Matt Chandler - Imago Dei

Good afternoon! If you have your Bibles, grab them. We’re going to start the new year slowly, and I will make this as easy as possible. We will be in Genesis 1, and many of you have already read that passage due to your Bible reading plan. However, Genesis 1 is where we’re going to camp out today.

Before we get started, I want to take about six or seven minutes here to express my gratitude. I want to specifically highlight who I am thanking. I want to thank the covenant members of the Village Church. If you only come here a couple of times a year, I am grateful to God for you. However, what I am thanking the congregation for now is something that they have done beautifully.

In my 17 years as pastor, I think there have been probably three or four what we call eras. My first seven to eight years were marked by an insane amount of growth—over a thousand people a year, in fact. That phase continued through year ten, but it was wild. During year eight, it was a chaotic time. Many of those sermons are no longer available online because I was overly enthusiastic and immature. Whether you know it or not, I was more aware of what I didn’t want to be than what I was supposed to be. Are you following me? The outcome was a lot of harsh critique of evangelicalism. In fact, I think 90% of my sermons focused on what evangelicalism was doing wrong and why we would not follow suit. That actually attracted a certain type of person to the Village—someone who could not tell us anything, as we were just telling everyone. There was an arrogance there in that season.

By the way, it was a great time; we ended up holding six services, which is incredible! Then, that season transitioned into the multi-site era, which was probably one of my favorite moments at the Village. For six weeks, we prayed and fasted, asking the Lord to do something significant. Within a couple of years, close to 14 million dollars' worth of real estate was deeded to us by other churches in really key locations around the Metroplex. This introduced the multi-site era at the Village Church. We grew to five campuses and attracted 12 to 15 thousand people on weekends.

That led us to 2015 when the Lord humbled us, and we needed it. We didn’t realize how much we needed it. I’m speaking about us as leaders, though you as laymen and women may have needed it too. We were confronted with the reality of our size, scope, fame, and brand. We began to value process over people and realized we had done some things that were not pleasing to the Lord. He exposed us for it, and by the grace of God, we tried to take ownership. I stood on this stage, attempting to own not just what we thought we were guilty of, but even more than we thought we were guilty of. I believed that the way to honor the Lord when He is humbling you is to embrace that, not resist it.

In 2015, that season of humbling led us to what we would later call «Multiplied.» You might not be aware, but we have been in a phase of multiplication for several years now. Multiplication is the process of divesting our campuses to autonomous churches. It is a purposeful plan to intentionally shrink the Village Church and make it a single congregation in the suburbs of Flower Mound that, by the grace of God, has a global reach.

I have joked, but with great pride, that we are the fastest-shrinking church in the United States by design—on purpose and with a lot of joy in it right now. So, you and I have been engaged in this multiplication process, and this brings me to my thank you. We are currently in a season where an established vision and purpose—one that was effective by every human metric—is coming to a close, while a new vision and direction is beginning to emerge from that ending.

If you are invested, if you are more than just an occasional attender of the Village, you can sense that we are at a crossroads. You might be feeling the loss of something or have a thousand questions about what we will do and what this all means. What does the future hold? Are we still going to have this, and I hope they don’t touch that because people love their church—that is universally true.

People truly cherish the church they joined and believe it should never change. If you’ve ever witnessed a church split, you may understand why—when people join a church, they do so because they love everything about it. If you try to touch or change that, they will remind you, «We’ve always done it this way.»