State DOMs train for small church growth ministry

There’s nothing wrong with being a small church — just ask Lloyd Borden.
   
Borden, the new director of missions (DOM) for Lookout Mountain Baptist Association, said he’s “just tickled” to be there — and tickled to take part in what he hopes is a rallying point for the 17 small congregations in his local church network.
   
A new strategy to grow the state’s smaller churches — “The Alabama Plan” — was introduced to two contingents of state DOMs recently, one in Conecuh Baptist Association June 2 and one in Morgan Baptist Association June 7.
   
The strategy’s purpose is to offer the state’s small churches — those who have 60 or fewer in the pews each Sunday morning — tailor-made ideas to help them grow.
   
“When a church gets a packet of material that talks about paid staff, department heads, etc., it’s quickly discounted because it doesn’t apply,” Borden said. “Finally someone had the insight to say that information is useless to these little-bitty churches.”
   
More than half of Alabama’s 3,200 Baptist churches fall into the numerically small church category, said Gary Swafford, director of the office of associational missions/church planting for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
   
“The request from our DOMs for any guidance to jump-start the small membership church has been coming over a period of years,” Swafford said.
   
And the answer came recently in the form of two similar ideas — one, The Alabama Plan shared with DOMs by Madison DOM John Long, and two, the Small Numerical Growth Plan piloted in the state by Marshall DOM Randall Stoner. 
   
The two work in tandem in the state — one is simply LifeWay-based and the other is LifeWay-packaged.
   
“The small church growth plans answer the plea of the small church to grow the church,” Stoner said. “Churches may be small numerically, but there’s no such thing as a small church — at least not small in impact or importance.”
   
The brand of the strategy that Stoner piloted got pastors to commit to a four-month training program, the first month of which is taught to the pastor himself.
   
“Basically it’s a pep talk to the pastor,” Stoner said. “A pastor has to be committed himself to growth, and then the plan assists pastors in developing Kingdom-focused leaders in their churches.”
   
In the second month, the pastor brings in the education director to train with him. The third brings key church leaders in to train, and the fourth brings in Sunday School teachers.
   
“We share with them how to enlist leaders. The key to growth is to find the people who have a heart to see the church grow,” Stoner said. “It helps everyone know and understand the responsibilities of his or her position, and it allows for accountability.”
   
Does the plan work? According to Randall, yes. “When we piloted it here, it allowed me to call the church’s pastor and say, ‘How’s your church doing? Can we help you?’”
   
Though Stoner’s association encompasses 100 churches, he said 75 to 80 percent of them are classified as small membership churches. “The plan is desperately needed because of the number of lost people in Alabama and the number of churches scattered across the state that are that size.”
   
Swafford agreed, emphasizing the urgency to empower numerically small churches to reach the lost. 
   
“Any church of any size has potential,” he said. “There’s someone in every community who still needs to hear about Christ and come into the church family to be discipled.”
Cleveland Brown, Conecuh Association DOM, said he’s hoping to kick off training for The Alabama Plan in his church network this summer.
   
“We’re hoping that we’re going to see some growth come from this and that it will give the people in our churches a better outlook on what’s going on,” Brown said. “We’ll also try to get together to celebrate the things they are accomplishing.”
   
For more information about the small membership growth plans, call Randall Stoner at 256-582-2882 or John Long at 256-536-0015.