Preaching and the Externally-Focused Church: An Interview with Rick Rusaw...Continued from page 6

Rusaw: Pretty traditional, a good church. It had a great reputation in the community. It had been going through some rough spots. Minister had been here a long time, a great guy. They went through some staff difficulties and then he ended up resigning and they were relocating and going through financial issues. They had started a new church a year and a half before and were losing a lot of their young people to that church. My wife said while we sat in the interview ? because I had not planned on doing this and coming here, I wasn’t even really sure I was going to do ministry ? and she said the more they described how tough things were, the more she knew I was going to want to come here. I’m just wired like that.

They were a great congregation just looking for a little leadership and we started reshifting our focus around those two things: how can we reach out and be leading people to Christ and how can we be serving? We started creating how we focused about ministry around those things. And so we have grown a fair amount. God has been kind to us about that. We are in a fairly small community. Our community is about 80,000 and doing the multi-site thing now too, so we have our second one launching this weekend. We have between 3300 and 3400 attending each weekend. We have five services ? two on Saturday, three on Sunday, and then we have one multi-site that’s been going a year. It’s about 20 minutes away from us, and the second one is 30 minutes away and it launches Sunday.

Preaching: For the preaching element of your multi-site locations, are you doing a live feed or tape delay?

Rusaw: We do a DVD from the night before.

Preaching: If someone was to come here and you preached over a series of Sundays, what would we experience in terms of style and approach?

Rusaw: Hopefully what you would hear is a message that, regardless of where you were in the journey, there was a place for you to connect. That there was some stuff that if you have been a believer a long time, it would be meaningful to you, and that if you were coming for the first time, you would had been able to understand what was going on. In addition, I would say we tend to be about the practical application side. So what’s to take away from this? How can I use this in my life right now? When I go home today, when I get in the car, what is it that I am able to use in my life at this moment? And I would think that the “come alongside” thing would be, whether you would describe it that way initially, or intentionally, I do believe that’s the piece that you would feel like happened.

Preaching: Do you preach typically in series?

Rusaw: Yes, we’re almost, always in a series. We try to rotate our series among kind of 101 and 201 stuff ? and I don’t mean the baseball diamond fan. We try to do stuff that would be very practical or need oriented. We’re launching an eight-week series about faith: Why Faith Is Hard. We invited the congregation ? a month and a half ago ? to write down what’s the issue where you think faith is hard for you or why you think it’s hard for people to come to Faith. If faith were easier, a lot more people would be living with it. So, why is it tough? We ended up with 1,100 responses, we categorized those into fifteen things, and broke those down into an eight-week series, which will be really fun because they helped create the series. I’m looking forward to the response that we get from that.