This is part of a series of interviews with pastors of churches whose attendance has grown 20% or more in 5 years. We hope this series will be a resource of ideas to help increase worship attendance at your church.

Add, Don’t Take Away:  Transforming Traditional Churches

One of the key principles I have learned in turning around older, traditional churches is “Add, Don’t Take Away.”  In loving and valuing the people in the churches I have led, I had to find out what was precious to them and honor that. For most older churches, that means traditional worship and Sunday School.  When I came to Heritage UMC, the congregation had two traditional worship services and a traditional Sunday School.  The leaders had been discussing for a year over starting a contemporary service.  The worship team wanted to take away one of the existing traditional services and replace it with a contemporary.  That had a lot of people upset.  We re-looked at the situation and suggested that we start the contemporary service during the Sunday School hour and leave the other services intact.

I did not think many people from the congregation would come to the contemporary service.  My aim was to reach those with no current church affiliation.  Well, after only a few weeks, it was apparent that many of the people in the congregation preferred contemporary worship.  The key influencers of the congregation who attended the traditional services got together and decided it would be best to combine the two traditional services.

We had been promoting the idea of outreach to the community and reaching the unreached population of our area; therefore, the leaders said that we should put the traditional service first so that those who are unchurched could come at a later time in the morning when they would be most likely to attend. It also allowed that service to run longer if needed.  The result?  Amazing growth!  We went from 300 in attendance in 2001 to 500 in 2005 in a semi-rural county seat community of approximately 20,000.

At that time, we realized many people in our community would probably not come to our campus for worship; therefore, we commissioned and sent out a group of staff and congregation members to plant a new campus aimed at unchurched, pre-Christian 18-35 year-olds.  This group maintained our mission, vision, core values, and core beliefs but had a different target audience.  Over time, that campus has grown to an average worship of 250.  We set them free this year to operate on their own.   Some of our best people chose to be a part of this mission venture.  We are growing the kingdom with nearly 900 total worshipping on the two campuses now.

After a while, we grew so much on our main campus that Sunday School space became an issue.  We, naturally, began small-groups which we call LifeGroups, that meet in homes.  But we did not take away Sunday School; rather, we have worked hard to transform our Sunday School experience into a more relationally-friendly format similar to a small-group. We used materials from Serendipity Publishing and the book Step By Step: Transitioning Your Sunday School to Small Groups by Hal Mayer to help us do that.

We also looked at the model of Journey Church in New York and began adding short-term intensive classes on Sunday mornings.  We call these classes “Heritage University.”  We offer such courses as “The Works of C.S. Lewis,” “New Testament Survey,”  “Systematic Theology,” “How to Study the Bible,” “The Character of God,” “Song of Solomon,” “Leadership Lessons from Nehemiah,” “The Case for Christ,” and others.  We also put our two morning services back to back and added a second tier of educational opportunities.  Recently, we have found that some of our busy, young-adult life-groups have chosen to meet on Sunday mornings at the church because of the availability of the nursery and the busyness of their work schedules during the week.

Another reason we have grown is our commitment to discipleship for our children.  We followed the suggestions of George Barna in his book, “Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions: Why Children’s Ministry Should Be Your Church’s Number One Priority”. He suggests spiritual growth happens best when everyone in the family is studying the same thing. My wife, Allison, and some of her friends at Central UMC in Fayetteville, AR, developed a ministry called Timothy Team.   This basic Bible study has a five-year cycle.  At Heritage, my wife studies and teaches the lesson to all the teachers, including me, on Sunday afternoon.  Susan Williams, the children’s minister at Central has written thechildren’s teacher notes and others have put together learning and craft activities.

On Wednesday, all ages study the same material.  I teach the adults.  Our youth staff teaches the youth, and over 50 adults break up into small groups with their children and teach ages 3 through 12.  There is also Bible memorization and homework for all ages each week.   This has been amazing.  We have a reputation in the community of being THE PLACE for discipleship!

More than anything, I believe the growth of Heritage is related to our passion to fulfill the vision the Lord gave us to “Become the Church of God’s Dreams.” This takes our eyes off of ourselves and focuses us on the Lord Jesus who is the head of the Church!  This helps us to seek the Lord’s desire for who He wants us to be and who He wants us to reach.  We have studied our United Methodist history and theology.  We discovered that our forebears were WORLDCHANGERS because of their vital faith and practice.

Like them, we worship with our whole heart! We have sought to get grounded in our powerful, Biblical, Wesleyan theology.  With hearts on fire for Jesus, we have reached out in love to our community. Monthly, addicts are delivered and healed in the Name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We feed the hungry, cloth the naked and proclaim the Good News of Jesus to the poor.  So far, this year, we have had the privilege of baptizing 69 persons with professions of faith.

We have to give a tremendous amount of credit to the Arkansas Conference’s Connected in Christ Ministry developed by Drs. Jim and Molly Scot and now directed by Dr. Michael Roberts.  This ministry helped me as a pastor to lead our leaders into discovering a shared mission, vision, and core values and defining our core beliefs and goals.  This has grounded and guided all our strategic planning.  There are many other factors in Heritage being a vital congregation—our leaders, our mission outreach locally and globally, our need-meeting ministries, etc. … We are blessed to be children (in the faith) of the early Methodists, seeking to spread “scriptural holiness throughout the land.”

J. Wesley Hilliard has been the Lead Pastor of Heritage UMC since 2001.  For more information about Heritage, go to www.heritagevb.org.  Other key books that have guided them in their journey to vitality include:  Twelve Dynamic Shifts for Transforming Your Church, E. Stanley Ott; Waking to God’s Dream by Bishop Dick Wills; Transitioning: Leading Your Church Through Change by Dan Southerland, The Purpose Driven Church by Rick Warren, and Conspiracy of Kindness by Steve Sjogren.

Pastor Hilliard email: wes@heritagevb.org