Pittsburgh NCD Tour - Vera White: Presbytery Director of NCDs

Met with Vera White who is the Presbytery Director of NCD's.  She suggested that the core team of our church plant use the PCUSA "Starting New Churches" discernment guide to give us more direction in our discernment process.  It's 17 sessions and some churches have done retreats at the beginning, middle, and/or end to get a couple of the session done in one shot.  She said it would help us get to a more concrete idea of what we believe, who we wanted to serve, and what we would need to do to serve them.  She also mentioned that the GA offered some grants for NCD starts even if the Presbytery didn't.

I think possibly the most interesting thing she said was that she sees her role as the left tackle (in football) for the NCD pastor who is the quarterback.  She sees her role as advocating for the NCD and in particular explaining why the Presbytery needs another church when it already has so many (and when many of them are struggling).  She said that she takes a lot of flak on behalf of the NCD's (from established churches) but she gives them the space they need to do what they need to do.

We also talked a bit about the balance between living in ambiguity and structure and of all the potential dangers that ego can play.

Our visit was really encouraging.  Please pray for Vera as she discerns what's next for her after she leaves her position in July.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community

Met with Jeff from Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community and Jen, their intern.  Hot Metal Bridge is named after the bridge on Hot Metal Street which was named after the steel mills that used to be there.  It wasn’t a theological move or anything like that.  Hot Metal Bridge is PCUSA and Methodist and does a homeless ministry twice a week where they open their doors and serve whoever comes in.  They do communion every Sunday and have a meal every Sunday after worship.  Food is a big part of their community.

Jeff said that when they started, they (he and Jim, the other pastor) did a “vision lunch” where he invited everyone who might be even remotely interested and pitched them the idea of doing a non-traditional community centered church plant.  They got an 18 month grant from the Presbytery and started doing worship once a month in an old Goodwill store.  Jeff said he spent a lot of time hanging out in the community in coffee shops and prayer walking the neighborhood because he didn’t know what else to do.   They did monthly worship for 2 years before they started doing weekly worship.  Eventually they did discipleship classes and part of that was doing a thanksgiving meal for the homeless, which eventually became their twice a week homeless meal.

One big takeaway was that they were constantly evaluating what they did and even when things worked well, they didn’t feel the need to repeat them.  Jen said she really appreciated the flexibility at Hot Metal Bridge, where they could try all kinds of stuff and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and it was all okay.  They were comfortable throwing things up and seeing what stuck and not feeling too bad if it didn’t.

The other interesting thing was that he said they had arrived at a place where a lot of the things they said they weren’t going to be about (having and maintaining a building, hiring staff etc.) were the things they needed to think about now.  With 250 people they could support it, but they had to start thinking again for a different perspective what it meant to be “non-traditional church” in almost the opposite way of thinking about what it meant to be church when they first started.   That said, they turned their upstairs area into lofts that were just available to people who were visiting the community and needed a place to stay, so the space is still very non-traditional in its usage.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - The Open Door

Met with BJ from The Open Door.  It's a church of about 90 people which rents space in an old church building that is a combined use space: there's also a pottery studio, an acupuncture/yoga studio, a consulting firm, and 3 other tenants.  They're really focused on spiritual practice and discernment individually, as a church, and for their community.  They take seriously the idea that the individual's spiritual health will directly affect the spiritual health of the church which will directly affect the spiritual health of the community.  They make it a point to engage their community in dialog (sometimes doing listening meetings, sometimes doing prayer walks and hanging out in local establishments, sometimes just going door to door and asking people what they thought of the neighborhood they lived in and what it needed).  They take seriously the idea of the church outside the walls and have started an urban garden in a poorer neighborhood.  They also try to be very permission giving and also recognize that most of their "programs" (bible studies, small groups, etc.) are short lived - maybe 2 months.  People gather around different topics or areas of life and meet for a while and when things run out of gas, they are free to let them go and try something.  They try to partner with other Presbyterian and other churches in the neighborhood, realizing that they can't do it all.  For instance, they send their kids to one of the established Presbyterian Church's youth group and they all go to the midweek Holy Week services and Ash Wednesday services of an established Presbyterian Church.

They started as a second worship of an established church, but after they started growing, they realized that the character of the people who were coming to the second worship service (which was called the Open Door) was not at all like the character of the people so they discerned together that they should be their own church.  The space that they became a part of kind of fell into their lap.  Some people had bought an old church building and said they wanted it to be a mixed use space, but they wanted one of the tenants to be a church, and so they became that church.

BJ mentioned that he wished they hadn't started with worship as a focal point.  In particular, because they already had "their way" of doing worship from the original setting as a second service of the established church, when they moved into their own space in a different neighborhood it was much harder to adapt their worship to the community they were in.  He almost cautioned against making worship too big a part early on, because it had the potential to suck up a lot of time and energy that should be spent on missional engagement.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - The Upper Room

I met with Mike and Chris from The Upper Room in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  They started in 2008 right out of Presbytery and are both bi-vocational.  They received a grant and were both ordained into the NCD.  Upper Room's mission is calling, equipping and sending and their core values are multicultural, sacramental, and missional.  (Mike described a mission as "why you exist", a vision as "what will happen because you exist", and a core values as "how will you get there.")  They serve a lot of students and focus on international students in particular.  Their mission is done formally in some ways: they partner with an organization that helps welcome international students and they partner with an organization that helps people bring houses up to code, but they put more emphasis on mission as part of the culture of the church and part of the lives of the people, rather than a "church event."  When people moved away from the church, they would commission them to be missionaries wherever they were going.  In church, Chris talked about the people he encountered in his other job (a barista at local cafe) and how he was trying to be a presence for Christ in that environment.

They started first by prayer walking the different neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and finding a neighborhood that they really felt needed the kind of mission that they were passionate about.  They gathered a core team of some people who had been praying for their discernment and friends of friends into Chris' living room to pray.  They started on Sunday nights (and eventually moved to Sunday morning because of all the grad students who wanted to study on Sunday nights) and began adding elements of worship into their meetings - communion, preaching, etc.  Eventually that become Upper Room.

I think the biggest take away for me in my meeting with Mike and Chris was a reassurance that this stuff is actually possible.  Their story and the story of Upper Room isn't remarkably different from the path that I've begun to journey and some of the similarities (starting in the living room) gave me a lot of reassurance.  I do know that I need to be praying more and in particular, be more intentional about praying for the people I encounter and for God to lead me/us with some more structure.  I sort of have this idea that a voice will boom from the heavens and I'll know what I'm supposed to do, but perhaps I need to be listening for a still, small voice.

Keep Upper Room in your prayers as it's on the verge of outgrowing the space it's in and as they are one of the stops on the General Assembly tour of NCD's in Pittsburgh.

Unconvincing arguments for and against homosexual marriage and/or ordination

Homosexuality and its place in civil and religious life has been beat to death and I don't feel like I have any special insight to offer that hasn't been offered before.  However, as I continue to hear the debate, either in the context of same sex marriage or ordination of homosexuals, I have encountered a number of arguments which I find wholly unconvincing.  These points are cited at times as if they are the only necessary data point to draw a conclusion and the conclusion that follows is obvious and unassailable.  However, I find the points lacking in many respects.

I will attempt to portray the points fairly and avoid creating straw men, but I admit that the reason these points are listed here is that I think they are much more complex and subtle than they are often presented to be.  I do not intend to take either side in this post, but simply want to push back against some points from each side that I think are oversimplifications.

Unconvincing points from the "left":

1) Homosexuality is natural.  Other animals engage in homosexual behavior and that homosexual desire is not chosen but is something a person is born with.  The assumption is then that God created it and it must therefore be good.  

Counter point:  There are lots of things that are natural and not chosen but innate and that are exhibited in the animal kingdom but are decidedly bad and we would hesitate to say God created them.  When someone does wrong to me, I have the desire to do wrong to them, but society, morals, faith, and a whole host of other forces say that it's not okay to act on that desire.

2) This is like the civil rights movement and in 50 years everyone will look back and think those who opposed gay rights were all ignorant bigots.  Among younger generations, there is overwhelming support for gay rights and as those younger generations grow up, their views will be the social norm.

Counter point: So?  Seriously though, comparing gay rights and civil rights is helpful to a certain point, but there are distinct differences in the issues at hand (i.e. one is a behavior, one is not).  More importantly, I hope nobody changes their position on an important issue because of what people 50 years from now will think of them.  I have a number of views which younger generations probably think are outdated, misguided, and ignorant but I still think are right.  Should I change them just because 50 years from now, people will think I'm ignorant?

3) The reason the church is dying is because we don't support gay rights.

Counter point: There are many reasons the church is dying, but this is not one of them.  There are growing churches in all different parts of the country that unequivocally do not support gay rights and still bring people to Christ.

Unconvincing points from the "right":

1) The bible says it's an abomination.  Leviticus, etc. etc.

Counter point: The bible says a lot of things.  It tells us to stone people.  It tells us not to eat pork.  It tells women not to go to church with braided hair.  Taking passages and especially commandments out of their historical context or even out of the context within scripture is troublesome.  Now don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we can ignore what the bible says, nor am I saying that we can just hand wave away parts of the bible we don't like.  My point is that everyone interprets the bible when they read it.  Even the most staunch literalist is not going around stoning adulterers because it's a) against the law b) clearly against Christ's broader teaching.  We interpret the bible because it was written thousands of years ago, thousands of miles away and things might not all apply exactly the same way now as they did back then.  That's not to say "the bible says so" isn't a valid argument, just that it isn't the be all and end all of arguments.  There is room for interpretation in every passage.

As a side note, I still don't understand from a strictly biblical perspective, why we're okay without blanket rules about ordaining divorcees, adulterers, addicts, and even murderers, but we need a blanket rule about ordaining homosexuals.

2) "Next they'll want to marry animals."

Counterpoint: One of two things is going on in this argument.  Either it's comparing living, thinking, feeling, loving human beings to animals, in which case it doesn't deserve any consideration at all or, much like the "50 years from now" argument from the "left," it's dealing with something that isn't a reality, may never be a reality, and probably shouldn't influence us anyway.  If we think it's wrong for human beings to marry animals, what does that have to do with human beings of the same gender marrying each other.  We should treat the issue on its own merit, not on some imagined, possible extension of it that may or may not occur 50 years from now and may or may not have anything to do with the current issue at hand.

3) The founding fathers <or other historical figures> believed <whatever>

Counterpoint: This is one that has always puzzled me a little bit, even in politics, but especially in moral and religious realms.  I would hope that in the last 200+ years we've learned something which might make us better informed than our founding fathers.  Even setting aside the discussion of the religiosity of the founding fathers (and Jefferson in particular), what does their understanding of marriage 200+ years ago have to do with us today?  Isn't the whole point of the system of government that they created that it can change to adapt to the times and to the will of the people, rather than being set in stone once and for all?

4) The reason the church is dying is because we don't condemn homosexuality and we've lost sight of God.

Counter point: There are many reasons the church is dying, but this is not one of them.  There are growing churches in all different parts of the country that unequivocally support gay rights and still bring people to Christ.

Conclusion

This question is not a "one liner."  There is no simple argument which opens and shuts the case in one sentence.  It's tempting to assume that people who disagree with us are not "really" Christian or are ignorant, brainwashed, unfaithful, or "don't really believe in God."  That last one in particular strikes me as the last resort of arrogance.  Is it really not possible that someone else with a whole life of different experiences and teachings could love God and come to a different conclusion?  Have we really never changed our mind or position about anything and felt like we were faithful through the process?

This question is complex, subtle, important, and difficult.  Even tried and true patterns of compromise like "Agree to disagree" and "love the sinner, hate the sin" don't really work when passions are so high.  For a while I took the position "Why are we spending so much time and money arguing about this when there are much more important issues to deal with?" but even that position makes an assumption about the relative importance of different issues.  There are definitely faithful Christians on both sides for whom this issue is THE top priority in the ongoing faithfulness of the church.

I wish I had something more useful to say about what we should do instead of just refuting a bunch of points and then not adding anything positive to the conversation, but I don't.  I guess my approach at this point is to speak my voice and vote my conscience when given the opportunity, but generally not to go looking for a fight.  I fully understand that for some, this is a matter of justice and for others it is a matter of purity and both require more urgency than I have expressed.  I hope that whatever your position and whatever your level of urgency, you can see my approach as a faithful one rooted in my love of God and my desire to love my neighbor as myself and I hope that I can see your position in the same light.

Evangelism: Putting the "Good" back in "Good News"

Evangelism has become a dirty word in a lot of circles.  I just spent 3 days at the Church Planters Academy in Minneapolis and none of the presenters used the word "evangelism."  That's not to say that the church plants or the post-modern/emergent/missional church doesn't do evangelism, but we don't like to talk about it much.

Evangelism in Greek literally means, "preaching the good news."  (Angel in Greek simply means messenger or one who is sent).  James Choung, author of "True Story," (from which I stole a lot of the ideas in this post) in his presentation at the Big Tent Conference last year started by saying that we are naturally wired to share things that we think are good news.  When we see a great movie, the first thing we want to do is run out and tell everyone how great it is.  And yet, when it comes to the best news in all creation, we hesitate to share.  He claims that this is the case becausewe don't think it will be perceived as good news by people we share it with.

I think there are a number of reasons for this, but at the top of the list is the abusive, manipulative, and often just downright mean ways that people have claimed to be sharing "good news," all the while making it (and any sign of them) very bad news.  I think the majority of Christians know the gospel is good news, but don't know how to articulate the gospel in clear way that makes it good.

While in Minneapolis, I got into a conversation over dinner with some other church planters about evangelism and a guy asked me, "So then do you think there is truth outside of Jesus?"  I hesitated for a moment (and actually never got to answer his question, since he got a phone call) but I thought about that question and here's my answer:

The truth-iness of Jesus Christ is not relevant to the goodness of Jesus Christ.  I don't think "truth" is the right question for me or for most of the people who are far away from God.  I've never practiced any other religion so I can't speak to the truth of other religions compared with the truth of Jesus Christ.  (Notice the particularly post-modern move of allowing behavior and experience to define truth rather than vice-versa.)



However, as an adult convert to Christianity, I have a very clear understanding of the goodness of the gospel and, for me, it basically involves three moves:

a) The world is full of suffering on the global and individual levels.
The global level of suffering is hard to argue.  Pick up a newspaper and you will see suffering.  The individual level of suffering is a little bit less public, but no less real.  My life was full of shame, guilt, and pain and I really didn't like what I saw when I looked in the mirror.  I felt inadequate, alone, afraid, and hopeless.

b) The God of the bible is good.
In spite of things like the problem of suffering and the wraths in the Old Testament, the overwhelming message of Jesus Christ is grace and love, as well as justice and empowerment.  (For many post-moderns, this move may actually come third.)

c) A life connected to God's goodness alleviates individual and global suffering.
As I struggle to turn my life more and more towards God, I continue to find that I have a much greater ability to live in a way that I can be at peace.  I like what I see in the mirror.  The more connected I become to God, the more I am able to be at peace with my own faults, the faults of other people, and the faults of the world AND the more able I am to change my faults and the faults of the world.  (The faults of other people are pretty much between them and God).

So that's the good news to me and that's the good news that I have committed my life to sharing.  Whether it's true, exclusively true, kind of true, or possibly even not true (another post for another time), I have found goodness in Jesus Christ and when I think that there are still people who feel inadequate, alone, afraid, and hopeless, then I feel ever more motivated to share the goodness that I have found in Jesus Christ.

So how about you?  What about the gospel is good news (or bad news) to you?

(Maybe I'll make this into a series and post about ways to share that goodness, but I think articulating the goodness itself is probably a good start.  Plus, nobody wants to read 8 pages.)

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.