On the first day of autumn it seems appropriate to talk about new beginnings. Today marks a new beginning for me as I enter the world of blogging. Journaling, I’ve done – regularly – for about twenty years. Blogging? Now, that’s another story. Sharing my private thoughts on the web for anyone to see? Are you kidding?!?! That’s why I have a journal - it’s just between me and God. But here goes… GULP.

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If Hamlet had been a 21st century American pastor, perhaps this would have been a big question on his mind, and on his lips.

In 1997, the church I served began a concerted effort toward planting a second campus. I was chosen to become the campus pastor. By the time I left that congregation in 2002, we were three years past worship launch on that campus, and in the midst of launching a third site. Those two campuses now exceed 1000 worshippers a week, in addition to the people gathered at the original campus. Over the years I have worked with numerous churches developing multi-site ministry – and also worked alongside churches who were simply planting a new church that would be independent of them. Both of these are excellent models for expanding faith community.

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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.

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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.

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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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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 » »