“Beware ministry on the cutting edge; because on the cutting edge you bleed.”  I’m told this piece of advice was circulating more than a decade ago, in the church growth movement, among mega church staff people.  The idea was this — better to play it a bit safe when trying to grow a mega church.  Let someone else experiment.  Use the tried- and-true methods that are working to grow your church — and don’t take too many chances.  This advice may have worked in the 1990’s of fast growing suburban church planting; but in my world, the words take a different twist.

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Another Path 1 staff member and I recently spent a week traveling through parts of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference which includes Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Among the hundreds of well established churches there I learned of a couple new and innovative church starts that really captured my attention.

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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. (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.

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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?”  (more…)

I’m not making this up! Really! There is such a thing as parabolic harmonious oscillation and I’d like to see more of it in the church! Can you figure it out? It’s a fancy physicist’s term for the movement of a swing. Leonard Sweet, nationally acclaimed author and professor, introduced this to the church in a workshop several years ago. Parabolic Harmonious Oscillation (even more fun to say aloud than read) is simply doing two things at the same time—leaning back and kicking forward. Try this sometime! You can’t make a swing move from a dead stop unless you lean back AND kick forward. (more…)