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Frazee's Neighborhood Groups: Do They Work?

I recently went to San Antonio with a team from Gateway Church to meet Randy Frazee and his team from Oak Hills Church (Lead Pastor is Max Lucado).  The conversation was about Neighborhood Groups, or as we call them at Gateway, Networks.  Our team wanted to learn how Randy was building towards place based groups around neighborhoods compared to our Network Model that is based predominately on neighborhoods but also some affinity.  At Gateway our goal is to help people ‘do church where they do life.’

Here are some of my learning’s from Randy and his team about their thinking and strategy for Neighborhood place-based groups.

They use the Fly Wheel analogy – for getting rotation and momentum around these three distinctives:

  • Belong
  • Grow
  • Serve

Their hope in their strategy is to bring the ‘Presence of Christ’ into the following five rings of ‘Belonging’:

  • Household
  • Neighborhood
  • Area Community by High School boundaries
  • Church Campus
  • San Antonio, Texas

What they mean by ‘Growing’ are the following types of activities/events/gatherings.

  • Bible Study – mostly through video driven curriculum
  • Discpleship
    • KNOW
      • ‘Story’ discipleship material (31 weeks)
      • ‘Story’ Bible
      • 30 Essentials of Theology and Values
    •  BECOME
      • Using the Christian Life Assessment
      • Creating a Serving Plan – ‘Serving’ (Using your gifts)

The History of Oak Hills and Randy’s seven (7) year plan for change. 

Oak Hills is a 53 year old church with a tradition of only having a Sunday service.  Here is an overview of his plan for integrating relational place-based belonging, growing and serving:

  • Yr 1 – Learning the current culture, collaboration, design, consensus (2009)
  • Yr 2 – Redesign staff, budgets (2010)
  • Yr 3 – Implementation of Area Communities and Neighborhoods (2011)
  • Yr 7 – Probably getting it.

The emphasis of implementation for Randy and his team right now is developing Area Communities based on High School boundaries.  This is how they define an Area Community, “An Area Community is an intentional gathering of those who attend Oak Hills Church.  These small communities are designed for the purpose of connecting an Elder with those who they are shepherding  and for supporting the development of a faith community in a specific geographic area.

The Area Community seeks to guide and support the mission of taking the presence of Jesus into every neighborhood by providing opportunities for members to experience the fullness of Christ as a community.”

These are the six (6) stages of development they are using for creating Area Communities:

  • Identify a trained leader.
  • Praying on prayer walks.
  • Rallying other believers through relational connections (no ‘gatherings’ yet).
  • Events beginning to start (Organic options – family play gatherings, neighborhood association events, Fun Runs, father and son events, tailgating at H.S. football games).
  • Monthly ‘Neighborhood’ gatherings that meet in a home.
  • Diffusion point for initial success in ‘Neighborhood’ gatherings is when 16% of the constituents in neighborhood are in the monthly gatherings. So…when 25 homes out of 154 homes…are a part of the neighborhood monthly gatherings.  The goal is to get 84%  of the neighborhood belonging, growing and serving.

Randy and his staff are passionately working to implement their strategy.  Their Oak Hills Website reflects these realities if you want to check in on how they are communicating their organizational structure for their mission.

My take away ideas from our conversation with Randy:

  • They have a good model of organizing people into place based relationships.  Especially in a church where there has not been a strong emphasis on relational connections in its history.
  • They will probably discover that not everyone lives in a ‘place-based’ way and the result will be some people will stay on the fringe of the strategy.  There is no room for affinity gatherings – like college students and singles for example.
  • They have great resources and a path for discipleship but their level of staff leadership emphasis right now is on the bigger Neighborhood and Area Community development.  In the long run without a life-on-life discipleship emphasis for life transformation, and eventually the leadership pipeline, could dry up.
  • The emphasis on gathering believers into these new relational gatherings and rhythms could lead to a culture of Christian-only gatherings.  Turning this culture of gatherings for Christ-followers towards reaching the un-churched will take intentional focus and effort in the future.