josh whitehead

Today in our Senior Leadership Team meeting, we were discussing some future plans. We are actually planning a production that highlights spiritual warfare for the weekend of Halloween.

As we were talking about the potential, Pastor said, “That’s the great thing about Faith Promise. We get to try new things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but we still get to try.”

What are a few things that we have tried that worked:

• Club 45 – a ministry for 4th and 5th graders that prepares them to transition into Middle School and adult worship. We started it last year and this year we doubled the number making the transition.
• Fellowship One – when we transitioned our database, we felt like F1 was the best route because of the accountability, children’s check-in and value of software as a service. Last year, because of the accountability structure, we baptized more people than ever before and are on pace to do the same this year. We’re implementing self check-in this weekend. It has been a great move!
• Service Times – through a set of circumstances we realized that the best times for people to attend FPC were between 10am and 1pm. We fought to keep our start time before 10am but finally changed our service times…again. We’re reaching more people than ever before.
• July 4 – this past July we decided to do one service in the community on Saturday night and cancel Sunday morning services completely (the first time I was without a church service to attend in 14 years). The result: over 5,000 people conservatively, 100 people trusting Christ as their Savior and new people flooding our weekend services the next week.

And, for everything that worked, some things do not work. Here are a few:

• Locking the doors – we started locking the worship center doors until strategic times in the service to cut down on the interruptions a few years ago and to help strategically usher the service. People had to wait in the lobby to go in, so they just left. Bad move on our part.
• Taking up seats for staging – we initially had a worship center that would seat 700 people. For the sake of drama, we put in side stages which took up about 150 seats. We couldn’t grow past 1500 on the weekend. We took out the side stages, added seats back and grew immediately.
• Building a “content manager” website - instead of hiring a web designer, we built two sites for the staff to edit. The staff gets busy and the site gets stale. As you grow, value the web – it’s more important than you think.
• Building to code, not to church – this could be an entire post! Here’s one area: we had 411 parking spots. We average 1.75-1.85 people per care depending on the weekend. The county says you can build parking for 4 people per car. We had to little parking. We built more parking – ASAP!

Build a culture where you can try. If you fail, LEARN and try again. What have you learned from what you have tried in ministry?