When people start coming to the church are there specific ways you seek to connect with them so they begin to feel a part of the ministry?
We’re not masters of this by any means. However, we have over 200 deacons in our church and if someone gets saved in our church within 24 hours someone’s calling that person. In that conversation they get engaged about their life and then we pass that person on to another ministry in the church, whether it be women’s ministry, youth ministry and so on. Then we begin to follow that person, they start doing life together.
There are several things we want our leadership to make sure that these people go through. They’ve got to go through the retreat, they’ve got to go through baptism, membership and so on. All of that takes about a year.
Help me understand just a little bit about your other campuses and locations. What’s their relationship to the mother church?
Those churches do not have autonomy. There is no board. The mother church main board is the board. These campuses, churches that we have, all preach the same sermon. They have a campus pastor there on site. And I rotate within the campuses. So some Sundays I may preach two times over here at the main campus and then I travel to another campus. Every week we meet with all the campus pastors, and each year all of our affiliated churches or planted churches get together to set vision for the next year. We do that. But the campuses do not have autonomy. The planted churches that we started many years ago do have autonomy—they do have a board—but we give apostolic oversight to them.
You’re all preaching from the same text. So how do you coordinate that?
Two times a year we meet with all the campuses to plan seven months. When we leave that two-day or three-day retreat, we know what we’re preaching in October, November, December, January, February, March—all the way through Easter. Every campus knows the title of that series, of that month and of that Sunday—and the verse.
Different ministries see it—the dance ministry, drama ministry, worship team. They begin to project, based on this verse or based on this sermon title. Then as we get closer to that month or that week we all get together on Wednesdays and we go over the upcoming sermon. Everybody interjects—maybe an illustration that they read or a story that they heard that would go good with the sermon. So it’s a round table and everybody’s giving input. The staff types it out and then the sermon gets circulated to the different campuses. Everyone has input. We’ll give them a skeleton of the sermon, but they are free to use it or create their own, just so they have the same verse.
