growth strategies

These are my Leadership Coaching Network thoughts & takeaways - #2.

You can read my 1st thoughts HERE and read all about this leadership coaching network I'm in with Tony Morgan HERE.

Last time we were together we talked through some successful growth strategies and themes Tony has helped implement in churches and that he has seen be successful.
Honestly, these are nothing new. I feel like we're doing all of these at Ridge and doing them well. BUT we can definitely always get better. I see a lot of areas for us to improve. Overall though we are nailing most of these.

Here are Tony's top 10 consistent themes for Growth and then my thoughts on each:

1  Listen to God and do what He says. Obviously peeps screw up when they just straight up copy what some other growing church is doing. Do your own thing. Do what God calls YOU to do! (On the flip side, I think Tony said something like "We run into a trap when we take our calling and assume it's everybody's calling.")

2  View ourselves as MISSIONARIES to today's culture. Of course being missional is all the rage but this is FOR REAL. It's not a fad, it's a Jesus thing. We are missionaries to Western culture and we need to start acting like it! it's what we're called to do.
If we were going to a foreign culture/country we would apply all kinds of missional principles, but for some reason we don't here in the West. I've written about this before and plan to again soon (like TOMORROW). We need to realize we are really cross-cultural missionaries here in Charlotte. Our methods must change according to our specific culture.

3  Build from the outside in. We can all see there are really 2 distinct approaches to building a church. 1) pour into a solid core group and help them become fully devoted followers and therefore they will reach all their friends. 2) try to attract the biggest crowd possible and help them become Christ followers.
Obviously with approach #2 you will have a bigger and more committed core! Then you are more able to be missional with that core than those churches who take approach #1 in the name of being hard core missional [imho].
*It's both/and = attractional and missional... not either/or. I don't believe we have to choose. At Ridge we don't believe we have to choose either.

4  Prioritize weekend services. Our culture still thinks that when they want to take spiritual steps it's going to happen on a Sunday morning in a church. That's where they go looking.
*BUT, of course it's not ALL about the weekend. It's really all about God's glory and His Name being made famous... and God changing people's lives through our church.
but, at Ridge, we believe that a great way to accomplish this is through our Sunday morning FOYER environment.

5  Focus on those you're trying to reach, not those you're trying to keep.
Of course this is Andy's phrase and it's what we live by at Ridge. This is how we make decisions - not based on "church people" we're trying to keep, but the unbelievers we want to reach!
we can't just do church how WE like it, but in a way that is relevant to unbelievers. [they way we're doing church now will probably become the new "traditional" church.]

On this point, Tony brought up an interesting point about musical worship style. WE (Christians) love hillsong united and the sixsteps guys... so we sing all their songs and worship God with them. But we sing those because we like them, not because that's the kind of music unbelievers listen to. He made the point that maybe we need a little more mix of some hip hop and the edgy/current stuff peeps are listening to on the radio.
I really like the thought. I also think I believe in the idea of "worship evangelism" too. Still working it all out and forming my philosophy on all this. *AGAIN, I think this is probably another example of "both/and" which is how we try to do it at Ridge. Rocking some Hillsong United but also some Linkin Park & current top 40 stuff.


OK, I can see that my takeaways are already getting too long and I'm only halfway through the 10... I'll have to continue it on Thursday. Tomorrow I'm going to post some more thoughts on #2 above and why we MUST be missionaries to our Western culture.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THESE 1ST 5 GROWTH STRATEGIES??? 

AGREE or DISAGREE?