Pastor Ronnie's 2010 Pastor's Report
2010 The State of the Charge
Submitted by Pastor Ronnie G. Collins
The First Hillsville Congregation is showing a membership gain of 8 people over the previous year and an increase of 17 in Sunday School attendance. These are good numbers but they don’t really show the true growth of the First Hillsville Congregation. I would attribute the increase in Sunday School attendance to the new ministry of taking Sunday School to the local rest home at Wheatland, next door to the church building. I would also like to see this ministry expand in 2011 to a second rest home/therapy recovery home also next door to our congregation. It is an awesome thing to see the church reach out to the many who have attended church services all their lives and in later years they seem to be forgotten. We have one gentleman at the current rest home where we serve who wishes to be baptized in the near future.
We are averaging 10 or more visitors to our services every week, many times above 20 visitors between the three services. We need to work on a way to fold more of these people into our membership here at First Hillsville.
We have the Out Of The Box Youth Ministry that ministers to an average of 50 teens and adult leaders each week in Bible Study, many times swelling to more than 100 at special events and 100 plus through online ministry with facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs. There needs to be a way to track these people and this ministry that is being accomplished in order to encourage others to reach out through all of the new avenues offered to the church.
This congregation has made a bold move to step out into the community and offer a New Worship Center, called Out Of The Box Worship Center. I (Ronnie G Collins) have been chosen to lead this new congregation with the oversight of our senior pastor, Ty Harrison. This will be a different style of worship, casual dress, contemporary music, and an exciting Children’s Ministry. Our goal is to reach out to everyone in the community, all age groups, who have a desire to be in worship but have not or will not attend a typical traditional church setting.
There are many reasons for this but statistics show that 78% of Carroll County residents do not attend church anywhere on the average Sunday Morning.
We have a lot of the work completed on putting this new service together. We have a building secured with help from Path 1 and Holston Conference New Church Development. We have approximately 30 people from the First Hillsville congregation who have committed to being missionaries to this new worship service. We have acquired a Worship Leader for the New Service, Jay Holderfield who currently serves in the praise band at First Hillsville. We are now waiting for bids from contractors to complete the needed renovations to the building we have leased. We had our first preview service on Sunday October 10th and had more than 100 people in attendance. We will do 2 preview services in November, 3 in December to include 2 Sunday morning services and an 11pm Christmas Eve Service at the new site. We will launch with weekly Sunday morning worship services at 9:30am on Sunday January 2nd, 2011 and we are excited.
Overall the congregation at First Hillsville is doing well. There is work that needs to be done in my opinion to communicate better with the congregation as a whole and to cast vision with the people. We are utilizing social media to a great degree. Including a website for First Hillsville, blogs, e-mail, etc… However, we must find new ways to do this with the entire congregation, several of which do not use the new technology.
I am proud to be a part of a community of believers who are doing tremendous things to reach new people with the message of the gospel.
Ronnie G Collins
Associate Pastor
