Brockport Free Methodist Church is a recipient of the 2004 Church Health Award from Purpose Driven. For the past five years, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and its church leadership affiliated ministry, Purpose Driven, have honored selected churches that have shown fruitfulness from their effort to implement the Purpose Driven Church paradigm. Pastor Tom Stroup has been senior pastor of Brockport Free Methodist Church for 26 years. About five years ago, he read The Purpose Driven Church by Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church, and began the process of leading his church in becoming Purpose Driven. He started by assembling a vision team that worked through Purpose Driven together. After a year of working with the vision team, Stroup began educating the rest of the church's leadership structure. "We took a year and a half of what was then our adult Sunday school and went through a cycle of what Purpose Driven ministry is," Stroup says. "Then we led them in a discovery of what the Bible says about God's purpose for a church. Finally we brought all of our adult ministries people together and asked what model would help us effectively accomplish God's purpose for our church. And that's when we introduced Purpose Driven ministry as the new norm for our church." Today, the five purposes drive every part of the church's ministry. "In everything we do, our staffing, programming, teaching, preaching and every element of the church, we strive to keep the five purposes in balance," Stroup says. Since 2002, when The Purpose Driven Life was published, an estimated 13,000 churches throughout the world have used the book in a "40 Days of Purpose" campaign, multiplying by hundreds the number of churches implementing the Purpose Driven paradigm. |
