FALL SERVICE STRUCTURE

Stafford Greer, Bearspaw Lead Site Pastor

Hello RockPointe Family!

Summer is here in full force and I trust that you have been able to keep cool during this heat wave. I also hope that you have found time to slow down and enjoy the goodness of God through some sabbath rest and vacation! Like back-to-school advertising in July, we don't really want to be reminded of the fall season around the corner, however there is one element of life at RockPointe this fall that I wanted to give you a heads up about already.

As a teaching team, we've been assessing and evaluating our service format and attempting to best plan for the next season of ministry at RockPointe Church. Part of this planning has included assessing our teaching team schedule, recognizing that two of our site pastors who would normally carry significant preaching loads are currently on leave. This has also included assessing the current capacity of our staff and lay leaders and recognizing a desire to reflect the unique makeup of our sites while also working towards unity as a church as a whole.

Some of the early changes to our programming are observed in our current online presence. We've switched from pre-recording and editing our messages, worship music and services to posting the message each week from the Bearspaw location. Ultimately, we are working towards live-stream the whole service from Bearspaw each Sunday beginning in September. This will allow for a more efficient use of resources throughout the week, as well as serve as a more accurate experience of what to expect at RockPointe for those who are checking us out online before coming to a service.

This process is not without some bumps as we figure out all the moving pieces and I'm sure that it will change slightly as we try it out and make some tweaks. Thank you in advance for your patience in this!

The next element that we will be experimenting with is the use of video in our services. If you've been part of RockPointe for some time, you will have previously experienced video teaching elements in the service. This will be similar, but will have some notable adjustments this time around.

One piece of recurrent feedback we have received is that our current model of preaching rotation can be confusing - it can be difficult to predict who is preaching where and when. It also has been challenging to preach sequentially through a book of the bible or have a teaching series build from one message to the next. Combined with reduced teaching team members and the addition of a Lead Site Pastor, we felt that we could do a better job of keeping our sites aligned with our teaching while still valuing in-person teaching, providing a variety of teaching voices, and providing opportunities for individual site expression. The result is what we will begin to experiment with and implement in the fall:

Bowridge and Westhills sites will be one-week behind Bearspaw. This will allow for a preaching rotation that will keep all sites moving through a series in a sequential way. Bowridge and Westhills will have one video teaching element a month to accommodate this one-week offset.

I will teach live at all sites at least once per month - this is to help provide a unified 'voice' in our teaching and vision casting in this next season, as well as give me a chance to connect with our various site congregations.

Each site will have a monthly site-specific service where local voices, ministries, missions stories, etc., will be able to be lived out. This is a chance to better lean into and honour the uniqueness of each site congregation.

We will still utilize a variety of voices from our teaching team (both pastoral and lay leaders) to preach monthly at each site.

These changes reflect more of a tweak to what we have been doing rather than wholesale change and it is our desire to provide an easier-to-understand format that highlights our unique congregational makeup while keeping all of our sites more unified. Thanks for your patience and grace as we begin to implement this in the fall.

I am excited for this next season of ministry at RockPointe and am grateful for all of you!

Press on!

Stafford, Lead Site Pastor, Bearspaw

P.S. This week, July 28, we will include some video elements at all of our sites as we kick off our new series, The Everyday Disciple. See you then!