When Kevin Garrett became pastor of First Baptist Church Atmore in 2018, the church was ready for a fresh vision, a fresh fire.
They prayed fervently and engaged Auxano, a church consulting firm, to help map out what that could look like.
Over the next few months, a vision team began using the inspirational phrase “The steeple and the people” as a beginning point. They focused on building relationships, bringing people into the body of Christ and offering hope to the community.
As the journey went on, they laid out goals and details of the vision and came to the last area in their plan — assimilation, or helping visitors plug into church life and service.
Assimilation
“When I was working on my D.Min. project (at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) I was selecting my focus, and it hit me that we hadn’t addressed assimilation yet as a church,” Garrett recalled.
So he made it his project and enlisted the help of the FBC family. They assembled a strategy team — which eventually became an assimilation team — and began meeting to find better ways to help people get involved at the church, not just attend.
Two years later, not only did the congregation have a better strategy, they had something Garrett hoped would help others — a book called “You Belong Here: How to Help Your Church’s Guests Become Family.”
Each chapter explains a reason for assimilation or a way to go about it.
Helping churches
“The desire is to help churches through the process of finding their own way to help guests become family members,” Garrett explained.
FBC adopted a strategy that “won’t be someone else’s strategy,” he clarified. But he hopes the strategy will help other churches know how to start an assimilation team that fits their needs.
“The process runs through our whole church, which is kind of cool,” Garrett said.
“The book looks at those relationships and connections and next steps, and it’s all broken up into bite-size pieces.”
There’s also an assessment tool churches can use to determine where each guest may fit within an assimilation strategy, to personalize it for every individual. The tool helps assess each person’s sense of belonging and purpose.
“The goal is to help churches become healthier,” Garrett said.
Rob Jackson, director of the office of church health for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said the book is something churches need.
“Many churches I’ve seen don’t have a strategy or process to move those who are guests to membership or to move those who are in membership to active involvement, using their gifts and talents in the church and then moving to a position of leadership,” said Jackson, who was an external reader on Garrett’s doctoral project. “He’s done a very good job of letting people know, ‘You belong here, you belong in the body of Christ. You belong in this local body.’
“What I see in Kevin’s simple yet biblically sound book is a process to help churches move guests to active membership in the church.”
Kevin Blackwell, executive director of the Ministry Training Institute at Samford University, said Garrett’s book offers theological reasons why churches “ought to be the most welcoming place on earth.”
Being effective
“He also shows practically how to make theological beliefs organizationally incarnational,” Blackwell noted. “In other words, how can churches most effectively reach and keep people whom God deeply loves?”
The book is for any church that wants to “get serious about moving guests into fully assimilated members who are actively growing in their faith,” Blackwell added.
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