Movement Church is a new church plant, so we are under no impression that we have mastered this portable church thing. In our formative launch team meeting phase we have dedicated one weekend a month to visiting churches and learn from them. Some of them are financial partner churches, while others are area church plants that we respect. I thought I would take the time to re-cap our times with these churches and share some highlights and things that blessed our team.
On Sunday September 30th we visited Grace Fellowship in Pickerington. They are a thriving church that recently sold there building after maximizing it with 4 services and is in process of building a new one. In the meantime they became portable and meet at Pickerington Central High School. They were already a church that we respected and were a financial partner of ours so the fact that they went portable is only an extra blessing as they can help us even more.
Our team had the chance to be there early for setup before first service and see things get put in their places and get to know the building. We sat through first service as a team so we could see what a worship experience looked like and than walked the halls and watched first impressions, children’s ministry, and tech in action during second service.
There have been many ways they have blessed us but here is the one I will camp on – As a staff team they have been 100% accessible to our entire launch team on Sundays, by email, by phone, and by personal appt.
Examples…
1) I reached out to Keith Minier last year and basically said I respect you, I would love if Movement could end up like your church and I intend to start bothering you with a lot of questions and he hasn’t flinched once. He has been gracious, humble, wise, transparent and a great guy to lean on.
2) Their children’s director Erica was telling me last spring that she wanted to be a resource and blessing to our children’s director when and if we even found one. When Mindy took the job and contacted her Erica was not just up for meeting but was an encyclopedia and really put wind in Mindy’s sail and gave her confidence, encouragement, and a ton of ideas and troubleshooting help. That is priceless.
3) Grace Fellowship has a dude named Charlie who does their tech. I don’t know what his title is but it might be Super Master of all things. He is the perfect marriage of tech, media, and ministry. He has been so gracious in offering advice and even taking the time to cut down everything he does for their services into snippets so it can also bless us in fundraising and promotion. He also gave our team super in-depth tours and explanations of what they do, why they do it, how we can adapt it, and other ideas that could also save money. At one point he had roughly 10 guys on our team around him in a semi-circle drooling as he explained his use of Apple TV’s all over the video that were connected to various TV’s and ipads. Here are a couple videos that Charlie has made available to us. A video of Pastor Keith Minier praying for us in second service.
and a video interview they did of us last spring
4) Drew Waggoner has helped our team out with first impressions and all the connection stuff that bridges the gap from Sunday morning to groups, serving, and follow up. We picked the brains of their first impressions team for a solid hour because what they do is solid.
One of the biggest blessings to me already in this journey has been seeing our family of churches surround us and take care of us. They have given us everything from money, to advice, to accountability, to resources, and love. We are a blessed church because of the churches investing in us.
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