Our church offers college level
fully accredited Bible training to all our membership. It is called
Highlands College. See https://www.highlandscollege.com/
.
We have approximately 1,000 students attending. We bought a conference complex a couple of years back from Healthsouth Corporation.
It is our pastor’s vision to make it tuition free. The students get hands on training in the ministry while getting classroom training.
A girl from our campus wants to be a worship leader. While she was in Highlands college, she lead the worship with fellow students in small churches throughout central Alabama. After graduation, she became an intern in our campus, and she now helps lead the worship. Her hopes are to be a foreign missionary in Japan.
Even in Huntsville, we can take Highlands college courses on Tuesday nights in our office complex to get our degrees and a place of service while getting our degree.
Our pastor has just
recently met with the mayor of Birmingham. Birmingham is on a lot of
the most violent cities in America lists. The mayor told our pastor that
4 neighborhoods out of the 99 neighborhoods are like war zones, so
we have a strategy of treating them like a home mission field.
We are planning to launch a campus like no other this summer in one of these neighborhoods. Instead of live streaming the preaching from our main campus.
Their campus pastor will be teaching messages specially tailored for people in those neighborhoods. Our pastor wants to use our Highlands College students to go door to door in an attempt to reach those neighborhoods for Christ.
Last week we launched our 2nd
Dream Center in Auburn Alabama. http://highlandsdreamcenter.com/
A Dream Center is a free medical and dental clinic where we provide
free care to the poor.
We also have a mobile Dream Center which we take to the poorest of neighbors to offer help. Members are offered an opportunity to serve there.
In addition, we have serve team small groups which members can help around the community free of charge.
Our church is developing an Ober like app. which will allow members to list the area of service, the types of skills needed, how many of each skill that they require, so we can more effectively build a team for each task to assist the poor. Our goal is to offer this app without any Church of the Highlands logos, so we can provide this app free of charge to any church who wants to use it. Any church who wants to use it can be customized with their own logo to make it their own.
In addition, each year our pastor asks for every member to serve one day in July to make an impact on our cities. We all wear the same logo shirt as we go out for various projects. Last year we had more than 25,000 participating.
Our pastor has an accounting
background, and he believes in being debt free. Currently, our church
operates on 60% of our income. We use the 40% to save up for new
buildings, while giving away the rest.
We currently have 8 campuses without buildings, and we are building campus buildings in Huntsville and Auburn right now.
We currently have 12 small groups and one freedom group meeting in Mobile, Alabama getting ready for the campus launch in August.
We are currently in negotiations with the Civic Center in Huntsville for a second Huntsville campus. We normally first go into a new community in the most affluent places for a campus. Live on 60% to build the building debt free. Then, launch campuses in less affluent areas of the city, and use the funding from the more affluent campuses to help pay for the buildings in the less affluent areas debt free.
Each July we also have our High
School/ College age Motion Conference http://highlandsstudents.com/events/motion-conference/.
Last year we had 17,000 students who came to the Birmingham Civic Center for training.
We open this conference up internationally wide. The conference consists
of 2 1/2 days of intense training and worship to prepare our students
to be victorious in the school year.
Yesterday, our students were offered a $75 early bird package which included a bus ride to Birmingham, hotel room, food, and the conference. If a student cannot afford to pay, they are offered a free scholarship. Each month the students have a monthly Motion night. http://highlandsstudents.com/event/motion-night-13/ .
Our Huntsville campus fills up our auditorium with 800 students for worship, teaching, and encouragement to join a small group for accountability.
Our church also has a First Wednesday service where our auditorium is normally near capacity. Tomorrow night for 1st Wednesday we are having Craig Groeshel who pastors the largest church in America.
Lastly we are in 19 of the 23
prisons in the state of Alabama. What we do is conduct worship services
each week in those 19 prisons, and have small groups. Our goal is to be
in all 23 prisons. We invite inmates after they are released to
continue to worship with us. We are also on President Trump’s
advisory council of improving the prison systems in America.
