WESTSIDE FAMILY CHURCH
Lenexa, Kansas
Lead Pastor: Randy Frazee
Website: WestsideFamily.church
Thriving Points of Emphasis: connected community, serving others, social impact, spiritual formation, holistic stewardship, data-informed
In Matthew 4, Jesus traveled from city to city, teaching about the kingdom of God while also healing people. He met them at their point of pain, whether it was relational, physical or mental, and they experienced transformation.
“That’s become the pattern of our ministry,” explains Randy Frazee, lead pastor of Westside Family Church in Lenexa, Kansas. “It’s that whole idea that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
In the past, he was eager to launch more campuses and get more people in the seats. However, several years ago, his vision for the church drastically changed when he learned about a mental health crisis that was sweeping not just his congregation but also the city and state. As a result, Westside Family started offering mental health services.
“We finally learned that the congregation isn’t inspired by a big church. They crave life transformation,” Frazee notes, adding that these days he and his team seldom talk about attendance numbers.
Life transformation can lead to personal flourishing, and Frazee believes the best way to ensure that a congregation will thrive is to listen to them. Most church leaders have conversations with the people who are closest to them, such as board members, staff and key volunteers, but that doesn’t represent the broad sweep of the congregation.
So Westside began to check in with their congregants to see how they felt about their spiritual growth at the church. One question they wanted the answer to was what kept people from thriving. They learned that many didn’t have enough margin in their life when it came to time and money. As a result, Westside offered a 10-week series with five weeks focused on finding space in one’s time and five weeks focused on finding space in one’s finances. They partnered with Ramsey Solutions and invited other churches to join this initiative. A total of 110 churches accepted.
“After nine weeks, we had 8,200 credit cards cut up and $4.7 million of cash saved in emergency funds. We also had $17.7 million debt reduced, plus 84% of couples reported having better conversations about finances,” says Frazee. “So many people experienced genuine life transformations, and it all began by asking what kept them from thriving.”
Around this same time, the church began focusing on growing the whole person rather than concentrating on a single dimension, such as church attendance or tithing. Leaders began looking at the dimensions of human flourishing, which include relational, spiritual, financial and vocational health. Interestingly, as soon as the church’s focus shifted to church health rather than numerical growth, giving actually increased by 40%. Clearly, the congregation approved of the new focus.
Every year Westside takes the Barna ChurchPulse assessment. They do it in each church service to get a holistic representation of the congregation.
“You’d be horrified if a doctor prescribed you meds without drawing your blood, taking your vitals or asking you questions,” Frazee points out. “It’s just as ludicrous for a church leader to prescribe something based on anecdotal evidence without listening to the congregation.”
Because people said in this assessment that they wanted to grow in their relationships, the church turned its attention to forming a more connected community.
“We have onramps to dynamic, authentic community, but we also are addressing our members’ own personal roadblocks,” says Frazee, who notes that everyone is starting at a different place on their spiritual journey. Westside Family knows that explorers make up 7% of the congregation and 51% of their people are in the first stages of their Christian walk.
“They’re excited. They’re weeping in services, but they’re also telling us that they don’t know much about the Bible or where they are supposed to go,” he adds. “We worked to help people not only take next steps, but also to meet them at their point of pain.”
The church has a fundamental strategy of wrapping God’s family around a hurting person’s family. And it’s not just the senior pastor but the whole congregation that’s been mobilized out in the community. They instruct their congregation to listen to those who are hurting, pray for them and care for them. Part of that care involves getting them to the right resources. Therefore, the church offers a class called Care Like Jesus, which teaches people how to access available tools and resources so that they can advocate for those who are hurting.
Frazee believes that care is the most effective strategy in growing numerically because when people feel cared for by their church family, that creates a bond and commitment to the church.
The Westside congregation also shared that coming out of the pandemic many of them were struggling in their marriages.
“If you don’t have a healthy marriage, you don’t have healthy families, and if you don’t have healthy families, you don’t have a healthy church,” asserts Frazee.
Church leaders immediately addressed the issue by engaging in a churchwide initiative where married and cohabitating couples took an assessment called Better Love by Les and Leslie Parrott, and singles took a self-assessment called the Yada! Assessment.
“I think what makes a church healthy really begins with culture, so we want to be sure that the overall congregation is thriving,” Frazee affirms.
This is partly why it was so unsettling when Frazee learned that Barna had data that listed the state of Kansas as dead last for good mental health.
“We assumed it would be California, New York or Washington D.C.,” he says. “Certainly, we would be the best because this is where Dorothy and Toto live, and there’s no place like home. But we were wrong.”
According to Frazee, for a number of years they have had one of the largest Christian counseling spaces in Kansas City, but now they are tripling their efforts by providing more than just counseling services. Currently, the church is completing construction on a new 20,000-square-foot care center that will house 20–30 counselors as well as care ministries, support groups, benevolence programs and Stephen ministers, which are specially trained laypeople who minister to hurting congregation members. Last summer 25 new care groups were started that deal with issues such as grief, pornography addiction and caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s.
“We’re doing all kinds of therapy that’s informed by our Christian faith,” he states. “Merging the space between counseling and spirituality creates healing.”
Over time, Frazee has learned that pastoring a local congregation is not a one-size-fits-all situation.
“You can’t go to a conference then come back and just incorporate something that worked at another church,” says Frazee.
And while he admits that in his early years of ministry he was driven by strategies that would get more people to his church, that’s no longer the case.
“Now I’m focused on engagement, not attendance. I let God take care of the attendance,” he concludes. “This year we’re focused on connective relationships and serving others. This intentional, thoughtful planning lowers my blood pressure because I go to bed at night knowing I’ve done the best job I could to honor God and the people I serve.”