Strategic Partners are autonomous churches that share the same mission, values and organizational structure as North Point Ministries. Additionally, Strategic Partners aim to implement the North Point ministry model and corresponding strategies. This network is structured to maximize the sharing of best practices and encourage leadership development. Our partners participate in monthly conference calls with other partners and North Point staff, connect with one another through North Point hosted conferences and websites, and receive area specific training through web-based resources and onsite visits.

Yes. Existing churches may be:

• Growing Churches whose leaders share North Point’s mission, vision & values and demonstrate high leadership capacity. Often these churches are already implementing the North Point model & environments. They seek more detailed consulting, leadership coaching, “peer to peer” learning and greater access to various content (video packages, curriculum, training manuals, etc).
• Transitioning Churches seeking to convert their church to the North Point model. These churches share North Point like-mindedness, i.e. a fundamental belief in an outsider focused, simple-church model. As a strategic partner, transitioning churches seek the support and guidance to successfully navigate a multi year DNA overhaul.

To the degree that our partners will often use video messages for a portion of their services, they are video churches. However, the use of video is more of a tool to facilitate effective leadership than a goal in and of itself. In the pursuit of strong, clear, effective leadership our partners strive to:

• Provide the most compelling, engaging and relevant communication possible.
• Leverage their influence to create healthy staff teams, empower lay leaders, recruit volunteers and while prioritizing the movement of all attendees into small groups.

Our Strategic Partners show video messages from 33% - 90% of their Sunday services. Most of our pastors elect to show video on an increasing basis, as they experience the benefits of being able to provide relevant, engaging content while increasing their leadership presence throughout their organization.

Only on a limited basis. A church, that is not a Strategic Partner, is limited to six messages per year that can be shown in their main service. The DVD videos produced by North Point are intended for unlimited small group use. A sizable portion our print and computer graphics, media elements and ideas are generated from outside of our staff through publishers, 3rd party vendors and other relationships. For that reason, we are often working with diffuse teams of people and businesses. Subsequently, much of the intellectual property is not ours to distribute. Our vendor agreements allow for use by North Point Ministries, which is exclusive to our campuses and strategic partnership churches.

We have collected an organizational knowledge for creating, executing and tweaking our specific model of ministry. Our desire is to partner with people who have decided to utilize this model and corresponding strategies by sharing principles, concepts, and best practices with peers throughout our network of partner churches. Ultimately, it is leadership, not ministry programming, that is the key variable in developing momentum in any church. Therefore, our primary goal is to help our partners maximize their leadership capabilities by prioritizing their ability to contextualize, rather than recreate, ministry specific programming.

The North Point model is simply a collection of practices and principles developed to help us pursue our mission To Lead People into a Growing Relationship with Jesus Christ.  

We believe that sustained life change happens best in the context of community, and that community is fostered most effectively through small groups.

We have a number of ways to learn more about our model. They fall into three basis categories: web-based content, on-site events, and resources (books, DVDs, etc). The greatest web-based resource for church leaders, staff or volunteer, is insidenorthpoint.org. This site was developed specifically in response to the numerous inquiries we receive from other churches throughout the year. The site offers content, links to specific North Point ministry area sites (e.g. students, grouplife, etc) and links to online resources like leadership podcasts, our youtube site and northpointTV. northpoint.org is our main webpage. There is a Quick Links tab at the top of the page that will allow you to look into the day-to-day happenings of our different ministry areas. There is also a link for Church Leaders on the home page that will take you directly to insidenorthpoint.org. There are a number of on-site events available to help people understand the ‘how & why’ behind North Point’s approach to ministry; tours, Sundays at North Point, Drive.

• Our guided tours are available every Sunday by reservation during the 9 and 11 services. If you plan to visit North Point, signing up for a tour is highly advisable. Due to the number of guests we have each Sunday and our desire to protect the quality of each environment, most of our environments and our staff members are unavailable to guests on Sundays. However, tour participants have both the opportunity to see all of our Sunday morning environments in operation and access to an experienced guide who can answer questions of both an operational and philosophical nature.
• Drive is a three-day leadership conference offered every spring at our North Point campus. It features several leadership-focused main sessions, interspersed with dozens of breakout sessions, learning labs and environment showcases that are designed to highlight events that don’t occur on Sunday mornings.

The links above will take you directly to the information & registration details found at insidenorthpoint.org.
Our strategic partners offer another invaluable on-site opportunity for learning about the North Point model. We frequently receive feedback from people who embrace our values, but who have a difficult time contextualizing and scaling them for their church. Our strategic partners have wrestled with the same issues and have found innumerable creative ways to apply the North Point model; be it in a movie theater in Canada or a school gymnasium in Tennessee. You can find the strategic partner nearest you by going directly to northpointpartners.org or by clicking the Strategic Partner tab at the top of the insidenorthpoint.org websites.
Finally, there are a number of resources available at our bookstores, :connections, located at each of our campuses and online at resources. There are a number of resources expressly designed to help both North Point attendees and other churches understand our model; chief among them would be Simply Irresistible, which highlights our 7 Core Values, and the Everybody series, which examines what we truly mean when we talk about outsider focus.

No. Our training program is exclusively designed to equip the lead pastors and any existing staff members of our strategic partners.

We desire to partner with pastors who are like-minded, who show high leadership capacity and whose demographics predispose them to be receptive to the North Point model.
"Like-mindedness" refers to the leader’s fundamental belief in pursuing an outsider focused, simple-church model through ministry environments based on the North Point model. There are many great church strategies available, but we focus exclusively on North Point model churches simply because it is the only model with which we have the experience and expertise sufficient to offer substantive assistance. The shared model also allows our partners to maximize peer-to-peer learning by providing a common language.
High leadership capacity can be defined in many ways, but some of the traits that we believe reflect a high capacity leader are a leader’s ability to recruit others to a shared vision (the quantifiable evidence of this capacity would be a high rate of volunteerism, a high percentage of attendees in small groups and a high percentage of attendees who give monthly), intentionally designed systems that focus on those who are far from God (outsider focus) and the ability to attract other high capacity leaders.
Favorable demographics reflect a more subjective evaluation, but any acceptable location would share these core elements: a sufficiently dense population to support an ‘invest & invite’ growth strategy, a core team with both a commitment to the ‘invest & invite’ strategy and strong relational ties to the community, and community with a regular influx of new residents.

The time from initial interest to actual launch can typically range anywhere from 6 months to 2 years or more depending on leadership capacity, community support and a number of other factors. Our goal is to help plant churches that thrive in communities for years to come, so we will support a launch date that reflects a team’s readiness to be successful in accomplishing the church’s mission over a launch date that reflects the group’s eagerness to start.

To prepare to plant a new church or transition an existing church using the North Point model as your framework, you will need to develop these core elements:

• Effective leadership: we have found that the success of our strategic partners correlates directly to the strength of their leaders. We would advise any leader that their chances for success hinge greatly on their ability to gather a strong, committed core group of lay leaders. The ‘buy-in’ of this group can be both developed and evaluated by the number of people in the group itself, the percentage of the group in small groups, the percentage of the group who gives regularly and the ability of the group members to increase their ranks. The degree to which a leader is able to accomplish these ‘buy in’ indicators is a gauge of his ability to effectively cast vision, as well as a measure of his ability to raise the relational and financial capital necessary for his church’s survival.
• Dedicated lay leaders: this is a core group of people who share a passion for the people in their community who are far from God, who are willing to give regularly to support this effort, who have strong relational ties to the community, who understand the North Point model and who are committed to leveraging that model as the framework of their new church.
Although both groups are necessary in any successful North Point model church, there are steps that either group can take while praying and searching for the other. Life Lessons Over Lunch is a program designed to promote spiritual growth in the marketplace. You can get details about this ministry by going directly to LifeLessonsOverLunch.com or through the Adult Ministries link on insidenorthpoint.org. It is a simple and effective way to reach outsiders, as well as an excellent avenue for increasing your core lay leader team. There are also some financial instruments that can help you support your church-building effort. Direct financial contributions to support the leaders who will ultimately make up the church’s staff are one of the most prevalent forms early donations take. But, there are also great financial instruments called Donor Advised Funds available through Fidelity, Vanguard, National Christian Foundation, Schwab and others. Donor Advised Funds allow you to tithe into a fund that disburses only into the charities of your choice, such as a startup church. If, for whatever reason, the venture doesn't materialize, you can still direct the money to go to another non-profit. This allows for the establishment of faithful, consistent giving habits before the church launches and provides the critical operational capital needed for the effort to be successful.

No. North Point Ministries is non-denominational. Our statement of beliefs and values can be found in the FAQ section of the North Point web site.
We do have a number of strategic partner churches with denominational affiliations.

Each of our Strategic Partners is independently governed and financed.
From a governance standpoint, existing churches typically maintain their local governance, as set forth in their organization’s by-laws.  Occasionally, existing churches make alterations to their by-laws, as they become Strategic Partners.
New church plants may choose to install their initial elders from the ranks of NP staff and laypeople, who have a long history of NP involvement. The transition to local elders may take up to 36 months.

Our strategic partners handle all of their own staffing decisions. You can find the contact information for each of our strategic partners at www.northpointpartners.org.