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.
Confucius said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Dr. Leo Marvin (“What About Bob” fame) said, “Baby steps, baby steps…”
On a cold weekend in January eighty-plus people took many steps from around the country braving threats of snow and ice to participate in our inaugural Coaching Forum in Nashville, TN. The evaluations we received from attendees were encouraging and educational. We did many things right and many right things! Overall 99% of participants said the event “exceeded their expectations.” That’s pretty amazing. Baby steps…
It’s been one of the most frequently quoted scriptures, “Without a vision the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:19) As church planters we have been well schooled in the virtues of casting a compelling vision. Wise planters do this well…and often! But there’s another side of this that requires equal diligence. I phrase it like this, “Without adequate funding the vision perishes.” Many a church plant has shriveled up and withered away because of a severe case of financial dehydration. Casting vision is easy. Gathering folks around that vision is exciting. Asking for money to support that vision is neither easy nor exciting (for many of us).
I had the privilege of facilitating one of the ministry tracks at our recent School of Congregational Development in Evanston, IL. The Advance Strategy Questions track welcomed thirty annual conference leaders across the connection including bishops, superintendents, and development directors. For six hours we presented and debated critical issues facing those responsible for new church development.
One of the nearly dozen topics we tackled over two days was identifying the qualities and characteristics of effective second pastors of new church starts. We agreed we have not focused enough on this topic.
The reasons are obvious to me and everyone who knows me! It certainly doesn’t take much explaining. I know the reasons I am not God—gross deficiency in things like omniscience, transcendence, omnipotence and such. Like every other human being who has touched terra firma I want to be God, I really do—to control my life, the circumstances around me, other people (especially in traffic) and even the One who is the Alpha and Omega. This is the very root of sin isn’t it? The desire and the intention to be God or at least control God.
There are moments where I am made more keenly aware that I am not God—not even close. Sunday morning was one of those epiphanies for me. I was dragged to visit a little church that was thought (by the denominational powers that be) to be dead. My wife, who works for our district, was asked to pay a surprise visit to this tiny outpost and report back any signs of life. I was an unwilling accomplice; but because I love my wife I was obedient.
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! (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.
