Church Planters Academy Dairy – Day 1

We started the day by finishing these three sentences in small groups:

I come from a people who…

I come from a place where…

I bring with me…

Session 1 – Creating Something from Nothing

Maggie Mraz – Bull City Vineyard (Durham, NC)

Nanette Sawyer – Grace Commons PCUSA, (Chicago, IL)

Nadia Bolz-Weber – House for all Sinners and Saints ELCA (?)

This session had a lot of good stories of success, but not too much guidance on what the core values or principles guiding that success were.  I know that transplanting ideas directly to a different context wouldn’t work, but I assume certain principles and values could work in a lot of different contexts.  A couple of common points to highlight: The power of relationships.  All three churches were heavily built around what the community was interested in and what the church might do to be a positive force to people in the community.  All three churches had very distributed leadership.  Nadia said “We are anti-excellence, pro-participation.”  In other words, we’d rather have people feel free to participate poorly than feel like only polished and practiced people can do so.  In a lot of cases, the leadership just let people have ideas and run with them without participating in whatever they were doing.  Very permission giving.

Session 2 Part I - ???

Mike Toy – Netscape employee #7

I’m not really sure what the point of this session was.  It was interesting to hear, but really focused on Mike’s story of different startups and how Netscape was incredibly successful by certain metrics but kind of toxic (100 hour work weeks for months at a time) in a lot of other aspects.

Seesion 2 Part II – Why failure is not an option, it’s a necessity.

Mike Stavlund, Rich McMullen, Mark Scandrette

This session was about failure(!).  The presenters looked at it from a couple of different angles.

1)      Failure from an individual ministry perspective – sometimes you just have to let a program or event go, because it’s run its course.  Either it’s not serving its purpose anymore or its purpose is no longer where the church is headed.  No matter how much you like it, sometimes some things just don’t work and that’s okay.  Using a language of “experiment” and “prototype” rather than “program” will help build a culture where it’s okay to try things that don’t work.

2)      Failure from a community standpoint – we heard a couple of stories of church plants that didn’t get off the ground.  Sometimes that happens too.  Maybe the measure of a “church” is in impact instead of longevity.  We all know of churches that can survive but aren’t making an impact.  But my question which I never really got to ask: how do we know we’re not using ‘impact’ as a cop out for not doing hard things.  Like we could all sit around a camp fire and sing Kum-ba-yah and think we’re having this great impact, but if nobody is being transformed by Christ, then nobody will come, and then we’ll die.

3)      Failure from a personal standpoint – the take home here was “It’s not about you.”  The success and failure of the church are not about your ability as a human being or your worth as a child of God.  It’s easy to go into an emergent/mission church plant with a “I’m going to show all those old people” chip on your shoulder or it’s easy to throw yourself into the church plant because your ego really *needs* (word choice intentional) it to succeed, but none of these are healthy patterns.  Sure, God can use them, but they’re not healthy.  The fact is that God’s goodness and our goodness are not contingent on anything at all and especially not on the success or failure of a church plant.  And the sooner we can acknowledge and embrace that and let God use us for whatever he wants and trust that when we give our best, the rest is completely in his control, the more likely we are to “succeed” (however you want to define it) anyway.

My big conclusions of the day was: church planting is really, really hard.  It will test and stretch your faith and commitment. God will show up but not always in the way you want and not always with the news you want. The trust to hold your plans below God's plans is key.