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.
Having recently read Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God, I was struck that our role is to seek God and His will in our lives. As we do that, He will show us how we can join Him in His work. God has been at work in Colorado Springs much longer than any of us have been alive, He has a plan, and He knows how we can fit into that plan – isn’t that why He brought us there?
It isn’t that God has been sitting around for the last several years waiting for some bright church planter to show up and discover a way to bring more people into the Kingdom. Quite the contrary, He just needs some illing individuals who want to be a part of something cool.
So, even before moving to the Springs, I began to seek God’s guidance. About a month before moving to Colorado Springs, we stopped at a strip mall in Fort Collins. While my wife was in the store, it came to me. My role is:
“To gather a group of people who want to experience God, seek where He is already going, and then join Him!”
I pulled out a strap of paper (yes, this was pre-PDA) and wrote it down so I wouldn’t lose it. And that’s where we began to focus. Although I kept getting pressure to write out our vision, this is what I focused on.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was reading Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, that I realized how relevant this vision is. Collins’ research shows that it isn’t the companies with a compelling vision that move from merely good to great, but the ones who seek to get the right people on the bus and in the right seats. This is what we were seeking to do at Common Ground.
And that’s what we did, we begin to gather people who were interested in truly seeking God, then we devoted the majority of our meetings to worship, prayer, reflection, and the Word. It was an awesome experience, and some say they’ll never enjoy church anywhere else again after being a part of Common Ground. (Hopefully they’ll seek to move their future faith communities towards a better model, not just complain that those churches aren’t Common Ground!)
Starting in about 2006, the Rocky Mountain Conference staff began to move towards a new model of church governence and leadership. Built on the shoulders of Paul Borden, and American Baptist Judicate Leader in Northern California, five churches were selected to participate in an experiemental program. Common Ground was selected to be one of those churches.
Unfortunately, as we worked towards the governance model of church leadership, the coaching and mentoring also began to dabble in leadership style too. I was pressured to develop a vision that was clear, compelling, measureable, and focused. I have to admit, that I agreed to do this, so I really have no one to blame but myself. However, in retrospect, I now believe that Common Ground hadn’t fully laid the groundwork to spell out the vision.
We were still in the “gathering a group of people” stage and we hadn’t fully sought to know “God’s will” or where “He was already working.” So, the vision we began to spell out was crafted more from human might than from spiritual seeking!
Jesus spent 24/7 with 12 men for three years. EVen when He departed, they still had lessons to learn. My core team wasn’t fully established until about mid-2004. We spent about six hours a week together for the next three years. And I’m NOT Jesus. That just simply wasn’t enough time to develop ourselves as fully devoted followers of Christ.
Given another five years, we could have begun to focus on the realtionship with God, and our pursuit of Him.
I so regret not standing up to the pressure to change our course. Either way, we wouldn’t have survived the arbritrary five year timeline, but at least when it ended, we would have had the solid spiritually bonding experience together. As it is, we lost that because of the pressure I put on my team.
I was an idiot.
In the end, I began to feel like for the denomination it was about success, even if that meant disabeying God’s calling. And that’s what I let it become for me too!
