The Story of Mercy Hill, part 3

Church planting is not an easy task. Redistributing Christians from one church service to another is fairly easy, however. All you need to do is get a better _ (band, preacher, kids ministry, theology, or whatever your consumer item of preference happens to be) and Christians will move.

That may sound harsh, but sadly, it isn’t too much of an exaggeration. Far too often Christians have either forgotten, or have never learned, that the church is the family of Christ followers who are helping one another to carry their cross into mission by the power and strength that only Jesus can provide.

That’s not to diminish all the things mentioned above (worship music, theology, preaching, children’s ministry), but merely to put them in their place.

We’ve conceived of this (with help from other leaders in kingdom-oriented church planting) as establishing the mission of the church first, and building our “institutional form” around that moving, thriving mission.

In light of this, after our four preview services in our second season (one each month in March, April, May, and June) which were held at the Boyd Recital Hall on campus at Rowan University, I had a sense that as a church our institutional formation was getting ahead of our mission-centric maturity.

Check out the rest of the story here.