How Your Church Can Become A Community Champion
Imagine your church being promoted by your mayor and city councillors. Can you dream of the day when your leadership is asked and funded to facilitate events for your town or city? Those opportunities are not only possible, but they are also highly plausible.
Jeff and Amber Price became the Lead pastors of Calvary Pentecostal Church, Woodstock, Ontario, in 2013. The community has a population of 45,000, and their average weekend attendance was 250. Over the next six years, Jeff and Amber pastored the congregation, built relationships and trust, reached out to the community, and began envisioning a new future, including planting churches and a name change to reflect the vision.
Opportunity and Growth
The church hosted multiple celebrations for the community year after year: Canada Day, Family Day, Christmas, and Halloween events for children and youth to serve the community. People came to an event and received an invite to attend on a Sunday. 80% of those who began to attend were unchurched people.
Over the years, many who checked out the church are now serving on one of the volunteer teams. Three hundred fifty volunteers are mobilized each month to serve in one of the programs.
The congregation grew from a weekend average of 250 to 1000.
What's In A Name?
In leading the name change, Jeff preached a series of messages in September 2019 called Movement. They started to close their services with the statement, "Calvary Church wants to turn moments into movements … remember, your life is a movement". For five months, they seeded this missional concept of being a movement of people making an impact for Jesus. In a January 2020 vision series, they highlighted the past and all the great things the church did. Calvary Church had a good reputation in the community, so the leadership was careful to communicate that not all name changes are because the previous reputation was bad. Jeff spent time with Calvary's seniors' group and walked them through the change. They held a town hall for the entire congregation and, in March 2020, became known as Movement Church.
They made the name shift to Movement Church because:
There are a ton of Calvary churches, and with the desire to plant campuses, it would become a problem at some point with the possibility of two Calvary churches in the same city.
People outside the church didn't understand the word Calvary and had mixed emotions about it (ranging from horseback riding to the crusades or just the feeling of an old church).
Christ has called the church to be a movement of people who make a real and practical difference in their local communities, country, and the world.
Servant Attitude
In 2022 Movement Church was asked to organize a citywide Easter Egg Hunt on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Pastor Jeff says, "It is so exciting to be able to stand in front of thousands of people from our community and bless them with Easter Eggs, community events, and a ton of free prizes. And what's really cool is all of this is sponsored by our local city government. They give us $30,000 to host this event for our community. Now that's awesome. Any time you can do Jesus' work for free is great."
Movement Church didn't get there by coming with an agenda and with a big platform of Jesus first. They got there by saying to their community they wanted to do something. In 2014 they didn't have a lot of money. They weren't a big church, but they had volunteers. They approached local businesses and said they wanted to serve the community. They asked owners to partner with Movement Church in doing a non-church event to make a difference and rally the city together and bring joy. The downtown core got excited about the potential, they held their first event, and 1000 people attended.
Because of this event and others, some city councillors heard about what the church was doing and approached the Prices. They proposed, "We would like to do this for the city. How can the city get involved in this?" From the second year of the event and on, Movement Church worked in partnership with the city - their team working with the city's employees and working with downtown businesses. All of them brought money together to host the event.
Influence for Jesus
The leaders of Movement Church understood that they couldn't wave the Jesus flag and have a typical crusade. They just went to the community and served. But because of that, the community fell in love with Movement Church. "The city trusted us and started to promote us. They started talking about us at these events. Every time I'm out there, I'm hosting it with the mayor or councillors, and they're promoting Movement Church – 'you gotta go to this church on Sunday. They are such a great church. We love Movement Church.' Our church gets so much promo from the councillors. They're so in love with what we do and how we come just to serve the community. Now the city fully pays for the event."
Can you see your mayor and councillors promoting your church to your community? Movement Church has grown from that event to being engaged in every event that Woodstock hosts. Canada Day, Woodstock Days or Streetfest, there is a constant need for volunteers, and they've learned to trust that Movement Church is an army of volunteers. The church takes care of parking, running the safety tents, doing clean-up in the park, and everything else. The city of Woodstock calls Movement Church their #1 go-to.
Approach your city with the heartbeat of a servant. Your city wants to run events, and they just need volunteers. Be the volunteer army for your community. Do the crappy jobs first and watch how the relationship will grow to an opportunity where you will be able to have others proclaim your church and what you're speaking about to your town or city.
Jeff will be speaking at the Church Vitalization Summit on August 30, 31, and September 1 – 10:00-11:30 AM MT.. Use this link for a free pass.
Connect with Pastor Jeff and Amber here.
Bob Jones is the founder of REVwords.com, an author, blogger, and coach with 39 years of pastoral experience. Bob is also an Advance Coach with the ABNWT Resource Centre. You can connect with Bob here.