Church Planters Academy Diary - Day 3

Session 0.5 Q&A with Tim and Tim

This was a continuation from the session last night.  We didn’t get to do Q&A with Tim and Tim because of time, so we picked it up again this morning.

The Tims talked more about distribution of leadership and clarified the I and We facets of leadership.  The fact is, just like Jesus had, there are always the 3, the 12, the 70 and the crowd.  Different circles of people with different levels of buy in, commitments, and levels of experience with the church plant.  It’s also okay to NOT do thing which are legitimate and good because they aren’t within the resource pool of the plant or within the ideology or vision of the church.  There are a lot of things that just aren’t at the right time.  (Many people come to a new church plant because all the other churches in town say no and they come to you hoping you’ll say yes.)

Tim Keel also said one of the most important functions of a leader is to name the things that you see going on in your community.  If something is not feeling right, if people seem tired, if something seems like it's running out of gas, if there’s a lot of energy in a particular direction, whatever…

Session 1 – Structures and Organization

Mike Stavlund – Common Table, Washington DC

Bruce Reyes-Chow – Mission Bay Community Church, San Francisco, CA (Former moderator of PCUSA)

Mike made an analogy to Walking Dead which I didn’t quite get.  The conclusion from the analogy was: “Beware of working for the people of the church instead of working with the people of the church.”  He also proposed a similar question: “Think about what will happen if you succeed?  What if you survive?  What kind of person will you become in the process?  What kind of community will you build in the process.”  He highly encouraged leaving gaps in the leadership structure of the church for other people to fill in.  Not a role where you tell them what to do, but a space for them to be creative and express their own gifts within a task.  Build a church that you love, not a church that only loves you for what you do for it.

Bruce did a powerpoint presentation on structures (slideshare.com/breyeschow).  He prefaced by saying he was working in and through the PCUSA and had had a positive experience of the mainline.  He just knew that there were other niches that the PCUSA wasn’t reaching, so he dreamed up a church that might reach some of those people.

Bruce first talked about why structures are often feared – they are most often not built for adaptability or flexibility.  They don’t inspire innovation.  The have been used to control and marginalize people.  Often times they codify one learning from one place and one time as if it will be applicable forever and ever.  He also pointed out that when we as pastors put things into a structure, we are necessarily giving away our power over them which requires trust.

He also pointed out that as people gather, some structure will take root.  We can be intentional about creating a structure which fosters innovation or we can just let the structure solidify on its own however it’s going to.

He talked about how reflective structures (structures which evaluate themselves regularly) avoid institutional marginalization and how healthy structures equip communities to manage polarities and maintain cultural continuity.  (I wrote that in my notes, but now I have no idea what it means.  I think basically he was saying healthy structures that allow adaptivity can give safe space for conflict, disagreement, and different visions, while also binding people together instead of being a wedge or a weapon that divides them.)

He advocated “institutional fluidity” (he chuckled at the almost oxymoronic quality of that phrase).

There are specific boundaries and assets – it’s not a free-for-all.  It embodies visions and culture, unleashes creativity and innovation, and it can mediate the ebb and flow of life.  Basically, a good structure is a healthy thing that creates stability in a good way.

A good structure can incarnate the ideals and values of the ministry.  It can administer and support the things about the church that are meaningful and it can help guide what are the things about the church which are meaningful.  It can nurture the church’s pastoral, prophetic, priestly, and poetic expressions, and it can be an individual person’s way of showing commitment to a church plant.

Bruce advocated using flexibility in structure like having 3 year terms for members of session but with permission to leave.  Mission Bay used face to face contact for the real life giving things – meaningful study, relationship building, organizational thinking and then used technology and online tools for business – votes, nuts and bolts decisions

They built in evaluation cycles for everything so that after 6 months, they’d take a look at a thing and decide if they still wanted to do it or if it had run its course.

Session 2 – Navigating the phases of a church plant

Panel

Doug identified (with some help) the following phases of a church plant:

1)      The church in your brain

2)      The initial core team meetings

3)      The first year before the crisis of change (honeymoon)

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4)      The traditions and history of the church being to compete with the present (That’s the way we’ve always done it)

There was also special mention of the 7 year itch in which everything seems to get deconstructed and a lot of things fall apart.  Bob’s advice was to endure, endure, endure.

I guess there’s a common issue of the core team leaving after 3 years?  Maybe from moving, boredom, burnout?  Tim Keel said that organizations are far more resilient than we give them credit for.  New people will take ownership and it doesn’t always have to be about you.

He said he went from a “trust me” phase where he was trying to build credibility with his core team and church participants to a “how can I help phase?” when people started taking the initiative and he just needed to serve as resource or consultant.

Doug asked about what the rites of passage in the life of church were to mark transitions and whether they were explicitly celebrated or marked.

Tim said sometimes you see them coming, sometimes you get caught flat footed, and sometimes you only see them in retrospect.  Any way the transitions happen, it’s important to name them, sit with them, experience them and celebrate or lament them.  Worship experiences are a great way to allow such moments to “be.”

Often the pastor has to go through a personal transition from approaching things through a “how do I solve this?” lens to a “What is God doing in this?” lens.

Doug asked “How do you balance looking back to reflect with looking forward to innovate?”  Some of the planters mentioned different ways they celebrated anniversaries, looking back at numbers and trends.  The conversation started veering towards numbers in general and the notion of “what you count is what you’ll get.”  Tim said if he counted anything, it was the number of people who were in discipleship relationships (mentor/mentee).

The conversation turned to salary of pastor and there were a couple of different models for paying the pastor.  I think the common thread was that no matter what you’re being paid, it has to make sense within the context of your church.  If you’re a small plant, don’t expect to get paid like a mega church pastor.  Another common thread was to look forward regarding salary.  If you take a small or no salary, what will happen when you leave?  Will anyone be willing to lead the church?  Will it need someone paid to lead it?

Session 3

Doug talked about some future opportunities for church planters.  He’s planning to do annual or more than annual events for church planters.  The Church Planters Academy sessions were all recorded and Doug will distill the knowledge and put it in book form.  Coaching will also be available from the presenters on an ongoing basis for approx. $3000 a year.  I’m hoping to find or raise the money, as I think that would be helpful for me.

Conclusions

Overall I got a lot out of the conference.  It was helpful to see a lot of models, to know that there are a lot of people trying this stuff, and to get some good practical and abstract ideas about church planting.  I’m not sure I related *that* much to a lot of the models that were being examined.  In particular, I have a very positive experience of the traditional, institutional mainline and I’m not that interested in creating something for people to come to.  One of the themes of the presenters was “I wanted to create a church that I would want to go to” but someone (Justin) asked/commented at one point “I don’t want to create a church that I want to go to.  I want to create a church that people far away from God would go to.“ My heart is in creating something where people far away from God might experience God or maybe even creating something where people close to God can go to be filled by the Spirit so they can reach out to people far away from God.  I still find it odd that none of the presenters mentioned the word evangelism.

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?

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.