Church planted by pioneers seeks to reach hipsters
MCC is a church planted by pioneers from Illinois 160 years ago. Throughout those 16 decades it is a church that has seen some major highs and painful lows. This legacy has included the season when the building was condemned, to an Easter they had an attendance of 999, and back to the summer we were 30 days from foreclosure. Almost two centuries afford you an experience in almost every imaginable season a church can experience.
For the past decade MCC has been a church, like many of yours, that hovered between 150 and 215. Almost 5 years ago we completed a transition between Lead Pastors in which I was entrusted with leadership of this church at the ripe age of 26.
Much of the story went the way you would imagine. I was young and ignorant. The church was gracious. God was good. Here, however, is what we’ve seen happen in the past 12 months:
- Launched a campus; not out of need for space, but as missionaries.
- Gone from 1 to 2 services.
- Gone from 9 small groups to 19.
- Baptized more people this year than ever before.
- Seen attendance grow from 237 last October to 380 this October.
I hope in the remainder of this article that I might encourage you with one of the major foundations for this growth we’ve seen. In short, we intentionally took on the mentality of a missionary.
1. We Studied Our Community
I took one missions class in college. The class I took was entitled “cross-cultural ministry.” The premise of the semester was: know your culture, know their culture, know where they diverge, know where they intersect, and strategize intentionally. All this we labeled as contextualization.
I knew then that God was not sending me out of the country, but I didn’t realize he was calling me to be a missionary. Becoming …
