In 2016, The Great 50 Day Challenge began as a period of renewal at First Untied Methodist Church of Port St. Joe, FL. The church had just come though a challenging season where several families had left the church. This sent the pastor of the church into a period of darkness questioning how to take a church forward in this divisive time.
On Good Friday, at the deepest of the darkness, the pastor, Geoffrey Lentz, felt the Holy Spirit challenge him to get up on Easter Sunday and announce that the Great Fifty days of Easter would be a season of new life. He challenged the church to bring in fifty new members in fifty days. This was an outlandish notion since the church had never brought in fifty members in a given year more less fifty days but Geoffrey challenge the congregation anyway.
By week three, fifty people had joined. A total of 98 had joined by the day of Pentecost. The church and pastor were not remotely prepared for this avalanche of new life. It created a snowball that forever changed the life of the church.
Looking back, it was this fifty day period that was the catalyst for transformation which led the church to more than doubling in size and caused a complete transformation in ministry, outreach, giving, and identity.
A few years later, Geoffrey shared these ideas with his friend Jay Cooper, the Pastor at First United Methodist Church of Montgomery, Alabama. Jay saw a need in his church for a jumpstart after the difficult years of the pandemic. He adopted The 50 Day Challenge and expanded it to other acts of service. The church brought in many new members, wrote letters to veterans, provided socks and gift cards to college students, packed care boxes for inmates, set giving challenges, and did several other acts of kindness. All of these practices together rocketed the church back to life. This intentional focus on new life and growth set the church on a new trajectory of growth and life.
Jay and Geoffrey talked about how others could benefit from this program and discussed it with their friend Nathan Attwood, Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Marianna, Florida. Nathan has a heart for the health of the greater church, especially churches in rural settings. When the three of them heard their Annual Conference statistical report read in 2021, where baptisms and professions of faith were becoming scarce and church closures were even more common, they knew that something had to be done. Revival was needed. Nathan immediately starting asking pastors to join in The Great 50 Day Challenge.
