How Are Mars Hill and Seacoast Using The City? [excerpt]

Brad House, Mars Hill Church (Seattle); Shawn Wood (Seacoast Church, SC)

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, and Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast, share how they’re using The City as a communication tool and how they help keep communications organized within their church’s community groups.

“The City simplifies the management piece and makes it pretty easy for leaders to do, and lets them lead.” ~ Brad House, Community Pastor, Mars Hill Church

Conversation Transcript:

Eric:It’s not a secret that both Mars Hill and Seacoast are on The City and you are using it as a vehicle for doing incredible work in the lives of the people in your church and I love hearing the stories that keep coming out from all the churches in The City but you guys obviously have more than your fair share.

Brad I know you are the first actual user of The City…

Brad:  I think I am the second.

Eric:  But the first guy was a fictional test case is that right?

Brad:  Exactly.

Eric:  How has The City helped you in terms of community groups?

Brad:  A big deal for us at the beginning when The City was coming out and being developed was as we were growing and getting past 200 groups and moving beyond that we were having a hard time just communicating and keeping things in order. So as lots of churches are doing, we got spreadsheets and all these things to just try and keep organization within the church.

So The City was a great communication tool for us to (1) just to be able to understand who do we have in our church and how are they connected? But being able to communicate from the pastor’s vision on down but also to be able to communicate what’s going on in community back up to the pastor so we can actually respond to what’s happening.

The biggest thing that helped right off the bat was just the ability to have some organization and communication.

Shawn:  Yeah I think for us it definitely has been communication because the key is we got over 400 small groups or something I can’t remember exactly how many and 13 campuses spread out all over and we’re wanting to share stories of what’s going on in community, we wanted to communicate to them in mass but also mainly like you’re saying have that bubble up and know what’s going on. We tried all different ways, emails set up just for that where we could try and filter those and going down through small group leaders to say hey capture your story, write it down and email it to us or mail it to us, smoke signals or whatever.

I mean we tried everything and there wasn’t any clear distinct channel to be able to get that communication going. So The City has allowed us to really dip into the lives of our community groups. So at a campus level, a campus pastor can join the groups and jump in and see what’s going on and be a part and also they can share information to the campus.

Then, for us, at the central support we keep an eye on everything and this allows us to know what is going on in our campuses. It’s a great tool just to hear the stories and what’s happening.

Brad:  When you look at something that may seem simple like communication and structure but when you have a large church and for us now we’re running 450 groups and if you have leaders, who are trying to manage like all those email lists, phone lists and trying to keep track. Then you’re trying to put together some type of assimilation to the church of how many people coming in and how do you run that system? When you don’t have a clear way to do that and you don’t have something that simplifies that process your leaders are spending all their time managing.

What I want my leaders doing is shepherding their people to the things we’ve talked about before, to community, to love of God and to the lost. If they are taking all their time trying to manage then we’re not building disciples. So that is one of the things The City does is it simplifies the management base and makes it pretty easy for leaders to do and lets them lead.