I officially took over the pastorate at Cornerstone the Sunday after Mother’s Day 2021. In just eight weeks, the place exploded. We more than doubled attendance, seeing as many as 900 in the building by the end of July. There was a lot of momentum. Honestly, it was almost too much. We didn’t have dream teams or systems in place, and we couldn’t serve that many people. As a result, we dropped back down to about 750 by November. Then, as we put the right systems in place, we began to see growth year-over-year. It’s been incredible! We’re four churches now. I don’t get caught up in numbers, but the last I knew, we were averaging just under 2,000 on a normal weekend. It’s just amazing the things that God has been up to.
How did we take a church that was unhealthy and turn it around to a healthy church that could handle exponential growth? First, my team and I had to accept that fact that our church needed pruning. We had to figure out what was holding back our growth, what was capping our ability to connect with our community and serve our people well.
Pruning Your Church from What Hinders Growth
I think what hinders growth more than bad strategies or systems is just good old-fashioned sin. I mean, let me make it plain: If you want your church to grow, stop stealing money from it. If you want your church to grow, stop committing adultery. If you want your church to grow, stop permitting broken people to hurt kids inside of your church.
I took over our church on the other side of an affair. We’re currently planting a church in a city that has eaten church plants for breakfast for the last 50 years. The church in Plains, moral failure. Those doors had been closed for eight years before we reopened the church there. The church in Mineola is now walking through the aftermath of a gross misuse of church resources at multiple levels, not just at the pastor level but at the board level. We’re working with an accountant, and he is working with four different churches in our area that are in cities of less than 3,000 people each who have all experienced embezzlement.
I think some of the biggest reasons why my generation, the older Millennials or Xennials, claims faith but doesn’t want anything to do with the church is Bill Hybels, Ravi Zacharias, Carl Lentz, Ted Haggard, Robert Morris, Tony Evans, Brian Houston, and Steve Lawson. There are too many to even name. My generation has looked to the church for help and decided, “That place is messier than my life! Why would I go there?!” They don’t see ministry. They don’t see all the people God has restored. They just see the headlines on social media of all of these guys, one by one, who have fallen. It’s up to us to prune out the sin and bring holiness back to the church.
Now, just because you’re pruning things in your church doesn’t mean you’re going to lose people or opportunities. You win when you prune. When you look at ministries and remove the inefficiencies you find, it increases the efficiencies of every other successful department. It allows you to keep a healthy church, reach more people and love the lost.
Preparing Your Church for Better Ministry through the Holy Spirit
When we came to Cornerstone, the church didn’t do altar calls. There were no salvation moments. We had to build them—not just an opportunity for people to say yes to Jesus but to learn what comes next. When you don’t hold altar calls well, guess what: You don’t really have a discipleship program, right? You don’t really focus on building the teams that are going to actually help people work out their salvation after they come to the altar.
When we were hired, the elder group looked at me and said, “You think that it will work?” I said yes! I said, “We won’t do a service on this campus without ever having an altar call. We will always have an altar call for people to come to Jesus.” They thought it would get old, but I knew it wouldn’t. We had over thirty people in Garden City alone who committed their lives to Christ this weekend.
Our second largest church team now is our discipleship team. We allocated resources to discipling people because we know God’s going to bring in a harvest, and we’ve got to be good stewards of them. Our job as pastors and leaders is to help people be everything God is calling them to be. We know that God hasn’t called us to just make converts; He wants disciples, so we need to have systems and procedures that allocate time, money, and human resources to discipling people.
Since the day we launched our discipleship teams, our numbers have not gone backwards; they’ve gone forward because we’re taking care of the people better now.
If you’re going to prepare your church for better ministry, I suggest you focus on three critical words:
- Charisma, the gifts of the Holy Spirit
- Energema, the activities, the working out, of the gifts
- Diakonia, the service experience (like a church service).
As you take these into consideration, you’ll break the cultural trend of seeing the church as a place to be a consumer. That’s what we have been battling for the last twenty years, a “come and have an experience” culture. People were not told to come and serve. They were not told, “You have a ministry, a spirit-empowered ministry that God has called you to—not just a physical place where you can experience God’s presence but a place where you can employ the spirit-empowered ministry that will help you discover there’s nothing more fulfilling than serving others.”
Church should be a place with a call to action. Right now, as a church, we’ve been fasting for three days. I’ve encouraged our people that they should fast at least one of the next three days and come to our noon prayer time to prepare for our upcoming spirit-filled service where we’re going to pray for people and lay hands on them to receive the Holy Spirit.
Maintaining Momentum through Prayer
Philippians 2:1-13 reminds us that God wants to give you the desires and the power to do His will. That is the plan and purpose He has for us. But how do you get to the point that God gives you desires unless you’re seated in His presence? How do you get the power unless you’re connected to the Spirit? How do you know what to prune and what to do new if you’re not in the prayer closet?
Our calls to action bring the church together to fast and pray, that the Holy Spirit would fall in a powerful way and in a correct way, an orderly way, that would be undeniable for those in attendance. This is how we as pastors can maintain the momentum of our churches.
A lot of churches are good at delivering a call to give or a call to serve the community. We do those kinds of things as well, but God said His house would be a house of prayer, and we should want to cultivate prayer after our pruning.
I have a statement I make at least once or twice a month, “You will not be comfortable in this church if you’re sitting and not serving.” I say that all the time to address complacency and spectating head on. A lot of times churches make it hard for people to begin serving, so we’ve simplified our process a lot, to where it’s 90 minutes and then we do many things. We don’t expect people to rotate their world around us, but we try to rotate our world around people, so we as a staff meet with people to do the work.
We also have an entire online curriculum called Cornerstone Leadership University that we can track through Google Classroom and keep up with how far along they are in their training and what part of the video they may have stopped watching. Our Dream Team numbers are higher now than they have been. And it’s all because we’ve learned to simplify our processes, make them volunteer-friendly, and cultivate prayer and planning together.
Pastor, if it seems like you’re in a season where people are coming at you, or you’re making changes in your church ministries and questioning if they were worth it—“Did I hear from God?”—please let me be an encouragement to you. I’d love to help you keep working it out. You can email me at [email protected]. If I can help you figure out where to prune and where to cultivate, I want to do it because we too have been through hard things. In 2 Chronicles 20, Jehoshaphat was told to stand firm, hold his position, worship, and then he’d see that God is God. Let me help you stand your ground. It would be an honor to encourage you like that.
This blog was created using content from the webinar Navigating Church Decline and Growth Trends.
