Innovative Church Network

Innovative Church Network

You may not know that PCC is one of the churches that helped form the Innovative Church Network. It started as a way for me and other staff and leaders to connect with other churches like ours. I became friends with Jeff Boggess from Atlee Community Church in Mechanicsville, Mark Jenkins from Mountain View Community Church in Culpepper, and Hank Brooks from Coastal Community Church in Virginia Beach. Each of these guys is the Senior Pastor at their church. We hit it off and felt that we could really understand each other and the highs and lows, challenges and triumphs of leading a new and different kind of church. We talk regularly about staffing, our families, balance, teaching, structure, leadership, church growth, finances, buildings, multi-site, education, and everything else under the sun. We’ve usually spend three days in the summer together with our wives talking, having fun, learning from each other, and planning the ICN.

The Innovative Church Network came out of our desire to help other pastors and church leaders to find what we have – a common bond with others in churches that are different from those around them. Specifically, the ICN caters to churches that either reach unchurched people, or churches that want to. We favor peer-to-peer learning, through guided discussions that give us all a chance to gain insights through each others’ experiences. While we hope to employ technology to help us in the future, we currently physically meet once per month, from September through May, at Atlee Community Church. We do not meet in December or during the month of Easter. We meet from 10-2 and lunch is served, but has to be purchased.

In October, PCC’s staff led the discussion, which was about building teams. Breakouts included ideas about building trust, mining for conflict and building a team from scratch. We also invited Tim Kinnell from Powhatan Mennonite Church to come and share from his experience leading his church from a committee structure to team based ministry.

This really is a unique opportunity for churches like ours and it is well worth the effort. I’ve heard more than one pastor now say that they would not still be in ministry if it wasn’t for the support and friendships they’ve found at this network. If you’d like more information about the ICN, you can contact our office or Desiree Henderson at DHenderson at coastalcommunitychurch dot com. If you are able, I hope you will come and be a part of this sometime soon!

Brian Hughes