Church Planters Diary Day 2

Session 1

Rachel Swan and Ann Kim – Pizzeria Lola

Rachel and Ann (in particular) talked about how they started a pizzeria with no experience in the restaurant business.  Ann said they threw caution to the wind financially and put all their life savings plus maxed out their credit cards because they couldn’t find any investors to give them capital.  Their staff is very much a community and every day before work they check in (“preshift huddle”) with each other about their personal lives for 15 minutes.  Ann said the key to making the staff a community was to make them feel valued.  Not that you’ll listen to or do everything they say, but they you’ll hear them.  She said the people were way more important than the building or the stuff and it took time to create a team which worked.  They had to fire people (amicably) whose strengths did not match the vision or expectations of the pizzeria.

Take away idea: “You have to listen to your gut.  The DNA of the organization is in you.  Let it guide you.”

Session 2

Context is Everything

Russel Rathbun & Debbie Blue – House of Mercy St. Paul

Russel and Debbie started a church basically by becoming a part of the St. Paul music scene.  They invited (and somehow got) famous musicians to come play at some of their events and then started doing a Saturday Night / Sunday morning thing where local bands would play at their church on Saturday Night and then during the Sunday morning worship gathering the next day.  They publicized their church the way local artists would publicize a gallery opening or a band would publicize a gig they were playing (send out postcards to friends).  They publically engaged the artists at artists events.  For example, bringing blank canvases to art festivals and just letting people paint on them.  Russel had a feeling that the “post-modern” church was plateauing and whatever was next would be different.  He proposed an idea of a church with an expiration date – what if at the founding of a church, you said in 5 years we hope to plant some new Christian communities and then we’ll be done.  The positives would be it would give permission for the thing to run its course and people wouldn’t feel like they had to hang on to something just for the sake or longevity or survival.  Paul (the apostle) planted a lot of churches and they don’t all exist and none of them look like what they did back then.  I agree with the idea of constant evaluation and the freedom to let a thing go when it’s run its course, but I hesitate to set the expiration date so early in the process.  I would maybe suggest doing annual mission reviews that included the question “Does God still want us to be a ‘thing’?” So that the Holy Spirit can tell us when it’s time to let go, rather than just semi-arbitrarily deciding at the start.

Session 3 – The First Two Years

This was a panel of presenters and other church planters (some who were attendees of the conference) who just got up and gave one liners about mistakes they made and advice for the first two years.  I’m basically just going to give the list:

-When you say you’re going to pray for someone, pray for them.

-If you plant a church, you may get disciples.  If you make disciples, you will get a church.

-Get to know Jesus more, treat yourself well, cook for your people.

-Do things that give you life and energy.

-Just because you do something that works once, doesn’t mean you have to do it again.

-Try not to take yourself too seriously.

-Recognize times when you’re intentionally creating chaos so you can ride in on a white horse to save everybody.

-Do not neglect your own spiritual care.

-Early on, I didn’t want it to be “the Tim show” so I used the pronoun “we” too early.  There wasn’t a “we” yet so language like “we believe…” and “we do…” made people think there was a “we” they weren’t a part of.  For the first few years, it was really about what I was doing and whether people wanted to join in that.

-If you can’t be the church without money, you aren’t going to be the church with money.

-Divorce the sustainability conversation from the faithfulness conversation.  And have both of them.

-Don’t wait too long to start good financial practices (accountability, budgeting etc).

-Have friends who aren’t a part of the church.

-“People leave.”  It’s not about you.

-Instead of thinking about who to reach, think about who you want to be led by and who you want to learn from.

-Stay crazy.

-Approval seeking is toxic and hopeless.  Be yourself and be comfortable.

-You won’t plant a church with the people you think you’re going to plant with.  There’s no one you need in your church plant except Jesus.

-Don’t believe what the people tell you when they say they’ll show up or call or whatever and don’t take it personally when they don’t.

-Don’t pick people for your team because you want to help them. (Codependency)

Session 4 – “I don’t get what you’re about”

Don and Pam Heatley Skyped in from New York (Vision).  The connection was a bit iffy so the conversation wasn’t easy to understand.  Basically what I got from the conversation was – People may not understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.  Sometimes it helps to put it on paper, but more for yourself than anyone else.  Have a clear understanding of why you’re doing it, what you hope to accomplish, who you hope to reach, what you hope to reach them with, and then don’t worry if anyone else gets it.

Bob Hyatt – Evergreen Community, Portland, OR

Bob talked more about the question “What to do with what other people think about my ministry?”

He said the biggest pressure was for him to understand himself.

Two types of people want to plant churches – the narcissist and the codependent.  i.e. The need to succeed and the need to please.  He said narcissism is often confused with vision and leadership charisma.  It’s revealed as narcissism by the long trail of bodies.  Narcissists enjoy conflict to demonstrate how much better they are than other people.  Codependents base their happiness on how happy other people are with them.  They avoid conflict.  Bob suggested that the growth of the codependent shouldn’t be to care less about what other people think, but to know more and be convicted more by what I think.  He also cautioned against preaching the unconditional love of God and then leading as if God’s love depended on our success or accomplishment.  He said differentiation is the ability to remain connected in significant relationship to people, while not allowing our behaviors or actions to be determined by them.  He said that Sabbath from a Christian perspective is the resting of my soul in the finished work of Jesus.

Maggie Mraz – Bull City Vineyard, Durham, NC

Maggie had a really interesting manifesto about her relationship with God and her place as a child of God, but I didn’t get any good notes from it.  Here’s what I have:

“When someone doesn’t get you, you feel rejected.”  We have got to care more about what God thinks than what people think.  Guard the time you have with God.  God knows what he’s doing.

Session 5 – Vision casting and leadership

Tim Keel – Jacob’s Well

Leadership is about seeing possibility and then committing whole heartedly to the path that opens up towards that possibility.  Jesus said, “Behold!  The kingdom of God is at hand!”  He pointed to a future and then through his commitment, helped bring that future into the present.  The biggest problem of leaders is a crisis of imagination i.e. not being able to see beyond the status quo.  Tim talked about the four modes of engagement as a leader:

1)      Knowing – perceiving data

2)      Being – Presence

3)      Doing – Practices

4)      Relating – Postures

He said we traditionally understand leadership as knowing and doing, but it’s really 90% about being and relating.

Tim Conder – Emmaus Way

He said that early on he just had to tell people what the values of the new church were going to be and people could either come along and follow or not.  He didn’t open the values of the church to a discussion.  The values were: missionality, hospitality, egalitarian-ism (all staff were bivocational).

Then once he got some buy in to those core values, then he had to work on giving things away.  He had to let other people become the social hub of the church or the mission hub of the church.  He said, “Look at who you are as a person and figure out how to do thing within your temperament.  Look for other people to do the things that aren’t in your temperament.”

At the end of the day, I still had two questions lingering:

1)      I would guess well over half of the church models presented have music and art as a focal point in the church.  Does this have to be the case?  I know the answer is no, but I’d sure like to see that fleshed out more.

2)      (And my wife reminded me that I have a chip on my shoulder about the “emergent church” so take this with a grain of salt)  Why aren’t we talking about evangelism?  Nobody’s even used the word.  There’s a lot of ground work that has to go on before you can even invite someone to check out a church or Christian community or even a “missional happening” or whatever.  How do we engage people who are far away from God in a way that would make them want to be a part of a Christian community or even understand what a Christian community is for or about, long before we’re ready to invite them to check it out?