Rev Dr Mike Stevens
Lead Pastor – Clovie Baptist, Adelaide
God Sized Dream
A few years ago we embarked on a church wide discernment process around where God was leading us into the future. We called it the God Sized Dream. By faith we landed on five vision priorities, with each one have various discipleship and missional pathways and goals.
The five vision priorities are:
- Reach – introducing people to Jesus
- Grow – going deeper with God
- Multiply – raising and releasing leaders
- Expand – one church, many gatherings
- Innovate – daring to dream
These five vision priorities, linked to our vision, mission and values, have been a guiding light in how we operate at Clovie. It’s been helpful for the leadership to align around common language and have a sense of shared direction moving forward. It’s also been wonderful to see the wider church engage in the God Sized Dream as we have a sense of church wide ministry focus and we can celebrate and tell stories of God at work in a way that makes sense to where we are as a church and where God is leading us into the future.
A couple of ministry initiatives that we celebrate over the last few years are…
One, in over 50 years history of the church we hadn’t been involved in multi-site ministry. As a large church, this was a real opportunity for us to explore. At the same time the God Sized Dream was approved by church leadership, we were approached by Gawler Baptist church (a church about 30mins north of us) asking if they could become part of our church family. This sat right in the expand vision priority and it was God who was leading this process. After prayer, discernment and many leadership and church wide conversations, Clovie Gawler was launched. We thank God as now Clovie Gawler is growing, has seen multiple baptisms and is now reaching out with God’s love into a growing part of our city.
Two, in my twenty years of being a pastor, I’ve found that sometimes innovating towards gospel outcomes can be challenging. Saying yes to something might mean saying no to something else, which can be hard for some. That’s why we included innovation into our God Sized Dream with an expectation to grow a culture of trying new things. To this end, we introduced a Kingdom Innovation fund where staff could apply for small amount of money (we have 4 lots of $500 each year) to try a new idea that would help us as a church live into the God sized dream. The Exec team approve the applications and we celebrate being a church that tries new ministry initiatives. We know some will grow and develop and some will not go anywhere, but the process of discovery will keep facilitating ongoing innovation into the future. This year we have funded a ministry initiative called Cherish, which is to reach out to families with children who have special needs so we can love and care for them during our Sunday services and beyond.
Be blessed as you follow God’s call and continue to live into his unfolding plans.
Rev Dr Mike Stevens
Lead Pastor – Clovie Baptist, Adelaide