Is Your Church Walking Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death?
“We were literally ready to close our doors,” says Pastor Lee Kricher. “There was no way our church was going to be able to survive unless we changed our mindset, shifted to a whole new way of thinking.”
Kricher had come to a stark realization, he tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of “Greenelines” on the Charisma Podcast Network. If his church didn’t change its mindset, it would become just a memory. The congregation of Amplify Church in the Pittsburgh area, with a 50,000 square-foot facility, had dwindled to 150 members, most of them older.
So Kricher took his board of directors on a special trip to Atlanta to visit Andy Stanley’s North Point Community Church. “What I really wanted them to see was what a multigenerational church looked like and what a commitment to the next generation would look like a church,” Kirchner says. He knew Amplify must make the same transformation.
As the church’s mindset slowly changed, it became a thriving church for believers of all ages. The transformation helped Kricher form Future Forward Churches, an organization that inspires and equips churches to fully engage the next generation. It also led him to write the book For a New Generation: A Practical Guide for Revitalizing Your Church.
To hear more of Amplify’s inspiring story, please listen to the podcast below.
