Tag Archives: merge

WE ARE AT PRAIRIE!!!!!! Whoooo-hooooo! Jesus is SO good. Such a great morning as we joined the Battle Ground campus, Hazel Dell campus, and our Deaf Church together for the first time! I just sense that God is going to pour out His Spirit in a new and powerful way in our church and I come with great anticipation during the next season for North Creek!

Everything was SUPER smooth from start to finish all morning. Our Leadership and Volunteer team was absolutely outstanding at planning, setting up, problem solving and making a great morning for everybody. Thank you to all of our volunteers who are bending over backwards all month to re-learn our systems, give it their all, and do it with joyful attitudes. Everybody was simply awesome on Sunday morning, which made the little challenges completely easy to conquer. I am humbled to be a part of such an amazing group that is focused on the mission of Jesus.

Worship in the main auditorium was off the charts. I just wept in the presence of God as we corporately lifted up his name! I’ve been waiting with great expectation to be able to worship with our church as a whole and I soaked in that moment for as long as I could.

Kid’s classes were SLICK! I was so impressed as to how well run, secure, and fun each environment was. We learned ALOT when we were at Prairie for Easter service, so we strategized solutions for those issues and NAILED it! It was such a joy to have our kids learning about Jesus and making some great friends in the process.

Mark spoke on the Holy Spirit and the book of Acts. Would you take some time this week to read Acts and ask God to help you understand the role of the Holy Spirit in your life? He is a complex, but inspiring piece of the trinity!

Thank you to Alvina who brought our set up team some muffins. It was a great treat! If you’d ever like to drop off some treats early for our workers, just let me know at stacy@coffeechurch.com.

We are looking for some new volunteers in these particular areas: Security team, Hosts/Ushers, Tiny Town, and our Prayer team. If you are willing to serve on one of these teams, we would love to have you! Fill out the volunteer form at www.coffeechurch.com.

We are also needing some childcare workers for the youth ministry. Our small group leaders bring their amazing kids during youth service and they need to be taken care of while they invest in our teenagers. If you can do that ministry, email Rachael@coffeechurch.com. Thank you so much for seeing needs and meeting them!

We are gearing up for our own small group season. We will have a shorter session this time to allow our churches an easy opportunity to meet some new people who may have attended the other campus or who are new. They will only be six weeks long, which is a simpler commitment for most of us to make! More info coming this weekend!

Our Hazel Dell building is set to close next week. We are so excited for the new church moving in! That building served us well when we needed it and we feel like the church moving in will thrive there. God orchestrated this all so perfectly and it has been incredible to watch and be a part of! He is so faithful. We anticipate the same story for our Battle Ground facility as well.

Whew! It’s been a busy month and we very much look forward to getting into a new normal. That being said, I am grateful for the hand of God who moves all of the mountains in front of us. Our job is simply to walk forth in faith and boldness.

Love you, church!

Here are some pictures of Sunday. We all missed most of the pictures in the foyer, so we’ll have to try again next week!

August 23 Coffee Church Highlights

By stacynewell

August 26, 2015

History, Inspiration, Ministry

July 19 Coffee Church Highlights

By stacynewell

July 22, 2015

Inspiration, Ministry

Church Plant, Turnaround, Merge, Multisite Church…

By stacynewell

April 13, 2013

Ministry

2 Comments

While that title won’t fit on Twitter feeds, it sums up the journey that we have been on as a church in the last six years. Last Sunday marked our one year anniversary of the day our church plant merged with a turnaround church to become a multisite church. The amount of risk in any one of those words is enormous, yet we are thrilled with the outcome at this pivotal point in our story!

I thought I would share some of the harder lessons we learned on an adventure that we would never have scripted.

1. Our Vancouver campus (original site) unexpectedly bore extreme weight in the merge. We went in thinking that Battle Ground would take the most energy to assimilate into the North Creek structure. What we didn’t take into accurate account is that pulling 35+ strong leaders out of a church of 200 would cause all systems to be reevaluated and restructured. Now, a year later, we have grown back to our original numbers and filled in the gaps with new amazing leaders. It is multiplying at it’s best, but the process was daunting at times because we were faced with rebuilding two churches at the same time. Battle Ground, on the other hand, had 35+ new leaders dropped into about 40 people that we merged with. Together they hit the ground running with new help and new direction.

2. The word “Merge” is not an accurate word for two churches creating two campuses of one church. In hindsight I think a better word would have assisted the process, but we still haven’t come up with a word that sums it all up! The dictionary defines “Merge” as: to combine, blend, or unite gradually so as to blur the individuality or individual identity of: They voted to merge the two branch offices into a single unit. It was never intended by either party to gradually blur the individuality of our churches. Battle Ground had been in a turnaround for a few years and was looking to redefine it’s DNA. Vancouver was looking to expand it’s DNA. The word “merge” gave off the impression that we were taking bits and pieces of DNA to create a new baby. Our terminology had to be defined at every turn, which created a lot of extra weight.

3. We ripped the Band-aid off so fast I’m not sure people even had time to gasp in pain (myself included!). At the request of the leadership and board of the church we merged with, we moved fast…really fast. Within 35 days of meeting the people of Maple Grove, the church was painted and decorated end to end, the leadership team was nearly completely different, every system was different, and together we launched the first public service with thousands of advertisements. That wasn’t our original intention. In our initial thoughts, we planned a much slower approach. Although there were some difficult parts of this strategy, in hindsight, I think doing things so fast actually helped give clarity. There was no question about how we were going to do things in the future…the future was staring everybody in the face…at both campuses simultaneously! That being said, it felt like a whirlwind for the first six months and took a great deal of adjusting to for our leadership team and congregation.

Those are just some of the little bumps along the way, but I do want to reiterate that we LOVED this journey and still do. It has been fun watching all of the chess pieces move as God directs and guides His people. I think the bottom line lesson is that in anything that God asks you to do, you’ll find difficult parts or you’ll look back and think about how you might have done it differently. However, it should never stop you from walking forward in what He has asked you to do!