Northeast Christian Church Honored at Exponential Conference

In his opening remarks at Exponential 2008, Ed Stetzer unveiled a startling statistic — churches under 200 in size plant four times as many churches as churches over 1000. And Bob Roberts puts out a challenge to all churches in his book The Multiplying Church when he says that any church over 75 in attendance can plant a church.

That’s why it was so much fun to watch my friend Daniel Barrett of Northeast Christian Church in Bakersfield, California receive a church-planting award at Tuesday night’s Stadia dinner at the Exponential Conference.

Daniel’s church isn’t large (about 150 on a Sunday morning), but they have a large vision for church planting.

Northeast is the product of a merger between East Hills Christian Church and Great Beginnings Christian Church in 2007. As part of this merger, they gave 10% of the proceeds from the sale of their land to help launch Kaleo Christian Fellowship in Bakersfield this January. In addition to this one-time financial gift, Northeast is a regular monthly contributor to Kaleo and are full participants in Kaleo’s management team.

But the most remarkable part of the story is that Northeast also put aside $425,000 dollars in the CDF Church Planting Fund, and the interest on that money will go to fund church planting in California’s Central Valley each year. Most amazing to me is the bold decision of Northeast’s leadership — if they haven’t grown enough within three years to need the money for their own land and building, the full $425,000 will become a permanent gift to church planting and generate interest forever!

Northeast Christian Church is living proof that an “ordinary” church can be fully engaged in church planting. I love Daniel’s humble spirit — he truly doesn’t see this as anything special — just hearing the voice of God and then following in faith. He gives all the credit to Jesus, and minimizes the way that God has used him and his church to do extraordinary things. He was totally surprised and shocked when the award went to his church — further testimony to his humble and gracious spirit.

The Northeast Christian Church Honored at Exponential Conference by Church Planting Journey, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.