5 Things I Love About My Church

My boy Adam wrote 5 Things I Love about My Church about his church and I thought it was a great topic.  I encourage you to write or at least think about the 5 things you love about your church. If you can not think of 5 things you at least like about your church, why do you go there? These are subjective things, it should be easy.

We recently became members of Experience Life Church and we have attended there for about eight months.

1. Prayer is important.

It is more than one of many items on their list of values & beliefs.  I attend the Monday night prayer meeting as often as I can. When I do, it is consistently the spiritual highlight of my week.  I think we now have around 10% of our weekend  attendance coming to our prayer meetings.  When you factor in the high percentage of not yet believers who attend our church, it is a pretty amazing percentage.

2. Next Steps

They have a clear process and hopes for what it means to be part of Experience Life with their Next Steps. The two that are not listed on the website, lead a life house and coach life house leaders, is on the back of the Next Step cards they share.   Though they have 10 steps, you do not have to do them in order.  Okay, you have to know Jesus before you are baptized, but that is it.  I was volunteering and serving at the top step, coaching 8-10 youth ministry life group leaders before I was officially a a member.

I will consider this to be point 2.5. This creates a culture of what is clear and expected by everyone.  It is exciting when you hear adults and students, in regular conversation, bring up what they think their next step of following Jesus is going to be.

3. My 10 year old can serve as a greeter.

This one is very personal but it indicates what they value. As a family, we volunteered as greeters for the Christmas Eve service.  The rest of us liked it but Sarabeth loved it.  So we asked if it was possible for her to join the greeter team. There were not any special committee meetings to create an exception to the rule, it was “That’d be great, we’re so happy she’s willing to serve.”  That is gold,right there.

4. No Perfect People are Allowed

When we first started going this was said just about every week for a month.  It was music to our ears.  Often times, churches know they are supposed to embrace messy people into their church but it is just so darn inconvenient.  So to hear a church , from the stage, invite messy people to not just attend but to become part of what God is doing, is lovely and pretty Jesus-y.

5. We Radically Love Lost People

Our church wants people to experience life by experiencing Jesus, experiencing community, and experiencing service. Our church is unique in that it has grown exponentially over the last three years.  It started with 12 people in a house about three years ago and now we average about 3,000 peo0ple on a weekend. It was averaging under 2,000 when we started attending  last summer.

Here is the exciting part; around 20% or more of the attenders became believers over the last year at the church.

It is not about any church getting bigger, it is about people needing Jesus to save them and to mature and eventually reply back with, “Jesus, you have ruined my life, where else could I go?.”

Every church will not grow like that but every church can radically love and care about the lost. Churches get sidetracked when they begin to care more about making the people in the seats happy than caring about the lost sheep that Jesus would go look for.

Honorable Mentions:

They partner with other churches around the country in the Servolution (Our hope is to give 2,000 hours of service to our area), the muffin bear, Crazy Love Christmas where we served over 100 families (bonus points for it originating from a small group, not church leadership), and more.

What are 5 things you love about your church?