Christian Congregation Church, Alexandria, Indiana

Founded by farmers in 1907, Christian Congregation Church has been a fixture in central Indiana for well over a century. Today it’s led by Pastor Kevin Young, the second generation of his family to pastor the church. His father led it for 40 years before him, and both his sisters still serve alongside him. It’s a small rural church with a long memory and deep roots.

It’s also a church that has been quietly exploding with life.

After reopening from COVID at around 100 people on a Sunday, attendance climbed steadily to more than 300. In a single recent calendar year, this “small church” baptized 100 people, including a wave of young athletes who came to faith through a pastor’s outreach to the local football team. Growth like that is a gift. It also creates a problem most churches would love to have: you start running out of room.

Knowing It Was Time

The last major building project at CCC happened in the late 1990s, when Pastor Kevin was still a boy. None of the three pastors currently on staff had ever led a building campaign. As the space crunch became undeniable, the leadership knew they needed help, but they weren’t sure where to start.

“I got some sort of email, saw something online,” Pastor Kevin recalls, “and I sent it to the other pastors and said, hey, maybe we should talk to this company.” That company was INJOY Stewardship Solutions.

Like a lot of rural churches, CCC faced real reasons to hesitate. Campaigns cost money. Would a rural congregation have the capacity to give? Was this even the right season, with so much uncertainty in the broader economy?

Pastor Kevin’s leadership landed in a place of conviction rather than fear. As he put it, there’s never really a perfect two-year window where you can guarantee everything will go smoothly, and waiting for one is its own kind of risk. The church came to feel that the cost of waiting was going to be more than the cost of moving forward. If not now, when?

Why INJOY

CCC had options. They could have pulled something together themselves. The executive pastor is gifted in finance, and the instinct to “do it in-house” was real. What tipped the decision was a combination of INJOY’s organizational depth, history, and affiliations, plus encouraging conversations with other churches who’d walked the same road.

But the moment it truly clicked came early. After the very first real conversation with their INJOY consultant, Keith, Pastor Kevin turned to his board and said he felt they’d already gotten their money’s worth, before Keith had even made his first visit. From that point on, there was a settled sense of peace that this was the right step at the right time.

The Spiritual Journey at the Center

Here’s what surprised them. They came in thinking the campaign was fundamentally about funding a building. What they discovered was that the heart of it was spiritual.

From the first conversation, INJOY pressed the church to make spiritual growth, not dollars, the central story. The 21-day spiritual journey reshaped habits across the congregation. A church-wide push to read a chapter a day through the Gospel of John caught fire, and people didn’t want it to stop. Months later, the church is still at it, now reading through Acts together with discussion groups built around it.

The fruit went beyond reading plans. Pastor Kevin, by his own admission someone who had taken a “laid back” approach to teaching on giving, found himself convicted to be more intentional about the spiritual side of generosity, and preached a series on it even before the campaign launched. The church developed new leaders and uncovered spiritual gifts in people they’d never had the chance to recognize before. There were baptisms during the campaign, and then ten more at Easter, just on the other side of it.

INJOY and Keith also championed something close to Pastor Kevin’s heart: bringing the whole family along. This wasn’t an adults-only effort. The kids and students were folded in, and the church saw the fruit of that in its children’s ministry too.

The Results

CCC set a goal of $300,000 for a two-year campaign, a deliberately measured timeframe, since this was new territory for the congregation. Pastor Kevin went back and forth in his own mind, some days sure they’d sail past it, other days wondering if they’d ever reach it. Keith’s steady coaching kept him focused on doing it the right way and trusting God with the outcome.

The outcome was remarkable:

• Goal: $300,000
• Total pledged: $364,000, well past the goal
• First Fruits offering: $70,000

That First Fruits number is dramatically higher than the average INJOY sees in campaigns, a strong signal of the trust this congregation has in its leadership, and of a church ready to move.

“Worth It?”

Asked what he’d tell another pastor wondering whether a capital campaign with INJOY is worth it, Pastor Kevin doesn’t hesitate. One phone call, he says, was worth the cost.

The way the church came to frame it was simple: for a limited time and a specific purpose, they had effectively brought Keith on as a fourth pastor. By that measure, they got far more than their money’s worth. Keith was a text away whenever a question came up, and he was always right there.

“There was never a moment where I thought, you know what, we could have done this without INJOY. It was the exact opposite. Every step along the way we were going, we needed them. We couldn’t have done this without them.” — Pastor Kevin Young

And the lasting impact, in his view, won’t be measured in square footage or dollars raised. It’ll be measured in the daily Scripture habits that stuck, the leaders who emerged, the gifts that surfaced, and a pastor who came away changed, convinced that for Christian Congregation Church, this was exactly where the Lord wanted them.