We human beings, with the best of intentions, often do stupid things.  Especially in moments of revolution, we find it easy to throw out the baby with the bath water.  And then we fail to notice that something of value is getting lost in our zeal for reform.

It happened to the Marxists of the last century, who somehow threw out human rights in order to save human rights.  Never did fully figure that one out.  It happens regularly to liberal Protestants, who in seeking to reform the church, sometimes react to symbols that have been used oppressively by wanting to chuck the symbol as well as the oppression.  For example, I run into liberal congregations who have developed allergies to talking about Jesus, as if Jesus is nothing more than the JEEsus of TV preachers and the Pentecostal mega-church circa 1978.

Now the same phenomenon is happening with the emergent generation of young adult church leaders, many of whom see no reason to retain the concept of church membership.  Of course, the old bath water that they want to chuck is cheap membership that means nothing, the practice of clubby Christianity, and hyper-focus on organizational affiliation to the neglect of following Jesus.  Again and again, I hear young leaders dismiss the value of church membership, as if it is a dinosaur, going the way of the Kiwanis Club.  They see membership as the symbol of all that went wrong with their parent’s church. Read more » »

After nearly a decade of new church development work I’ve come to appreciate church planting as an “artful science.”

Before joining the Path 1 team I planted two congregations for our denomination. My approach to the first plant was very scientific—very formulaic. I thought, if I could just find the right formula, the right process, the magic bullet of church planting I could be serving the next Church of the Resurrection! And God laughed from heaven!

So I charged off to every conference I could afford to attend, read every book about church planting I could find and spent the summer carefully crafting my five-year plan. I had the maps, charts and formulas for success and hit the ground running. Like a mad scientist working in his lab I became obsessed. I wanted to do this the RIGHT way!  Truth is– I needed this thing to work because a lot of people were watching me. Some of them were waiting for me to fail. I couldn’t give them the satisfaction! So, I toiled in my lab even harder.

You don’t know this about me but before ministry I was pursuing a career in art. My passion was to design churches—the bricks and mortar stuff. In high school I competed for and won a four-year scholarship to a prestigious art school. It’s a long story but I walked away from all that to follow a call to full-time pastoral ministry. My artistic creativity oozed out into pastoral ministry in subtle ways—creative communication, marketing, signage, liturgical designs and such. Yet even these artistic expressions eventually fell silent to the tyranny of the urgent—got to find more money, more people, more staff, more leaders, more everything. The scientist better get busy! Read more » »

Often the most difficult conversations around any kind of ministry initiatives are the financial ones. This shouldn’t be the case! When we ask people for money to support the work of Christ we are really inviting them to become partners in God’s work. We are inviting them to invest in the eternal– to “lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.” (Mt. 6:20 RSV)The Path 1 staff is committed to finding and sharing best practices from across the connection to reach the goal of 1000 church planters and 650 new churches by the end of 2012. To meet and exceed this goal will require tremendous, and often sacrificial, financial support. Someone once said, “God already has all the resources needed to build the kingdom–he has placed them in our pockets.”I invite you to check out the funding strategy resources recently posted on this website. “Ten Effective Funding Strategies” will help your annual conference leadership think creatively about funding new church starts. “Interviewing and Choosing a Capital Stewardship Company” will help both local churches and annual conferences zero in on the most important questions to ask when considering professional stewardship counsel.To read these and other related articles, visit Resources for Annual Conferences, Fund on the Path 1 website.

My friend David Arruda is a pastor in Massachusetts.  Many years ago, David was running several businesses at the same time.  He had gathered a management team of folks with a highly structured approach to business.  They constantly tried to slow down decisions, seeking to run every idea by senior management before people on the front lines could act.

One day, determined to teach another style of leadership, David took a marker and wrote the following words on a whiteboard: “Have fun.  Take risks.  Go fast.”  The next day, the mantra had caught on and he found it on whiteboards all over the building.  When David transitioned into pastoral ministry, he held on to this winning mantra, adding the words, “for Christ’s sake.”

Today I am working with David to develop a network of home fellowships sponsored by 14 mainline congregations south of Boston.  We are seeking to develop an approach to building new faith communities that serve and disciple persons who are largely beyond the reach of the staid, historic congregations who are sponsoring this effort.  We are borrowing ideas from other Christian groups and applying them in ways that are still very new for mainline protestants in the USA. Read more » »

By John Michael De Marco | April 30, 2009 {1010}

With permission from e-Review Florida United Methodist News Service

NOTE: See related story, Florida Conference expands support to new churches

Two Florida Conference pastors have joined a nationwide effort to equip 1,000 people to launch 650 new United Methodist congregations by the end of 2012.

The Rev. Gary Shockley, former senior pastor of a new church start called HopeSpring United Methodist Church in Winter Garden, Fla., joined the Nashville-based Path 1 initiative recently as a new church strategist. Shockley is still living in Orlando, but commutes to Nashville once a month.

Path 1 is a response to the new church development goal “New Places for New People” — one of the 2008 General Conference’s four key areas of focus for the next quadrennium. The other three areas are developing principled Christian leaders, engaging in ministry with the poor, and fighting diseases of poverty, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Read more » »

I was leading a a focus group with a United Church of Christ congregation talking about missional outreach when a middle-aged woman directly across the table from me blurted out, “I could never bring myself to invite anyone to church.  I am just not comfortable doing that!”

She dared to say out loud the oft unspoken (and not so mysterious) reason why so many churches do not reach their potential. She spoke for millions of American church-goers who feel that inviting people to church is an invasive and highly uncomfortable thing to do. However, in this case, the woman added that she shares in the church’s annual mission trip to help Mayan peasants in Guatemala - and that the experience each year is so life-changing that she cannot help but talk to her friends about it.  So she persuaded one of her friends to come on the trip this last year.  Her friend was similarly moved.  The friend made some great friendships with church members on the trip, and ended up joining the church.  I looked the woman across the table directly in the eyes and smiled, saying, “Guess who’s an evangelist and she doesn’t even know it?”  Read more » »

I think it’s one of the most challenging passages in the New Testament. In Luke 15 Jesus tells a very long tale about two brothers. One is dutiful, attentive, trustworthy, steady and predictable. He’s the older brother. He does and says the right things. He’s the “good” son. The younger brother, in comparison, is impulsive, restless, seeking, selfish, and unpredictable. He’s no good (compared to the older brother)!  Read more » »