Going to two services

Lacy,

That places you between a rock and a hard space.

100 folks comfortable . . . should mean that your church is affording a full time pastor and one other full timer . . . You are tight (very tight) on staff to lead the change.

First leadership.

You will need a strong pastor (volunteer?) in the area of children's ministries.

I might suggest to have the children's ministries to focus on a separate service time (sunday night?, wednesday night?). This will pull we have to ____ on sunday morning and allow the focus on sunday morning to be the worship service.

You will need a strong administrative pastor (may be the senior pastor- may be someone else). But, in everything, you will need to augment the lead pastor. If he is weak in visitation, grow a man to lead the visitation team. If he is weak in administration, then find an administrator.

The best way to lead change is through the small groups (in your case probably in the Sunday School). Naturally, leadership menas that you have 'consensus' and 'buy in' from significant leaders within the flock (deacons and their families and SS school teachers for example).

 

Northwood:

They use blended services and multiple services so that they can use a very large part of their budget to target ministry (their two big ministries are nation building and their second is church planting).

They intentionally choose to expend resources on church planting - and they do it.

They are just now building a newer larger sanctuary . . . they waited so that they could spend the money on church planting instead.

About 15 miles from them is 'Fellowship' at around 20,000 . . . Fellowship is a newer mega-church than is Northwood. Northwood runs over 2,000 . . . each weekend.

But, the church planting network that Northwood has started runs (forgive me because I really do not remember how many hundreds of thousands) over 100 thousand each week. I really think that they had over 250 thousand each weekend.

 

Model.

Based on the limited information so far, I would suggest these options:

1. Two services with SS in between.

2. Sunday School then service. Maybe have a fellowship time between the two sets of services?

(Remember that you can always choose to have a 5th Sunday or Saturday and rent the local HS football stadium or basketball court . . . )

Remember that if you are planning for growth . . . believers that you disciple do not choose the 11:00 time for worship unless you teach them to choose that time.

The unchurched with a more Catholic background are not significantly impacted by worship service time.

The unchurched without a Catholic background do seem to 'prefer' the 11:00 worship time . . .

. . . note: The 11:00 worship time can be modified (usually moved from 10:30 to about 11:30) without negative effect . . .

A really good book on the subject is "Surprising Insights from the Unchurched" By Thom Rainer.

This would also be a great time to find out if some of the members of the church would like to start some small groups in their homes . . .

:thumbs: