THE DEMOGRAPHIC TIPPING POINT

 

Being a compulsive statistics nerd, I spent far too much time studying the Electoral College map over the last six months.  In October, I was reading the polls on my i-phone twice a day.  When asked to predict the election outcome the day before November 6, I got it right except for Florida.  The major reason that I felt Obama would win the election finally was a steady demographic shift that has been ongoing for most of my life.  Basically every four years, non-Latino white people represent about two percent less of the electorate from the previous presidential election.   This is just something that we statistical nerds have quietly noticed.

WHY DO SOME NEW CHURCHES GET LABELED AS FAILURES?

Early in their lives, some children and some young churches get labeled as failures. Once so labeled, there is almost no chance of their fulfilling the dreams that once surrounded them. In the world of new churches, once we label them as failed, we may quickly pull all resources and close a project, effectively saying to the people gathered, "Thank you for your time. Don't call us we'll call you. Here is a list of other xyz churches in your county. Have a nice life." Many of these folks were taking intentional personal risk to trust anything related to organized religion. By our actions, we are then insuring that they will never go near any church again in their lives.

TOO LATE FOR TWEAKING

A quarter century ago, as a local church leader in my 20s, I was already forced to rethink the ministry paradigm that worked in my childhood. I would attend workshops offered by the national church, the conference, the teaching church or the independent writer/gurus - and the question was always very simple: "What will it take to make church - as we know it - attractive to and effective with baby boomers?"

A NEW COACH ON OUR TEAM

Bishop Robert Hoshibata recently appointed the Rev. Beth Estock as a coaching consultant to The Epicenter Group: the third full-time person on our ministry team, and our first fulltime "associate pastor"!  Beth is coaching church planters and transformation leaders, especially in the areas where conventional church is failing to engage the population.  She also will lead several leader development clusters (perhaps the fastest growing dimension of Epicenter's work).  I am delighted to add Beth to our team for the following reasons:

THE POWER OF AN MRI

 

One year ago this week, as my hosts in the Philippines were driving me from church to church in the Cavite province south of Manila, I experienced chest pains.   Given my family history of early onset heart disease, this troubled me. On Palm Sunday 2011, I preached at Puno United Methodist Church in Quezon City.   Before worship, their pastor prayed over me and assured me that I would get home safely. After worship, a physician in the church examined me, and concluded that I might have pericarditis - exactly in line with my symptoms. She gave me a prescription, and my journey continued, with considerable discomfort for another three weeks.

HOW TO AVOID GETTING STUCK IN 1999

In September of 1999, we launched worship at the Soundside Campus of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church with 590 worshipers the first Sunday.   We worked Charles Arn’s 1990’s check-list for how to start a new worship service as if it were Bible, and we had a good result.  September 16, 1999 remains one of the most thrilling days of my whole life.  We did a lot of things right and a few things wrong, but God was very good – and we added hundreds of new folks to active participation in an organized Christian faith community in the year that followed.

WHAT I AM LEARNING ABOUT "PARACHUTE-DROP" CHURCH PLANTS

When I worked as a new church developer for a United Methodist region a few years back, the one thing I said I would never do would be to try to plant a new church as a parachute drop: as a stranger and alien in a community. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I had helped establish two new faith communities in a place where I had lived and networked for several years. Dozens pitched in to help with both projects, and I lost sleep over neither.   Today (a decade later) these two faith communities together gather 1200 in worship on most Sundays.