Mixed-up Priorities and Broken Relationships

I was told that church planting would be the hardest thing I would ever do.  They told me this.  I believed them.  However, they lied.  It was much harder than one could ever explain.  As we were winding down our stint as church planters, some friends of ours were starting plants in the Denver and Minneapolis areas.  It was hard for me to even be excited for them.  Knowing the task that lay ahead, I wanted to shout at them:  “Turn back!  Don’t go!  Danger!  Danger!”  But if someone had tried to disuade me before we started, there is no way I would have listened.

Bill Hybels has said that one cannot plant a church and remain balanced.  Ron Gladden has often repeated that phrase.  I wanted to prove them wrong.  Unfortunately, because of much of my background and personality, I was unable to do that.  I became quite unbalanced during the five years we were planting.  I believe this helped to create our lack of true success in our plant.

Vision, Mission, and Values

During the first two years of Common Ground’s existence, we developed small groups, and operated on an “attraction, not promotion” agenda. The community that was occurring in our cell groups was a big factor in some of our earliest ascensions to the church. From these small groups we recruited and “called” leaders to join the leadership team.

Our focus was to “get the right people on the bus,” then to unravel the vision, mission, and values of this great experiment we called Common Ground. We started slowly, trying to keep the purity of the DNA. We spent weeks creating a shared list of core values. This team, which had considerable turnover, also produced a comprehensive set of leadership standards.

Style vs. Substance

(Note: This is a copy of an e-mail replying to a criticism of our church plant.)

Thanks for the comments on Common Ground.  It was tough, but we knew that being missionaries to an alternative culture would be that way.  They lied to us however, “they” said this would be the hardest thing we’ve ever done.  It was much harder than that!

Initial Retrospective

Leaving Colorado Springs and Common Ground is one of the saddest things I and my family have ever done.  Common Ground was our baby, but more importantly, there were about 30 people who were on a discipleship journey to Christ, but hadn’t arrived at a stable place in that growth.  When we left, many of those people fell away.  A few went back to drugs and alcohol, several stopped attending church, and many more with less than evangelistic values came back to fill the pews.

We now have come to realize the following:

1. Five years is not long enough to plant a church targeted towards the deeply entrenched, secular, postmodern seeker.
2. Funding for Adventist church plants should not be determined by pre-defined funding formulae, but by the growth and ROI, independent upon established churches.
3. Church planting pastors should not work without a team.  Planters should follow the biblical model and be sent out in twos.
4. Church planting pastors need closer support and supervision than established church pastors.  Mentoring, coaching, and prayer support are essential.  Clear boundaries and protocols need to be developed.
5. Church planters need to be involved in the establishment of protocols and strategic planning at a much higher level than is now allowed.

Our Target

It has been said that if you don’t have a target, you’re sure to hit it!

Many church plants are started for a number of reasons.  As one friend says, all churches were planted at some point.  In fact, most churches started from a dissatisfaction with the status quo.  Unfortunately it wasn’t a desire to reach lost souls as much as it is a “felt need” to do church a different way.  In my not-so-humble opinion, this builds bad DNA into the church right from the start.  It’s no wonder then that the church isn’t involved in evangelism or service to those outside of the congregation.

Can Leadership Be Learned?

There is a great debate that’s been taking place for years.  Possibly longer.  Decades, centuries, millinia?  In my last assignment, I was assaged constantly to grow a leadership team, to scale my efforts, and this would guarantee success.  Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the market: we weren’t able to grow our team.

Now, here’s the caveat, we were working with all volunteers (except me), in a hostile environment, with great baggage and social pressure for people to NOT join our team.  But all of my superiors, each of my mentors, and the various coaches we employed, were telling me that I could grow these people into leaders.  If I didn’t, it was mere failure on my part to be a good leader.

The System is Broken

Recently my brother, who is also a church planter, wrote a letter to his boss asking some tough questions.  The letter was written so well that I asked if I could repost it here.  I’ve removed some information that is personal and altered the names, but for the most part, here is the letter reproduced in full (after the jump):

Experiencing God

So how does one begin starting a church from scratch?

We didn’t want to focus on “former” Adventists, or even those who may be considered non-regular attenders.  We didn’t want to focus on those who were currently attending church, but were bored with the music, order of service, or “dress-code.”  We didn’t want to be considered “sheep-stealers” or just be involved in moving the saints from one church to another.

Yet, within Adventism, there didn’t seem to be many church plants that had successfully gone into the unchurched population and built a church of “living stones.”  But, we knew, in our hearts, that if that were our intention it would become our reality.

Recent Comments and Replies

I have recently received a few comments and replies to the following blog posts.  In order to best answer these, and to save myself time, I will post excerpts of those comments below along with my replies:

I just read your blog, and can’t help but be a bit sad. Lots to learn there, though, so I’m hoping that the process of writing it is therapeutic! Have you shared these thoughts with administrators?

Good to Great. or Good to Mediocre?

From the beginning we wanted Common Ground to be fresh and new.  Not so fresh and new that no sensible person would attend, but fresh enough to be attractive to the average person.  But where to start?

Much of the advice I was getting back then, in the early ’00s, was to cast a vision so compelling, so audacious, and so, um, visionary that people would flock to be a part of our church.  However that didn’t seem to fit the way I see God.