Adult learners fill the building and flow into off-campus locations for Spring Hills Baptist Church’s latest selection of educational opportunities. Each class, meant to encourage people to learn, love and lead like Jesus, is part of Spring Hills’ overarching ministry known as Spring Hills University (SHU).
Spring and fall SHU courses include a wide variety of topics for adults who would like to grow spiritually, discover their God-given gifts, develop as leaders, and learn to build families. Classes take place on different days, in different locations, and vary in length from one to nine sessions in order to better accommodate individual schedules and allow people to participate in more than one class.
Spring Hills’ Connection Class is also part of SHU and provides a way for people to learn Spring Hills’ story, beliefs and values. They learn how to connect with a group, how to discover personal spiritual gifts, and where to serve – all as part of the church mission, “Building generations for Jesus Christ.”
With the excitement of each new semester of Spring Hills University, there are also a multitude of behind the scenes tasks and responsibilities for pastors, staff, and volunteers. They help people choose, schedule, find resources, locate, and attend classes.
One thing Spring Hills has found to be true is that with a program as large as SHU, organization is key. This year, Spring Hills has found that Realm is just the tool they have needed to bring all the details of SHU together into one place. So far, Spring Hills has enjoyed using Realm for registering students, sending out weekly class group emails, and providing class rosters for instructors. They hope to use Realm even more in the future to consolidate all SHU-related tasks into one easy-to-use app.
Spring Hills is finding, in addition to increased organization of their SHU ministry, the best part of using Realm as the backbone for SHU logistics and communication is the greater ability to so see fruit of the ministry. Weekly reporting of SHU attendance and the ability to filter these results by demographics provides real time and tangible evidence that SHU is meeting needs and helping people to love, live and lead like Jesus.
This post was contributed by Kathy Howell, one of our ministry partners. Kathy is the Communications Coordinator at Spring Hills Baptist Church in Granville, Ohio.
