Thursday and Friday of this week was spent at Church of the Highlands in  Birmingham, Alabama (first time there)

Phil Goldsberry, Chad Haymon and myself headed out on Southwest airlines  to spend a one and a half days with Chris Hodges and his team at Church of the Highlands. This round table was limited to 30 Senior/Lead Pastors and thier lead team…..about 50ish of us in total.

My expectations for the trip were pretty high – to learn and absorb as much as possible while we were there. I was ready to stand in fron of the fire hydrant and drink it all in.

Chris Hodges launched….I love the word launch rather they plant a church. If you dont know why we use this work read Nelson Searcy’s book called LAUNCH (great book)  …. anyway – he launched his church in 2000 and while we were there the church was around 12000 people with then starting thier 6 multi-site campus in three weeks. ….. WOW. A church that is 9 years old and running 12000+ people …. you have to admit that that is pretty spectacular!

The premise of the round table discussion was to get upcolse with the values and DNA of Highland Church. To read more of the history of the church go here.

Chris Hodges speaking

If I had to take the 10+ hrs that we spent there and put it into four statements it would be that Church of the Highlands beleives in 1: The weekend Service 2:Growth Track (Membership and Spiritual Gift/Ministry Profile – I have blogged about how Christ Life Church does it here) 3: Small Groups 4: Dream Team (Volunteers)

Hopefully over the week I will spend some time on my blog debriefing how and why they do what they do – it is an incredibly simple proccess that I beleive has allowed them to remain a warship is the Kingdom battle that we are in and not a cruise ship that most churches have become.

Lastly – we go stuck at the airport so we had three hours to debrief our trip as we waited for our plane to arrive.