Why I Believe Partnerships Are Important
I don’t think a city can have too many churches. But a city can have too many struggling churches.
- Some have churches with buildings and few people or limited vision.
- Some have churches with limited facilities but plenty of people and vision.
When these churches can partner, God can do a lot! The people of the struggling churches can be blessed with strong leadership and an evangelistic thrust. The people in the stronger churches can leverage their resources to expand the gospel in other places.
With the use of technology and strong leadership, I look for hundreds of partnerships to form in the near future.
At LifeChurch.tv, we make many resources available for any church to use free of charge. I pray that you get creative to do your part in partnering.
- You might consider uniting with another church.
- You might make your building available to a church plant on a Saturday night.
- You might combine single adult ministries with a church down the road.
- You might give away your resources.
- You might make your building available for a nearby Christian school to do their plays.
If you get prayerfully creative, you can do more with others for the glory of God than you can do alone!
What ideas for partnering do you have?
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[...] Craig Groeschel talks about why he believes in the power of partnerships. [...]
Merge teen youth groups and partner with outside organizations like YOUNG LIFE. Parents are drawn to seeking God when they see that their teens life has completely changed. They want to know HOW this could be true and WHO helped.
Merge church functions…4th of July, Halloween, Christmas hoopla and reach out to the community during these times. Have a toy drive and invite struggling parents to shop( pick out) at Christmas time. Collect coats..food..clothing (free consignment)…mega yard sale…Community projects… redo someone house…job fair. etc…the list can go on and on. Think outside the box and together…Give Give Give.
unite continually to clean parks, mow yards…so on and on to serve. When an ice storm hits, everyone should know that the “Christians” will all be out with chainsaws doing clean up.
We are beginning to use your teaching in another week. We will start off as an “Open” user to see what doors God opens. We are seeking God’s clear direction in a partnership and this is our way of stepping out of the boat.
Now I can give up the responsibility of preparing a message each week and I can focus on other areas of ministry. This will be a learning curve - that’s for sure.
Thanks Craig - your team has been so helpful already.
We are doing this and seeing amazing results. When we look beyond the walls of our denomination and church we can then see all people as God’s people or future God’s people. Networking has helped us raise funds, reach people and grow the Kingdom. It is amazing!
..and I totally agree with you on this Craig. We are moving into a storefront this winter and have already approached an ethnic church in the immediate area about using our facility on days we are not. We partner with another church a few blocks up the road from the site already for youth and single adult events.
Someday, our prayer is that we will find a permanent building and grow with another group who wants to partner with us. This is more the type of “merger” I think of when I think of putting a group together..
The tools Lifechurch provides are very nice. YouVersion and Church Metrics are both excellent pieces of software and to do it for free is amazing. Thank You for your generosity.
It is awesome when churches can partner together. Kind of as an added thing to that, I think that many pastors and leaders are living on an Island by themselves. They might think that noone else is going through what they are going through. I know that is true in the Northeast, as I’m sure it is everywhere else. Building friendships and accountability with other pastors can only help build and strengthen those churches even more. This is why I love what you guys do for other churches! Thanks!
We are beginning a project for our city that no church could do alone but we know we could do together. The idea is for every home in a 4 city area to be individually canvassed and invited to participate in a city wide food drive.
One of our primary goals is to see the names of individual churches blurred as the and the name of Jesus is made clear.
We are in the initial stages of planning, but are praying fervently for a community of churches to partner together for/and in the name of Jesus.
[...] and influential church in our region (CedarCreek) and this week Craig Groeschel from LifeChurch is blogging all about partnerships between churches in order to make the best impact for the Kingdom. Craig and LifeChurch have really exemplified what [...]
When ONE PRAYER began I shared the vision with two other pastors in our community and since then we have been meeting on Thursdays for prayer and vision casting. Since July God has brought 3 more church pastors and we have began a ministry called ONE MINISTRY. November 20th we are working together to bring in FEED THE CHILDREN. We will be able to provide 1600 people 7 days worth of food, blankets, health kits and toys for their children. I am excited to see what God is going to do through this ministry that was birthed because of the example of LifeChurch.tv
Zac
My dad pastors a little church with their own facility that also hosts a Christian school, a Christian fine arts school’s classes and performances, a reading clinic, a personal training facility, music lessons, and two additional churches on the weekend, one on Saturdays and one on Sunday evening. When they built the building years ago, that was my parents’ dream for it. (Oh yeah, they live in an apartment in it and also have an extra apartment for visiting missionaries.) Whew!
Craig,
Partnerships are so vital! I pastor an established, traditional church that did not adapt to their changing community over the last 30 years. Now we are a small congregation in a big building in the midst of a sea of need. We are leveraging the power of partnerships to regain our place of impact in the neighborhood.
Our church is not alone–there are a bunch of churches in similar situations, but there is no network where we can connect with each other. Some of us are learning from the generations that are coming after us. There’s a lot of synergy that can come from mentoring/reverse mentoring. There are lots of exciting possibilities. Many of the pastors in my generation (and older) either don’t know how or are scared to initiate partnerships.
Much of the emphasis in church circles today is on the splash and impact of explosively growing new churches. That’s great, and I thank God for them. But please, don’t leave the older, more traditional congregations out here to languish and die.
Can someone help??
Rob, my husband just became pastor of a small church in Norfolk. Would be very interested in hearing what you have to say. Please email woodlandavebaptistchurch@gmail.com
I just met with pastors representing all of the provinces in Argentina who were joining forces to create a church planting network. The goal was to share information about what church planting and evangelism projects were underway, collaborate on techniques/strategies, and then share key leaders/people who can participate in new church plants. There are over 10,000 townships without any evangelical churches, so they realized the only way the Church would be known is if each church stopped acting alone in response to the shared Commission. Exciting to see what God will do with it!
Rob,
It seems to me that the only way for a church to avoid dying is to change. But it sounds to me like that option may not be available since the church has been resisting change for 30 years. The only positive option may be to turn the death into creative destruction.
I was part of a church on the downhill slide. Creative destruction for us was to become a campus of LifeChurch.tv. If you go this route you will have to decide what is best in your situation. You might want to investigate the LC options of Open and Network.
Tom et al,
Let me share “the rest of the story…”
* Partnering with our local association of churches and city government, we were able to get a grant and bring 175 missions volunteers in this summer for a blitz week repairing owner-occupied homes for low- and moderate-income families through World Changers;
* Partnering with the other churches and community organizations (civic league, block watch, etc) and our local Baptist Association, we were able to do an outreach in the community square. We had music by Russ Taff & Greg and Rebecca Sparks, had a bounce house for the kids, popcorn & cotton candy, and served 500 hot dogs to folks in our neighborhood;
* Through the entry this provided us to the Middle School, the churches in our neighborhood provided 750 backpacks of school supplies on the first day of school;
* Through partnership with Angel Food Ministries, our congregation is the only host (distribution) site in our city, and we served over 320 families last week.
Currently we are working together with the other churches in the community on several other outreach projects.
Yes. It does mean change. Sometimes that change is as radically discontinuous as a change in worship style. But sometimes that change is as simple as getting outside the church doors.
And we’ve realized we can’t do it on our own–we have to partner with others. Now trying to help some of the larger churches who want to come into our community and let us be the recipients of their outreach rather than partnering with us to help us reach our community –that’s the challenge.
We just celebrated our 89th church anniversary. We’re not on the downhill slide. We believe greater things are yet to come through the power of partnerships.
Bravo, Rob. That’s thinking outside the box. That’s being the church.
Great post. As a presbyterian, we have “built in” partnerships. But the formal partnership is often not nearly as life-giving as the one which is chosen out of a sense of common cause (either cultural or spiritual).
But partnerships must go beyond inter-denominational, inter-associational cooperation, as many above have pointed out.
I loved what Mike from Argentina described. Rob Edwards also had a great story.
I’m going to be planting in South Jersey, near Philadelphia. The lower nine counties of New Jersey have 3.3 million people.
Is one denomination going to reach that area for the Gospel? Impossible.
May God grant us the partnerships we need to take the Message to the Lost.