Rocky Fork Fellowship: Writer's Notebook (part 2)

Rocky Fork Fellowship Groundbreaking Ceremony

Last week I posted portions of an interview with Scott Rice, the current Rocky Fork Fellowship chairman of the elders.

I also spent about an hour talking to Mark Butrum, RFF Senior Minister, and  Chris Collier, Executive Minister. What follows are some of the things we discussed that didn't make it into the article in the October issue of Christian Standard..

The Building Project

Chris: There’s a lot of people working on the building project. Don’t give me all the credit, and I’ll accept all the blame. I hope it relieves Mark to do what we need him to do, what he’s skilled to do.

We’re blessed to have a lot of people in the church who have experience in construction, experience working with the county. Through those people we’ve been tied into others. We’ve been leaning heavily on the professionals we’ve hired for design and engineering. That’s why it’s not fair to say I’m the guy doing it all, I’m just collecting the data, collecting the information.

Mark: Chris did a huge amount of work with cost reductions – right size, right price comparisons. Bringing all that into perspective. One of his talents is being able to pull data together and make it so we could and read it and make decisions together. It’s OK to have all this raw data, but unless you put it in one place and say, this is what it might look like, you can’t really make decisions, you’re just pulling numbers.

Chris: There’s some balance there of faith vs. fact and what you see on paper. We took a faith step in identifying the budget point. We’re still trying to hold to that budget, we’re not done holding to that budget. It takes a lot of moving things around and deciding . There’s so many options. From what kind of paving we’re going to put in the parking lot all the way to what kind of building this is going to be, how big, what the span is, how many fixtures in the bathroom.

Mark: Keeping some of our core values in mind, stewardship is very high . We want to come out with a finished product that is not only reasonable and what we can afford, but also matches the expectations of the future we want to get into as far as future growth.

Chris: Stewardship is more important than professionalism.  All indications are this is not the end of what we do, but we have to start somewhere. We looked at huge scale down to smaller than what we finally rest on, trying to fin a balance. It would be awesome if we outgrew it in 3 to 6 months, but at the same time we want to expect what ‘s going to happen. I hope it’s always about how this is going to help us accomplish our mission.

Mark: We keeping harping on it: this is a tool. We haven’t arrived. We have people ask, when are you going to become a church? They don’t see us as a church yet because we don’t have a building. I’m OK with that, but we need to change our mindset that the church isn’t the building. This is a tool, it doesn’t mean we haven’t arrived yet because we haven’t built it. There’s so much more to do.

Mark: Vision leaks. We've got to talk twice as much about vision and mission to overcome that. So we’ve got to have this balance. When we started this campaign, we knew this was the beginning of something that will probably never end. We’ll probably always be campaigning for something, whether it’s more staff or another building, a second campus, another church, plant. Something, we’re going to be constantly in this cycle of collecting funds, and not just tithing to keep the church going. We’ve got to keep the vision out front more than the other. We struggle with keeping the campaign out there. We struggle with talking about both and getting those two back in synch again.

Balancing Growth and Mission

Chris:What makes RFF unique is that family welcoming atmosphere. We have to be careful. Some of the churches I’ve attended have fallen into accepting that it can’t be done, or accepting that there’s nothing you can do about it., that if you get to a certain size, you can’t keep doing that. I don’t agree with that, I don’t agree that we always have to say society or culture has changed and people won’t come to church. It’s because nobody asked them or challenged them or got to know them enough to bring them along.

Mark: One of the things we want to do this year is to look at how we reach people. We’re refocusing a lot of energy on that right now. How do we reach people, how do we bring in new people, how to create an environment where people who are coming to RF will bring in their friends and feel comfortable about it, will want to do that. How do we, once they're here, whether it be for a picnic or special event, how do create an on-ramp to RF? It goes down to every one of us. We all have to be mission minded. We have to in a place where we know, I’m accountable for the people I invite.

Mark: Every weekend we get a sheet of people that were here the 2nd or 3rd time, or who was missing. Chris and I and other people in the church take names from that list. We text them, Facebook, call, however we can get hold of them and and say we missed you. We’re not trying to be the attendance police, but we missed you. Is there anything going on, is there a divorce or split or kids are sick. Reach out to people let them know you care. We find that when we make a special effort to do that, there’s an attendance spike the next week. You may make contact with one neighbor and suddenly there’s two families coming, because a neighbor or family member they know, someone who used to come, they’re coming back too. That’s awesome. I’m paraphrasing Andy Stanley, but we want to be the church where unchurched friends invite their unchurched neighbors. We want to be that kind of church where it’s perpetual motion, exponentially.

Mark: When we put a building up out here, we’re going to have people coming out of the woodwork to come visit us. I say visit us. How are going to get them to come back a 2nd, 3rd, 4th time? The infrastructure has to be ready for that. Small groups, things for their kids, all that has to be ready for them.