Control, Trust, and Surrender

written by Bethany McKinney Fox

This devotional-style blog series is written with the intention of giving you space slowing down, find your center, and ground your day.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

In pretty much every recent conversation I’ve had with church starters and leaders, the consistent questions are how long physical distancing will last and when it will be wise and safe to gather again in person with our worshiping communities.

These wonderings make sense - we want to plan, to discern the best path forward for connecting to our members and connecting them to each other, and honestly, to prepare personally in our own hearts and minds for how long we are going to be leading church online. And every day we are reminded that we are not holding the steering wheel on the world, that we don’t have ultimate control over the spread of the virus, the decisions of our lawmakers on when to allow gatherings, or over the feelings of our community members on when they feel safe to meet again. There is a lot that is out of our control.

And I think most of us realize that really, that’s always true. But this season makes it obvious a lot more often. The control we think we have over our lives and the world is mostly an illusion, and one that gets disrupted on the regular. But in non-pandemic times, some of us like to lull ourselves back into the soothing belief that if we can just do things the best or “right” way, we can achieve all the outcomes we plan for. Nothing like a pandemic and the tragedy, grief, and frustration that comes with it to remind us that we can’t hold the reins quite as tightly as we sometimes might want to.

Below you’ll find a scripture, reflection questions, and a closing prayer to make some space to prayerfully reflect on control in your own life, or loss of control, and how you hold these together with trusting God and surrendering to the movement of the Spirit. When it feels like the right time, you might spend some moments with God to wonder together. It might be first thing in the morning, during a mid-day walk, with a close friend over video chat, with a member of your household, or at the end of the day as you reflect on all that has happened. May it be a time of feeling grounded in the love and sufficiency of God.

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Scripture

You’re invited to read this slowly, maybe a couple of times, and invite God to speak to you. Notice your reactions as you read the story, where you resonate, where you feel tension, where you have questions.

Luke 1:26-38

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

Questions for Reflection 

Take some time to be with God as you reflect on any or all of the questions below, whichever feel meaningful to you, or anything else the Spirit brings to mind. It may help to write things down to help organize your thoughts or feelings, or simply to make space for silence and notice what comes up.

• What are some of the places in your life or in leading your community where you feel especially not in control right now? What is not going according to your vision or plans? Additionally, what are some of the places where you do feel control, and where things are going pretty much how you plan for them to go?

• Think about what feels out of control right in life now, what feelings does that bring up in you? Anger? Disempowerment? Peace? Amusement? Exhaustion? Creative energy? Fear? Trust? Something else?

• How are you responding to or coping with any difficult feelings? What are some of the more and less life-giving ways you are caring for yourself in this season?

• In the scripture above, what was your reaction to Mary’s final statement, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”? Did it feel like an attitude you aspire to have in your relationship with God, or not? Or does it feel complicated? Why or why not?

• When we feel a loss of control, it can be an invitation to trust in God or surrender our plans and life to God’s love and movement. Which of these words—trust or surrender—do you feel more closely captures what God is inviting you to in this time of pronounced uncertainty? Spend some time sharing with God where you’re at now in terms of trust and/or surrender. Pay attention to the images, words, scriptures, or memories that come up when you reflect on this. You might want to stay with one of these that feels especially meaningful.

Closing Prayer

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

Suscipe, by St. Ignatius of Loyola

Go in Peace, friends!

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Rev. Dr. Bethany McKinney Fox is the Director of Spiritual Formation for Cyclical LA. She is the organizing pastor of Beloved Everybody Church in Los Angeles, an ability-inclusive community where people with and without intellectual and other disabilities lead and participate together. Her recent book Disability and the Way of Jesus (2019, IVP Academic) explores how to follow the healing way of Jesus to create communities of mutual thriving.

Honoring Our Grief

written by Bethany McKinney Fox

This devotional-style blog series is written with the intention of giving you space slowing down, find your center, and ground your day.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

As church starters focused on leading communities and adapting our structures and practices in this time where we can’t gather physically, by necessity we are focusing on creating new things and orienting toward the future as we imagine and plan for what our worshiping communities might look like in this changing social structure. And as innovators in general, we honor and participate in new beginnings for communities on the regular. This is such a gift.

But this time in particular also has a lot of loss and grieving mixed into it, and it can be hard to honor endings, and to make space for these feelings when we have so much energy and hours to spend focused on planning and adapting for present and future realities. Endings matter as they can invite transformation and beginnings, and taking time to attend to and value them allows us to embrace the whole of what God has done and is doing.

So, to honor the endings we are going through, below you’ll find a scripture, questions, and a closing reading to make some space for lament, and for acknowledging and holding before God some of the sorrow, loss, and grief you may be experiencing right now. Processing our pain isn’t something we always have energy for, but when you have the energy for it, we invite you to engage with these thoughts and questions that might help open up the process. Maybe this will happen first thing in the morning, maybe it will be during a mid-day walk, maybe it will be with a close friend over Zoom, or with a member of your household, or as you prepare for sleep. Whatever time works for you, may it be a time of feeling received and accompanied by the God of all comfort and embracing love.

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Scripture

Psalm 42

1 As a deer longs for flowing streams,

   so my soul longs for you, O God.

2 My soul thirsts for God,

   for the living God.

When shall I come and behold

   the face of God?

3 My tears have been my food

   day and night,

while people say to me continually,

   ‘Where is your God?’

4 These things I remember,

   as I pour out my soul:

how I went with the throng,

   and led them in procession to the house of God,

with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,

   a multitude keeping festival.

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,

   and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise God,

   my help and my God.

6 My soul is cast down within me;

   therefore I remember you

from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,

   from Mount Mizar.

7 Deep calls to deep

   at the thunder of your cataracts;

all your waves and your billows

   have gone over me.

8 By day the Lord commands with steadfast love,

   and at night God’s song is with me,

   a prayer to the God of my life.

9 I say to God, my rock,

   ‘Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully

   because the enemy oppresses me?’

10 As with a deadly wound in my body,

   my adversaries taunt me,

while they say to me continually,

   ‘Where is your God?’

11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,

   and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again give praise,

   my help and my God.

Questions for Reflection 

Take some time to be with God as you reflect on any or all of these questions, whichever of them feel helpful, or anything else the Spirit brings to mind as you explore places where you are feeling grief and loss in this current reality. It may help to write things down to help organize your thoughts or feelings, or to make space for silence and just see what comes to the surface.

• What do you miss about life before COVID-19––both the mundane and special things? Who do you miss being able to engage with in physical presence? You might want to write some of these things down just to acknowledge and honor all of what you are missing and grieving at the moment, and bring that list with intentionality before God.

• What do you miss about gathering in person with your church? While there may also be some beautiful gifts in this season of gathering in different ways, how has transitioning to a remote gathering format felt like a loss in terms of sharing your gifts, heart, or leadership with your community? 

• Have you noticed more grief or sorrow in your heart in this season? Are there moments where this has become stronger for you? Is there a place in your body where these feelings seem to reside?  

• Where have you been finding support in this time? What spiritual or prayer practices, hobbies, physical activities, or personal relationships have been especially nourishing for you? Thank God for what has nourished you. If you find yourself also feeling the need for more support, reflect on who you might reach out to or what activity you want to make more space for in the coming days.

• Do you have any questions for God?

Closing Prayer

Do not hurry as you walk with grief;

it does not help the journey. 

Walk slowly, pausing often: 

do not hurry as you walk with grief. 

Be not disturbed by memories that come unbidden. 

Swiftly forgive; 

and let Christ speak for you unspoken words. 

Unfinished conversation will be resolved in him. 

Be not disturbed. 

Be gentle with the one who walks with grief. 

If it is you, be gentle with yourself. 

Swiftly forgive; 

walk slowly, pausing often. 

Take time, 

be gentle as you walk with grief.

written by Andy Raine, Northumbria Community

Go in Peace, friends!

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Rev. Dr. Bethany McKinney Fox is the Director of Spiritual Formation for Cyclical LA. She is the organizing pastor of Beloved Everybody Church in Los Angeles, an ability-inclusive community where people with and without intellectual and other disabilities lead and participate together. Her recent book Disability and the Way of Jesus (2019, IVP Academic) explores how to follow the healing way of Jesus to create communities of mutual thriving.

The Speed of Life

written by Bethany McKinney Fox

We’re starting a new series! This is the first entry in devotional-style series that are written with the intention of slowing down, centering, and finding ground during your day.

Photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash

As our rhythms and usual patterns of busyness and productivity are in flux right now, it might be a good time to sit with God and reflect on the speed of our lives. Especially on the other side of a flurry of Holy Week and Easter activity, and all the innovation and adapting that has been happening over the past weeks (even more than usual for us church starters, who already adapt and innovate all the time), it might be worth being prayerful about the speed at which we’re moving, and reflecting on whether God might be calling us to think about and live with a different relationship to speed and time.

Below you’ll find a short scripture, some reflection questions, and a closing reading, all connecting to speed and slowness - ready for you to engage at a time that feels helpful for you. Maybe first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee and a journal, maybe with a lit candle in the evening before bed, maybe with a friend, partner, or colleague together - or however you feel called to take some space to engage with God in prayer and reflection. 

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Opening Prayer

“I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord!”

Psalm 27:13-14

Questions for Reflection 

Take some time to be with God as you reflect on any or all of these questions, whichever of these feel helpful, or anything else the Spirit is bringing to mind for you as you think about time and wonder about the speed at which life is going these days. It may help to write things down to help organize your thoughts or feelings, or to make space for silence and just see what bubbles up in you.

• How has the pace of your daily life changed over these past weeks of being “safer at home?” What has felt more rushed? What has slowed down?

• For the aspects of your life that seem busier and faster paced, how has that felt? Energizing? Exhausting? Typical? Fun? Irritating? A mixture? Something else? As you notice these feelings, you’re invited to refrain from judging them as good or bad, and to engage them with compassion and curiosity, and to wonder what might be bringing these feelings to the surface. You can write them down if that helps to clarify.

• For places in your life where you have slowed down, or even paused, how has it felt to go slower? Relieving? Uncomfortable? Present? Anxious? A mixture? Something else? Just as in the previous question, as you notice these feelings, you’re invited to refrain from judging them as good or bad, and to engage them with compassion and curiosity, and to wonder what might be bringing these feelings to the surface. You can write them down if that helps to clarify.

• Take time with God to reflect on anything coming to mind about “waiting for the Lord” as the Psalmist writes. What does that look like for you right now?

• After thinking about your speed of life and how you’ve been responding to changes in pace, is there anything you sense God calling you to do or continue to reflect on?

Closing Prayer

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Written by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ; excerpted from Hearts on Fire

Go in Peace, friends!

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Rev. Dr. Bethany McKinney Fox is the Director of Spiritual Formation for Cyclical LA. She is the organizing pastor of Beloved Everybody Church in Los Angeles, an ability-inclusive community where people with and without intellectual and other disabilities lead and participate together. Her recent book Disability and the Way of Jesus (2019, IVP Academic) explores how to follow the healing way of Jesus to create communities of mutual thriving.

Serving the Local Community During Social Distancing

written by Ryan C. Brown

The spread of COVID-19 has caused many pastors around the world anxiety and panic. Questions surrounding how and when congregations are able to meet in physical spaces have left many pastors scratching their heads as to how they should be leading their communities during this uncertainty. As Easter approached, there was word that some churches were planning on resuming service as normal, inviting thousands to gather together in one location. Health experts are still urging pastors from around the globe to recognize that promoting a gathering be detrimental to the efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In a recent article published in Christianity Today, pastors from both Spain and Italy discuss measures they have been implementing to prevent the spread of this virus. Top on the list for ways to stop the spread of COVID-19 is to adhere to social distancing guidelines. As pastors here in the US, we also must join these efforts and come together to keep our communities safe. 

While our communities are not meeting physical spaces, perhaps social distancing provides another opportunity to serve the wider communities we find ourselves in. Pastors and churches that are active in advocating and protecting their local community earn a sense of trust. Many eyes are watching and the time to show the good faith communities can provide. 

Several pastors have found success serving in this capacity already. Whatever the approach may be, social distancing offers unique ways for pastors to serve those closest in proximity to them—the people living in their local community. 

New Opportunities to Serve the Local Community

“And when it grew late, his disciples came to [Jesus] and said, ‘This is a desolate place...send them away to go into the surrounding villages and buy themselves something to eat.’ But [Jesus] answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’” Mark 6:35-37a (ESV)

This verse from Mark feels a lot like the posture many pastors take during times of extreme crisis like we are in now. In this verse, the disciples were overwhelmed with the need to provide food for so many people. When they asked Jesus to take care of it, he empowered them to become leaders. This scenario is prevalent now because what Jesus is doing is encouraging his disciples to get creative in how they define serving people. Pastors and churches are being given the same invitation to be creative in how they serve during social distancing. It is time to begin “turning over some rocks” and deciding where to begin to find a new life in terms of partnership and providing resources. 

The local government is underutilized by many faith leaders. Townhall meetings and city council hearings are essential places for pastors to get a pulse on the needs of the local community. Having a voice in the community outside of Sunday morning shows a deeper intention to connect with those around you. This also gives pastors the time to look into new partnerships for their ministry. These next few weeks would be a great time to comb through the internet to see what is happening in the radius around your church building. Taking this time to become familiar with your community could unlock new potential for your team and ministry. 

A misconception of social distancing is that it has to suspend any and all future planning. Pastors and churches are scrambling to take care of the immediate needs that they are missing some great future opportunities for ministry. One of these opportunities can come in forging a new local partnership. The work of God is done not only through the hands of faith leaders and faith communities. COVID-19 ignited a desire to serve others in need. People are driven to act and are taking small steps because they know small steps are at least moving in some direction. Pastors and churches can come alongside these groups and join them in the work they are doing. Social Distancing gives pastors a chance to find new partnerships they may otherwise not come into contact with. Creating a new sustainable partnership is also a great way to ease the stress and anxiety of the congregation.

Social distancing does not have to cut us off from our neighbors. Moreover, this cultural moment can allow pastors to identify and empower new leaders who are naturally rising to the occasion. During your next Zoom meeting or online service gathering, ask people what "local" means to them and allow them to be the eyes and ears of community outreach. There could be an entire crop of future leaders, church planters, and other "do-gooders" just waiting to be ignited. If you are struggling to adapt to this moment, recognize that the solution to the problem may be empowering another person to solve it.

Community Redefined

“For I was hungry and you gave me food…” Matthew 25:35a (ESV)

One of the unexpected benefits to the Social Distancing measures is that is has encouraged churches, pastors and churches to redefine what it means to be a local church. Now, more than ever, it is evident that "local church" doesn’t represent size or demographic. Local churches now are those willing and able to set up and serve people in need in real-time. There are a number of ways in which churches are already thinking outside of their normal boundaries and are reaching their hands out to those closest within reach. In Bay, Arkansas, a local church is helping with COVID-19 and a recent tornado by passing out over 2,000 free meals to people in their community. What an image of Matthew 25:35 literally come to life!

It may not be possible for every church to serve meals. And in a few months, there may be regulations against doing that. But that should not discourage leaders from finding creative ways to be a local resource.  Here is a list of ideas that might help you stay connected, or even connect for the first time with your local community: 

• Many public school teachers have been doing drive-up visits to see their students. This is a great idea for families and elderly members in your community. You can maintain a safe distance and not leave your vehicle, even just waving from the street. 

• Soujrn’s Grace Collective, an inclusive faith community in San Diego, CA created “Helping Grants” for members of their community affected financially by COVID-19. These are funds they can apply for to help cover expenses such as rent, utilities, student loans, groceries, etc.  

• Securing accurate COVID-19 testing is a major need for many counties throughout the US. Pastors can use this time to advocate for their representatives to speed up getting accurate tests made as well as putting pressure on the administration to move faster to secure better testing. 

• Encourage other pastors who are not adhering to Social Distance measures, to start doing so. Currently, 15 states have in place a “religious exemption” to allow worship services to occur. Some are in the most vulnerable states in terms of at-risk individuals. If we are to truly care for the people God has entrusted us to care for, we can not allow in-person gatherings to happen, regardless of size or others. 

These are just a handful of ways unique and creative thinking can open up new opportunities for your ministry. Major changes in the structure might be how your church redefines the community. Whatever the avenue maybe, social distancing has allowed pastors to reshape their perspective on community and what it means to serve those near them. 

Closing

Social Distancing is now a part of our culture. We will have to practice this again at another point in our lifetime, probably sooner than we think. Pastors from around the globe are telling pastors in American to be ready. We must take them seriously, we must listen to their warnings and we must get prepared. As we get prepared, let's not forget our responsibility and instead step up as leaders. We do not have to figure out all of the answers on our own. We have a team of leaders either in place, or waiting on the fringe, looking for their chance to become ignited. 

It is the moral obligation of faith leaders to look after and care for God's people. We can do this by helping them stay safe and keep their distance when other people's lives and safety are at risk. Pastors and churches, let us look to the benefits of social distancing and lead our communities safely. The eyes of the world are watching, and there are many of them. I pray we rise to the challenge and be the leaders we have been entrusted to be. 

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Ryan C. Brown is a Pastor, church planter, Father, and Husband.

Ryan is the founder of Proxemia, a network of interest groups with a missional purpose located throughout Los Angeles, CA. Ryan also serves as the Director of Student Ministries for New Life Christian Church in Glendale, CA. Ryan enjoys spending time with his son, Reece, watching soccer and writing music. 

@ryancharlesla
@prxnetwork - Coming soon!

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Ten

“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:17-18

Challenge Ten: The Core Team Adopts Vague, Imposed, or Poorly Discerned Progress Metrics

In the past I’ve worked with many teams attempting to start churches in post-Christian environments. Oftentimes, these teams prioritized the need to listen, connect, and serve in their respective settings, but gave scant attention to setting targets for ecclesial development. This cultivating of relationships with people outside the church, with the intent to disciple them in the way of Jesus, was commendable. And people did come to faith. What was less commendable with these initiatives (and we as overseeing leaders bear responsibility for allowing this) was their reticence to set measurable goals to enhance the sustainability and maturing of their forming expressions of church. A number of teams seemed to view the intentional defining of progress targets as an incumbrance to authentic grassroots experimentation. As a result, vast energies and finances went into projects that only ended up having the staying power of a few years at best. I believe that we could have curtailed that attrition had we helped teams articulate more appropriate and clearer progress targets.

None of us involved in church planting like to have sponsoring organizations breathing down our necks and checking up on our progress. “What do they know?!...We’re the ones on the ground building the plane as we fly it.” Yet most of us know innately that if we persistently operate with a fuzzy, generalized idea of what we’re aiming to become––in the next six months, year, two years––chances are we’ll eventually run into frustration on multiple levels. 

We may suddenly feel the sting of certain unspoken or ignored metrics held by our sponsoring organization or sending church that tell us we’re not measuring up to expectations. Or, if that’s less of an issue, we may find ourselves plagued by an unhealthy degree of vision drift, over-reach and scattered hyperactivity, all of our own making. To be good stewards of the vision God has given us, we as leaders must adopt the practice of identifying and subjecting ourselves to prayerfully discerned, specific progress targets. This is a piece of the team leadership work we must not avoid. 

Before going any further, let me say that I’m familiar with the push-back on the dangers of quantifying progress when so much of what we’re doing seems to defy measuring. I’m not talking about reducing the artful and intuitive leading that’s so generative in church planting, but rather giving greater attention to answering the question, “What might this thing we’re doing look like further down the road, if in fact it’s working––what evidence of progress would we hope to see?”  With that in mind, let me offer some thoughts that I hope might help any startup team articulate its own “metrics for success” for any given stage of development.

Important considerations when setting progress targets:

• What we measure is what we value. I once heard a pastor challenge his people to greater participation by presenting the harrowing statistic that only 67% of the body were involved in ministry. The more he spoke, the more I realized the metric he was espousing was really about the percentage of members who were serving in-house in church-sponsored programs. Later, I approached him and asked if he had counted all the stories and serving being racked up every day by church members ministering outside the programs of the church? He told me he had never thought of that. This helped me understand why the church had such a feeble commitment to helping members minister as agents of shalom in their daily lives and vocations. 

• Teams tend to reach their own articulated versions of success much better than someone else’s version. Overseeing agencies often impose their ideal metrics upon a project without enough regard for the grassroots metrics the startup team would like to pursue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally appropriate for a sponsoring body to lay out its own generic benchmarks for measuring progress over time. But sponsors must also allow startups teams the prerogative to massage and even amend those organizational metrics so that the team embraces them as their own defined measures of progress.

• By too rigidly defining metrics, oversight bodies can rob teams and communities of the growth that comes from wrestling with each other and God about what growth ought to look like. Leadership maturing happens in the struggle to discern hoped-for growth targets. In other words, it’s as much about the process of discerning metrics as it is about arriving at an agreed-upon set of metrics. Project overseers would do well to regularly encourage any steps toward progress and not only offer accolades when teams hit or exceed the agreed-upon progress targets. 

• Finding a good coach to help us move toward our progress targets is pure wisdom and can be very satisfying and fruitful. Internal coaches working for a sponsoring group can be a key go-between advocate to help team leaders stay true to both their own metrics AND to the clearly stated desired outcomes of the sponsor. This of course assumes that the sponsor does their work and articulates a set of generic progress indicators that are both germane to each phase of missional community maturing; and that are also commonly experienced by teams as they activate the dynamics of missional church planting movements (1).

• Though progress metrics are important to communal development, it’s helpful for teams to continually rest in the reality that success in planting is not primarily about the results achieved. Faithfulness in doing our best to follow Jesus in the sloppy terrain of planting is the true metric for success (i.e. no failures in responding to the call, even if the plant doesn’t reach viability). 

As starters we need room to push on anticipated and unanticipated doors of opportunity, and then walk through the ones God opens. This is another way of saying that not everything should be measured by someone else’s standard or ideal of progress. It may also be helpful to remind ourselves that even if our project doesn’t reach long-term sustainability, our innovating work can still offer a prophetic call to the existing body of Christ. Even if it’s only for a season, our attempts to tangibly live into God’s inbreaking reign may well end up being God’s way of stimulating other starters and other churches to trust the Spirit and step toward their own discerned, faith-stepping goals. Let’s honor both the risky journey of startup and also recognize that our movement toward appropriate, well-discerned progress metrics can only increase the likelihood of our project’s longer term viability and contribution toward God’s work in our city. 

Some closing questions and a resource for discerning metrics:

1. Here’s a few questions we might consider regarding our own team’s growth aspirations:  What specific targets (metrics for success) do we need to discern and articulate, so that we can measure progress over time?  What time horizons will we base these on, and what evidences of progress do we hope to see for each of these horizons? Who will hold us accountable to our progress goals, and when will we talk about those?  Who will we ask to come alongside us to help us stay true to our progress goals?

2. As mentioned, we in Communitas International (www.gocommunitas.org) noticed that far too many of our projects were floundering for years without ever gelling into sustainable forms of church. To address this alarming attrition, we as a wider community of church planters and sponsoring churches were compelled to identify the characteristics that any form of ecclesia tends to exhibit as it matures toward ecclesial adulthood. We came up with these “twelve hallmarks of maturing church,” which are essentially discernment benchmarks upon which teams can set their own targets for growth (2). We’ve since found that in any given season, two or three of the twelve hallmarks tend to be “live” issues for a given team, meaning that goals around those particular areas will often foster the growth needed for the immediate season ahead.
   

Notes:

1.  These dynamics are described in very practical detail in the book, Dynamic Adventure: A Guide to Starting and Shaping Missional Churches, by Steigerwald, Loyd, Crull & Kuder (Centennial, CO: Communitas Int’l, 2017).

2. These twelve hallmarks of maturing ecclesia are expanded upon in the book, Grow Where You’re Planted: Collected Stories on the Hallmarks of Maturing Church, by Steigerwald & Crull (Portland, OR: CA Press, 2013).

written by Dan Steigerwald

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Nine

“My life is a listening. His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond.”

— Thomas Merton

Challenge Nine: Leaders Fail to Prioritize Spiritual Discernment in Their Decision-making 

You can hardly grow in life, let alone plant a church, without learning to listen well. 

As Thomas Merton put it, “My life is a listening. His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond." The capacity to listen deeply begins in the arena of our own personal journeys, and it expands outward from there. 

Listening is of course foundational to the practice of good judgement, or what we call “discernment." Dr. Leonard Sweet asserts that “the initial mode of leadership is receptivity: hearing, not speaking. A hearing heart picks up signals rather in the way radio receivers pick up waves from the ether. In fact, sometimes you ‘hear’ it from its absence as much as from its presence…”  Sweet argues that “we naturally prefer the eyes to the ears because when we look with our eyes we are in control of reality…When we hear with our ears, we are vulnerable to reality…With the eyes we can construct our own reality; with the ears we have to deal with situations as they really are…” (1).

In our vision development and in our decision-making, we as church starters need to take Sweet’s words to heart. It’s easier to see ahead than it is to hear––in surround-sound––what is going on all around us at any given moment. In the face of rising complexities in our culture we need to learn this art of stereophonic listening, which involves the capacity to simultaneously tune in on three levels so that we might discern:  

1. What the Spirit may be saying to us directly and from the Scripture narrative.  

2. What we as a team (and forming core) sense is “right and good” to do. 

3. What the soundings of our local context have to tell us.
   

As we face complex and sensitive leadership decisions, I believe these three modes of hearing can help us lead much more wisely and with greater satisfaction and Kingdom impact. Let’s consider what it might mean to activate these three modes of listening within our own team. 

Listening to God or God-echoes

If we’re honest, too often we call God into the picture only to rubber-stamp what we’ve already decided.

True spiritual discernment will always make provision for the Spirit to offer input and to even overturn what may appear to be a brilliant plan of action.

Of course, that guiding voice can be heard in the soil of the sacred text, where we “in simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape us with the Word, making a salvation-garden of our lives” (James 1:19, The Message). 

If we approach our leadership decision-making as an act of worship and stewardship, we may be more inclined to exercise the patience and pace to tune into those Holy Spirit hunches. Hopefully, we will also incorporate input from those who are prophetically gifted, as oftentimes God will speak through them by means of images, dreams, impressions, etc. This little essay on accessing the prophetic to enhance our hearing capacity may be worth reading. For complex decisions, I encourage every team to also tap into one or more trusted mentors and at least one experienced leadership coach (preferably with church planting experience), as there’s both safety in this counsel and reservoirs of wisdom. And while we’re at it, we all can benefit greatly from ongoing spiritual direction, as the rhythm of meeting with a director helps train our ears to pick up frequencies we often miss. 

Listening to Our Body

“It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...” (Acts 15:28). 

As part of my wife’s spiritual direction training with the Franciscans, she is learning to practice “somatic mindfulness,” a focusing technique that enables one to carefully tune into what their physical body may be telling them at any given moment. This practice includes mindfully visiting and exploring each part of the body in order to tune into those areas where we’re holding stress or tension. When tightness or an ache is noticed, the mind is guided to gently help the body receive comfort, release or healing in that particular spot. 

Our church startup team would do well to honestly assess our own practice of somatic mindfulness, only the soma (body) I’m talking about is actually our little Christocentric initiative. 

How do we as leaders truly hear each other’s hearts/perspectives? What does that look like in practice? And what do we do to ensure that others in our community are able to provide valuable feedback on issues of direct concern to them as stakeholders? What guidelines have we laid out to help the wisdom within our midst flow into the thinking/weighing of our leaders?

Perhaps one of the most effective ways for us as leaders to grow in our capacity to pay attention to our forming body is to pull ourselves together into little listening dyads or triads. Spiritual friendship can be a fertile field for us to learn not only how to discern what’s in our own heart, but also to hear what is ringing out from the hearts of others covenanted with us as co-listeners.

If you’ve never practiced spiritual friendship in any formal sense, here’s a practical essay on how to go about it. 

What leaders regularly practice together to discern their own lives and what God/wisdom may be offering becomes foundational to a faith community’s collective discernment. 

Listening to Context

With the rising heterogeneity of American culture, church starters need to learn to operate with cross-cultural listening skills that missionaries (not colonialists!) utilize to become cultural insiders. 

In my experience, people crossing cultural boundaries with the aim of cultivating God’s shalom will generally need to engage in three primary movements or behaviors:

1) immersing and listening (ABSORBING);

2) connecting and befriending (RELATING); and 

3) participating and enriching (SERVING).

These behaviors all involve an overlapping interplay (i.e. they’re non-sequential) as a team encounters its local setting. They also incorporate ongoing discernment as their practice yields all kinds of cultural data, relationships, and inroads for serving our local community. 

If we can envision these ABSORBING, RELATING, and SERVING movements each taking a spot at a point on a Celtic trinity knot, we can “get the picture." The overlapping dynamic of the behaviors is captured by the lines that cycle back and forth to each corner (behavior) on the triangle, and all lines go through the center (which signifies our discernment filter with God and with our team/community). In other words, as missioners we discern wise/strategic responses as we absorb the soundings of context, as we relate to neighbors and other locals, and as we serve in various justice and compassion initiatives (2).

Of course, it’s not easy to hold the line in this kind of three-fold listening. 

Urgencies from building and maintaining startup momentum scream at us to simply choose courses of action that make strategic sense, yield results quickly, or satisfy those we perceive as important stakeholders. (All of these, by the way, may have their place in a given critical decision-making moment). We may have to consider it a spiritual discipline to slow down the pace of our decisions on sensitive matters so that we can truly exercise “tact." 

According to Merriam Webster’s, tact is defined as “a sense of what to do or say in order to maintain good relations with others, or to avoid offense. [It] implies delicate and considerate perception of what is appropriate” (3).

If we hope to be tactful in our leadership, we must put into practice a decent discernment process (4). Getting started may be as simple as defining a practice or two for each aspect of the UP-IN-OUT movements described above. Whatever measures we can take to grow as listeners will inevitably make us that much stronger and wiser in our leadership.

Some closing questions and suggestions:

• What’s your criteria for discerning something? What does that package look like?  What kind of decisions require keener discernment; which ones would you see as pretty straightforward and not needing broader consideration? How might we as a leadership team articulate, as clearly as possible, how we practice discernment on important decisions, so that we can turn to a tried and tested pattern time and again? 

• Alan Hirsch encourages a decision-making process called “six thinking hats,” which allows teams to factor in a multi-angled perspective on important decisions. SeeThe Shaping of Things to Come, by Alan Hirsch & Michael Frost (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2013), 244-245. This sort of practice can also be modified into APEST questioning within a lead team, using the Eph. 4:11 orientations Hirsch describes in his book, 5Q. 

• Lastly, we can learn a lot from the anabaptist tradition as far as what it means to practice discernment well. The “leadership table” at Portland Mennonite Church discerned a “statement on sexuality,” which I think reflects leadership discernment at its best. They humbly worked together to craft a unified approach forward even though the leadership team was not in full agreement theologically. Check it out here.

Notes:

 1. Summoned to Lead, by Leonard Sweet (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 57-60.

 2. I’ve actually written a pithy, easy to read booklet for starters and churches on how to wisely (discerningly) sow God’s shalom in our local setting: Growing Local Missionaries: Equipping Churches to Sow Shalom in Their Own Cultural Backyard (Portland, OR: Urban Loft, 2014). Available on Amazon.

 3. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tact, accessed Oct 31, 2019.

 4. Let me state clearly that I’m not suggesting we are either discerning or we’re not, but that too many of us (me included) regularly make poor leadership calls either because we’re too impatient, too restricted in our range of decision-making inputs, or too afraid that our preferred outcomes might be displaced if we let other strong/wise leaders weigh in (including both guidance and push-back from our primary Leader). 

written by Dan Steigerwald

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Eight

Challenge Eight: The Startup Goes Public before Road-testing its Core Identity and Discipleship Pattern

As a church starter or future starter, we’re no doubt excited to bring the church of our dreams into visible expression. We’ve been busy with the on-the-ground discernment and missiological work, and we may have even settled on the form of church we sense is best for our context. At this point, we may be tempted to raise the banner and project our public face as a new church, especially if we have supporters, sponsoring agencies, and interested locals pressuring us to get the dream out there. We’ve really thought and prayed this through, so is there anything else we ought to consider before we go public?

Let me suggest that there may indeed be a very good reason to hang in this gestation period a while longer.

I’d say it may be one of the most important readiness factors we might use to gauge the timing of our coming out, and I’ll frame it as a question:

To what degree have we as team actually road-tested our collective identity and our Jesus way of life?

By “collective identity,” I mean your vision, values, theology, ecclesial culture and prospective name. By “our Jesus way of life,” I mean that core set of up-in-out practices that help us to grow as mature, credible witnesses of the gospel. I’m asserting here that any church startup team ought to rehearse or practice these dual elements together for a season prior to going public. This up-front experimenting with our unique missional ecclesiology can pay huge dividends when we actually do “throw the doors open.” Let me explain.

It’s pretty much common knowledge that in the early stages of church planting, lead teams need to carve out time for deep processing together in order to articulate the critical “who we are” pieces of vision and values, philosophy of ministry, and guiding theology. At the same time, teams need to also define the base practices around which their community will be apprenticed to think, act and care like Jesus.

A deep buy-in on these together is key to establishing our initial DNA and the communal culture we want to create. This is church-planting 101. What I want to red flag is the tendency to move this crafted clarity into the public arena as a declaration of who we are and what we major on, without giving due attention to actually rehearsing these for a season ourselves.

If our team has done that initial 101 work well, we’ve reached some primal clarity about our communal identity and discipling pattern. At this stage, we may have already begun to populate a nice, image-laden website and other media platforms with all our well-crafted identity stuff under the banner of a catchy name. We may have taken on board a cutting-edge discipleship approach that’s proving fruitful elsewhere. I’m all in for getting the “who we are” and “what we major on” pieces as crisp and clear as possible, but where I’d caution us is to not take our arrival there as the signal of our readiness to go public.

We need to first get this clarity into deeper motion in an experimental “zone of practice.”

1. Practice What You Preach

For one, this helps those joining us to respect our judgment and trustworthiness. When we ask our community to adopt an identity and way of life that we ourselves as leaders haven’t even tested for validity, we’re gambling with our credibility. Sure, we’ve done our missional homework together, but that’s a far cry different than moving, quietly and behind-the-scenes in a lived expression of our DNA and our discipleship rhythm. It’s only through our own personal trial-run with a corporate identity and way of life that we ourselves can authentically say to others: “Hey, we’re finding this identity, culture and discipleship rhythm both doable and life-changing ourselves. Won’t you join us in practicing these too?”

2. Get the Lead Team on the Same Page

Another good reason to have a tested identity and way of life is that it helps your lead team to maintain crisp and united momentum forward. It’s much easier and more enticing for others to align with our experienced sense of identity and practice than when these are only superficially embraced. 

3. Protect the Community

A third good reason for a practice zone is to help leaders protect the community that we’re all co-creating. When we can harmoniously attest to the fit and efficacy of our communal identity and core practices, it makes us less susceptible to the influence and muscling of strong personalities who come with their own, often hidden, agendas. An old timer once warned me that church startups tend to draw pathology, and I’ve discovered that there’s some truth in that. Startups of course also draw healthy strong personalities who smell something good brewing. Whatever the motivation, pushy types who want to impose their ideas about who we need to be will find it harder to violate our communal boundaries when we have a shared experience of what life together under Christ means for us (1).

So our practiced clarity gives us credibility as a leadership team, it motivates others to join our community, and it protects us from the counter agendas that will be thrust our way. However, there is yet another compelling reason we ought to defer going public. It relates to the timing and priority of our centralized worship gathering.

To many starters, the move into a weekly worship experience represents the epitome of what it means to go public. Yes, I would argue this too ought to be delayed in favor of rehearsing our identity and discipleship pattern. It may indeed be helpful to run a “preview service” for some months before our official “launch service,” as many startup teams do. But, even then, worship only covers a certain spectrum of what ought to involve a wider, more holistic array of practices that form people in the way of Christ. In other words, there’s a lot more we should be previewing or rehearsing before projecting a public face than our pithy weekly-worship liturgies. 

I’m blending the worship gathering issue into this conversation because many church starters end up spending way too much time and energy on designing and fine-tuning our primary weekly gathering. If we overemphasize our weekly worship service, whether that happens early on in the process or later, that gathering will likely become the center of gravity for our plant. Once that happens, the rising commitments demanded to provide quality preaching, worship, attentiveness to youth and small children, set-up and tear-down, responsiveness to visitors, etc. will likely cripple our ongoing attention to mission and other key aspects of holistic discipleship.

Even though we may be able to provide excellent, growth-challenging experiences for attendees on a weekly basis, we all know that’s not enough to help our people navigate life and grow spiritually (2). So, to conclude…

…don’t just do a preview service, preview the whole shebang of what you’re inviting people into, and do it for a good six months or longer. 

Well, hopefully all this makes sense as we consider our own pre-public practice together. Road-testing our identity and discipleship pattern may well be our next best action as a team. Of course, this is not a science, and exceptions abound in the wildness of startups. And, if we’ve already gone public too hastily in the way I’ve described, it’s never too late to fess up and then create some new zones of practice where we can freshly engage or revise those critical “who we are” and “how we grow” pieces.

Here’s some parting questions that may be helpful to consider:

1. To what degree are we as a lead team activating, in our own individual and communal lives, those elements that define our collective identity and Jesus way of life. Where might we need to make adjustments, and what might a fresh “zone of practice” look like for our team to credibly say, “we ourselves are living into this identity and way of life?” 

2. How will we prevent our gathered life as a church from becoming the main drain on staff, community energy/time, and resources? How will our team help incoming people understand and support our plant’s unique identity and discipleship pattern? 

3. For more on how to craft and rehearse the identity and Jesus-life we’ll be inviting others into, see Dynamic Adventure: A Guide to Starting and Shaping Missional Churches, by Steigerwald, Loyd, Crull and Kuder (Centennial, CO: Communitas, 2017), pp. 79-98.
   

Notes:

1.  Just to be clear on the subject of Christian “floaters”: 1) Some healthy deprogramming and re-infusion of new DNA usually needs to happen among all those coming into the core community of a plant; 2) Every forming church will have a sub-culture emerge, and that’s okay and to be expected. Followers of Christ do need to be socialized into a countercultural way of life where the damaging narratives of mainstream culture (consumerism, hyper-activity, individualism, etc.) can be effectively resisted. However, many will need to be “un-discipled” from extra-biblical religious behaviors; 3) To reduce the friction of values clashes and hidden agendas, planting teams do well to introduce a process for incoming Christians that debriefs their previous church background/experience, draws out their story and values, and explores their fit with the plant’s vision, formational practices, and desired internal culture. 

2.  This is especially true if we’re employing this weekly format and other attractional gatherings/events in ways that extract people from their natural connections with people outside the church. We thereby socialize them into non-incarnational ways of living their faith. The church must remain a missionary community throughout its life. Our core group needs to practice spiritual rhythms together that accommodate different age groups and that also don’t require an undue focus on the gathered life of the church. Acting under the assumption that a Sunday gathering is the best way to meet the spiritual needs of their kids, parents will often push team leaders to go public far too soon. It’s wise to include vested participants early on in the crafting and practice of a discipling culture that meets not only the needs of children and youth, but the needs of all the participant groups represented. 

written by Dan Steigerwald

Photo by Ryan Ng on Unsplash

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Seven

Challenge Seven: Leaders are Poor at Empowering Diversity and Leading Collaboratively  

Back in the late 90’s, I recall reading a leadership essay by business guru Margaret Wheatley called “Good Bye Command and Control.” Wheatley was predicting the rise of a more participative style of leadership that gave team members greater latitude to self-organize, collectively share ideas, and solve complex organizational problems. This stood in contrast to the prevailing “great man” view, which extolled the highly dominant [male] leader who exhibited both extraordinary gravitas and the capacity to deliver results like a shrewdly pragmatic CEO (kicking people off buses was a common metaphor). 

In retrospect, I think it’s safe to say that Wheatley’s call for a more collaborative way of leading has become the preferred style of leadership today. This increasingly applies to team leaders endeavoring to start new churches. As we face ever accelerating change and complexity in all of life’s spheres, contemporary church starters are compelled to collaborate across swaths of diversity, both internally and externally. Even for a "first-among-equals," diversity-seeking model of leadership, there are several values to keep in check as you develop your church's collaborative ethos:

1. Who are your internal and external teams?

2. How will you delegate? 

Who are Your Internal and External Teams? 

When it comes to collaborating in church planting, one aspect that’s often viewed too narrowly or superficially has to do with the “who” question. Who are we accessing or including to round out perspective on our internal team? And who are we accessing or partnering with in our city to keep us immersed in wider Kingdom endeavoring? The first question––who we access or add to our internal team as our startup gains people, resources and momentum––is critical to the DNA and health of our initiative, so obviously this is a higher priority in the startup phase than building external partnerships. But both kinds of collaborating are essential over the long haul. 

The internal collaborating helps us express and incarnate the gospel adequately within our context, while also informing how we apprentice our people in the way of Jesus (i.e. discipleship). The external collaborating helps us play our part in fostering new missional initiatives and expressions of church in our city, while also providing a flow of resources to counter the natural turn inward that too often plagues church startups.

On an internal team level, most of us today appreciate the value of empowering an array of leadership diversity. Plurality in leadership not only allows us to prophetically demonstrate reconciliation across many common lines of division, but it can also expand our capacities to cultivate true learning communities. Allowing outside perspective to permeate our leadership ethos and inform our communal learning requires us to cultivate humility and a learning posture. But that posture must work in tandem with leaders doing the work of clearly defining ways people can offer feedback and alternative perspectives. I’d say that half of the battle involves unblocking and encouraging the flow of feedback, and then giving visibility to whatever prophetic edge God may be trying to accent. 

In the building of an optimal collaborative mix, our discernment must be theologically, prophetically, and missiologically informed. We pay attention to what Scripture and the trajectory of the gospel prompts us to pursue. We give ear to whatever prophetic corrective the Spirit encourages us to assert in terms of who should be sitting at our particular leadership table. And we prayerfully listen to our specific contextual realities, who it is God is calling us to reach/serve, and the unique vision God has given us as a forming church. This “stereophonic listening” allows us to populate our teams with that mix of humanity needed to give the greatest advantage for the gospel in our setting.

Of course, we can’t talk about collaboration without also mentioning what Alan Hirsch calls “APEST symmetry.” If God has truly given gifts for the upbuilding of the body of Christ along the five Ephesians 4:11 orientations, we as team leaders need to ensure that we’re accessing all five perspectives in our decision-making. These five-fold orientations will optimally find expression within our lead team, though it’s not simply balancing the five but working to build symmetry of voice (i.e. a strong leader who tends to over-accent their orientation may need more than one offsetting counter-voice). A lot of teams will find, especially in the early phases, that their team mix is deficient in one or more of the APEST orientations. But team leaders can readily cover for any initial lack by regularly incorporating input from trusted leaders in partnering churches or outside entities who robustly express those under-accented orientations. 

How Will You Delegate? 

Getting beyond the “who” and into the “how” of collaboration, it’s important to mention the importance of good delegation on the part of team leaders. Too many team leaders work so hard and passionately to catalyze momentum for planting that they unconsciously settle into a pattern of over-functioning in their role. At the least this involves giving too much time and attention to areas that could be delegated to existing team members. At its worst, over-functioning can amount to a margin-less existence for the primary leader, not to mention a micro-managing style that stifles both the sharing of leadership and the development of leaders. Hoarding work in such a manner is a collaborative no-no for team leaders!

The truly collaborative leader will be motivated to share power because they realize they’re not omni-competent, nor are they necessarily best-suited to lead on given issues or at certain seasons of the church community’s development. But good intention often runs aground in the muck of poorly defined team roles and leadership decision-making protocols. Collaboration becomes so much easier when team leaders do the work upfront to articulate what decisions they are empowered to make, which decisions require input and approval from their sponsoring organization/denomination versus which ones that require input and approval from their team and/or core group, and who ultimately needs to be kept informed about the choices made. These decision-making protocols are often left so fuzzy in church planting that the ambiguity actually undermines the collaborative ethos leaders are trying to develop. 

In your church startup, you may be the primary leader who is building a complementary team around you. Or you may be one among two or three leaders who together form a collective point leadership (i.e. you share the role of orchestration). Whatever the configuration (single point leader or multiple point leaders), such strategic point leadership should ideally be situated within a wider team who are empowered to cover various aspects or domains of ministry, each with clear definition and real accountability. And these all supported by the agreed-upon infrastructure of leadership decision-making norms. 

In closing, I’ll only briefly mention the importance of team leaders collaborating with outside groups, organizations, churches, alliances, denominations, etc. The team’s vision for church planting needs to be couched within the wider work of God going on in their area. This can offer a wealth of resources and encouragement––and the team can also offer what they have, internally, to help foster mission and additional planting in the city. It’s never too early to build that outward reach into the newly forming community, as that posture almost inevitably creates wider berths for more leaders to step in and join the collaborative efforts to make a difference for good in the city.

Parting questions and recommendations:

• How are you as team leader(s) working to discern your diversity goals and empower others to participate in leadership with you?  What measures are you taking to help your leaders understand and function well in roles that give them real authority? What as team leader(s) can you delegate in this season ahead and to whom, and what’s your plan to wisely hand off those areas?  

• Who might you collaborate with beyond your project, toward the greater Kingdom good in your city and beyond, but especially toward the raising up of church starters?

• To help leadership teams with practical skills in how to share power well, I highly recommend Making Room for Leadership, by Dr. MaryKate Morse (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2008).

Notes:

1.  APEST is of course an acronym Alan Hirsch has coined for the apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, shepherd and teacher orientations the Apostle Paul claims (in Eph. 4) have been gifted to the body of Christ. For more on how to identify these orientations and how to deploy them in a balanced 5 point fashion in teams, see Hirsch’s book 5Q (Columbia: 100 Movements, 2017) and the accompanying 5Q Guide by Hirsch and Jessie Cruickshank (Columbia: 100 Movements, 2018). 

2.  Co-leading or actually sharing the point leadership function can work well with the right mix of leaders, though it does demand quite a degree of maturity, experience, complementary giftedness, and trust among the point cluster. Sharing the point leadership role is much like a married couple who shares the responsibility for the growth of the relationship, letting each do the dance of co-leading, with each partner taking the lead role in certain aspects of married life as needed within a partnership of mutuality. 

written by Dan Steigerwald

Photo by Cassie Boca on Unsplash

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Six

“Shalom ‘doing’ flows from shalom ‘being.’”

Challenge Six: Shaping Evangelism and Natural ‘Awakening Spaces’

Let me start this post by revealing that I’m not a natural or gifted evangelist. O, like you I do heartily invest in long term connections with non-Christians in my relational networks. And like you, I am a discerner and starter who is not afraid to step into risk. But I have to admit that I’m consistently feeble when it comes to sharing Christ with friends and neighbors. Some of that hesitancy is fueled by the consumption culture in which we swim, where someone at every turn is always trying to sell us something. Even the subtlest evangelistic appeal can feel pushy in this environment. So, l would much rather join other Christians in “adorning the gospel” (cf. Titus 2:10) by living in estimable ways than actually explaining the good news by story or by some logical or word-based presentation. The character and outworking of our faith within the arena of everyday life, after all, speaks louder than words…so I tell myself.

Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin often asserted that the best translator of the gospel is actually a community that lives it.  Demonstrating what we mean is of critical importance, or as Newbigin put it, 

“The congregation must be so deeply and intimately involved in the secular concerns of the neighborhood that it becomes clear to everyone that no one or nothing is outside the range of God’s love in Jesus….It must be clear that the local congregation cares for the well-being of the whole community and not just for itself” (1).

Such a no-strings-attached serving posture allows us to collectively mimic the sacrificial, pursuant love God has for all people and all of creation. But, right on the heels of this statement, Newbigin adds another exhortation relevant to every church planting team:

“This involvement must not become something that muffles the distinctive note of the gospel. The church ought not to fit so comfortably into the situation that it is simply welcomed as one of the well-meaning agencies of philanthropy” (2).

As we attempt to demonstrate the gospel within our setting, most of us regularly perform beautiful Jesus-like acts, and many of those we do in the neediest of places.  And we likely engage in these acts of kindness alongside other community development efforts sourced within the fabric of our non-Christian ethos. This way of operating is vitally important to our discipleship and to our credibility as a local expression of the body of Christ. But to Newbigin’s point, in our efforts to make a visible difference in righting societal wrongs and responding compassionately to people in need, we must not shy away from speaking of the now and future hope we have in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ongoing interceding, and renewing of all things. 

Jesus is good news, not only what we do in Jesus’ name! 

A Visible Difference

So, how are you and your team doing at accenting the unique note of the gospel within your setting? That’s an important question to continually ponder!  And further, we have to ask ourselves how much time and energy are we actually committing to reaching disgruntled or de-churched Christians under the guise of evangelism?  Is our evangelistic ministry mostly about recruiting floating Christians, or is it truly about befriending and “good-newsing” non-Christians? Making new disciples must factor in prominently somewhere within our missional approach, or chances are we will grow like so many church plants do—primarily by transfers from other churches.  

In whatever ways we conduct our evangelistic ministry, I think we have to also attend to the critical pre-evangelistic work of cultivating awakening spaces. Most of us would agree that it’s often a process of micro-awakenings over time that prompt a person to explore and eventually make a commitment to follow Christ. These awakenings more often than not happen within places where people have experienced a sense of belonging and/or a sense that what the group is doing is enriching to them or others in need. The laughter, relational connectedness, and good feelings that arise from experiencing beauty, service and fun together often create “thin places,” experiential moments that the ancient Celtic Christians described as a co-mingling of heaven and earth. When they arise, we’re often cast us into spiritual conversations where our “being ready in season and out to give an account for the hope that is within us” (I Peter 3:15) is put to the test.  

 Yes, our team and core group can create spaces for our non-Christian friends to belong and spaces for them to co-participate with us in meaningful spiritual practices and service (some of these can dovetail well with our gathered worship and with special groups and events oriented to non-Christians). But I usually recommend that teams put a premium on finding causes and special interest groups to join that culture is already running. This helps our interface with non-Christian culture to be not only more sustainable, but it also benefits our personal discipleship as we have to venture out and discern where God/shalom is already at work.   

Living Out Shalom

Living out our faith by word and deed as we regularly interface with people outside of faith admittedly requires quite a lot of us as church startup teams. For one, we must immerse ourselves regularly in the gospel Story, both as a way to keep us motivated to overcome timidity and share our faith, and also as a way to help us remain so conversant with the good news that it flows easily and naturally from our lips. We must also work to cultivate discerning, prayerful hearts so that we can recognize where the Spirit may be awakening a person to move toward God’s love. And finally, in shining forth the good news we must pursue sane rhythms of life together that develop and feed us as a communal people. This includes approaching life as a journey involving ebb and flow, or times of engagement and times of disengagement.

In short, our demonstration and proclaiming of the good news must be counterbalanced by lived-out spiritual practices that bring shalom to the souls of our core team. Shalom doing flows from shalom being. If we fail to seek that balance, we end up projecting the journey with Christ as a performance treadmill that wears people out. That’s hardly good news for anyone looking in! 

Of course, so much more could be said on this subject!  But I leave you with a few thoughts and questions that you and your team might find helpful to process:

• In your own cultivating of belonging and participative spaces where your team can deeply interface with non-Christians, consider our culture’s narrative of “not-enough-ness” as a rich onramp for the gospel (i.e. not the sin story). Brene Brown and others have hit a cultural artery by addressing the shame narrative so pervasive in our everyday lives - the narrative that we have to do more, be more, have more, serve more, etc. in order to be okay or acceptable. If most of us feel we don’t measure up to cultural ideals or even our personal ideals, how might you cultivate a culture of vulnerability that allows the gospel’s clear grace and acceptance note to ring out?

• Who within your team and forming core seems to be evangelistically gifted? How are you a) positioning them within your relational networks and wider community to exercise that gift; and b) employing them to train the body in seeding the ground and sharing the hope we have in Christ?

• Review Paul’s letter to Titus and write out the different relational spheres Paul instructs Christians to operate tactfully within so as to “adorn the gospel” and protect it from being “maligned.”  Talk about specific implications this could have for the way your core group operates in your cultural setting, and then develop your own plan to cultivate and co-inhabit belonging and participating spaces with your non-Christian neighbors.
  

Notes:

1. Lesslie Newbigin Missionary Theologian: A Reader (Cambridge, SPCK, 2006), 145. 

2. Ibid, 145.

written by Dan Steigerwald

Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Why Cyclical: Chris Lopez and Darin McKenna

Darina McKenna and Chris Lopez are co-pastors of New Abbey NoHo, a new church that will take root in North Hollywood in the coming year. Currently they are working the the Cyclical LA Starters program as they begin their church-starting journey.

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Darin McKenna and Chris Lopez

Every Sunday at New Abbey Church in Pasadena,

we begin with a unity and diversity prayer. We stand and hold the hand of the person next to us while a pastor reminds us of and affirms us in the differences we embody. In a sentence, that prayer is: we’re better together than we are apart. We believe this is true not only in our community, but also in our church’s leadership. Diversity in leadership is invaluable, and Cyclical LA not only affirms that, but is a valuable space where we experience that truth.

During our time with Cyclical LA, we have been reminded of and introduced to other church communities that are embodying their own unique way of following Christ. We value this network of church leaders both for the opportunities to learn outside of our church frameworks and for the mutual desire to learn from each others’ differences. It’s one thing to have church members value your perspective, it’s another to feel appreciated among colleagues.

We are connecting with and being helped by church leaders in the Cyclical LA network who worked in the North Hollywood community long before we got there. Their perspective on the cultural rhythms of NoHo have informed how we discuss engaging the local community. We have access to leaders of racially diverse and differently abled communities, which informs our own conversations about inclusion and intentionality in our language.

We’re Better Together…

Church leadership can be one of the loneliest spaces in church community. The Cyclical LA network makes it otherwise, and provides helpful feedback and perspective along the way. They remind us again and again that we’re better together than we are apart.

Learn more about New Abbey on their website, or follow them on Instagram.

The New Abbey NoHo Team

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Five

“A successful startup is not your crowning glory, rather it’s the legacy of you leading well and after the manner of Christ that’s your high prize. Let faithfulness be your metric…”

Challenge Five: Point Leader(s) Undervalue Cultivating a Safe, Developmental Team Ethos

One of the ugliest team implosions I ever witnessed involved a huge church planting team that parachuted into a European context full of enthusiasm, ministry expertise, and resources. The team leader was exceptionally bright, communicative and full of vision, so much so that he was commissioned to lead with only a hasty intuitive assessment by our Mission’s president. Exuding an air of gravitas, he readily elicited followers from his teammates and could dazzle groups in any conference setting. Over time, we as the oversight body of our Mission began to get alarming reports from his team members. Within the private confines of the team, this leader was regularly resorting to coercive, manipulative, and shaming behaviors to get team members to toe the line. Eventually, we had to intervene and confront him, but instead of owning up to his “stuff,” he went AWOL and eventually joined another Missions agency. The team tried to salvage the project, but within months the initiative collapsed.

In this case, the team culture gradually became toxic due to the leader’s hidden character flaws, which became apparent in the crucible of planting pressures. He had decided early on against pursuing vulnerability and his own development, and as a consequence he placed little value on creating a team ethos conducive to undergirding the lives and callings of his team members. The bright and promising goal of a new kind of church in a city with few churches carried the team for two years, but ultimately that was not enough to compensate for the erosion of what I would call a safe, developmental team culture.

When Practicality Combats Team Cultivation

This situation may strike you as an outlier and not something that could happen to you as a team leader. To that I would say, be careful. To cultivate within your team the kind of respectful collegiality, openness, and concern for one another’s well-being and growth requires ongoing, persistent intentionality. And that intentionality is as much about the work of creating conditions within our team as it is about ongoing attentiveness to our individual soul formation as leaders (or, as Fuller leadership guru Dr. J. Robert Clinton used to say, “ministry flows out of being”).

With the clock ticking and the momentum and relational load rising over time, it’s not uncommon for point leaders to gradually shift their focus toward the product they’re trying to deliver at the expense of stewarding their own growth and the growth of a healthy team ethos. In other words, as a leader you can get hooked on responding well to practical urgencies because they offer more immediate rewards than the non-illustrious background work of leadership development, accountability, and team cultivation.

So, I would encourage you as a lead planter to carve out the time and space to undergird your own formation, and work to make this a high value within your team. Set aside specific times to share with one another how God is challenging you, what you’re learning, what specifically you need to confess or own, where you’d like prayer or tangible help, etc. The safe, grace-filled, transformative team culture you cultivate is key to seeding the same within the wider community you’re planting. A successful startup is not your crowning glory, rather it’s the legacy of you leading well and after the manner of Christ that’s your high prize. Let faithfulness be your metric, not whether or not you end up with a sustainable church.

Let Faithfulness Be Your Metric

What’s needed to create a team environment conducive to growth, perseverance, and effectiveness, of course, will vary from team to team. But the strands of practicing vulnerability, extending grace, and showing genuine concern for one another’s development and performance are a good baseline. On top of this, we need to give attention to seeding and maintaining a healthy team dynamic that fosters the kind of openness, communication, and understanding conducive to team effectiveness and satisfaction. To bolster this way of acting, I always encourage teams to articulate their own clear, agreed-upon guidelines for healthy team interaction and for handling conflict. Also, periodically set aside un-rushed times to hear one another’s stories and to affirm the gifts, passions, and unique personalities each team member brings to the table. The payoff for operating this way is deeper trust, respect, and mutual satisfaction, which invariably produces greater staying power and ministry effectiveness over the long haul.

Lastly, to steward our maturing as leaders, it’s always a good idea to proactively seek a mentor or two to keep us reaching and growing. It’s also wise to develop safe relationships with peers outside the project, especially friends who will tell us the truth when we’re off base or deceiving ourselves. I can’t say enough about the value of enlisting both an appropriate therapist and a spiritual director for whatever season of life we’re in. Ultimately, whatever effort we expend in the direction of helping ourselves flourish and grow will help make us more grounded and safer as people. And this will bleed into every relationship our leadership touches.  

Some thoughts and suggestions for further study:

• What does your commitment to leadership formation look like in practice—for yourself and for your team? What basic practices might your team agree to share to foster safety, vulnerability, accountability and your mutual development as servant leaders?

• To promote healthier team interaction, study a few “rules of engagement” examples devised by effective teams. As a team design your own. Also, articulate your process for addressing conflict, not simply stating Matt. 18, but flesh it out! Have your team interact over it - explore how it works specifically, including its suitability as a church-wide process.

• Excellent resources: The Emotionally Healthy Leader, by Peter Scazzero (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015); The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002); The Leader’s Journey, by Herrington, Creech & Taylor (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).

Also, this is a brilliant and practical current resource for church starters: “Why Character, Why Now?”
See also “16 Questions” for a host of helpful ideas on 16 crucial features that truly formative organizations tend to possess.

written by Dan Steigerwald

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For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Top photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

Why Cyclical: Brian Terrada

Brian Terada is the founder and director of Be Free, an LA community that “believes in sharing and listening to one another's stories because it is the only way we can use our differences to unite rather than divide. We believe that love begets freedom, and everyone should be free.“ Last year, Brian was a part of the Cyclical LA and 1001 NWC summer cohort. We’ve been privileged to see Brian grow into his role as a leader and community-shaper. Keep reading to hear more of his story!

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Ever since I joined Cyclical LA a year and a half ago,

I have been constantly surrounded by terrific influences that spur me on toward love and good deeds. As Be Free has grown, largely in part due to the support of Cyclical LA, I have had consistent meetings with mentors who hold me accountable to taking care of myself, loving myself, and doing my work from a place of humility and excellence. I've received monthly coaching sessions from Cory Marquez, in which I receive care and direction for myself personally, and for the work that I get to do. I've received bi-weekly coaching sessions with Whitney Warnes during my apprenticeship, in which I was consistently challenged to make personal and professional goals to meet. My mentorship meetings with Beau Wammack, pastor of NVC, every other month for the last eight months have been formative in my health and maturity, especially as a Christian leader in my community. My spiritual direction meetings with Bethany Mckinney Fox have also been formative in developing my personal relationship with God and how that effects the work that I do. I always know that Nick Warnes will make time for me, so I've been able to meet and consult with him many times, from which I always receive encouragement and inspiration on how Be Free can move forward on its own, and with Cyclical LA's support. 

I am building a community that means the world to me,

and with that comes a lot of responsibility that I am still learning to handle. However, through the multi-tiered cyclical system that Cyclical LA provides me, I am able to receive spiritual direction, organizational direction, divine affirmation, and connection to a network of people who are in the same boat as me—making me feel less alone in my endeavors. Without Cyclical LA, I don’t know where I would be or if my organization would even still exist. Because of all the positive influences that Cyclical LA has given me, I feel confident, supported, and loved as I continue to strive to bring about more love and freedom through the work of Be Free.

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Four

Making ends meet, side hustles, and second jobs—is making it work really working?

Challenge Four: When Funding Limitations and Outside Work Demands Restrict the Point Leader(s)

When I finished seminary outside of Amsterdam, I had a lead on my next vocational step. A pastor friend in the States invited me to join the pastoral staff of his church, which seemed like a great place to land after several years of cross-cultural ministry. And so, my loving spouse, two baby girls, and I prepared for the big move, even donating our car to a local ministry. And then...it all fell through. The elders of the church weren’t ready to hire me after all. Here we were, ready to jump with no landing place in view. This precipitated an unnerving “Oh no, God, how will we make it?!” kind of week.

Thank God, the Creator rose to the occasion and did some flash creating. With no knowledge of our latest news, the couple on the receiving end of our car donation suddenly called one evening with a surprising invitation: “Hey Dan, we’re moving to the UK! Would you and your wife please consider taking over as pastoral wardens of the Dovecote Hostel in The Hague?” With quite a bit of back-and-forth negotiating, my initial resistance to the idea finally melted when their board agreed to provide us with an apartment, a stipend, and the leeway to prioritize work I was doing at a new church in Amsterdam—work that I hoped would mature into a funded pastoral position.

Little did I know the hostel job would become a critical piece of a larger unfolding drama. As we cared for international students attending a local grad school, we began to meet all kinds of Dutch and expat folks who wanted to be involved. The work we were doing became an easy talking point in conversations with strangers. In contrast, I avoided mentioning my role in the Amsterdam church as that usually led to an abrupt end to any conversation.

WHEN MORE THAN ONE JOB MAKES SENSE…

Without planning, this “secondary job” became the chief avenue through which we were eventually able to start a church in The Hague. That role gave us credibility with unchurched folk in and around the school, who loved the idea that my wife and I were meeting practical social needs of visiting students. It provided us with income and housing, while also bolstering our reputation with local churches. It took about a year and a half of working this job to awaken us to the idea of church planting among our growing relational networks. Soon I resolved to get out of both my volunteer church job and my paid hostel job to attain the crowning role of “full-time church planter.” It took some effort and a lot of fundraising, but in time I managed to get what I wanted. A new international church eventually took root in the city, and it’s still thriving today.

In retrospect, I don’t think I ever gave due credit to that hostel job for helping me succeed in planting. I viewed it only as a stepping stone. Now I recognize that it was a relational stage-setter for starting a church, and it could well have become an ongoing complementary part-time job. But that never entered my mind, as in those days (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), full-time vocational ministry was the dominant paradigm. Today, that’s obviously not the case. Fewer and fewer church starters are able to find the funding needed to support a full-time startup role. And even if funding could be found, many don’t want to operate that way—and for legitimate strategic reasons!

Staying involved in more than one vocational trajectory can actually make good sense, even throughout the entire planting experience. For one, it can help team leaders move in greater financial freedom, as fundraising among friends and sponsoring churches generally requires time, travel, and a commitment to developing mutually-beneficial relationships. A second job can also provide the planter with relational bridges into culture, enabling a sense of solidarity with the average Jane or Joe who, in a like manner, have to juggle multiple jobs just to stay afloat (1). And, besides providing more latitude for the planter’s vocational satisfaction, bi-vocational arrangements can make room for other point leaders to step in and share the rigorous demands of a church startup. Two or three leaders running on point means everyone has more room to breathe and cultivate momentum.

Nowadays, being a lone point leader pouring out 60+ hours per week into church planting may not be the optimal way to lead a startup. Perhaps you’ve already decided that in your situation.  I noticed recently that a friend who was doing a great job overseeing church starters in his denomination recently recast his role as “director of co-vocational church planting,” drawing attention to the reality that a mixed-role platform is increasingly the preferred option for lead planters in American contexts today (2). While this may be a trend, if you’re a church starter who wants to operate this way, you’ll need to take measures to ensure your outside work does not squelch the generative momentum needed to get a church started.  

Corralling and synergizing the people and resources needed to plant a church that’s attentive to new discipleship and multiplication requires a great deal from leadership teams. There’s not much way around that reality. If you allow the demands of other jobs to siphon off too much time and energy without somehow complementing or fueling the planting process, you as a planter may struggle to deliver the leadership presence and intensity required to get a faith community established. This is likely even more true if your team is working in a disadvantaged neighborhood, where you regularly encounter radical brokenness and needs.

BE SHREWD

When choosing vocational roles to supplement the planting roles, I encourage starters to be shrewd in leadership focus. You as a team leader generally need to view your church startup role as the priority against other vocational roles. In other words, your heart must remain steadfastly committed to planting. If your passions lie elsewhere or get too dispersed, the project will most likely suffer (3). One starter I worked with in my city decided to take up a chaplaincy in addition to leading his church planting team. The people he served through that work had little natural interface with his neighborhood and the core group, and that was already a small red flag. It soon became apparent that his heart was really in the chaplaincy job and the planting initiative would have to play second fiddle. Within a year, he bailed on the project and it never reached viability. This is not an uncommon storyline, believe me.

If you’re underway with a planting initiative, creative vocational outlets may be a wise strategic alternative to intentional fundraising. Or you may be wise to factor in both, given that funding limitations do pose a real threat to church startups. Much depends on whether you have other seasoned leaders on your team to help lead the project forward. If you do, you’ll likely have more flexibility. If not, fundraising may be a worthwhile option for you to pursue.

Though many loathe the idea of support-raising, such partnerships can be vital to freeing up a leader’s time and energy for planting. And they also can be formative to those giving. Grants are out there for church planting too, and often these can be used as seed money that others can be challenged to match. As the project begins to get traction, your forming community may need to start supporting its leaders sooner rather than later (i.e. not simply relying on limited grant monies or what you as the leaders can provide). Keep in mind that this giving value is usually harder to instill in a community that is used to NOT bearing much financial burden to start their church. People need to own their faith community, and giving is part of fostering that ownership. Lastly, do remind yourself regularly that what you’re attempting to start is well worth supporting. You don’t have to apologize!

Some questions and suggestions:

• How might you reorient your vocational platform so that as many aspects as possible might be congruent or complementary with your aims to plant?  

• If you’re working bi-vocationally as a team leader, what is your plan for sharing leadership and insuring that startup momentum, new discipleship, and needed rhythms/structures for growth are not compromised?  

• Consider personal support-raising and pursuing grants as ways to help undergird your availability to the planting initiative. If you have reservations about fundraising, please read Henri Nouwen’s little booklet The Spirituality of Fundraising available as a free pdf: https://www.perceptionfunding.org/uploads/1/6/8/9/16891606/spiritualityoffundraisingbyhenrinouwen_267.pdf

written by Dan Steigerwald

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Dan Steigerwald

For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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NOTES:

1. According to a LinkedIn article released this past month, by 2020 50% of the American workforce will be working as independent contractors or freelancers (see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2020-50-americans-expected-working-independent-zubair-alexander/, accessed May 6, 2019).

2. A “covo” planter, according to Brad Briscoe, is “one who has a clear and definite calling in the marketplace that they never intend to leave. They know God has called them to be a teacher, mechanic or doctor and they desire to weave that calling into the plan to start a new church.”  See Brad Briscoe’s free ebook available at www.namb.net: Covocational Church Planting: Aligning Your Marketplace Calling with the Mission of God (Alpharetta, GA: SEND Network, 2018), 25.

3. If two or more bi-vocational leaders join you in sharing the point leadership burden, I’d say at least one of your leaders needs to make the planting initiative their priority role.   

   Top photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Three

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

Ephesians 4:11-13 NIV

Challenge Three:  The Startup Team Lacks Capacities to Lead Forward and Steward the Outward Impulse

In recent years, I had the privilege of working closely with the leaders of two local planting initiatives. One was an excellent teacher and naturally facilitated his team’s involvement in community development initiatives across the neighborhood. The other had a strong relational woo strength that allowed her to easily connect with strangers and even get them to show up at parties and theme-focused groups. Though the two starters stepped out boldly and gave their best, sadly, neither initiative lasted beyond two years. In retrospect, I’d say two related issues hindered the longevity of these projects, and it may be well worth your time to consider if these might need addressing within your own situation.

The first issue relates to the ratio of outward to inward energy present within startup team. In order to see a new missional church emerge out of whatever cultural subset(s) God has us working among, we know that we must generate a persistent lean into culture and into the networks and social havens of people outside the church. This posture enables us to plant the gospel among people living life way beyond any church-culture enclaves. Teams don’t always have the ability to maintain that kind of “outstretch,” as it can feel more natural and immediately rewarding to focus on nurturing the internal ethos of our forming core group. And yet, it’s precisely that turn inward that can erode the momentum needed to make new disciples and be an incarnational presence within our given cultural setting.

outward vs. inward

Alan Hirsch and others assert that it’s the Ephesians 4:11 apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic (A.P.E.) orientations that enable a team to maintain this steady reach outward. For healthy churches to emerge for the long term, Hirsch argues, these functionalities need to be brought into an integrative balance with the nurturing, people-development strengths of shepherds and teachers (1). On the front end of church planting initiatives, however, this balance of energy, must be [at least temporarily] skewed toward outward engagement.  

The lead planters mentioned above had trouble maintaining that outstretch, even though they did move in certain A.P.E. gifts.  The first was strongly prophetic, the other highly evangelistic. Both, however, were truly shepherds at heart, and this orientation continually skewed the energy of their core groups toward encircling and nurturing people. Over time both their groups were unable to keep up the ongoing missionary engagement and witness needed to see more than a couple of house church fellowships emerge.

In all fairness to these planters, they also faced another depleting factor common to church startups. Both of them, to varying degrees, were not able to garner the influence and team decision-making needed to mobilize groups of people toward some preferred future. In short, they were not leading with enough consistency and savvy. Let me explain.

…every member of the body of Christ can from time to time engage in a “leadership act”

Like you, perhaps, I see leadership as being primarily about influence. Now, arguably, any person can influence others in some way, and hence, in a certain respect, it is accurate to say that anybody can lead. As one of the top Christian leadership guru-types, Dr. J. Robert Clinton, once put it, every member of the body of Christ can from time to time engage in a “leadership act”—a group-influencing behavior that changes the way the group acts or thinks. However, Clinton also adds that having the capacity to carry out leadership acts doesn’t mean a person has a gift or calling to lead. Only those who frequently and persistently engage in leadership acts can rightly be called “point leaders” (2). 

Church planting is more than simply rallying together and cohering a group of Christians into a house church or a Sunday gathering. In order to form and animate a local body of Christ into a visible, sustainable and accessible local expression, starters must become adept at a number of repetitive leadership behaviors. They must continually cultivate the core group’s grasp of its identity—its calling, its unique vision and values, and its theological non-negotiables. They must continually be champions of all aspects of that identity, inspiring all involved to live into it even as they themselves live into it. And they must continually be able to mobilize groups of people into activities and processes that are meaningful and that tie into a greater communal whole. Carrying out these kinds of functions requires adaptive, strategic leading, ideally within the ethos of a collaborative point team, where one leader’s deficiency is covered by another’s strength.

In order to form and animate a local body of Christ into a visible, sustainable and accessible local expression, starters must become adept at a number of repetitive leadership behaviors.

In summary, starting sustainable [hopefully reproducing] missional churches requires both an enduring outward stance and also regular acts of catalytic leading. In the early stages, the initiative may be mostly about missional discerners teaming together to get a lay of the land and hopefully establish some relational/locational beachhead. Eventually this team will need to evolve or be amended to include load-bearing leaders gifted at overseeing groups and activities that nurture missional engagement and the forming of a solid core group.  All the while, the startup must maintain a high degree of A.P.E. activation, at the least to help counter the natural inward-turning force that Christians quickly generate when they taste authentic community together.  

One parting disclaimer I feel needs to be added to all I’ve tried to pack in a brief blog post. Startup teams deficient in leader strength or A.P.E. functionality should not be dissuaded from initiating the planting process. If they are willing to learn some needed skills along the way, access good coaching and mentoring, and create a berth for additional leader(s) to eventually emerge or join them, they may well be able to establish an enduring expression of church that suits who they are and what they have to bring.  

Some questions and suggestions for team leaders:

• How would you evaluate your team’s “outstretch”? It’s leadership savvy? What measures could you take to undergird both elements within your startup initiative?

• If you feel daunted by the entrepreneurial and leadership behaviors needed to start a missional church, consider seriously:  a) hiring a coach-mentor familiar with the terrain of leading startups - it’s almost like having a trusted out-of-context teammate;  b) identify a local A.P.E. network in which to participate (e.g. Forge http://www.forgeamerica.com/ or any regular gathering of entrepreneurial types). At the least you may find a ripe field for recruiting those with stronger outward orientations, and maybe some of that A.P.E. sensibility will also rub off on you.  

• Be on the lookout for potential load-bearing leaders—those in your forming community who often influence others to take action or adopt new perspectives. Give them ministry-related assignments and see if they can: “be faithful in the smaller things;” prioritize being available to the project; and demonstrate a humble, learning spirit.  

written by Dan Steigerwald

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Dan Steigerwald

For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Notes:

1. For more on defining and deploying these 5 Ephesians 4:11 gifts, I highly recommend Alan Hirsh’s 5Q (Columbia: 100 Movements, 2017). Whatever we may think of A.P.E.S.T. as a taxonomy for releasing balanced diversity within the body of Christ, it has to be one of the better ways to help animate local churches into a more full-orbed expression of their calling.  

2. J. Robert Clinton, Leadership Emergence Theory (Altadena: Barnabas Resources, 1989), 34.  An important sidelight here: if you’re an American, you’ll probably agree that we’re overly enamored with “leadership” or the importance of being a “leader.”  We ought to regularly remind ourselves that the calling or gifting to lead is only one functionality among many that are needed to activate healthy communal bodies or organizations.  The Apostle Paul even puts the gift of leading toward the end of his list in Romans 12:6-8. This doesn’t mean leaders don’t play critical roles, or that we should dumb down the concept of leadership, suggesting that anyone can do it.   But as with any gift or calling we’ve been given or to which God has summoned us, we ought to intentionally work to develop and season it over time - just as Paul exhorted Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God,” a gift that appears to have involved a commissioning for apostolic leadership.

Top photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Second photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge Two

"Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called.”

Ephesians 4:3-4 NIV

Challenge Two:  Point Leaders Define Themselves More By What They’re Against Than What They’re For

When’s the last time you caught yourself railing on some church for its faults? “I’d never consider taking my friends into that environment.” Or, “Wow, they’re the most cutting edge 90’s-style church in the city.”  Or maybe it was a broader condemnation: “Most churches talk a lot about Jesus without acting much like Jesus.” These kinds of words may slide off your lips too easily if you’re a church planter. And when you get together with other planters, you know too well the sarcasm can get downright ugly.

If you are a contrarian when it comes to the way churches typically operate or portray the faith journey, you’re in good company. That push-back mentality in starters is often a legitimate “holy itch,” a Spirit-imbued agitation prompting one to step forward and bring some needed change. The inherited Church obviously needs many correctives, or we wouldn’t have so many DONEs floating about! (1) And given that many churches have earned their own bad reputation, it’s easy to want to avoid any guilt by association.

Author and missiologist Alan Hirsch’s work on Ephesians 4:11 helps us better understand some of the roots of this non-conformity and reactivity. (2) Hirsch’s research shows that those of apostolic, prophetic or evangelistic orientation often move into church planting and other outwardly-engaging ministries/vocations. Ideally, these “APE” leaders are able to stay in healthy, reciprocating relationships with local churches, as they help protect congregations from turning inward as they themselves find needed support/wisdom from these sponsors. Unfortunately, APE leaders are too often suppressed within a still-prevailing Christendom paradigm where shepherds and teachers are the dominant favorites, Hirsch asserts. (3) And we all know what penned up wild horses eventually do.

Habitual negative contrasting inevitably serves to nurture a core message that emphasizes what you’re against more than what you actually want to stand for.

Maybe you’ve felt like a bridled horse yourself?  You can’t wait to get outside the walls and demonstrate your improved version of church—a version that you will resolutely insure won’t be like the church(s) in which you’ve been underutilized. Or maybe you’re just plain uninspired by church as you’ve known it. Whatever the case, it’s not hard to understand why you may feel highly reactive against the established order. But it’s also not hard to see where this can begin to work against your passion to plant a healthy alternative.  Habitual negative contrasting inevitably serves to nurture a core message that emphasizes what you’re against more than what you actually want to stand for. People fed up with conventional church or Christianity will indeed find it reassuring to know you see the same faults they see. But there’s a time to turn and face the future and let your dreaming pull you ahead and fuel your rhetoric; a time to channel that reactive energy into crafting a captivating message about the faith community you’d love to see emerge.  

To make the turn from defining yourself by what you’re against to what you’re for generally requires intentionality and a good dose of humility.  In my experience, crossing that threshold involves two motions, both of which take time and occasional revisiting. The first involves a process of coming to grips with what you’re reacting against, being able to state it clearly and working to release any hold it has on you.  The second involves some deep reflection where you capture for yourself a) what you truly love and appreciate about Christ’s body, the Church; and, b) what your version of a local expression of this body might look like when done well, including the intended impact it could have in people’s lives.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

1 Cor. 1:25

If you’re still wondering why all the fuss about defining what you stand for in reference to the body of Christ, you might consider this.  The work of cultivating a healthy, biblically-informed, ecclesiology (that’s what’s in view here) generally leads to healthier discipleship. (4) As a leader you will bleed off the toxicity that you allow to cling to your soul, and that can taint the mix in ways that could be hard to undo in the future.  And we know from Jesus, Paul and other biblical writers that it’s darn near impossible to collaborate for Kingdom gain across a city (cf. John 17:20-23; Ephesians 4:2-6) without working alongside existing churches. We can take the high road and practice what Brian McLaren calls a deep ecclesiology. “A deep ecclesiology seeks to honor the church in all its forms, from highest (most sizable, historic, hierarchical, institutional, liturgical, traditional) to lowest (most ephemeral, relational, small, innovative, grass-roots, organic, disorganized).” (5)

Hopefully, you can see the value of cultivating both a healthy and a deep ecclesiology. Both require a love for the church.  And, as per my previous blog post, I hope you’re also firmly embracing the missional vocation of the church in the world. Imagine what your faith community could be like if these were defining elements: 1) we reach toward a high view of what “church” can be; 2) we lock hands with existing churches to express both the Kingdom and Kin-dom of God; and, 3) we invite the triune God to fuel us and send us, by the power of the Spirit, to plant the gospel in the soil we’ve been given to garden. This full-bodied ecclesiology—one that's healthy and deep and missional—is surely a pursuit we can passionately stand for!

Some questions and suggestions for team leaders:

• What measures might our team take to articulate a positive image of the body of Christ?  Consider: a) exploring as a team the NT writings to see “church” with fresh eyes; b) interacting over the essay “Church Beautiful” by Glasgow planter, Wes White.  

• In reference to my own attitude regarding the church, what do I need to come to grips with, forgive, let go of, or even repent of?  To whom will I look to process this, so that I can be freer to help my team boldly define vision in terms of what we’re for?  

• How might we as team cultivate a healthy, reciprocal relationship with some churches in our city?  How might we help them be involved in our experimenting? What strengths do they have that we might tap into to help fuel the culture we are trying to create?

written by Dan Steigerwald

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Dan Steigerwald

For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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Notes:

1. DONEs again are those who have left the church (not Jesus or God) and have no intention of returning - for more, see Josh Packard’s Church Refugees (Group Pub, Loveland CO: 2015).  Given that a high percentage of planting attempts are aimed at DONEs, it’s easy to see why team leaders targeting them end up casting visions full of anti-church rhetoric.

2. A healthy dose of non-conformity is actually consistent with the persona of most entrepreneurs. In his latest book, Originals (New York: Viking, 2016), social scientist Adam Grant argues that it’s the non-conformists who move the world.   They see problems with the status quo, and they push against it, creating new, innovative businesses, nonprofits, communities…you name it.

3. Alan Hirsch brings out well this suppression of the “APE’s” in the body of Christ in The Permanent Revolution (San Fran:  Jossey-Bass, 2012), and in latest book, 5Q (Columbia: 100 Movements, 2017).

4. Ecclesiology relates to one’s understanding and appreciation of the “church” - its nature, purpose, and core practices, including the diverse ways it manifests itself as a visible, accessible form or body.

5. Brian McLaren, "The Strategy We Pursue" for the Billy Graham Center Evangelism Roundtable "Issues of Truth and Power: The Gospel in a Post-Christian Culture" April 22-24, 2004, as quoted by Andrew Jones May 31, 2005 blogpost (accessed 3-27-19): https://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2005/05/deep_ecclesiolo_2.html.

Photo by Amy Peryam on Unsplash

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today: Challenge One

“Missional at its core involves an identity.”

Challenge One: Superficially Grasping Missional Theology and its Range of Application

This past year I’ve frequented a church that pours incredible energy into all kinds of justice and compassion ministries throughout our city, and even nationally. They strive to give fair representation up-front to diverse voices often not heard in the body of Christ. They send missionaries to serve both locally and in distant lands. Through preaching, teaching and diverse short-term focus-groups, they constantly challenge us to engage the powers oppressing our “neighbors.” Clearly, in many ways they are living well into their slogan: “Seek the peace of the city” (Jer. 29:7).

As much as I appreciate and support this church’s outward stance, I see them falling prey to a common tendency that also plagues many church starters. They seem to superficially or narrowly interpret “missional” to mean any outward, culturally-engaging behavior in the name of Christ. We’re missional because we prioritize outreach, proclaim the gospel, engage in good works in the city, oppose injustice in our world, invite non-Christians to specialized programs and events, etc. Indeed, such behaviors are consistent with being missional. However, I’m convinced this overused adjective actually covers a great deal more. And I would even argue that those other under-accented layers are actually key to making our participation in the missio Dei more sustainable, satisfying and complementary to Christian discipleship.

Here’s what I’m getting at: missional at its core involves an identity.

Here’s what I’m getting at: missional at its core involves an identity. It’s not primarily an extra set of behaviors we add on to our work of building koinonia and meaningful worship into our gathered life – you know, completing the triangle so that we have a fair distribution of activities in the UP, IN and OUT categories. It’s also not only practices we bring or do in culture, but it involves a co-participation with culture that takes into account where God is already at work in us and ahead of us—note that I just said “in us” and not only out ahead of us in culture.

Missional gets back to the vocation or calling of the church in the world (1). Our gathered worship and community are meant to sustain and fuel us for God’s mission (the missio Dei) in our local contexts and further afield. Flip the UP, IN and OUT triangle on its side with mission on the point—like an arrowhead in motion—and you’re getting closer to how the Scripture narrative portrays God’s people in the world. Using a strong NT metaphor, the “body of Christ” in its local and ecumenical expressions is meant to be an animated body, moving as a visible sign and foretaste of God’s renewing of all things—a renewing that is now underway, with the Spirit of God as Catalyst, that will one day be brought by God to fullness in the new creation.

Most church planting teams can grasp this profound missionary calling of the church. And they can run with it. But what they often neglect to do is to wisely channel and steward all that outward-focused energy/behavior. When teams fail to work smarter as they plunge into the needs and opportunities of their context, this can lead to a slow burn-out of the core group and little lasting missional impact.

Choosing where to invest our energies and with whom to do that requires us to practice discernment on multiple levels. We take stock of the gifts, interests and experience God has placed within our core group. We inquire and listen to discern the needs of our local context, including what people and what ground that God may be stirring our hearts toward. And we simultaneously lean in to hear/see where God and goodness are already at work. At the intersection of these circles of discernment we find our unique zone for missional creating and cultivating.

This way of operating allows us to be:

• People of shalom (remember, you can’t give away what you yourself don’t have);

• who bring shalom where it’s missing (think also in our cultural climate of the harder prophetic action of loving our enemies);

• who work with the shalom that’s already present;

• and who bear witness along the way to the ultimate Source of shalom.

“Mission is faith in action, hope in action, and love in action”

—Lesslie Newbigin

As church starters help their forming communities move into their calling in the world, and as they practice the kind of multi-leveled discernment mentioned above, they position themselves for more sustainable and satisfying engagement of their neighborhoods, city and world. Missional becomes more than an exhausting array of outward activities and practices. And more often than not, God surprises us along the way with the discovery of shalom wells, sometimes in the most unexpected of places. How many of us, for example, have learned to drink deeply from the wells of natural and artistic beauty; from deep friendships and partnerships; from the consoling solidarity we find with heartaches and impulses for good in our fellow human beings? Such wells are graces that strengthen our souls, even as we give away what’s given to us in an often-grueling servanthood within broken American culture.

Missional is not a passing fad, it’s a holistic way of life that locks onto hope and accesses Holy Spirit, God’s tangible down-payment guaranteeing our inheritance in the new creation coming (Eph. 1:13-14). It’s worth the time and effort to infuse it into our DNA, our discipleship, and our life in and with the world. As Lesslie Newbigin once said, “Mission is faith in action, hope in action, and love in action” (2). Perhaps these three ideally form the sides of the moving triangle noted above, with love as the driving force and faith and hope as sides of the arrowhead. Imagine what we might be as a people, if we could express missional in such a full-orbed way!

Some coaching questions to deepen missional inspiration and practice:

• What core missional stories and texts does God have your team focusing on? How are these integrated into your vision for a new church expression?

• How might you balance the team’s prophetic unction, so that decision-making in context is based on APEST discernment and not only prophetic imagination?

• What measures are you taking to infuse a healthy missional theology and lifestyle into your lead team and forming community? How will you measure progress in these?

• How do you practice leadership discernment, and how does your creating and

  cultivating of shalom correlate with your team’s gifts and passions, what you’re

  learning from cultural “insiders” (esp. non-Christian truth-tellers) regarding needs and

  opportunities, and the evidences of shalom-sowing already happening before you?

written by Dan Steigerwald

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Dan Steigerwald

For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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References:

1.Michael W. Goheen, The Church and It’s Vocation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018).

2. Newbigin’s The Open Secret (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995) actually has chapters devoted to each of these: Mission as Faith in Action, Mission as Hope in Action; Mission as Love in Action. I highly recommend the book!

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Key Challenges in Church Planting Today

“What if you could identify some of the most common challenges faced by church-starters?  And further, what if you could also take measures to disarm or reduce their effect? “

Photo by Branislav Belko on Unsplash

If you’re truly immersing in your local setting, you’re regularly encountering people who’ve decided they’re finished with church (the DONES) or who claim no religious affiliation at all (the NONES).  The research tells us these populations are on the rise, perhaps eclipsing the 100 million mark in the US alone (see note).  These fellow humans experience shalom whether they know its Source or not.  Much like you and me, they yearn to experience love, justice, community, hope, purpose, etc.  They feel the deep angst of falling short, of not being enough or acceptable in their present state.  And they’re just as stymied as we are about the fragmentation of our culture and the false promises of consumerism, civil religion and identity politics.  

Some of these people are your friends and neighbors. Their lives rub against yours and create that ache you have to show them another way to be human – the way of Christ. You’re discerning what this could look like and what your part might be in it.  Or you might already be underway with cultivating a new expression of church that NONES and DONES could readily inhabit. To capitalize on the potential before you, you know this sacred work will take much more than good intention, courage and entrepreneurial energy.  Many obstacles dot the horizon, and you wish you could get a better bead on those that could slow or even take your initiative down.

What if you could identify some of the most common challenges faced by church-starters?  And further, what if you could also take measures to disarm or reduce their effect?

It’s to that end that I’d like offer a series of posts over the coming months. These will attempt to describe, address (on some level), and invite discussion over twelve specific challenges team leaders typically encounter on the road to missional church planting. Twelve is not a magic number, but in my experience as a practitioner as well as a coach, mentor and trainer to many hundreds of church-starters these past 25 years, I see teams repeatedly wrestling with these.  

We’ll start the process today with a tight list of the twelve top challenges. In subsequent posts, I'll address each challenge one at a time, including a description of the challenge, suggested action(s), and some key questions a leadership team may want to process with an experienced planter coach.  I welcome any input from practitioners along the way, as leaning into these is more an art than a science.  One last thing worth noting is that the work of befriending and creating participative spaces for NONES and DONES is generally much slower-going than big-splash, event-based church planting.  This reality when coupled with the challenges we’ll be covering underscores the critical need for point leaders to cultivate the interior "grit" or staying power to persevere.

Starting a sustainable church that grounds its life in Jesus is a messy, often uphill journey.  But the process doesn’t have to be soul-depleting.

And now the list.  Here are ten key challenges church planters commonly face:

1. The core team has a superficial grip on missional theology and how to apply it.

2. Point leaders define themselves more by what they’re against than what they’re for.

3. The startup team lacks capacities to lead forward and steward the outward impulse.

4. Funding limitations and outside work demands restrict the point leader(s).

5. Point leader(s) undervalue cultivating a safe, developmental team ethos.

6. The team neglects to share the gospel and cultivate safe spaces for awakening.

7. Leaders are poor at leading collaboratively and empowering diversity.

8. The startup initiative projects an attractional public face far too early.

9. Leaders fail to prioritize spiritual discernment in their decision-making.

10. The team adopts vague, imposed, or poorly-discerned progress metrics.

Again, we’ll expand on these one at a time in coming posts, so please feel free to leave any relevant comments or questions along the way.  

Let’s see where this conversation goes.

Written by Dan Steigerwald.

For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/

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NOTE: The “Dones” according to Josh Packard in Church Refugees (Group Pub, Loveland CO: 2015) are those who have left the church (not Jesus or God) and have no intention of returning (for a tight summary of Done characteristics, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZICtBMBKAI). In more recent research, “Exodus of the Religious Dones,” Packard estimates that as many as 65 million Americans fit this description, with another 7 million who are “almost Done.” The “Nones,” coined in 2012 by the Pew Research Center, refers to those 46 million+ who classify themselves as having no religious affiliation (see http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/).

We're in This Together: A Response to the Borderline Shooting

I woke up on Thursday, November 8th to anything but my usual Thursday morning, day-off routine. My phone was blowing up with the news of a mass shooting at Borderline Bar and Grill, which is only about five minutes from our home and right smack in the middle of our church context. My wife and I frantically began tracking down people that we knew would have been there, hoping and praying that we would receive word that they were still alive. 

What does a new church that does not own property or have a building do to gather people in response to tragedy? I knew right away that waiting until a Sunday would not do.

We did know people that were there that night who survived, while many others, friends of friends, did not survive. After a few hours on the phone with families that were dealing directly with this crisis and with people all over the country who were concerned, I had a moment of panic. What does a new church that does not own property or have a building do to gather people in response to tragedy? I knew right away that waiting until a Sunday would not do.

I grabbed my phone and reached out to Dave Rhode of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Westlake Village. Westminster is my home church and Lightshine’s parent church; I hoped that we could work together to support our community. Before I could even ask, Dave said, “Let’s partner and do something together.” Dave and I, with the help of other staff from both churches, put together a beautiful vigil at WPC that evening. It was without a doubt the most difficult ministry day of my life as the fires had also begun, which precipitated mass evacuations and gridlock on our streets.  

Somehow, I barely made it to WPC by 5:00 pm that evening. We hosted people from both our congregations and probably some from the community as well. We prayed together, sang together, and shared together. We began to grieve together. The key word here for me is together.  

source: lightshinechurch.org

…it’s better to have good partners than a building.

I was asked to write this brief article to show how our existing churches and new churches can partner together for the work that God has called us to in our community. What a gift a good ministry partnership is! I left this experience thinking, it’s better to have good partners than a building. I am grateful for Dave, for his leadership his friendship, and for his willingness to be in this together.  

PCUSA is a connectional church, something that most us genuinely value. Dave and I are also partnering with other PCUSA churches from our neighboring friends in the Santa Barbara Presbytery (Emmanuel, Monte Vista, and Moorpark). It’s good to know that we are not alone when facing tragedy, but the Spirit and our churches walk with us. Priceless!  

Written by Rob Douglas, pastor of Lightshine Church in Westlake Village, CA.

Beloved Everybody Church

Beloved Everybody Church started meeting in October 2017 as a community committed to welcoming the full participation and leadership of people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities, collaborating and worshiping together. It was important to us to include shared leadership across abilities as essential for our church, because too often people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are considered objects of ministry rather than co-laborers in the work of the gospel. We recognize each person as an essential member of the body of Christ who is a gift in themselves, has God-given gifts to share with others, and whose presence makes every community more complete. We all need each other.

…too often people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are considered objects of ministry rather than co-laborers in the work of the gospel.

For a number of folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, worship gatherings that are more passive, and emphasize lots of words, listening, and abstract theological concepts can be inaccessible. For some, these kinds of practices don’t allow for real engagement, mutual sharing of gifts, or discipleship. So at Beloved Everybody Church we continue to find ways to gather and worship that create space for all of our members – both with and without disabilities – to engage God and one another in ways that are accessible to them, and to be transformed in the process. Our gatherings tend to be highly interactive, relational, participatory, multi-sensory, and embodied. For example, we’re likely to embody a scripture text either by assigning roles for characters to dramatize a narrative or to create movements that correspond to what’s happening in a non-narrative text. I don’t think any of us will soon forget Jesus blowing on us (as his disciples) after his resurrection, or the movement in Psalm 23 from fearfully huddling as we went through “the valley of the shadow of death” to sitting up tall as we declared that we would “fear no evil, for you are with me.”

We all need each other.

We are a community that intentionally welcomes people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (and other types of disabilities), because without this intentionality our practices and spaces would almost certainly not be truly accessible. But even though this is a stated focus, the space we have created has proven to be a place where others – who may have not even thought much about disability before – are finding deep welcome and encountering God. A number of people who have not been to church in years have found their way to our gatherings, and found there a nourishing space where they can belong, and have a experience of God in the midst of community. We are not perfect, but by God’s grace we continue to grow to embody our name, as we recognize that everybody is beloved and to strive to treat them that way.

Blog post by Bethany McKinney Fox, MDiv, PhD.

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Check out Beloved Everybody Church on their website, or follow them on Facebook and Instagram: @belovedeverybody.

Bethany also has a book coming out in May 2019 titled, Disability and the Way of Jesus: Holistic Healing in the Gospels and the Church.

Check it out here if you'd like more information or to pre-order! 

You Don’t Know Which Will Succeed (Wisdom from Ecclesiastes)

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I definitely over-planted my garden this spring.

I started off with radishes in nice neat rows. But once my row was planted I still had a half packet of radish seeds. So I scattered those over the garden bed with no regard for planting distance or depth. Then I did the same with my kale. And again with lettuce and tomatoes and beans. I thought, I can always thin them out later.

After a couple of weeks, some seeds that I planted grew into sprouts. Some seeds were eaten by birds. Some just didn’t come up. At the same time, “volunteers” came up from last year, most of which were growing better than the ones I planted: tomatoes in my lettuce and squash in my potatoes. And I didn’t even plant squash last year!

As we’ve been on the journey of nurturing ecosystems for starting new churches and worshiping communities, I’ve noticed a similar progression. At the beginning, there’s a voice inside me that says, “Be careful about which ideas you invest in. Don’t invest in the ones that are too far fetched. We should focus our energy on the ones we know will work.”

I don’t think I’m the only one who hears this voice. New church development in the 20th century has largely been marked by the preference of predictability over chaos, viability over experimentation, and strategy over tactics. There are certain locations, time periods, and demographics in which a new church will work. We’ve been planting in neat rows.

But as new and unexpected leaders, ideas, and partnerships emerge and show signs of vitality and congeniality in our ministries, assessment centers, churches, discerners groups, or core group meetings, we need some wisdom. We need to know how to go forward because our context has changed and it no longer feels like a straight rows anymore. Here’s what the writer of Ecclesiastes has to say.

“Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap. As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the maker of all things.” Ecclesiastes 11:4-5

The reality is, even though I think I know which ideas will work and which won’t, and even though it seems like prudence and wisdom has been driving my preferences, I’m really much more likely to waste valuable time and ignore what the Spirit is doing. Perhaps true wisdom is to not waste time under the sun trying to predict an unknown future. Wisdom is working hard to nurture it all, unlikely as it may be.

“Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.” Ecclesiastes 11:6

Who would have guessed that a few Christians patronizing their local bar would encounter spiritual conversations on a regular basis?

Who would have planned a group of middle aged adults would find joy adopting a nursing home to bless them, play with them and pray with them?

Who would have anticipated that my most carefully planned strategy for transforming a Christian small group into a missional community would flop?

Who knows when our ideas will take root? Will it be this year? Will it be next year? Will we get the job we need to support ourselves or will we be able to raise funds? Will our vision be shared with others? Because we cannot predict the future, we root ourselves in the present and follow the Holy Spirit’s leading.

High pneumatology means that the powerful winds of the Spirit are not only sovereign but extremely unpredictable. Wisdom says to let go of the future a little bit, to try lots of things, to be unafraid that our efforts will be wasted on an unlikely idea, and to simply start something and allow the Spirit to grow what the Spirit wants.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll have squash this year.

Blog post by Brendan McClenahan. Printed with permission.