Non-member Counseling:
Capitol Hill Baptist Church generally does not provide counseling services to non-members. We recommend Heart Song Counseling for nonmembers.
Church Recommendation:
Please visit the 9Marks Church Search as a starting place for healthy churches in your area. We do not know or endorse every church found on the tool, but this is a helpful starting place.
Membership:
There are 3 main steps in joining CHBC.
First, prospective members should take Membership Matters classes. Membership Matters are 6 classes offered at 9:30 a.m. on Sundays that help them get to know our church better. Going through Membership Matters classes does not require them to join the church, but it's often a helpful tool for them to get to know the pastors and our philosophy of ministry. The classes are required for anyone to join the church.
Second, an incoming member is scheduled for a membership interview with one of our elders. This interview is important because the elders ask for the incoming member's testimony and an explanation of the gospel. It's also a great opportunity for the member to ask questions that they have either from the Membership Matters classes or by observing our public services. For questions about how elders conduct membership interviews, a resource on 9marks.org is recommended: How to Conduct a Membership Interview. After the elder finishes the interview, he will present the membership application to the elder board for consideration to nominate this person for membership in the next members meeting.
Finally, in the next members meeting, the elder will present the prospective member and short biographical information. The congregation will ultimately vote to add the person to our membership.
Directory
The church uses Planning Center Online to create and manage the membership list. The directory is not edited as a PDF each time, but rather generated from Planning Center. The directory is built using a combination of software, PDFs, and Excel sheets. Another church administration platform that a sister church uses is Instant Church Directory, which is an app.
The directory has a specific structure:
- Cover Page
- Prayer Guide
- Elders, Deacons, Staff, and Interns contact details
- Church Covenant
- Members in the Area
- Members in the Area but unable to attend (physical ailments)
- Members out of the Area (temporarily away or transitioning to another church)
- Children of Members
- Supported Workers - Domestic
- Supported Workers - International
- Pastors Sent Out
- Supported Seminarians
- Former Staff and Interns
- Membership by First Name List
What do we do for music?
Bulletin and Sheet Music Preparation
- Hymn photos are typically found on websites like Hymnary.org and then copied and pasted into bulletins.
- For songs that cannot be found or are written in-house, a software called Sibelius is used to format the music, often to fit on one page.
- For copyrighted songs, a CCLI license is used to print music and lyrics for congregational use.
- Bulletins are emailed to the ensemble team by Friday, and ensemble members are expected to review the music before rehearsal on Sunday mornings.
- The bulletin creation process is described as "low-tech, Microsoft Word."
- Tips for assembling the bulletin include looking at page numbers to understand the finished product's order and inserting JPEG files of hymns directly into Word.
- The format requires the bulletin to have a number of pages divisible by 4 (e.g., 16 pages, which is 4 pieces of paper, double-sided, with 2 pages per side in landscape orientation). The number of "sermon notes" pages can vary to maintain this total.