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.
Zechariah 4:6 NLT “This is what the LORD says… It is not by force nor by strength, but by my Spirit, says the LORD Almighty.”
Intellectually, we knew that it was prayer and more prayer that would ensure the success of this plant in Colorado Springs, but once one really gets into the accelerated growth curve of planting, it is easy to start pushing with all of our might and strength. I confess that the details of administrivia and building relationships began to consume my time.
Coming from an unbalanced background, with an addictive personality, I now know that I needed to be more careful to avoid the pitfalls of devoting too much time to planting, and not enough time to QT3 (quantity, quiet, quality time) with God and my family.
It wasn’t until my daughter was born in January of 2005 that I realized how much of a workaholic I am. But by that time I was knee-deep into the weeds of planting and didn’t know how to make changes. Now, I don’t have good role models to follow, but the ownership was still on me to make changes.
It was also about this time that I lost my mentor and supervisor, Ron Gladden, to some internal church political battles. In fact, the entire Church Planting Center was shut down and it left many plants and planters adrift in a sea of confusion. Still, though, the ownership of balance was upon my own shoulders and I kept allowing myself to push too hard – all at the sacrifice of my family.
During this time, we continued to see great and explosive growth. Our small groups multiplied like brush fires on a Southern California hillside. Our contact and reach into the unchurched community was like nothing I’d ever seen before, within Adventism. All this success becomes quite heady. Like a drug, I wanted more and more.
Although workaholism, and its associated successes, can be viewed with praise from those around us, it is still rooted in unfulfilled needs. I was, like generations before me, thriving off of the accolades of success. I wanted more!
In the Fall of 2006 I hit a wall. I was burned out. The emotional toll of trying to be a good Dad and a successful church planter had become too heavy for me to carry. I grew depressed and tired. I needed a break. The conference offered to give us a week of R&R in the Rustic Cabin at Glacier View Ranch. Unfortunately that week ended up only being three nights. Three great nights, but hardly the week that was promised.
During that time, as I reflected on the past few years and the future that lay ahead of us, I knew that I had to make some drastic changes. I committed to my wife and family that I would end the 80 hour work week. When we returned, I told our leadership team that I was no longer going to put in so many hours. I asked them to step up and take more responsibility for the fractal they managed. They willingly agreed.
For my Core4 leadership, this meant that if they didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. For me, it meant that I had to release my grip on this church we had started from scratch. Jennifer and I, at first, did everything. We led the groups, led the worship service, recruited leaders, gave Bible studies, et cetera. We did it all. But as our leadership grew, we were able to let go and let them take over certain responsibilities.
Often, for me, “The Perfectionist,” it was hard to let go. But this phase of burnout was forcing my hand.
During the same time, my superiors at the conference were urging pushing me to turn my core leadership into true leaders. Its not that I’d not been trying to do that for a few years, but none of us were seeing fruit in that process. (I now know that those people didn’t want to be leaders) This burnout phase gave us an opportunity for the Core4 to step up and lead.
After a few months of me taking more of a laid back approach and creating a leadership vacuum, I wasn’t seeing any real victories. Around the Spring of 2007, I knew that Common Ground was going to fail if we didn’t get serious about the roles of our senior leadership. It was at this point that I began to push the Core4 to step up and “make it happen!”
My Dad is a very competitive sportsman. With a little parental support, he could have been a pro baseball player. My brother and I have learned to play to win. None of us goes into a game just to have “fun.” Fun is winning. I’m the guy that never gives up. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.
If it is the bottom of the ninth and we are down by three runs, I am still urging our team to get in the game. Even if we have two outs and we’ve been playing cruddy, I’m still urging everyone to get in the game. Don’t give up! Don’t quit early! This is the way I approached Common Ground in the Spring of 2007.
We only had a few months before we had to have adequate tithe and attendance to be considered a success. I was getting the word that there was no such thing as partly successful. We needed the full $265k annual tithe in order to continue to play in this church planting game. The mere $140k wasn’t going to do it.
Indeed, though our congregation was around 150 people, the conference appeared to only be counting attendance (100) and membership (45). Our opportunities for success was beginning to look pretty feeble. But, I don’t quit until the final out.
As I was seeking to motivate my team; and pointing out the options if we didn’t succeed, it was looking like they were losing heart. My most influential core leader would usually respond with a desire to wait until September 1, 2007 (our deadline) and see what the conference would do. I tried to explain that this would not be an option, but I was unsuccessful in my argument.
To try and get my point across to this man, I sent a heavy hitting email. It was my intention to wake him up to the very real failure that was looming in the future. I was seeking to knock him lose from his fear of attempting something drastic. I knew I was taking a risk. I knew that the email may not be taken well. But I was getting desperate.
In retrospect I now know that email was a bad choice. It wrecked my friendship with someone I admire and love. And, it ended up serving no purpose.
A month later we had a heart-to-heart meeting. It was a joint meeting with our governing board and Core4 leadership. During that meeting we asked the leadership if they were willing to follow me? For the most part everyone expressed love and appreciation for me and my family, but it was clear that they had lost confidence in my ability to lead. Afterward, I sat down with my board chair and said, “I’m done.”
With that, we began to make preparations to leave Common Ground and to move onto another leadership position.
Here’s what I learned:
- Stay balanced. Don’t sacrifice your health or your family for the cause. Play to win. Play to succeed. But keep the priorities straight. God, Family, then Career. Win with God first. Win with your family next. And then, finally, win with the task before you.
- People before tasks. This is a lesson I’ve tried to learn before, but apparently haven’t learned well enough. 100 years from now, will anyone remember what happened at Common Ground? Probably not. But the relationships will last into eternity.
- Don’t plant without the infrastructure. My brother tried to dissuade me planting as a lone planter, but I was unwilling to wait for that to happen. I had two planting offers on the table and I wanted out of the small, conservative, rural church we were in. The lack of one or two other planters to join me; the lack of sufficient denominational support; and the lack of regional support from a solid Mother Church. All of these contributed to our failure.
The bottom line though and the only thing I have control over is my ability to lead. Spiritually, socially, emotionally, and relationally. I needed to lead by putting God first, always. I needed to lead by putting my family’s needs above the church’s, always. And, I needed to lead by putting the members of the church above the success of the plant. I failed in each of these regards.
I don’t believe that five years is a sufficient time line to plant a church with an alternative evangelistic focus. To plant a church using traditional Adventist public evangelism, I think there is potential to achieve success in five years. But for the model we were pursuing, I don’t believe that was enough time. Knowing that now, I’m not so sure I would have entered into a five year project to do what we felt called to do.
Jesus spent 24/7 with 12 men (and some women) for three and a half years. I had about 4-5 hours a couple of times a week to spend with 5-10 people. And! I’m not Jesus! It just takes more time to disciple people in our fast-paced, busyness that we call life.
Now, I continue to pray for the relationships that are broken. I continue to recover from my burnout. And I continue to pour more and more of my time into my family. I am hoping that I don’t make some of the same mistakes in the traditional format where I am now working.
August 8, 2008
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:
Yes, there is a lot to learn. It would be good if there were an ongoing process of critiquing church plants and the church planting system. One of my complaints with the current pastoral role is the lack of accountability in the system. A bona fide system of annual performance reviews, goals, and objectives could greatly increase the effectiveness of the position. At a minimum, even if we don’t hold the pastor’s feet to the fire, we could at least survey and critique individual churches.
What I have begun to do here is to document our successes and failures – the church, the leaders, the systems, and the various administrative functions of the denomination. I’ve not shared this with them at this point, because I want some feedback from my friends first. There are some significant failures in our current church planting systems, but I don’t want to be so pointed at those that I don’t take personal responsibility for my own failures first.
The chief differences in my approach to pastoral leadership now are subtle, yet significant. Now, more than ever, am I putting family before my occupation. This has come about for a couple of reasons. First, it is the right thing to do and I should have done a better job in the past. Second, I’ve learned that no matter how motivated I am, I can never go faster than the lid of the organization that employs me. Basically, this is the Serenity Prayer personified.
The new churches are challenging because of their traditional, yet liberal paradigm. It takes time to build trust in a rural and traditional congregation. I know that I’m going to have to be patient and wait for the right timing and that is a challenge for me. In the meantime, because the process of moving these churches forward is slower than what I experienced in a plant, it allows me to spend more time with my family and readjust my workaholic habits.
I believe we have grieved significantly for the losses at Common Ground. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of the demise of another former member into the abyss of worldly wandering. The months of August and September were very hard, finding out that we were leaving and having to find a new position, a place to live, and give birth to our son – all that was difficult.
At this point, we are able to step back and take hard, honest looks at ourselves and the system that caused Common Ground to fail. A year and a half to two years ago, Common Ground was one of the most successful church plants in the NAD – probably in the top 10 somewhere and quite possibly in the top 5. But now, if I were there, I’d pull the plug.
It is clearly the hardest thing we’ve ever done. We know that God used us. But we also know that the denomination, AND the culture, were not ready for a church like Common Ground. We were too experimental for the denomination and too traditional for the culture. I believe we were about 10 years ahead of our time.
If we could have realized the funding to keep going, I do believe we could have acheived a financially sustainable attendnance and income. However, we believe that five years is not enough time to raise up an experimentally evangelistic church within Adventism.
Thanks for the feedback. I also appreciate that this comment was also posted so others could see it, on the blog, in the comments. Feel free to share it with your interns – or anyone else you think would benefit.
Steve, in the most recent post I don’t clarify the “mother church” statement. But in another post I talk about not having an openly hostile, or antagonistic mother church. Colorado Springs was in upheaval when we arrived and we didn’t even know it. Shortly before our scheduled launch the primary church in the Springs went through a nasty and bitter split.
We were wondering why we were having so much trouble attracting visionary, evangelistic Adventists to our startup. Once the split occurred we saw why. They were all marshaling their forces to do battle with each other. The very people that would have been an asset to the success of Common Ground, chose instead to follow their bitter friends to start a church focused more on style than vision. It was really hard to watch when that split imploded and the people we thought could have been an asset to Common Ground, stopped being Adventists altogether.
I don’t believe it is necessary to have a mother church. I don’t even think a plant needs the assistance or cooperation of area churches. But for a community the size of Colorado Springs, with only 500k people and one numerically strong church. The kind of controversy we witnessed really hampered our ability to gather some disciplemakers together. Indeed, in the last few months, that church has undergone another split and the split has split. <sigh>
We do feel affirmed. We know that we fought a good fight. We’re no longer discouraged and I don’t think I am being too hard on myself. I just want to take a realistic view of the successes and failures. I don’t think it is fair to point to some system and leadership mistakes if I’m not willing to point at myself in the mirror also.
Yes, we learned a lot about reaching unchurched people. Even while practicing our craft as church planters, I became aware at how ignorant most pastors, and in turn their churches, are at reaching the unreached. Our vocabulary, our cliches, our traditions, and much of our closed community actions do great damage to our ability to reach out into our communities. It is amazing how far verbiage alterations, dress styles, and humility will open doors for shared conversations.
As we develop relationships and wait for permission to speak into people’s lives, they will let us and actively, and enthusiastically participate in the working out of their own salvation (and ours in the process)!
Working in a traditional church, it will take years before I am able to introduce some of these pardigm shifts to the congregations here. Our goal is to stay here until retirement and to lead these congregations across the thresholds of misunderstanding so that they too can crash against the gates of Hell to save lost souls.
Yes, they tried, you’re right. But in my family, we take the approach that we can do anything possible. the impossible will just take a bit longer to accomplish. Had we the money to continue, I believe we would be at that survivable mark in the next 3-5 years. I had said that if the funding dries up, or the leadership changed, we would find a way to tough it out.
However, with the growth of our family, we decided to put our energy towards these two beautiful kids instead.
One of the things I continue to wrestle with is the lack of leadership in this area. I have never been dependent upon my current employment in such a way that I was afraid to do the right thing. I keep saying, “If this pastoring thing doesn’t work out, I can always go run a backhoe somewhere.”
In my opinion, we need two things: 1) Church leaders who are willing to have one-term presidencies; 2) Church leaders who are willing to turn the reins over to younger leaders.
Most Fortune 500 companies are managed by their senior VPs, who are in their late 30s and early 40s. Our church barely lets someone on the church board at that young age. Lyle Schaller has said that if you are past the age of 35, you’re too old to affect change in the church. I think more of our people need to understand this principle.
This is also another reason I’ve chosen to step back from the front lines and pour my energy into my kids. I will prepare them to stand on my shoulders and change the world. I’ve done enough world-changing for two lifetimes. If I were in my 20s or 30s, I would not hesitate to give it another shot – maybe. Going back to my earlier comment, I don’t think the culture or the church are ready for what we were trying to do at Common Ground.
Yes, see above. I think I even have a couple of books inside of me – this is the beginnings of one of those.
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Thank you everyone for the great comments! I’m looking for additional feedback as to tone/style before I pass this on to my overseers. Have I been too harsh on them, not harsh enough? Too real, not real enough? Have I taken enough ownership for my own shortcomings?
I appreciate your help!
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