pat loughery

Part of the learning model in the Doctor of Ministry program at Bakke Graduate University has us writing daily journals for each in-class day. These journals describe what we saw, how we interpreted it and what we’ll do with it.

THURSDAY 6/5
Today began with a parking problem the parking lot was full, and I was redirected to the under-buildng parking, but it was locked and nobody was around to let me in. So I paid $15 to park next door, and missed the first part of worship even though I arrived ten minutes early before the hassles. That’s no fun.

During our morning time to debrief yesterday’s activities, a profound issue came up for me. Lowell Bakke led the discussion and said that a major change happened at BGU when the staff and faculty realized that their focus on leadership needed to change. Although the school remains committed to transformational leadership, it recognizes that models of leadership are easily skewed and become power grabs. However, as they began to see the centrality of stewardship of God’s resources, the staff and faculty found a system to latch on to. Stewardship focuses us on what we have, not what we don’t have (time, people, money, resources). Stewardship also keeps central the reality that we are dealing with God’s resources as well. Vision becomes something that is shared by the leader and the community, instead of something that is driven by the leader into the community. This is one of those moments that I will need a lot more time to unpack.

The theme for today was ministry model analysis. We took a school bus around to three different Christian ministries in order to meet leaders, see their facilities and ask questions. Ray gave us a group of questions that we should be looking to answer at each location.

First we met with Ron Ruthroe at New Horizons. New Horizons serves Seattle’s street youth from its facility in the Belltown neighborhood. Ron is a dynamic and engaging speaker, and I loved exploring their facility and hearing about their vision and strategy. In 2007, New Horizons served 1700 unique people. They are given shelter during the day, laundry and showers, hot food, entertainment, counseling and most of all, healthy relationships and relationship training.

I was impressed with the way Ron described New Horizons’ highly relational and careful approach with their audience. The outreach they do on the streets makes relationships so that youth can come look for a person instead of a service. The intake form they use is highly confidential and simple so that the young person doesn’t have to divulge personal stories too early in the relationship. I also appreciated that Ron organized our tour so that we wouldn’t be in the facility that the audience was in, so that there was no risk of broken confidentiality. I also loved how New Horizons organizes, trains and handles its volunteer staff. Ron spoke to us about the population that they serve, and gave us information about Seattle’s street youth, and talked to us about life on the streets. He also spoke to us about the failures in Washington’s foster care system. My wife and I are I the process of foster care training as we’re considering doing a foster to adoption, and we’ve talked about our desire to continue doing foster care later in our life. The picture of the system that Ron shared deepened my desire to do this. I loved when Ron said, “everything we do is evangelism and spiritual development”, and then went on to speak about one of the youth teaching him the deep truth of the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. From the time we got to hear and observe, this ministry looks to be very healthy and is making a massive impact on Seattle’s youth.

The second place we visited was Church on the Hill, led by Jason Hudson. Church on the Hill is a small, incarnational church in Seattle’s Capital Hill. Jason shared the simple vision of Church on the Hill, which is about connecting life with Jesus, and they do this by being in the Scripture together and obeying Jesus. Their core value is contextual Bible study and they have a four step study method that they publish and use in the church: They read the scripture and look for details of context, then they summarize the passage, then they look at the theology in the passage (how God is revealing himself), and then they look at anthropology (how God reveals humanity in the passage). Jason demonstrated this model to us by taking us through a dialogue on Daniel 1.

I felt very much at home with Jason’s style and his discussion methodology – very much like what I’ve used in my previous church plant – and his ability to guide a discussion and respond to new insights from others. I was also thrilled to hear that even though Church on the Hill is small (around 50 in attendance at the most), it just sent out a church plant, which requires much faith and a willingness to see the Kingdom of God grow more than the attendance of one person’s church.

I wrote in my journal, as I heard Jason’s stories about engaging with their neighborhood, that “I’m hearing my vision here, my mode, my desires.”. It was thrilling, and it was an encouragement that such a model for church planting can truly be successful if measured correctly. It gave me life and a desire to launch a new effort in the Lord’s timing. Jason’s handling of the implications of Daniel 1 – that we can be sent into our world into some very dark places in order to participate in the plan of God – was a beacon of hope for me.

As soon as I got back to a location with Internet access, I got in contact with Jason and we’re working out a time to get together and swap stories. I want to hear more about their model and their story, and I think that by telling him my story I can understand much more about what God’s doing in the midst of it.

After lunch, we visited our final model, the new Downtown Mars Hill Church. This campus is led by Tim Gaydos. I liked Tim personally, but I found the model of Mars Hill’s campus to be institutional and remote. This downtown campus is one of seven campuses of Mars Hill, whose main site is a few miles away in Ballard. Teaching is done by Mark Driscoll at the Ballard campus, recorded and replayed in this site’s video screen.

I asked Tim to talk about the reasoning behind this teaching model, and whether they think it’s the best model for spiritually forming the people in each campus. Tim replied that Mark Driscoll is Mars Hill’s teaching pastor, and that they want to attract people to Mark’s teaching. I agree that Mark is an excellent communicator even if I disagree with some of his theology and application, but I was disappointed to not hear any processing and reasoning behind that decision. It appeared to me to not have been carefully considered from the perspective of what is best for spiritually forming the people in distant locations, but I grant that I have a strong preference that a pastor or leader be able to know the names of his or her church.

Throughout Tim’s talk, I heard the language of attractional church: The people must come to us, evangelism happens when people come through these doors; we hope to attract a diverse crowd. I didn’t hear language of going to the people where they were, except to gather them into community groups for the church activity of a Bible study. I also heard the language of church as a sanctuary or haven from the evil world outside. These answers were couched in missional language, but the activities being described were attractional. I can see the value in attractional church when there is a strong personality at the center, but I am concerned that what we win people with, we win them to. If we evangelize people to a strong personality, then that is the reality of their spiritual expectation. It’s not a model that I think is mine to follow.

When you come in the door of the building, there is an elevated cage at the entrance. Tim described the history of this building – it used to be a hip-hop nightclub that had a lot of violent activities related to it, and those cages were for go-go dancers in the club. Tim told us that they were excited to redeem the building for Christ, and that the cage was now their coat rack. And when one of our students asked Tim how they were intentionally seeking diversity, his answers were that they hoped to attract a diverse crowd, and they’ve talked about hosting a hip hop act in order to appeal to the hip hop culture. Both answers are attractional, not missional, and where our discussion with Jason included a story of he and another member of his church going to a performance art show with their building owner in order to help him discern darkness from light, Tim didn’t have stories about going to be with the crack dealers out in his parking lot, or the go-go dancers who used to dance in those cages. To me, this illustrates the difference in approaches between these two churches. Certainly neither one is completely right, but my own preference is for an incarnational approach that has the missionaries out among the culture, not hoping that the culture will come to them.