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.

Some 700-plus onsite visits later to churches in eleven denominations, I now coach and consult full time. Sometimes, the churches nod nicely, and do absolutely nothing with anything we talked about.  Other times, they totally surprise me, doing far more than any of us envisioned.  Sometimes, they embrace partnership with a coach the way Adam Weber did when I visited him and his church of 100 worshipers in the summer of 2009 in Sioux Falls, SD.  Four and one half years later Embrace Church now gathers nearly 2000 people each weekend, not counting their new online campus.  And they are about to launch another campus a few miles away.  They were, according to Outreach Magazine, the fourth-fastest growing church in America in 2013.  What an honor to work with people of such faith! 

Stories like St. Jude and Embrace keep me in a good frame of mind when I have to deal with airport security several times a week. 

In 2011, I received a call from Bishop Larry Goodpaster in Charlotte (my former boss), asking if I could help one of the former flagship United Methodist churches of Western North Carolina.  I agreed to a yearlong engagement, working alongside an excellent interim pastor, to try to discover a way for healing and renaissance in a church that was losing people by the day.  In my first weekend with First UMC Gastonia, I visited with 88 different people.  Some wept.  Most were discouraged.  The exceptions to this were the senior high youth and their parents.  However, once we talked through the pain of all that was going on in that church, the team there engaged with me, and they began to have fun.  Attendance stabilized.  Laughter returned.  Anger softened.  Bold plans were laid.  A new pastor was appointed.  A new worship service was launched, and weekly attendance was suddenly up 150 a week from a year earlier.   Now First UMC Gastonia today, the only major downtown church in that city that did not relocate, is ready for the gentrification that is revving up big-time in a former mill town.    

It is not only the larger congregations.  I do so much of my work with small and midsized churches, which struggle in many ways to compete with the programs and ministry offerings of big box super-churches.  Yet, these feisty, Gospel-driven smaller congregations do some of the best ministry in the nation.  There are so many of them. 

One that comes to mind is New Day Church in the Bronx, started up about six years ago.They have less than 100 people on Sunday, yet they engage a young, multiethnic array of people whose passion to change the world is palpable.  They raised a flag for progressive Christianity in a borough of New York that had very few such options.  New Day is now planting a second site in Harlem.  They will pull it off.   Because (to use the categories of Readiness 360), they have spiritual intensity, cultural openness, dynamic relationship practices and a sense of missional alignment that will enable them to do amazing things with and for God.   I get to trouble shoot with New Day each month, and to think with Pastor Doug Cunningham about leader development and other issues critical to their ministry journey.  If I lived in New York, I would ride a train an hour one way each week to be a part of such a magical place! 

This is what I get to do every day - to invest in people and places like these.  I suspect the next twenty years will fly by in a blur, because partnering with leaders to help dreams come true is about as fun as it gets in this life.