Horizon Owings Mills in our tenth year as a church. We started with two “missionary families” and a few college students in 2001 and within a few years we grew to about 220 people on Sundays, 120 people in small groups. That was more people than our building and leadership structure could support so we we sent several small group leaders out to plant a church in a neighboring suburb. Two years later, we grew again and had the opportunity to start a church in another neighboring suburb, but that didn’t work out. Now, we’ve got about 90 people in small groups and about 100 people on Sundays.
After ten years, we’re starting to look like a “normal” church, and we have no idea what to do with that. We used to be 18 to 25 and single. We’d perform 4 to 5 weddings a year. Now, we’re having 5 or 6 babies born each year. All those babies are in our small groups, and they need to go to bed a lot earlier than 19-year-olds so many of our groups are experimenting with different times, patterns and activities, looking for models that fit our evolving community. We can see why many churches turn to age/gender segregation and programming, but we’re not going to go that direction. We don’t want to give up on the “extended family” we’ve been able to build through age/gender/stage of life-inclusive groups.
That’s a bit of what’s going on with us right now. We’re playing around with some Sunday morning ideas, conceptualizing a business start up that we think will help us start future church plants and looking for ways to connect with the local college and surrounding communities. But, including kids in our small groups and our movement from young and hip to geriatric and static are the biggest things we’re working through.
Welcome to Horizon.