How to Organize a Growing Church

Rick Warren talks about on how to organize a growing church.

[Music playing] Because I have, a number of different mentors in life, but one of my mentors was a Peter Drucker and he mentored me in principles of leadership and for about 20 years. In one of the things I have learned, I asked him one day how often thus the rapidly growing organization like, a company, a church, or a city have to reorganize or restructure in a period of rapid growth? And Peter told me “I think about every 45% growth.” Now later I heard him use two other different numbers, so I think he just made up the numbers, but the point is, it was periodically you have to restructure. Jesus said you could not put new wine in old wine skins, you know, no animal can grow about seven inches without a skeleton. Nobody has ever started a church smaller than me, because my first member was my wife. In January 1980, I preached the first sermon, she did not like it and it has been downhill ever since, but I just would not give up. I did not give up so we began to grow and pretty soon we had 100 members, then 200 and then 300 hundred and what works in decisions when you have 50 people? It does not work when you have 150 people and the way you organize to make decisions when you have 150 to 500 or a thousand or 2,000. Now what works at 5,000 people, then work it is 6,000 so we in reconstructing, pretty much every year we know. When we just restructured from 20,000 to 22,000 people every weekend we kept having the way we we add staffs and things like that. There are two ways that we restructure right now, one of them is I do not really pastor the entire church. It is too big. There are now over 100,000 names on the role of attendees of Saddle Back Church, so Saddle Back Church is the size of the city. I mean I could be a mayor, just put me Mayor Rick Instead of Pastor Rick. The church I pastor is like a thousand times bigger than the town I grew up in. It is 100,000 names, now think about this, in a 100,000 names, how many people are in a hospital every week in a typical city? A lot, how many people have marriage problems in a city of 100,000? A lot, how many deaths and marriages? A lot, so you have to build it so it is not built on your personality. There is no superstar pastor who can personally care for the needs of everybody and so, I actually pastor about 14 other pastors, and this 14 pastors take care about 450 full time staffs, and those 450 full time staffs take care of over 10,000 lay leaders in different small groups, and those 10,000 lay leaders In different groups and ministries take care of 100,000 people, so in many ways it is division of labor. Just in the way when Moses came out of Egypt and they are going to the promise land, God said, Moses you are to appoint leaders of 10, and leaders of 50, and leaders of 100, and leaders of 1000 because if you try to do all this work by yourself you are going to die, you are going to burn out. That was his father in law who’s named Jethro gave his original management consultant, so we call it jethrogation instead of delegation. Based on Moses father in law who said here is the management principle for the people of god. But the key to a body growing is your not just one cell and you get bigger and bigger and bigger, your body is many cells. In my case a lot of cells, and what people never understands about Saddle Back is, journalists gets this wrong all the time, is they come and they see the Sunday morning services and the big crowds and all that we do on the weekends, and they think, that is Saddle Back Church. Not at all, not at all, that is the tip of the iceberg and an iceberg is 95% is below the water. The real church is not what happens on a weekend service or a big service. The real church is what happens in about 3,800 small groups all during the week, spread out. We encourage every member of our church to be a part of a small community. A community of faith and that would be six, eight,10 people, to get more than 10 people in a group then somebody is going to stop talking and somebody is going to stop listening and the more dominant personality will tend to rule the group. So we really think that in small group community small is better six people, eight people, whatever, and so we developed a program called 40 days of purpose. This is a campaign that we did that is a small group factory. It develops small groups and when we first did this on 2002, we had 800 small groups in our church and we added almost 2,000 groups, I think 16,000 small groups in one week, by people think, I want to study what is the meaning and purpose of life, and now we kept adding. We had other campaigns 40 days of community, 40 days of peace, and now we have 38,000 small groups, they meet in their home, they rotate their leadership, and we give them materials of lots of choices of things to study. But it is basically this discussion guides based on scripture bible study, common problems that people deal with, and they are in every city in southern California from Santa Monica to Carlsbad. [Music Playing]