Connection Point Church among America’s fastest-growing congregations

Connection Point Church in Jackson has been listed in an Outreach magazine article among the 100 fastest-growing churches in the United States.

Each year, the Lifeway Research team surveys churches, verifies the numbers, calculates the results and compiles the lists stated in the article on its website. In preparation for this annual report, they solicited participation from more than 10,000 churches.

Connection Point Church was ranked 74 out of 100 with an attendance average of 1,919 and a growth rate of 23%, according to the Outreach Lifeway Research website.

The church’s head pastor is Chris Vaught, who has been with Connection Point since January 2011, before the congregation changed the name to Connection Point from The First General Baptist Church of Jackson Missouri in 2012.

"We are humbled by the growth we’ve seen in such a short time. This recognition is not about us but about God's faithfulness and our people's willingness to share His love. What started as a small gathering all those years ago has grown into something that exceeds anything we could have imagined. We are simply grateful for the lives touched and the opportunities ahead as we continue to serve,” Vaught said in a news release.

Compared to attendance in 2019 of just more than 900 people, Connection Point now serves a congregation of more than 2,200 in-person split among three services each week and more than 7,000 online viewers each week. Vaught said the church is really big on teaching people to have a personal relationship with Christ and then teaching scripture.

“The people themselves have gotten so motivated to want to grow in their personal walk with Christ and then study learning how to learn from Scripture and apply Scripture to their lives. They're the motivators right now, they're the ones that are inviting. 97% of people who attend church still do so from a personal invite. And a lot of our growth has come because our people have gotten so focused on their own walk with Christ, and they're sharing Christ with family, friends, neighbors and then with the online campus,” he said.

In addition to people attending because they were invited, Vaught said he has met many people who began viewing services online and wanted to show up on the physical campus. He said people have come from South St. Louis, Southern Illinois, Portageville, Fredericktown and the Farmington area on a regular basis after attending online. There is also a large Bollinger County attendance, which has given Connection Point the opportunity to start on a new campus there.

“We found was we had over 100 families driving from Bollinger County to this campus every weekend, and then we were gifted a piece of property. A church that was closing actually called us and said, 'We have so many people from our community already driving to Jackson that if you will open a campus here in Bollinger County, we will donate this property to the church.' And that's what they did. And so we're pretty excited about that. We have over 100 volunteers already from this campus who are going to help launch that one in the community hopefully in November,” Vaught said.

To keep up with the demand of the Jackson campus, Connection Point has had to build two more parking lots as well as another road to come in and out of the property. The campus is set on 28 acres and the church building is a 43,000-square-foot facility.

Along with this facility, those at the church try to keep to the key ingredient of the church — a personal relationship with Christ, teaching Scripture and then community engagement. As a church, the congregation is big into helping the community and is involved with the local schools and businesses, Vaught said.

Vaught said he and his team at Connection Point had no idea they were in the top 100 growing churches in the United States, but were extremely humbled at the news, as well as learning they were the only church in Missouri to be listed.

“You don't think about it in the moment, because we're so engaged in just trying to do ministry and touch people's lives. The fact that we're in Jackson, Missouri, a town of 15,000 people — so when we were notified that we made the top 100, it was somewhat surprising. It was extremely humbling, and we know that we can't take any credit for it. We're just striving to honor Christ and to make Him known to people. We have a saying here, 'We want to see God do a work that only Christ can get the glory for.' We want people to say, 'That's not the pastor, that's not the team, that's not those people, they're not that good. God has to be doing this,' because we know in the end, he's the only one that made this happen,” Vaught said.

For more information about Connection Point Church, visit https://yourcpc.church.