THE POWER OF TWELVE

In a couple of my coaching calls this month, I have been told (by very talented leaders) that they were struggling to get a committed core of people for their new church project. In both cases, their work focused on 20-something adults, who admired the new church, friended the pastor and liked the church on Facebook, and were even willing to pitch an hour of volunteering occasionally. However, in both cases, almost no company of highly committed persons came together at the core. Yet.

I DON'T WANT TO GO TO CHURCH - BUT A DINNER PARTY SOUNDS INTERESTING

Zach Kerzee is one of my new coaching clients this year. This past summer, Zach set out to do something that should be almost impossible: to plant a church, from scratch, in one of the most church-averse parts of the nation. On top of this, he had no team ready to help him. It was what we call a parachute drop church plant. I agreed to coach him, thinking to myself, "Bless his heart."

WHEN IT COMES TO CHILDREN'S MINISTRY - MAKE IT WORK!

On the Sunday after Labor Day, I found myself at an old-fashioned Rally Day at Ebenezer United Church of Christ near Buffalo, NY. It was worship on the church lawn, under a big white tent, dinner on the grounds, and start-up for all the children's Sunday school classes. Kids were everywhere! I visited with many of their teachers - some of whom have been in the classroom for more than 50 years; one twenty-something was picking up teaching for her grandmother, to carry a tradition forward. For all the tired, dead Rally Days out there, Ebenezer still knows how to throw a good fall party and rally the neighbors and their children!

WHY REVITALIZATION IS NOT ENOUGH

Most American denominations are now in free-fall. We have tried everything we know to encourage and help local churches adapt to a new world - and we have produced several excellent resources and processes which are bringing real renewal and hope to hundreds of congregations. And yet the death tsunami seems to swallow all our anecdotal victories in a collective plot-line of ecclesial annihilation. This thing is so far beyond "adaptive leadership" that I am apt to throw something the next time I hear that term benignly tossed about as a solution to our present situation.

RE-IMAGINING YOUR LIFE'S WORK

Do you know what you wish to be when you grow up?

25 years ago, my brother-in-law asked me about my career goals.  My answer was simple: I just wanted to pastor a church, to create relevant ministry that blessed a community.  He was not impressed.  He decided that I was a person of low aspiration.  In fact I was just trying to enjoy each season of life that presented itself and to savor it as if it would last forever!

HOW FAST SHOULD A NEW CHURCH GROW?

As the guy who has coached the fastest growing new church in the UMC for the last four and one half years, I should add that I have also coached some of the slowest growing new churches.  In a few cases, new church projects just fail to take root, and we need to close the project, making a note of lessons learned.  In most cases, however, where excellent church plants grow slowly it is because they are relating to a different audience than the fastest growing new church mentioned above.

TWENTY YEARS OF DOING THIS

I am coming up on the twentieth anniversary of my first church consultation.  It was St. Jude Episcopal Church of Valparaiso, Florida.  I charged them $500 for the whole thing.  After several meetings, I recommended that they sell their facility and relocate to an adjacent town.  (This is not something that Episcopal churches are known to do easily.)   My relative ignorance of how rare such a move was for an Episcopal congregation enabled me to take such a bold stance with them.   Amazingly, they decided to go for it.  They bought a plot of land near Niceville High School, built a first unit, and tripled their worship attendance.  And through this experience, I got hooked.  I discovered the power of partnering an interventionist with a prayerful congregation to make strategic ministry decisions and to leap forward in ministry effectiveness.

THE STORY WE CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS

This past month, I had an interesting conversation with one of the United Methodist bishops on the subject of theology and the church, specifically the thriving church - of which there are few within most mainline denominations.  Apparently it is possible from a casual read of this blog to conclude that I don't think theology matters much to the future of the church.  I want to correct that notion.  Theology matters and, just as in the first century, it is rooted in people's encounters with the Living Christ.

WHAT DOES COMMUNITY ORGANIZING HAVE TO DO WITH CHURCH DEVELOPMENT?

Everything!

If I were to boil church planting down to a few base ingredients, they would be these: 1. Prayer, 2. Clarity of Vision, 3. Understanding the focus population, 4. Networking and 5. Team building.  (And all these ingredients also go into revitalizing existing churches, as they get re-rooted in their communities.)  The more interwoven a church planting team is with their community, the easier it is to plant a new church.   In the old church planter boot camps they used to teach us that a planter should be making 25 fresh contacts a week.  This little admonition often came on the third day, when we were running behind in the agenda - and after a few minutes of suggestions about places to make said contacts, the agenda moved on.  I have personally trained almost 200 people in LaunchPad planter training in the last three years, and we seldom have time to really teach people how to make effective contacts and build a community of friends and allies within their neighborhood.  We just tell them "You had better do this, or you will be sorry."