The No. 1 goal at North Point Church in Springfield, Mo., is to get people involved in small groups, where the church’s leaders believe they will grow and learn. But the church provides a variety of entry points for visitors who may not be ready to go directly into a small group. Lead Pastor Tommy Sparger shares what some of those entry points are:

“This is always evolving, but I’ll just name a few of the things we do. Every week, if you’re a visitor, we tell everybody, ‘There’s a blue card in the seat back in front of you. Fill that out, and then you can go to the welcome center and get a North Point gift bag.’  In a day and age where people are going green, it’s reusable. We load that full of information about ministry, our philosophy and who we are, plus we put goodies in it. We put a View-Master in it with a little reel of the staff and who we are, and we put Twizzlers and candy in it.

“We also do a quarterly newcomers dinner where we introduce the staff and tell newcomers about the church. We also bring in a local improv comedy group. It’s just a really cool connecting point.

“Every Saturday night and Sunday morning, we offer a class called NextPOINT. It’s a high-energy, 30-minute class designed for visitors. There are leaders and greeters and doughnuts and coffee and video segments that introduce people to the church.

“We also use Starting Point, a 10-week class for new believers [from North Point Ministries in Alpharetta, Ga.]. And once a month on the second Saturday, we take out buses of people and get our hands dirty, whether it’s doing a school makeover, giving toys to kids at Christmastime, helping out with the AIDS Project of the Ozarks.  We connect people through ministry.”

--From Outreach magazine, July/August 2009