many of the other older, dying churches in the area—even though it was only about five years old.
“It was a very traditional church, kind of a spinoff of a Pentecostal church,” Huguley says. He met with the board and told them that if they wanted him to be the pastor, a lot of things were going to change. And they agreed—100 percent. “[The board] said, ‘We want to do whatever it takes,’” he says. “So we started making some changes in small-town Mississippi.”
Huguley and his team stepped out in faith and hired a professional musician to be their worship pastor. They brought in a youth pastor and built a facility for students. They added fog and lights to their worship service experience. They replaced Sunday school with small groups that meet in homes throughout the week.
The results were pronounced and immediate. Since 2012, Cornerstone had grown from 90 weekly attendees to around 750—about 10 percent of Amory’s population. In addition, the church has seen a large influx of millennials and the unchurched, something Huguley says is a rarity for a small town in the South.
“Our church is full of millennials,” Huguley says. “Probably 75 percent of our congregation is a group of people that everybody says is exiting the church.”
When Huguley arrived at Cornerstone, although his leadership team was eager to make some changes, none of them had yet seen the vision their new lead pastor had for the church.
“I had the vision in my heart of what I felt like the Lord wanted at Cornerstone,” Huguley says, “but I had to get the people who had been in traditional churches all their lives to catch the vision.”
Early in the process, Huguley invited some of his key leaders to accompany him to a conference at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, where they saw firsthand what a vibrant, growing, contemporary church looks like.
“We carried some of our traditional people into a setting like that and they actually got to see that God is in this,” Huguley says. “When we came back from that conference, I had key people in the church coming to me and saying, ‘What is it going to take for us to do what they’re doing?’”
As the changes started happening, Huguley and his team met some resistance from the congregation, especially older members who were comfortable doing church as it had always been done. However, once some of the senior adults saw their kids and grandkids coming to church for the first time, “all of a sudden they began to like change,” Huguley says.
“We’ve had whole families—grandparents and parents and their children—start coming to our church all at once,” Huguley says. “Now grandma sees their kids loving it, and so grandpa loves it, and because grandpa loves it, everybody loves it.”
Another primary factor of Cornerstone’s success has been its large presence in the community. “If the community doesn’t know you’re there, then you’re not really there anyway,” Huguley says.
The church has developed a strong relationship with the local school system, allowing use of the church facility for various events, including the high school’s junior/senior dance. Cornerstone also enjoys a close relationship with the city of Amory and its mayor.
“Pretty much anything we need, the city is there,” Huguley says. “But in the same way, anything they need, we’re right there. When the city needs something musically, they reach out to us because we have musicians, we have the singers, we have the band.”
The church’s outreach initiatives include seminars for men and women that bring in hundreds of people, featuring prominent guest speakers like Clay Dyer, a professional fisherman who was born without limbs, and country music star Jo Dee Messina. The Saturday before Easter brings 2,000 kids onto Cornerstone’s property to hunt for 100,000 Easter eggs and hear the gospel, and 1,500 people show up for the church’s trunk-or-treat event on Halloween.
In cities like Amory, where industry is dying and morale is low, Huguley says it’s crucial that churches make their weekend services a celebration.
“We have a large number of people who have been out of church,” Huguley says. “Maybe they got burnt out or tired of church, so they just didn’t go anymore. A huge number of them are coming to our church. And I believe it’s because we make our Sundays a celebration, the highlight of their week. We’ve heard people say that they can’t wait until Sunday.”
One Sunday last summer, Huguley says he was observing the church, reflecting on the vision that had come to life right before his eyes.
“I was standing in the first service, and the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘This is what was in your heart,’” Huguley says. “I looked around and I said, ‘Lord, this sure is. This is exactly the vision you gave me several years ago, sitting in my pastor’s office and hearing it wouldn’t work.’”
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CORNERSTONE FAMILY FELLOWSHIP
Amory, Mississippi
CFFAmory.com
Lead Pastor: Greg Huguley
Launched: 2007
Weekend Attendance: 750
Affiliation: Nondenominational
