Archive for August, 2009
Q and A with a Church Planting Wife [Part 1]
1. What was your first reaction when Todd told you that he felt called to plant a church in Lincoln? What thoughts or emotions went through your head?
Todd had just returned home from a business trip to Portland when he dropped the news that he thought maybe God was calling him to plant a church. This was threeish years ago, but I remember we were sitting on the living room floor surrounded by his luggage, one year old Iris running around crazy with excitement because her daddy was home, and I think, initially, my first reaction was surprise…and a little bit of shock because of the unexpected nature of his announcement.
At the time, in my mind, the only types of men who planted churches were ones who’d always been Christians, whose families were all Christians, who’d grown up in the church and been heavily involved in some aspect of ministry their whole lives. Their wives were also life-long Christians, also super gung-ho about ministry, and also extremely musically talented with a natural inclination for leading worship.
Todd, well, he’d been a Christian for barely three years. He wasn’t really that involved at our church. He was working his dream job. He was in the middle of pursuing a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. Neither one of us, actually, fit the image flashing through my mind of what a church planter should look like. I certainly was not gung-ho about ministry or musically talented! And besides, we were pretty settled right where we were. Church, job, house, neighborhood, baby – things seemed to be going well, pretty white picket fency.
I don’t know. I’d like to say that once the shock wore off a bit, I was completely excited and supportive and loving and that we prayed together and things were peachy keen, but honestly, I just blew him off. I think in my mind I decided that the idea was too crazy to even contemplate, I was happy with our life as is, and I had other things to worry about at the moment like getting pregnant with our second child. Besides, he didn’t even seem particularly sure of this calling himself. And just as an aside – I had prayed long and hard at church camp as a little girl for God to please not make me marry a missionary. I had married an engineer. As far as I was concerned, the matter was settled.
And that’s kind of where it stayed in my mind for the next year or so until it started becoming more and more clear that the calling God had placed on Todd’s life wasn’t going away. Despite the fact that this is what I had been praying for, it merely strengthened and grew and became unignorable. And eventually, even though there was lots of kicking and screaming along the way, I came to feel a little bit called too, which is how we ended up where we are now. Strange how God works, isn’t it?
Identity in Christ
Two Sundays ago, I had the honor of preaching at Believers Church up in Hannibal, Missouri. I preached from 2 Corinthians 5:21 on the topic of Identity in Christ. The basic premise was that there are two sides of the gospel and that we tend to often emphasize one while minimizing the other. My point in it all is that the gospel is not just about who God is and what he’s done – it is that to be sure, but it’s also more than that. The gospel is about who God is, what he’s done, and who we are – as Christians – because of it.
Give the audio a listen my visiting my Sermon Cloud page. You can also find it on the Believers Church website. Believer’s Church is a fellow Acts 29 church and a supporter of Project 2 Pillars, so while you’re there check out a little more about who they are.
Q and A with a Church Planting Wife [Part 0]
Beginning this week and spanning out over the next couple of weeks, my lovely wife Meghan will make a guest appearance on the this blog to answer some questions that I have posed to her with regards to church planting from her perspective. Our desire is for this blog to be a resource and I have a firm conviction that there aren’t near enough resources out there for the wives of men who feel called to plant churches. In order to contribute in a small way, Meg will be guest posting by answering the following questions:
1. What was your first reaction when Todd told you that he felt called to plant a church in Lincoln? What thoughts or emotions went through your head?
2. Over this two year or more journey, what has it looked like for you? What has been hard for you? Good for you? Have there been times of excitement, fear, indifference, doubt, loneliness? Describe some of the highs and lows.
3. What has/is God teaching you through this process?
4. What do you see your role being in this plant and why?
5. What fears do you continue to battle and what are you most excited about?
6. How can people pray specifically for you in this season?
Men and Church
A deep passion of 2 Pillars Church is to see men become biblically masculine men. A biblically masculine man loves Jesus, loves the Bible, loves his wife, leads his family, works his job, and serves/leads the church. I recently came across a blog post by the lead pastor of one of our Strategic Partner churches, Bob Thune (Coram Deo) that I think speaks well to this topic of men and church.
In what Bob himself calls a “dangerous post,” he lays out the following three aspects of the church that mitigate against a healthy spirit of biblical masculinity:
- Greeters. For some reason, lots of seeker-driven, attractional churches utilize official greeters to welcome people as they walk in the door. Which screams to every man: this is not a dude’s place. The places where men gather – bars, backyards, hunting grounds, sporting events – don’t have greeters. Dudes – at their extroverted best – give each other a head nod and say, “What’s up bro.” But a long extended handshake and a “so nice to see you this morning” screams “awkward” to most men. (If you are a man and you disagree with this, it’s probably because you’ve been walking into churches with greeters for so long that you’ve forgotten how strange it is.)
- Visitor-Focused Communication. Question: what makes people feel welcome? Many churches seem to think the answer is: going out of the way to communicate with “guests.” But this is easily overdone. The worship leader begins the service by welcoming guests. The pastor begins his sermon by welcoming guests. The paper products handed out at the door are targeted toward guests. The whole scenario is warm, nurturing, inviting, welcoming… and overdone. Dudes like control: they will decide if they want to fit in, and no one will force it upon them. And dudes like a challenge: men pursue women who are “hard-to-get” because, well, they’re hard to get. Churches that are overly welcoming say to men: “clingy relationship ahead.” Most dudes have already had one of those – and they aren’t looking for another.
- “Nice” Sermons. In David Murrow’s excellent book Why Men Hate Going to Church, he contrasts masculine values with feminine values. Men appreciate risk, adventure, competition, independence, and success. Women tend to value harmony, intimacy, stability, and relationship. In light of these differing values, most sermons don’t connect with men, because most sermons don’t talk about sin, judgment, repentance, and leadership. Men want to get punched in the mouth. Men want to rise to a challenge and show themselves competent. Men want their pastors to talk to them like their coaches talked to them – tough, honest, and direct. In this morning’s case, the pastor highlighted the theme of God’s presence in hardship in Joseph’s life. There was a lot of empathy and softness toward people going through tough times. But there was very little masculine exhortation. And like a chick flick, God’s faithfulness to Joseph turned out to have a happy ending. I couldn’t help but think of John the Baptist, who like Joseph was thrown in jail unjustly. God’s faithfulness to him meant his head got cut off. But you rarely hear that one preached.
(Read the original post in its entirety: Reflections on Attending Another Church)
10 Ways to be a Great Church Plant Core Group
Luke Simmons is a fellow Acts 29 church planter who planted Second Mile Church in south Phoenix. Luke recently posted to his blog notes from a talk he gave on “10 Ways to be a Great Church Plant Core Group.” As a young church plant ourselves, there is much to glean from Luke’s post which I have re-posted below:
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We’ve been so blessed at Second Mile to have such a great core group — we called them the “launch team” — who have done so much to help us start in strength. Tomorrow morning I’m going to be sharing with a group of men from the core group at Christchurch of East Mesa, a new sister church of ours (both of us were launched out of East Valley Bible Church in Gilbert). My contention is that it doesn’t matter how gifted or called the church planter is if his team is not on board in living out the vision of the new work.
So I made a top 10 list to help these guys start the church in a healthy way:
1. Your primary job is to create a culture that you and God will be happy about 10 years from now. This is a difficult thing to do, and part of the goal behind our current Core Values series. Who you are in the early days is who you will be later. Sure, some things change. But the DNA of who you are as a church and what drives you is formed quickly. Even though many core group members eventually move on, their role as culture-creators is essential.
2. Your new pastor and church will eventually disappoint you and let you down. People get into a new church thinking it will be utopia. It isn’t. Even if it is for a while, eventually the glitter rubs off. If you find the perfect church, leave because you will ruin it.
3. Work to create an evangelistic texture to every ministry environment. Evangelism is not just one program or an event. It happens all the time as people feel comfortable inviting friends and welcoming them into the community. Tim Keller’s resource on Evangelism & Church Planting in Postmodern Cities is very helpful here.
4. Always talk as though nobody knows who your heroes are. Christianity has its own little subculture, and different churches have their own set of “heroes” that they admire and talk about. But if you mention “Piper,” “Keller,” “Crowder,” “Luther,” etc. without explanation and assume everyone knows who those people are, it creates insiders and outsiders in a way that isn’t helpful. For us, and for Christchurch, it’s important not to assume people know who “East Valley” (our sending church) or “Tom” (our sending church’s pastor) are. One lady visited a group, kept hearing from an older woman about all the things “Tom” used to say and assumed that he was the lady’s deceased husband! Either way, to people who are far from God or not from your tradition, this is unhelpful and alienating.
5. Be known by what you’re for, not what you’re against. Is the church started from a positive vision for something or as a reaction against something? It makes all the cultural difference in the world.
6. Don’t moralize your personal preferences. Sometimes people are drawn to a new core group because they think it’s an opportunity to “create the church I’d like to attend.” But if those preferences (styles, times, songs, programs, plans) become sacred and moralized (i.e. “this is the right way to do it”), you’ll be disappointed (at best) or divisive (at worst), convinced that everyone else is sinful and bad.
7. Leave your current church on great terms (or go make it right if you didn’t). For a Christian who’s joining the core group of a church plant, this is really important. Don’t leave with baggage from your last church. If you’ve been in a position of leadership or responsibility, communicate with the people you’ve been working with. Don’t disappear out of nowhere, don’t drop the ball, and don’t smear mud on people or things that you didn’t like there. If you’ve already left and you’re guilty of division or gossip or dropping the ball, go apologize, ask for forgiveness, and make it right. Don’t bring your personal junk into this new work and think it won’t negatively influence the new work.
8. Relentlessly involve new people. I’ve realized that, in general, the “80-20 rule” where 20% of people do all the work is not the fault of the 80%. They would like to be involved. But once the 20% know each other and who they can count on to get things done, they stop asking people outside that circle. That’s why it’s huge to constantly be meeting and involving new people.
9. Be ready for change. I call this the “Brett Farve Retirement Principle” or the “for now” principle. One of my mentors says you should end every sentence with “for now” because the only constant thing in a new church is change. We’ve followed this advice and it is very good (for now).
10. Direction, not intention, determines your destination. This line was stolen from Andy Stanley’s “Principle of the Path” and simply means that where you’re headed is where you’re headed, even if you’d like to be headed somewhere else. The implication is that the things you want to be true of you in the future have to be part of the equation now or they will be very difficult to implement to the culture someday.
These are things that we’re still working on and trying to develop, and I’m thankful for the men and women who are striving to make them a reality in our church. It’s made the early days of this effort a sincere joy.
