pat loughery

A few years ago I wrote on this same topic for The Ooze, and that article was well received and I’ve heard it was helpful to folks.  Maybe below you’ll read similar themes tempered by a small amount more of maturity.

A week or so ago, my friend Deanna, posting from her @YourPastorsWife twitter account, wrote some excellent tidbits on a theme that got my attention:  “Things We Learned Church Planting”.  I responded to a couple of her tweets, and then she challenged me to write some.

Deanna and her husband John planted a church in our town the same time we planted Mt. Si Vineyard, and we appreciate their friendship and their perspective.  I learned a lot in our church planting efforts, so although it’s been a while since I revisited that topic here, the theme’s still very interesting to me.  Oh, also my friend Todd Hiestand bugged me a couple of times to blog these items, and I was afraid he’d steal my ideas as his own 😉 (kidding; Todd’s got better ideas about church planting in suburbia than I do)

So, here is how I responded that day – no editing, and these are in order, and perhaps I’ll comment a bit on each one.

• (Things we learned church planting): Find a way to answer “How’s the church?” without referencing attendance numbers.

So, this was our big challenge, initially and all along the way.  If your attendance isn’t impressive to those asking the question – and ours never was, and I struggled with my feelings about that – you have to measure success differently and flip the script a bit – as I say again a couple tweets down.

• Know your city and where its inhabitants gather. Where are its hubs?

This is basic missional church, right?  In our city, people gather at one or two of the bars, and at the soccer fields for youth sports, but past that – we’re an exurb without many gathering spots.  No coffeehouse, no shopping mall (well, an outlet mall, but that’s used way more by destination shoppers than locals), no youth activity scene.  Homes is where people hang out, but not a ton of gathering.

• Find ways to measure your success through stories, not through numbers.

See above.  More for yourself than for those asking the question – but how do you know it’s going well?  For me, I wanted to be able to focus on the stories – who’s changing, how am I changing, who are we serving, what’s happening that wouldn’t be if we weren’t doing this church thing.  That to me is way more critical than “two new  families showed up last Sunday!”

• Engage your crew with service work and grow community from there, not the other way around

Ah, things I wish I would have learned.  This comes from the Church of the Savior folks in DC, led by Gordon Conwell.  This theme is captured really well in my current church, where we do service projects together, and community grows from that.  I now believe Gordon when he says that if you start out a small group to build community, it’s nearly impossible to shift that group into mission and service; it’s too inwardly focused.

• Things we learned while church planting: Build on the skills and dreams of those with you, not those you wish you had but don’t

Church planters always think they need a great musician and great kids leaders and great environment and great preaching, but what if you don’t have those?  (Of course, we had all those things :-)).  But can your community pursue God together if nobody can lead the singing time when you gather?  What happens if nobody is REALLY psyched to teach the kids every week?  What ARE people psyched about, and what is the community together psyched about?  Perhaps that’s more God’s Kingdom than trying to get the structure of Sunday gatherings just like you’ve seen it done everywhere else.

• You are not in the same context as the models and leaders you learned from; that’s GOOD

I learn from seeing the ideas of others, and church planting is nothing short of overwhelmed by information about models.  ALso, church planting conferences, and church conferences in general, tend to be led by people who are in churches most unlike yours – big, growing, “successful”.  What makes them the best voice to speak to you in your place and time?  Some wisdom can be gained by their experiences certainly, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that those models are going to work for you.  They won’t.  God’s ways change, and your area and your people and your soul is different than theirs.

• You’re serving God’s kingdom, not building yours. If all your folks find another church, good!

Keep telling yourself this.  If all you are is a short-term processing center while people catch some whiff of God’s kingdom, but then move on to some other part of the global church, you’e done your job.  Nobody will believe you when you say this, though 🙂

• The people you wish would find another church, don’t 🙂

Yes, well… sometimes the great joy of shaping a community is that the people who are most unlike what you wished you had, are the people most engaged.  Now, there are folks who are toxic and controlling and community killers, and that must be dealt with, but there are others who are simply just too different from what you hoped for, and that’s entertaining.

• Xns can have weird hangups (Easter Bunny, non-organic kids snacks, Yoda, Catholics, candles)

One time we had a loooong discussion about why we let the kids play on the lawn outside our gathering spot, when we didn’t know if the lawn was fertilized with organic fertilizer or not.  I mean, hours-long. See the item above.

• You may find much stronger support via web-friends than via your tribe. That’s OK.

We had friends within our tribe and outside our tribe.  I found great support though in the early days of the emerging church discussion, and when blogging was at its peak, and through likeminded folks who used similar language to me and who I’d neve rmet before,  Trust God – nah, beg God – for supportive friendships.

• Teach people how to make and be friends, and how to throw parties. CF John 2.

Maybe it was just our folks, but I think this is a cultural thing at least in the Seattle area and the US Northwest.  People – myself included – just have a really hard time being and making friends, and very few are great at throwing parties.  Basic social and relationship skills can always be improved, and isn’t the Gospel completely relational and party-aimed anyway?   Perhaps if everybody in our circle learned just how to be friends, and to throw parties with their friends, the world would change.

• Other churches (and planters) are not your competition; loneliness, consumerism, individualism are

Ah, yes.  Competitiveness is a funny thing, especially among pastors (who of course measure each other by Sunday attendance), even though we all know we’re supposed to be on the same team.  But we’re wary of each other anyway, and we’re only happy when one of our folks heads to another church if it’s one of those folks we really wanted to leave.  But the real enemies, at least in my culture, are those things above.  Horrible enemies, they are.

So, for those of you reading – what have you learned about planting a church?