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HOW I GATHERED THE FIRST 100 PEOPLE TO MY CHURCH
By Stephen J. Ro, Church Planter, Living Faith Community Church, Flushing, NY

Vision and Core Values The vision of Living Faith Community Church is to saturate New York City with the Gospel to bless and transform the life of the city and the world. Our core values are: 1. Gospel-Driven: The Gospel tells us that our root sin is not just failing in our obedience to God but relying on our obedience to save us. Therefore the gospel is not just the way to go to heaven, but is the way to address every problem and is a way to grow at every step. 2. Prayer-Rooted: Healthy church is both a result of and a means to the dynamics of spiritual renewal, therefore we must be rooted in extraordinary prayer as well as corporate and individual repentance before God. 3. World-and-Life View: The Lordship of Christ over every area of life prevents us from dividing life into secular/public vs. private/sacred realms or into physical/worldly vs. spiritual/church realms. 4. Multi-Ethnic: We will mirror our geographic neighborhood, which is very multi-ethnic. We will seek to reflect more racial unity than our neighborhood in order to witness to the truth of the Gospel. 5. City-Positive: We do not just seek our own prosperity, or even the peace of our neighborhood, but the peace and prosperity of the whole city. We will not only have pity or sympathy on our city, but also will respect and learn from it as we show compassion. 6. Community-Based: We believe that the Gospel alone changes people's lives and creates a new community which loves and serves each other. And this change occurs as Christians learn to apply the Gospel and share their lives with one another in mutual encouragement in small cell groups. 7. Church-Planting Minded: We do not consider church planting to be either traumatic or an unusual process. Rather, we are always planning and working toward the next daughter church, just as we are always doing other ministries of the church.

Stephen J. Ro Growing up in the urban setting of Baltimore, MD, Pastor Stephen Ro has a special love for the ministry in the city that brought him to New York in 1991. He gave his life to Jesus at the age of 13 and committed himself to God to be a pastor one day. After confirming a call to ministry, he entered Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia where he received an M. Div. His passion is to be Gospel-Driven in everything he does and wants to extend God's Kingdom through a church planting movement. As a church planter trained in the Redeemer Church Planting Center, he has a desire to see the church planting movement go forward to transform the entire city of New York. Pastor Stephen Ro is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and a Board Member of Concert of Prayer Greater New York. Pastor Stephen Ro and his wife Candice have three children, Christian, Calvin, and Prosper. For more information about Living Faith Community Church, please visit www.lfcc.net.

The success of a church really can't be determined by only measuring attendance. But getting the first 100 people to come to our worship service was very critical to the future "success" of our church.

At Living Faith Community Church, (LFCC), we started out with around 40 attendees at our first service, and it took a couple of years for us to reach the "100-person" mark. When that happened, I really started to sense our function as a community - that we could grow both individually and corporately toward our goals. I concentrated on the following tasks in the first year or two to build the foundation for our ministry: Get a worship space, build a Gospel-driven service for the performance-driven, develop community fast, know your people, and stick to your core values.

Getting a Worship Space
This may be an obvious thing - we needed a consistent and functional gathering place since this is essential in growing a church. But I found that securing a worship space was (at least in Queens) one of the most challenging things we faced. Early on, I found a PCUSA church that was already renting the building to a Mennonite congregation, a Spanish Charismatic group and a Korean church at various times on weekends. The building was only available on Saturday night. We decided against that option, but found that every church building in the area was already rented by 3-4 different congregations.

So we approached a high school in Flushing. Schools in this area are not very gracious about renting to churches, but we were able to meet there for our first year. After 9/11, the school needed to increase security, and we could no longer afford the extra cost. So we moved to a synagogue in Queens where we are currently worshipping. It's not the most ideal situation - we have to meet at 2 PM on Sunday afternoons. Once again, we are talking to other churches and synagogues, and praying that another option will open up.

Build a Worship Service for the Performance-Driven
We learned early on that we needed to be sensitive to both believers and non-believers worship and fellowship times. Otherwise non-Christians simply won't come back. Being missional and outward-focused, this meant we had to speak the gospel to them without using exclusive "Christian-ese" jargon.

Our community in Flushing is about 80% Asian American - mostly a mix of Chinese and Korean people. Many are unchurched and some have Buddhist backgrounds. These are cultures that are very performance driven. Some mistake Christianity for yet another invitation to more "religion" or good works. Our response was to emphasize the work of Christ throughout the service. This message of grace through Christ's work seemed to really speak to them and sparked faith in our early people. It was a great reminder of the gospel for believers and an important introduction for non-believers. So, I strove to make my sermons and the order-of-service gospel-driven, grace-oriented and Christ-centered in order to help people to experience God in worship. We wanted to make sure that attending church was enjoyable, not laborious or done out of legalistic requirements.

We also wanted an appropriate setting that allowed for freer worship. To these goals, we made sure that a friendly, welcoming team greeted members of the body. We also encouraged eager new members to join the team of greeters. This was a great place to serve - who better to welcome visitors than those who were recently made members? They were already sensitive to the needs of newcomers. This Welcoming Ministry encouraged the guests to sign the guests form and we made follow up contacts with them. I sent an email or post card, and one of the members of the Welcoming Ministry sent a follow up email thanking them for their visit.

Worship music was very important. Our worship leader is also our seminary intern, so we receive the competence of not only a trained musician, but a seminary graduate. We use contemporary praise songs, many from Sovereign Grace Ministries, and the leader facilitated not only the praise music but the corporate prayer time as well. Our congregation loves to sing! So, music was very important in drawing the first 100 people into the service and bringing them back multiple times.

Develop Community Fast
We formed community groups right from the start of our first worship service. I found developing relationships to be one of the most important things in growing a church. Community groups are often the first door into the church. People invited friends and co-workers to a community group first because it was more informal and non-threatening. Once relationships were established, the newcomers felt more comfortable going to the worship service.

Community groups also gave the believers a place to discover and exercise their spiritual gifts. I focused on discipleship and training to help members reach spiritual goals. With this growth, lay members used their gifts to collectively worked toward the established vision and goals. They became outward focused and in turn, helped others to understand the gospel. Gift-use of lay people is vital to keeping people at a small church.

Know Your People
The pastor and elders must know everyone in the church. At LFCC, we familiarized ourselves with the names of visitors and regular attendees by reviewing the visitor's forms after each Sunday. It was important to make this effort so that I could begin to care for each person.

The Puritan pastor, Richard Baxter made it his habit to catechize his church members and to make regular visitations. Following this example, I also made pastoral visitations once a year to connect with the members and regular attendees.

Everyone wants to be loved, cared for, and needed. We cannot operate the church through programs but rather through relationships. This was especially true in a church like ours where 80% or more were young Asian Americans, a culture where approval and acceptance is based on success. Therefore, a meaningful relationship between the leaders and the members was critical in a small church.

Sticking to the Core Values
There is a tendency to lose focus on values when starting a church and growing the many programs and functions. It was vital for us to remember our core values and to stick to them. Core values always bring the church back to where it belongs and where it should go. Whenever we had leader's meeting, we often read through our core values to remind ourselves why we were doing what we were doing. Every ministry team was expected to reflect the core values of the church in their activities and programs. This also gave ownership of the vision to our lay leaders so that they were better able to serve the body and use their gifts.

Many visitors stayed at our church because they like our vision and core values. For example, we got to know a Korean lady who came because of the Gospel-driven focus of our church. She grew up in a Buddhist home where she was constantly reminded of the works she had to perform. Later, even attending a Catholic church and a Korean church, she was still focused on a works-driven life. At LFCC, she finally heard about what Christ did for her. Now her works are coming from a place of grace, and her faith has really grown.

Other members have told me that they were drawn to LFCC because of our focus on church-planting. In their experience, churches were often very insular within the existing community. They wanted a church that was intentional about prayer and financial support for church-planting, and was committed to expanding the kingdom outside of LFCC.

One Last Note
Well, we got to the 100-person mark, and we are expanding our ministry while still keeping the focuses I have mentioned. I get excited when I hear people say that LFCC is not like - a church but we are - a church. What they mean is that we are an intimate community and reflect the rich heritage of historic Christianity, without being rigid "traditionalists".

But if I had to do it over again, I would have definitely prayed more with the core group. Also, I would have shared the missional aspect of the vision much more. It should have been part of the DNA of the church from the get-go. But when we first started, we were so concerned about making sure our church was very neat and organized, We made it a priority to develop the right activities, programs and administrative functions before focusing our efforts to bring in the unchurched and meeting their needs. We were afraid of the "messiness" of it all. We were too concerned about making ourselves look like a church instead of being a church.

So, we didn't start out with all of our core values. They developed after we started as I received more training and input. We made many mistakes, but we have learned so much in the process. And we are still learning!