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Vision, Strategy, and Goals

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Passing the Baton

Geneva Vollrath enlists Generation NeXt to reach women worldwide.
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra | Outcomes, Jun/Jul 2008

Stonecroft Ministries was old. Well-established. Comfortable. Effective for generations. And clearly in decline.

Established in 1938 in San Jose, California, Stonecroft was built by a generation of women who made do with less and supported the war in Europe, women who stayed home with their children, who shared the gospel with ladies at the local country club and over tea around the kitchen table. One of the few women's ministries to focus solely on evangelism, Stonecroft branched quickly across the United States, then gained widespread footholds overseas.

By 2006, the organization had 40,000 volunteer evangelists, mostly in the U.S., with a presence in 63 other countries. But the average age of a Stonecroft volunteer was over 60, its national representatives all needed to retire, and its numbers had been dropping for 20 years.

"Our audience stayed the same for too many years," says Geneva Vollrath, appointed in 2004 to be Stonecroft's third CEO, the first from outside the ministry. "If you read the statistics of churches that don't have children and people in their 20s and 30s, you see what happens to those churches."

Vollrath and other leaders realized Stonecroft's calling as a ministry was at stake if it did not reach out to younger women and teach them, in turn, to reach their generation for Jesus. She had been mulling over the problem when she spoke to a group in Colorado in September 2006.

"I was talking through the generational issues I saw out there," she says. "A young woman, a Generation Xer named Stephanie, came up to me and said, 'You nailed my generation.' Stephanie went on to explain how important it is to her generation that we in the older generation take time to mentor her." It was a "wow" moment for Vollrath, confirmed a few months later when a group of Texas women in their 30s asked to come under Stonecroft's leadership as they began a ministry to women in rural areas.

Vollrath knew God was telling her she was on the right track. Now her challenge was to visioncast and communicate this vision throughout the ministry, and to convince Stonecroft's volunteers to risk everything they knew how to do.

"We had a model, a manual," she says. "We knew everyone could do it the same old way. [By changing] we risked offending people who have done it traditionally; we risked ourselves, who we are known as." While Stonecroft wasn't doing away with traditional outreach models, it was adding variety and starting to move out of the box in many areas.

Today, just 18 months later, Vollrath and her team have hired younger staff members, pushing the average age of a Stonecroft staffer from over 60 down to below 50. The national representatives retired and Stonecroft hired 15 younger Field Directors instead, charging them to reinvigorate the troops to reach young women in their own communities.