Christ’s Church of the Valley weds Parkway Christian

In the West Valley of Phoenix, Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria resides on a 100-acre campus, and was founded 28 years ago by 63-year-old senior pastor Don Wilson. Leaders there talk about the congregation being focused and, yes, marketed, on men within the age group of 25 and 45, on the premise that once you get the men to come, the family will follow.

Sixteen miles away in Surprise, AZ, a 30-minute drive, is Parkway Church, 13 years old on a 40-acre campus. Trent Renner, 40, is the founding pastor. Parkway averages 2,500 in weekly attendance, while CCV averages 16,700.

The two congregations have come together as one. Church Executive posed questions on the new corporate expression to Ashley Wooldridge, executive pastor at CCV, and now of both congregations:

Is this an adoption, absorption, acquisition, or merger?

CCV and Parkway joining together would probably best be described as an acquisition. Parkway is going to become CCV and we are going to have one church in multiple locations. As we started discussing what the new organization should look like, we placed a huge premium on unity. We realized you couldn’t have the unity we were looking for if the churches didn’t join together under one leadership body and mission. Both churches will operate and look the same. The great news is the two churches are very similar already, so the integration is going very well.

Does Christ’s Church have a strategy or set of parameters in planting or merging with other churches in the West Valley?

We believe to reach the city of Phoenix we have to continue a dual strategy of planting new independent churches and launching new CCV multi-sites. CCV has had a long history and strategy behind planting churches. We have planted dozens of churches all across Phoenix and Arizona and we do not see that changing. We have not had a strategy around mergers, but we have had to develop one as churches approached us asking to merge.

We have spent time with several churches discussing what it would look like to merge together. Those discussions have really helped us define what we think will work. At a very high level, we believe in point leadership so all our mergers will be led by one senior pastor and one team of elders. Beyond that, we believe the two churches need to have a similar mission and values that can be built upon. Some would call this “DNA.”

Theologically there needs to be a foundation as well although we don’t believe that has to mean the churches are from the same denomination. The last stat I saw on denominations said there were more than 33,000 different denominations in the United States alone. That is a tragic number. We are going to need to see more churches working together if we are going to impact our cities.

Many denominations believe the exact same things on the essential items of the faith. It’s only in non-essentials that they have differences. Although it hasn’t been done much, who says two denominations with similar theology can’t put aside very non-essential issues to reach more people with the central message of Jesus? I think we’ll see more and more mergers where denominational issues are put aside for the greater good of the bringing more people into the Kingdom.

The press release says this is the first of “many” locations throughout the Phoenix area? What do you see happening and on what timetable?

We have spent more than two years doing our homework on multi-sites. It actually took us a long time to come to the conclusion that we wanted to do multi-sites in the first place. Our senior pastor, Don Wilson, fought it for some time because he believed so deeply in church planting and raising up future generations of preachers.

He wasn’t sure this wasn’t just a fad to boost the ego of the pastor. As he dug deeper, he saw multi-sites as a way to extend our effectiveness around our existing campus. We have thousands of people who come every weekend who want to reach their neighbors, but drive more than 20 minutes to church. We’ve planted dozens of churches across the Phoenix area, but we have found that people still will drive what we would consider unreal amounts of time to come to CCV.

We know those same people are less effective in serving, inviting their friends to church, and being involved in our ministries. So, we do see several multi-sites across the valley. But our strategy is to choose to go to locations where we already have a critical mass of people first.

We’ve watched churches across the United States make decisions to jump to a different part of town or a different city where they really don’t have a large base of existing people coming to their church. We’ve observed those sites to be less effective. Right now our base of people is in the west side of the valley, but down the road I believe we will be valley wide [across the Phoenix metro area] as we continue to grow.

CCV’s Neighborhood Ministry is your small group program. What are some of the implications of the acquisition for that program?

We like to say around CCV that our Neighborhood Ministry (NM) is the nerve center of our church. While many churches have multiple programs that they promote to do ministry and fulfill their mission, we essentially only have one — NM. CCV’s mission is to WIN people to Christ, TRAIN believers to become disciples, and SEND disciples to impact the world. We simply say: Win, Train and Send.

What did the two churches see in each other that they found attractive?

Probably the most attractive thing was a similar mission and strategy. Parkway is a church of 2,500 that is doing amazing things in their community in Surprise. They had come to us just over a year ago and wanted to implement neighborhood ministry in their church. As they implemented NM, it became very effective for their church.

But one thing became very evident to their senior pastor, Trent Renner. He had a church of 2,500 with members mobilized in the neighborhoods all around Parkway. But he also knew that CCV had 2,200 people that lived within five minutes of his church meeting in completely separate neighborhood groups.

While their church continued to grow, Trent felt like God had him stuck in the passages of John 17 on unity. The thing that kept bugging Trent was, “Am I really being as effective as I could be if I have a church of 2,500 doing amazing things in Surprise, but CCV has more than 2,200 people that live right around Parkway but still drive to a different church.” He asked a simple, yet profound question, “Could we be more effective together than we could as separate ministries?”

But that required Trent giving up the leadership of his church. He was the founding pastor and had grown the church over 13 years from just 20 people to now 2,500. I don’t know of any example in America where a founding pastor of a megachurch decided to give up his leadership to join forces with another church because he felt like together they could reach more people than they could apart. Trent is an unbelievably humble leader.

I hope his example is one that will inspire more to be open to this line of thinking. I think churches humbly joining together could provide the next revival in this country. I’m not saying mergers are the answer in every situation. But Trent’s example should cause every leader to pause and ask the same question. The only thing that keeps some leaders from making the same decision is power and pride.

What does Don Wilson bring to the new mix of both churches?

The strength of CCV is found primarily in the leadership and wisdom of a senior pastor who has three distinct traits: Character, Leadership, and a heart for Evangelism. Show me any healthy, growing church in America and you’ll find those three traits.

Although Don is 63, he has strategically surrounded himself with young leaders that he delegates to. Our leadership team primarily consists of men in their 30s and 40s. Most leaders like to surround themselves with people who are the same age and think the same way they do. Don has created a culture where we can all challenge each other and the status quo. This has allowed us to continually learn, grow and reach more people.

What will be the teaching plan for both campuses?

The current plan is to always have a live teacher on Saturday nights in Peoria. Surprise will have services on Sunday morning and evening and will be primarily video teaching. The Peoria campus will have the capability of doing video as well but will likely be a mixture of both. The video feed at either campus would be a recording from Saturday night. We are exploring real time video methods for future use.

How is the current economy treating CCV’s finances?

We did a staff reduction in 2008. Since that time we have been blessed with our finances. In 2009 we saw an 11 percent increase in our giving and last year saw an 8 percent increase. We’ve been able to use this increased giving to pay off debt, while holding our operating expenses flat even as we grow. Looking back now, we see the increases as God preparing us for going multi-site.

Will there be some attrition of staff that is duplicative between the two campuses?

We do not have any plans for reducing staff. Parkway already had a fairly lean staff. We are repositioning some people between the campuses to find the right fit as we move to multi-sites. We have some people from the Peoria campus going to Surprise and vice versa.

The biggest adjustment for the Surprise staff is thinking and pacing for a church of 17,000 vs. 2,500. There is a distinct difference but we are confident in them being able to make the leap. We’ve put in place some strategic integration initiatives as we meld the two staffs together. I came from the business world where we did several mergers/acquisitions. I saw some go well, and others were complete failures. We are trying our best to integrate the staff and congregation as smoothly as possible.

There are some big changes for our Peoria staff as well because many of them are being asked to step up to larger leadership roles as we create more central teams that are overseeing multiple campus ministries. To be honest, we are all being stretched. But if you are a leader, that excites you and motivates you. When you do a church merger it will never be completely smooth. But we are confident that God is doing some amazing things with these two churches joining forces to do more together then we could apart.
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