How have you measured success in your roll-out of The City to your congregation?
My focus is on getting attendees into our house churches – our version of small groups. We have around 70 house churches. The largest piece of success for us is getting all of them represented on The City. We have almost all of them on The City now and most are avid users. All of our house church leaders are on The City and use it to share information with their group.
The City is a very useful tool for our house churches to communicate with each other – sharing needs and coordinating events. Our house churches meet at people's homes, not at our building. A major way that The City gets used is coordinating those meetings, meals, etc. People also share local opportunities to serve and about mission trips they're going on. They'll post needs on The City to help raise support.
What positive outcomes have you been able to measure for your church based on using The City?
Our whole goal with our house churches is to see that people are getting into personal relationships with other Christians – one-on-one discipleship. On the weekends we have 3,000-3,500 people come to our services. With The City, we can know how many people coming to those services are actively engaged with one of our house churches. I can go into the administrative side and see that 1,100 people are on The City and part of our house churches. We want to see our people in those discipleship relationships with each other through our house churches!
About Apex Community Church
Apex Community Church began as a fairly traditional church focused on big weekend services and grew to a congregation of about 2,000 in five years. Over the last few years, they have decentralized into a network of small house churches in an effort to better concentrate on their objective of making disciples of Jesus. These small house churches, comprised of 15 to 30 people, function as individual churches–baptizing, taking communion, going on mission trips, etc.