In South Dakota, towns are often separated by dozens of miles of ranches, farmland, empty grassland, or mountains. As the fifth least densely populated state in the country, South Dakota presents unique challenges for ministry. However, GracePoint Wesleyan Church in Brookings, located on the state’s eastern border with Minnesota, has consistently found innovative ways to carry the message of Jesus to distant communities.
With an average attendance of 1,700, GracePoint is a thriving congregation that leverages its resources to network with other churches within its denomination. By focusing on a model of networking for church multiplication, the church has fine-tuned a strategy to multiply its impact across the state through years of trial and error.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve been involved in three other church plants in Minnesota and Indiana that didn’t do so well,” says Lead Pastor Steve Norby. “It was a model where they would go and do their own thing while we simply sent money. Without a strong relationship, success was difficult. You have to be okay with the fact that you might fail as often as you succeed, but you can’t quit. Now, we are focused on how to provide robust support and relationship without being controlling.”
The church knew that for it to be successful it needed to focus its efforts closer to home.
“We have a philosophy: here, near and far,” he says. “We try to do the fully orbed New Testament missional kind of approach, but we feel like our backyard is becoming our mission field more and more. That’s why there’s this emphasis [on networking with churches in their own state] these last few years, because we are basically becoming an unchurched culture. We have a burden now to really say, we need to be involved with the ‘near’ part of this thing tremendously. The advantage is that you understand the culture really well. You can go in there, quickly get invested and get going.”
At the same time, Norby says, they didn’t want to just plant campuses that would become mini GracePoints. Even planting in their own state meant there would be quite a distance between locations, in towns that are different from one another. A one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work. They decided, instead, to develop a model that’s a hybrid of a hands-off church plant (like their first attempts) and a multisite model.
Their current model is a multiphase process that has GracePoint working with a few very small churches and incorporating a lot of GracePoint’s DNA as the new church becomes established. In Phase 2, GracePoint is more hands-off but still offers some focus, organizational support and leadership. By Phase 3, the smaller churches should be completely self-sustaining, although Norby says their networking relationship would continue.
“We’re there just to further the kingdom,” he says. “We want them to be autonomous works of God that then become networking centers themselves. We’re just beginning this, but that’s our dream.”
And though they have big dreams of reaching more and more cities in their state with new or revitalized churches, they’re going slowly, making sure they can fully support those churches they do choose to network with. GracePoint isn’t a big city megachurch. But it’s still found ways to take advantage of its context, location and resources to slowly, steadily, populate its state with healthy, thriving churches.
“Anything healthy reproduces,” Norby says. “That’s just a basic life principle. So I think church planting or church multiplication should be a natural outcome of health and vibrancy of the church.”
—Jessica Hanewinckel
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GRACEPOINT WESLEYAN CHURCH
Brookings, South Dakota
Lead Pastor: Steve Norby
Website: GracePointWesleyan.org
Founded: 1960
Denomination: Wesleyan