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. (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! (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.