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The holy trifecta of a healthy church

The following is an excerpt of “Doing More together” which is a free resource available to you through The Rural Pastor Podcast.


Principle #1: Bible preaching, relationships and vision are the holy trifecta of a healthy church.

Too many times we look for some secret sauce, like those late-night television commercials that promise you can lose weight, change your financial future, or make a bass boat out of duct tape. The problem is, they’re almost never the truth.

This first principle is actually one we discovered looking back in the rearview mirror. Our little band of approximately 100 people in a declining, indebted, rural congregation saw tremendous growth that led to nearly 500 in worship within the first couple years of our transition.

What was the secret sauce?

There wasn’t any.

We simply did what you would expect any good church to do, and God blessed it!

Visitors turned into regulars, regulars turned into members and when they were asked why they chose to be a part of CrossPoint one of the main responses was, “You preach the Bible here.”

Personally, I internally questioned what in the world other churches were talking about for half an hour every Sunday morning?

What we’ve discovered is people just appreciate solid biblical teaching that’s more clear than clever and they aren’t looking for five easy steps to whatever, or a self-help series on how to be you 2.0.

Walking through books of the Bible, saying the hard things, and leading with love seemed to be just what the doctor ordered.

In addition to solid biblical teaching, relationships are something that can’t be skipped if you’re going to pastor a church. This meant lots of high school volleyball games, fried chicken dinners in people’s homes, and late night hang out time in the church parking lot talking about everything from the NFL to the NRA to the SBC.

The final piece of this holy trifecta of biblical preaching and relationships was vision. Not just any vision, but a wild, join-us-on-an-impossible- mission-and-let’s-see-if-God-shows-up kind of vision.

We decided the vision for our church was already cast in the Great Commission, but if we quantified it we could give ourselves a target to shoot at.

So, with no voice from heaven, but understanding that the tithe was 10%, we decided we would give him 10% of the city. Yep, 10% of 35-40,000 people meant we were going to be a church of 3500- 4000 people.

It was such a preposterous proposition that we found a number of people who wanted to be part of it just in case it actually happened!

Some of you may object to setting a goal like that, with seemingly impossible standards. But, I ask you what happens if we only make it halfway? What a failure, right? A little neighborhood church only running 2000 people now?

I think you understand what I’m saying.

The vision was huge and that compelled people to be a part of something bigger than they were. The goal was not to keep the lights on, or run a program one more year, or fill all the vacancies of the people who quit doing the roles from the previous year. It was to shake the town upside down and spread the gospel everywhere, handing back to God 10% of the city redeemed by the blood of Jesus!

That was the vision in the beginning, but now let me tell you an encouraging story. The location of the church’s first campus is in Hutchinson, Kansas, and we became known for having some pretty exciting Christmas Eve services.

As we grew, the number of services had to be multiplied each year and even extended to the day before Christmas Eve (affectionately called Christmas Adam services).

In 2019, with seven services over two days, we saw 4,046 people attend that holiday celebration. We know Christmas and Easter are high points, but we saw what it could look like when we finally reach that vision and goal!

Now, some of our smaller locations have actually touched those numbers in attendance. Let me explain what that means. When a church reaches 10% of their city, it’s no longer a church in that city, it’s that city’s church. When one out of every 10 people at the grocery store, one out of every 10 kids in school, one out of every 10 nurses at the clinic goes to CrossPoint, it’s a tipping point that changes the community and it is fantastic!

Big vision doesn’t scare people away, it draws them close. When you spend time cultivating relationships built on solid biblical preaching, you lay the groundwork for some great growth and ministry.


To see all the other principles and get your free copy of “Doing More Together” go here:

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