Wednesday, March 26, 2014

TWENTY YEARS OF DOING THIS


I am coming up on the twentieth anniversary of my first church consultation.  It was St. Jude Episcopal Church of Valparaiso, Florida.  I charged them $500 for the whole thing.  After several meetings, I recommended that they sell their facility and relocate to an adjacent town.  (This is not something that Episcopal churches are known to do easily.)   My relative ignorance of how rare such a move was for an Episcopal congregation enabled me to take such a bold stance with them.   Amazingly, they decided to go for it.  They bought a plot of land near Niceville High School, built a first unit, and tripled their worship attendance.  And through this experience, I got hooked.  I discovered the power of partnering an interventionist with a prayerful congregation to make strategic ministry decisions and to leap forward in ministry effectiveness.