When our church celebrated our one-year anniversary, I realized that we were actually going to make it as a church. We had all the things going that a healthy church seems to have from outside appearances. We had weekend worship services, children’s ministry, outreach events, small groups, and a few other teams in place that were needed to be a church. However, we knew there was something missing. We were great at gathering people, but honestly, we stunk at defining clear next steps for growing in Christ.
Next Steps to leading a missional church was an event that we attended when Grace River was 18 months old, and this event changed everything for us. We learned about how to create and execute 8 healthy systems to make our church thrive. It was these systems and the Natural Church Development Survey (NCD) that enabled us to take this next step as a church.
We didn’t see a harvest of people meeting, knowing, and following Jesus until we started really focusing on the systems that would make our church healthy. What I didn’t know back then is God wanted to grow our church way more than we did. He was just waiting on us to have the systems in place to help make disciples. If you are looking to remove some barriers and make the practical changes necessary to impact your community for Christ, Next Steps is for you!
Chris Highfill
Planter and Lead Pastor
Grace River Church, St Peters, MO
In the last 2 months, Grace River Church has had 6 baptisms and 7 people have accepted Christ.
