Schools of Experience

All across the united states some of the largest and most aggressive churches are offering schools for church leaders. In most of them the faculty is composed solely of the staff of the host church, and the lectures deal with details of how that particular super church performs its diverse ministries. I want to survey the schools held by five of the largest of these churches.

California: “Leadership Institute”

Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, California, held its first “Institute For Successful Church Leadership” in 1970. This congregation, whose membership exceeds 6,000, sponsors four institutes a year. It attempts to limit enrollment to 175.

Each lanuary, April, September, and November an institute begins on a Wednesday and concludes on Saturday, led by approximately ten church staff members and one national or international guest speaker. Dr. Robert Schuller, Garden Grove’s pastor, directs five of the sessions. Included in the registration fee of approximately $135 are five cassette tapes of the lectures by Dr. Schuller, a thick notebook, and several lunches and an evening banquet. Class topics include: how to set challenging goals, fund-raising, how to reach the unreached, every member a missionary, how to make a small church significant, and how to advertise and publicize.

Schuller, a Reformed Church of America minister, began Garden Grove Church in a drive-in movie lot and has developed a nationally known “drive-in” ministry. The church now has 350 Sunday-school teachers and has helped launch thirteen new congregations.

The Midwest: “Pastor’S School”

First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, whose pastor is Dr. Jack Hyles, now officially has the world’s largest Sunday-school with an all-time high of more than 23,000 present in December, 1973. It owns more than a hundred buses. Its Pastor’s School began in 1964. Registration at the 1974 school was 2,311. The tuition fee is about $20. This annual conference takes place in March, from Monday through Friday.

Dr. Hyles leads several of the many sessions. Topics include: the pastor and his people, church music, elementary children, church business, deacons, junior work, Christian schools, nursery, promoting the Sunday school, the church secretary, the invitation and baptism, ministry to the retarded, the teacher-officer meeting, teen-age Sunday-school work, pastoral leadership, shut-ins, and teen-age soul-winning. There is no printed schedule; every registrant attends every class. Usually one or two guest preachers are invited in for special evening services. All other speakers are church staff members.

The Everglades: “Evangelism Clinic”

During the past decade an explosively exciting congregation of Presbyterians under the leadership of Dr. James Kennedy has drawn a lot of attention to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The church has surpassed 2,000 in membership, and the pastor’s book entitled Evangelism Explosion has marked Coral Ridge as a major center for training Christians to carry out reproductive evangelism. More than 300 “evangelists” go out from Coral Ridge regularly each month to invite people to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

The evangelism clinic, begun in 1967, is held more than once each year, and enrollment is usually limited to 100. The church’s pastor and staff are its leaders. The registration fee has been $175 for the five days of training.

This clinic concentrates on the specific evangelistic techniques used successfully at Coral Ridge. It differs from the other schools in that it deals much less with the place of the total Christian education and finance programs of the church. The clinic offers church-centered training in evangelism and some counseling. After a film and lectures, laymen each take two pastors into homes in the Fort Lauderdale area for actual witnessing training.

The Southwest: “School Of The Prophets”

In the heart of downtown Dallas, Texas, is First Baptist Church, a congregation of 17,000 members with 260 full-time employees. Dr. W. A. Criswell is pastor, and there are fifteen ministers of Christian education on the staff and several assistant pastors. The average weekly attendance is above 5,000.

The “School of the Prophets,” which began in 1971, meets each March. The tuition of approximately $40 includes a 300-page syllabus, covering every area of ministry at the church, and the noon lunches. Classes begin on Monday and finish on Sunday. Six of the twenty hours are led by Dr. Criswell and the remaining fourteen by his staff. All participants hear the same information.

The curriculum is divided into twenty-four sessions. Ten are led by the pastor, in pastoral ministry, sermon preparation, study habits, soul-winning, using the telephone to visit, counseling, and the crucial task of selecting, supporting and supervising a staff. Nine sessions in educational ministry led by various members cover work with various age groups, mission education, and outreach to business and professional adults. Additional classes of one session each which are led by the staff include: church music, recreation, inner-city missions, bus evangelism, budget control, church uses of computers, wills and trusts, radio and television, church publications, and free news coverage.

Virginia: “Workers’ Conference”

The names of Dr. Jerry Falwell and Thomas Road Baptist Church have become identified with “saturation evangelism.” Located in the hill country of Lynchburg, Virginia, the church has a membership of 10,000. During 1970, the church printed, for free distribution, more than four million books and pamphlets. Youth meetings at the church have attracted as many as 2,500 teen-agers. From 1966 to 1970 the average weekly Sunday-school attendance went from 750 to over 5,000.

Thomas Road holds a “Pastor’s School and Worker’s Conference” each June. The fee has been around $25. The 1973 conference used forty-four speakers, all but five of them members of the staff of Thomas Road.

Topics include Bible memorization, how to organize finances for the small church, Sunday-school bus ministry, how to have a disciplined class, how to get people excited about attendance contests, how to prepare sermons, prison ministry, differences in methodology between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, the pastor’s wife, how to prepare curriculum, how to start a Christian day school, how to win souls to Christ, the importance of Christian families in the church, and church use of computers.

Each of these churches began as small, struggling congregation. Each has a success story it is willing to share. These churches believe that God wants successful, growing, soul-winning churches. That is what their schools are all about.—JOHN N. VAUGHAN, associate pastor, Trinity Baptist Church, Memphis, Tennessee.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.