I write this on an Amtrak train returning from a 4th of July weekend with my young adult son in New York City.  We are headed to DC for fireworks tonight before he flies home tomorrow.  He and I had great fun in New York.  I had never seen Times Square at 2 am, but when you travel with a 21-year old, you shift into a slightly different time zone.  Yesterday, after we watched the Yankees toast the Toronto Blue Jays (in about 97 degrees), we noticed that our subway train back to Manhattan was headed ultimately to Coney Island.  Neither he nor I had ever been to Coney Island, but we had read all kinds of stories and seen movies about it - so we said, “Let’s just stay on the train all the way to the beach,” About ninety minutes later (we were riding the local) we arrived in this large railway terminal on the lower coast of Brooklyn, with thousands of people pouring out of trains onto the beach and into the amusement parks of Coney Island. 

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“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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Sometimes people ask us what new church starts is really all about. We have many answers, but all of them lead to the fact that healthy new churches make more disciples, more young disciples and more diverse disciples who transform the world. Recently we heard that one of our newer church starts got the attention of their community by challenging all local churches to a food drive smack down (our words, not theirs).

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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…)

One of the significant tasks of church leaders is to find, equip and deploy lay people to lead in creating new places for new people. If we are going to produce a multiplicative growth for the new church starts movement in the United States, engaging lay people in church planting is one of the paths to move forward.  We have this great opportunity and solemn responsibility, as leaders of our United Methodist denomination, to empower the lay people of our churches to get out from their church pews into the world to give witness to the amazing love of God by proclaiming the Gospel of Christ and participating in planting new churches. 

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