The Grove Community Christian Church
The Grove Community Christian Church
CHILDREN’S MINISTER
The SETTING:
The Grove Community Christian Church finds its home in an idyllic setting. The Village of Baltimore is a small community in central Ohio with a population of about 3,000. Housing is affordable. People are friendly and kind. Values are mostly conservative. Surrounded by farm and pasture lands on the outskirts of Baltimore it would appear the church is in the middle of nowhere. However, it would be important to not be fooled.
Within a 10 mile radius of the church there are over 32,000 homes that are by and large unchurched. In addition, new construction is booming down the roads that lead to the church. Moreover, the church sits just 20 miles from the heart of downtown Columbus. With a population of just over 900,000 and a regional population of over 2.1 million, Columbus Ohio ranks as the 14th largest city in America. The bedroom community of Baltimore and the surrounding towns find their schools filled with children and youth who come from young families who are mostly unchurched.
The area, therefore, provides an expansive opportunity for a church that is ready to be salt and light to a world in desperate need of Jesus as its Lord and Savior. The Grove desires to be that church!
The CHURCH:
The church finds its roots in the “Restoration Movement”. This unique season in church history that took place in the late 1700’s, early 1800’s found people from all denominations who were fed up with sectarian theology and anti-Biblical teaching. The goal became to take the Bible as their only rule of authority and to establish a church that restored what we read about in its pages. They believed that Christians should be united and the church should be one. They were confident that if we rejected creeds and counsels and made the Bible the only source of authority, their dream could be unleashed.
In 1974, Midway Christian Church was born with a commitment to stand on the restoration principles. Its first meeting place was a home. Soon thereafter a farming family in the church determined they wanted to provide the land to support a church building. Five acres was donated. Several years later the church purchased the additional acreage from the family giving the church a total of 42 acres. Buildings were constructed. Lives were changed. And by the mid 1990’s church attendance grew to 150.
By the turn of the century the church had fallen on hard times. Attendance was running around 30. The leaders of the church sought the wisdom of a “mega church” 20 miles away. Those meetings ended with Midway Christian Church becoming a satellite of Fairfield Christian Church. In 2008 an aggressive building program began to add 65,000 square feet of building space to the existing 10,000 square feet. The dream was that the Christian school of the main campus would house their Jr and Sr High school (The Academy) on the Baltimore campus. Interestingly the main campus underwent hard times, the school never moved into the facility and the decision was made to separate the two churches make them two individual congregations once again. The separation occurred. The buildings and grounds were bought back by Midway Christian who, in the process, changed her name to The Grove Community Christian Church.
The leadership of The Grove is excited about the coming years. We are committed to hiring a fulltime Children’s Pastor to join with our fulltime Youth Pastor. We understand that 95% of people who come to Christ do so before they are 25 years of age. We have determined to allocate a significant percentage of our church resource to reach out to this age group (birth – young adult) and spur on evangelism and church growth.
Children’s SPACE
The facility that was erected in 2008 includes a children’s wing with nearly 20,000 square feet of space. Classrooms, resource areas are in abundance. We are looking for a person who will bring vision and growth to the Children’s Ministry area and help us fill up these rooms with bright-eyes children.
The CANDIDATE:
Our future Children’s Pastor will be a person with:
- A passion to reach and lead children in their personal walk with God
- A desire to partner with parents and help them model Jesus and pass on a heritage of godliness
- Gifts of leadership, organization, teaching
- An understanding of the need to recruit, train and retain a volunteer staff
- An eagerness to help mold our Children’s Ministry and take it to the next level
- VISION! An ability to see what it can be!
- A person working toward a bachelor’s degree from a Christian college, or a seminary degree
The FUTURE IS BRIGHT and we STAND READY to press ahead
If you have any further questions, you can contact me by email: dereklauer@thegrove.church – Or through my cell phone (602) 284-5812.
Blessings!
Derek Lauer
Senior Pastor
