I've Been Thinking About This…

Pete Wilson

Pete’s job – teaching, vision & discipling the other pastors. Pages of notes here about Crosspoint’s experiences (‘MS’ stands for Multisite; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.):

Regarding the campus plant:

• A launch team is essential
• Launch takes a massive amount of work
• Missions are a great way to bring multiple campuses together to help cement connections in the whole church
• Crosspoint has 4 ‘Serving Saturdays’ each year
• MS makes any DNA problems more evident
• MS appears to demand matrixed management, but it doesn’t work very well (something that’s become very obvious in the business world).
• MS has the advantage of making a congregation become less building-centric (cool insight).
• Launched new campuses with mailers, but word of mouth has always proven most effective. Not too much with Twitter/FB. Social media good for communication and assimilation; not so much for growth.
• Target is to have campuses self-supporting within 1 year
• Also give an offering to churches that are planted nearby

Regarding the CP, he must be exactly the right fit:

• same as the lead pastor except for the preaching – Crosspoint’s CPs report to Pete and Jenni Catron (the executive pastor) and meet twice each week.
• Qualifications: heart, commitment to the DNA, be a strong leader, strong communicator.
• Top passions: leadership and spiritual development.
• Every campus sees the CP as their pastor rather than Pete.

Regarding video teaching:

• Video teaching is working well – used to be a 1-week delay, now down to same day (actually about 10 minutes, and could be pulled down to a 2-minute delay if they chose).
• There are 2 backup messages ready if needed.
• Regarding the switch to video teaching –
  • it was hard to stop looking at the people locally and focus on the camera, and
  • gets feedback from the CPs about the video teaching.

Regarding the week’s schedule:

• Mondays: every visitor gets a handwritten card; volunteers get a card as well.
• Tuesdays: meeting day
• Wed/Thu CPs do counseling, visitation, meet with volunteers & staff

My takeaways here:

1. The way Pete talks about it sometimes, you might think that Crosspoint is a well-oiled machine that everyone else is running, and he’s just a figurehead wandering around. But it’s clear that he does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. Until recently, for instance, every new person coming to the church got a handwritten note of welcome from him – as the church growth rocketed upward, that alone was a huge amount of work.
2. Choosing the right people and investing them with the right vision is evidently an essential constituent of the growth – almost as vital as consistently great teaching and an environment of fellowship.

A wonderful talk to listen to – hard to miss the excitement he feels for the church and it’s people.

   Send article as PDF