Insight into North Point

What a blessing to have a comment from Rich Barrett. Rich appears (I have had no other contact with him except his comment post) to be the lead pastor of a church plant named Access in Jacksonville, FL. It is a "strategic partner" with Northpoint (Andy Stanley's church). They have a blog here.

It was interesting to hear more about their process. If I'm hearing right, they have three environments with three purposes.

1. Sunday morning worship service - The goal here is to connect people with God. They call this the foyer. The foyer is not for the church person. It is for your friend. It is for you to bring your friend. Part of me thinks this isn't exactly true. Surely, you get something out of the Sunday morning worship. But at least, they are clear about process. This is the primary access point for new people.

2. Small groups - These are where they would say "transformation occurs." These groups mostly meet weekly, but some seem to meet less often, and somewhere I saw where they meet 2nd and 4th Sunday nights, which is an interesting option. They do not provide childcare but will pay for childcare at a reasonable rate. (Is this per family or per group?)

3. Grouplink - This is the movement piece. It is a strictly transitional environment. Grouplink is every 8 weeks, perhaps the 1st Sunday night of every other month. Grouplink is a 2 hour event, separated into two groups - singles and marrieds (I'm assuming that a woman whose husband will not come goes to the singles, which btw is divided by gender. No swooping...looking for a date.) "Assimilators" (that seems like a horrible name due to the Borg) help you find a group by life stage or geographic area, which you attend for 8 weeks. If you like the group, stay in the group. If you don't, come back to the next Grouplink and try again.

One funny video (above) suggests there are expected to be 50 people at each Grouplink. I'm not sure if this video was specific to Northpoint or Access.


A second funny video, suggests the group becomes your support group.

They also have a Serving option, but I don't see a purposeful flow into this one. I'm sure there are advertisements for opportunities, but it looks like it lacks the flow of the other three environments. To be fair, it looks a reasonable solution. I can see a flow into our Connecting Globally easier than Connecting Locally. We could have events, for both, that include an opportunity to learn about something local or global and then sign up for the opportunity to volunteer in that area.

I'll give them this. It is simple. The areas where I question are "The foyer is not for you" and "8 married couples or 12 same sex singles". But why should these be questioned? When you put it all together, with flow, it is deeper than any program could offer.

Thanks for the comment Rich!