Training The Members Of The Hacienda Heights Seventh-day Adventist Church To Create Missional Communities

Problem A 2011 analysis of the Hacienda Heights Seventh-day Adventist Church revealed it had poor missional health in it, was not outreach focused, small group oriented, or a discipling community. This attributed to plateaued church growth with a congregation consisting largely of boomers and a significantly low percentage of GenX’ers and millennials. Method An intervention to train the members of the Hacienda Heights church to create missional communities was developed and applied as a means to improve the church’s missional health and growth. The intervention was developed by studying missional church literature and assessing the church and community. The resulting intervention included these modules: personal transformation, creating a sense of urgency, developing a guiding coalition, fostering passionate and authentic spirituality, mentoring disciples of Jesus, and developing missional communities. A follow-up assessment was conducted after the application of the intervention in order to determine its effectiveness. Results The intervention trained the church to create multiple missional communities. Missional health also increased as a result of the intervention, which led to improvements in spiritual development, mission and vision casting, organizational methods, outreach methods, leadership development, and discipleship. An increase in church growth was also observed among the millennia generation with eight baptisms, two recommitments, six new interests, and an increase in attendance of 21. Conclusions The conclusion of this project is the intervention effectively trained the Hacienda Heights Seventh-day Adventist Church to create missional communities. Secondly, it should be applied indefinitely to foster continued missional community growth and counteract the innate challenges of living missionally in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. Lastly, without an intentional effort to create missional communities, a church inwardly focused will not reach outwardly on its own without a committed and equipped team of missional leaders to apply the intervention.