Jimmie Davidson, Highlands Fellowship, and Standout Churches
This morning, I preached at Highlands Fellowship in Abingdon, VA. I plan to write more about the church and its pastor, Jimmie Davidson, in the coming days. That post will deal with their remarkable global strategy.
First, in this post, a little about the church.
Highlands Fellowship was part of a study that LifeWay Research did last year called "Standout Churches."
In order to be in the "Standout Church" survey, a church had to have:
A minimum of 26 baptisms for 10 consecutive years (1996-2005)
A membership to baptism ratio of no more than 20 to 1 each of these ten years
A minimum of 5% growth in worship attendance overall (2005 compared to 1996)
Highlands Fellowship is one 22 (of 43,000 churches examined) that met the Standout Church criteria. Nineteen (of the 22 churches invited) participated in the study. You can read more about it here. The PowerPoint from the study is here.
You can listen to Jimmy in an interview about that study here.
The church is multisite so, late last night, I spoke to a camera in an empty room with 1000 seats. The "High Def" recording was then delivered to three locations (in Johnson City, Bristol, and Abingdon) early this morning. (And, no, I do not look any better in High Def.)
Then, this morning, I preached live at Abingdon and that message was "beamed" to several other venues with different worship styles.
Their web page listed their Abingdon venues as follows:
The church has about 3000 attendees on a weekend in all these different venues and locations.
Jimmy is a great guy with a remarkable gift for encouragement.
But, that is most remarkable is how they are mobilizing their church in a small town to be involved globally... more on that soon.
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