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October 10, 2003
When Woodland Hills Church rolled out its Growing in the Spirit project during the first months of 2003, Senior Pastor Greg Boyd mentioned the The Sanctuary as one of its partner ministries. Efrem Smith had recently launched this church plant in North Minneapolis, and Boyd said he wanted Woodland Hills to help Smith avoid "ten years' worth of mistakes" the leadership learned first-hand guiding Woodland Hills.
With a congregation of over five thousand people, one may be confounded by the words "mistakes" and "Woodland Hills" showing up in the same breath. The infectious popularity of the church, which came very early on in its life, necessitated moves to larger venues like Harding High School in the spring of 1995, and Arlington High School in 1998. But the church lacked a governing foundation: no board of directors, no constitution, and no mission statement.
"For a long time," Boyd said, "we'd ask, 'What type of church do we want to be?' Here we are, growing from five hundred to a thousand, and always kind of asking, 'What do we want to do? Where do we want to go? What are we supposed to be doing?'"
This notion of spontaneity allowed God to move the church in the directions he wanted it to go, but it also lacked a certain micromanagement that allowed the rudder to be ignored.
“For four years,” Teaching Pastor Paul Eddy said, “‘How are we going to get through next Sunday?’ was the only question anyone could ask. It was like, we have to do what happened last week, plus two hundred more people. So there was never any time to get strategic until things got so bad we had to forget about Sunday. We had to figure out who we were and what we were doing.”
Part of “forgetting about Sunday” was adding Janice Rohling to staff, who became the Executive Pastor. Her job was to take the leadership’s vision for the church and give it clarity, to mold it into a workable model. She likened her job to that of a person assembling a puzzle.
“A lot of my job was getting the pastors on board with where we were going... spending time with them, gaining trust with them, and getting them to buy into what we were trying to do,” she said.
In 1997, Rohling formed the Steering Committee, a group of leaders in the church who were assigned the task of forming a board of directors and drafting a church constitution.
“Out of the Steering Committee,” she said, “came the structure.”
One may wonder, then, about the paradox of a church that grew to such a size while almost coming apart. How does one reconcile the two extremes?
“The answer,” Eddy said, “has a bi-level reality. There’s a God piece and there are human pieces. The first human piece is this guy, let’s be honest [pointing to Boyd]. That’s why we went from forty, to three hundred, to one thousand pretty quickly. Norm [Blagman, Worship Pastor] became the second big human piece in terms of a draw. We’ve got amazing preaching and worship at this church. There’s a really good communicator and a really good worship leader, and that’s the dual team that any church can use as a launching pad. And on the human level that’s what God used.”
Check back soon for the third and final installment of Woodland Hills history articles!
article by Matt O'Brien | 
