By Kristen Thomason
In 2022, Tyler Tankersley came down with COVID while attending the CBF General Assembly in Texas. He wasn’t the only one. His circle of friends began referring to it as the “Brisket Baptist Variant.”
While contracting COVID wasn’t ideal, it did give Tankersley time to think about everything he had learned that week at the Thriving Congregations pilot cohort. To become a Thriving Congregation, a church needs to excel in five important areas: Compelling Clarity, Faithful Agility, Holy Tenacity, Rooted Relationships and Dynamic Collaboration. He knew Ardmore Baptist Church, the church he pastored in Winston-Salem, N.C. was healthy in many respects; but was it thriving?
Ardmore Baptist’s Vision and Navigation Team joined with four other North Carolina churches to form a learning community. Encouraging one another during the learning process, cohorts meet 10 times online and three times in person over their year together.
Through the Thriving Congregations program, Tankersley and his team were able to look objectively at Ardmore Baptist. “When we learned about the attributes of a thriving congregation, that framework gave us a good way of thinking of both the strengths and areas of growth for our congregation.” They realized that while the congregation was strong in Rooted Relationships, they lacked Compelling Clarity in many of their ministry areas.
Thriving Congregations helped Ardmore Baptist examine the “why” behind its commitments in order to prioritize its missions involvement. “We were a mile wide and an inch deep,” Tankersley said. “Instead, we have sought to identify some primary missions goals and moved towards cultivating deeper and deeper relationships with a smaller amount of missional partners.”
By reconnecting with the purpose and energy that fueled past mission projects and redirecting it to meet the needs of the present, churches like Ardmore Baptist can more fully love their neighbors.
Tankersley expanded the churchwide exploration of calling with Dawnings, CBF’s visioning curriculum. “One of the steps in the Dawnings process is to invite the entire church body into a place of listening for God’s voice speaking their own calling into being. The hope is that we tilled the soil of souls so that in the next year we can plant even more seeds of calling in people’s lives, so that we may be a congregation of people listening to the Holy Spirit.”
Listening to the Holy Spirit is the key to the Thriving Congregations process. “If you enter into Thriving Congregations with already set answers for all your problems, you will not get anything out of it. But if you trust the guidance of the Spirit and if you hold loosely to your own expectations, you may just gain fascinating new insights into who you are called to be.”