7 Next Steps

On September 16, 2007, Pastor Mike and the Otterbein Leadership Team outlined 7 priorities for the church as we look ahead and accomplish our purpose of Making Reproducing Disciples of Christ. Following is an overview of what was shared on September 16.

An Overview of the 7 Next Steps:

We plan to strengthen and expand our prayer ministry.

We plan to work with our Middle School and High School ministries to make sure they have the resources and space necessary to be successful in reaching students.  This may result in us placing some kind of semi-permanent structure at our current location to meet their needs until we relocate to Welty Road.

We plan to make some changes to our Sunday morning schedule to optimize the times for growth and outreach.  There are two things driving this issue.  First, we believe that the optimal times for people in our community to attend church on Sunday mornings is between 8:00 a.m. and noon.  Currently, our 3rd worship service ends around 12:30 and we are hearing that for many people, the late dismissal is a hindrance to them attending that service even though the modern style of worship would be their preferred style.  Secondly, we want to see if we can begin to offer full age-graded children’s programs (like we do now at our 9:45 a.m. service) during at a second worship service so that parents have a second option when deciding which service to attend on Sunday mornings.  Our hope is that we can make some changes to our schedule sometime around the first of the year that will address both of these concerns.

We plan to expand and further develop our service/outreach in our community, nation, and throughout the world.   This may include things like adopting a community in Haiti and sending regular teams down to Haiti for construction, VBS, agricultural training, etc. It will probably include things like community work days several times a year for our local community.  While we will continue to have ministry programs at our church facilities with the hope that people who aren’t yet followers of Christ will come and hear about Jesus, we will be more intentional in going out into our community, nation, and throughout the world to serve them in the name of Jesus.

We plan to develop a quality young adult ministry for 18-30-year-olds.  Our vision is that this ministry would go beyond something that we would do on Sunday mornings and may include a weekday evening worship experience designed specifically for 18-30-years-olds. 

We plan to strengthen the marriages and families that are within our church as well as those in the community.  This may include special family conferences or marriage conferences.  It may include mentoring programs, family nights, etc.

We plan to continue to move toward our relocation to Welty Road.  While no timeline is available, it appears that we are probably at least 3 years away from constructing facilities on the Welty Road property.  Until then, there are a number of things we can do to get ready for construction including getting the land ready, putting in our community areas (ball fields, pavilion, etc.), and finalizing the drawings for our new facilities.

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For more information about the 7 Next Steps and the progress we are making on accomplishing them, check out Pastor Mike's Blog.