On Saturday morning, I flew out again for the Phoenix area. I had been at Cornerstone Christian Church almost exactly a year ago to do a Women’s Event. They had wanted to have me in to do a pastoral interview as part of a sex series, like so many churches that I have spoken at in the last three years.
CORNERSTONE COMMUNITY CHURCH ATTENDANCE GOES FROM 2500 TO 6000 IN ONE YEAR!
They were doing a series of five or six weeks on sexual issues and had wanted to wait until their new building was completed to start the series, since they knew they couldn’t handle the number of people that they would get in the old building. I was astonished to hear that they had — when I was there a year ago, they were about 3000 people, 2500 to 3000 people every Sunday. Their new building opened on April 1st, and they were almost immediately at 4000 people with the new building opening. When they started this series two weeks ago, which they call it “Bringing Sexy Back.”
When they started this new series, on the very first week, 2000 extra people showed up and the number has stayed
basically the same ever since, which I was astonished by. I can’t imagine how a church handles going from 2500 people to 6000 people in the face of a year, and it looked like the church was struggling to figure out how to do that as well, because that means hiring more staff people, having more programs, having more small groups. It was just wonderful to see how the staff of the church was all pulling together like a family and trying to figure out how to make this happen. Clearly, people were really being fed in this church, and I was delighted to see how they were handling it.
Another thing that was fun is that the young adult pastor ended up doing the interview because the senior pastor, Linn, who I had met when I was there before, had wisely realized that he was getting a bit burnt out. He had decided to take a week away from the platform and let other pastors handle it, which was also very refreshing for me to see. So often, I see pastors push themselves, and push themselves to the point of burnout, and it was really refreshing to see a senior pastor who is very willing to step back and rest for a week and let one of the other pastors do a great job with the interview. Overall this was a tiring weekend because the church has been growing so rapidly that it was five services and they were worried that they might have to add a sixth service, but it was such a delight to be able to talk to that many people at once. We did run out of books half way through, so that was bit of a bummer, but still it was a terrific weekend.