Out Of The Box
For the next several blogs, I want to highlight some business/ministry ideas that are focused on reaching people who will never attend our churches. If the pundits are correct, somewhere between 53% – 60% of people in our community have no intention of ever attending anyone’s church…even yours! So the church must go to the people, and that requires creativity and entrepreneurial ideas. In a recent post, I mentioned this quote:
In his book, Chase The Lion, Mark Batterson says, “There are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. We shouldn’t just be trend spotters. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we should be trendsetters. If you want to reach people no one is reaching, you might have to do something no one else is doing.”
So I want to spend some time discovering and writing about people who are doing church in a different way…a way that will move the needle of effectiveness with the 60%. Since I am presently short on content, I will start this with a personal example of the way we have combined business and ministry to change our community. We call it Destiny School of the Arts.
Honestly, when we began this school, we were high on vision, but short on knowledge. We had the missional idea of creating a school for the children of our community. Early on, we decided to NOT make this a Christian school. It would simply be a school for our community that just happened to be led by Christ-followers. Our idea would be to provide a unique educational experience for the children of our community while loving and caring for them and their families. That mission has never changed.
After eight years of investment, struggle, hardship and education in private school leadership, we are actually seeing this vision become reality. We presently enroll over 130 students, have an excellent staff and are showing a profit. In addition, our vision has expanded to include scholarships for non-English speaking children. We are in the middle of a pilot program to help these children become fluent in English prior to entering elementary school. Mastering the English language is essential to the future success of these children.
But the greatest successes are found in the relationships we have formed with people who would’ve never attended our church. And those relationships are turning into kingdom growth.