I am starting to notice that there is a weight the deeper you get into pastoral ministry.  As we proceed with team building and training with Awana, and getting our Community Group together this fall, we are having a lot of hard conversations with people about where they are at.  Work challenges, relationship challenges, sin struggles all pile up on people.  As their pastor (even if I am not the main pastor) I empathize and feel the weight of those problems.

There is some truth to the idea that pastors are either narcissistic or co-dependent to degrees.  This area is definitely an area of co-dependence.  I also have this quirk where I am always trying to solve everyone’s problems.  Reining that tendency in is important.

Phil said I would be stretched this fall.  It appears that is already the case.

By the way, in anticipation of my next preaching event, somebody buy me this book! Yeah. The one to the right. Over there. You see it.

We’re back in Vancouver, and strangely enough the hot humid weather of central Florida seems to have followed us home.  It wouldn’t let us go in fact, as our arrival in Toronto was swathed in the same kinds of massive downpours we saw several times in Florida (which caused our flight to be delayed by an hour, leading to our homecoming at 2am!) Daytime highs today around 33 (about 90 for any American visitors!), but with two blessed differences: first, I got up this morning and it wasn’t that hot… more like 19C or 70F.  Having an evening heat respite is a big deal for me.  Second, it ends now!  Tomorrow’s high is more like 78-80F or 27C.  That will be absolutely beautiful after 5 days in the parking lot that is Orlando’s theme parks.

I’ve been twittering the odd thought that crosses my mind today.  So watch that if you like, but we will be writing more thoughts as we digest our experience down there.

Of course, that will be all mixed in between the burning needs to:

• Get in contact with my academic advisor re: grad essay (haven’t heard from him since May, and he finally emailed me while I was gone of course!)
• Call all our small group people for this fall to arrange to invite them out,
• Call all our Awana leaders to make sure they come to the tour this Saturday and block off the time for the Awana orientation next Saturday
• Call all our small group people from last year to arrange to meet and finish off our outreach event planning

Good thing some of those people overlap…

PS.  shout out to Zach, pastor and blogger out in PA that I met at iGo!  Great meeting ya!

I’ve been reading Ed Stetzer’s Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age lately.  It is beastly-long as compared to the quick read that Launch was.

I was trying to catch some rays and darken the skin a little before we head to Florida at the end of the month for a little iGo action and a round of Disney.  I made the mistake of leaving the book on my lawn chair.  The boys got out the sprinkler and turned it on full-blast, drenching my lawn chair and my book, borrowed from TWU.  Because of its saturation, I think I’ll be buying the library a new copy, so I’d better enjoy this one!

In that light, I’ll say this: the chapters do go by quickly, and Stetzer does a good job of listing references on each chapter so you can do further reading.  In a lot of ways, since I am 3/4 of the way through the book, I have been disappointed thus far.

I actually started to comment on this book before.  I initially like some of his insights, early on, but as the book moves along, it gets more ordinary.  Not a lot is new in fact.  It is more a synthesis-type book than a new approach.  I find myself in later chapters reading his words which openly rehash material from a variety of other resources.  Not plaigarism - he cites his sources clearly - but just disappointing.  Like if I had read something else I’d get more.

The most recent couple of chapters I read were on building launch teams and on small groups.  The small groups chapter was actually weak.  He only discussed small groups of one model type - and I am not even sure I agree that it’s a good type.  It’s a jack-of-all-trades small group - one that is designed to provide fellowship and community, but also worship, Bible study, and evangelism.  I have become convinced in my time in different small groups that it is impossible to do all these things well when you try to do them in a small group.  Stetzer himself points out all the pitfalls of bringing non-Christians into a group full of Christians - the Christianese that gets flung around, the discomfort of being the “new guy”, the culture shock are all not good things for someone you are trying to introduce to the Gospel.  Not only that, but it also hurts the relationships of the people already there.  To “go deep” and really open up your heart in the safety of Christians is hard enough.  What chance does your group have of real authentic community when strangers keep appearing and disappearing, who could do anything with your deep secrets and fears?

The chapter on building a core did hold some useful discussion, but I was at a loss as to understand how his description of various means of teambuilding reflected unique approaches specifically for the postmodern crowds.  Maybe it’s because I see a much more intensive variety of postmodern people in Canada - specifically in my workplace at a technology company, and also in my studies of Whistler’s church planting challenges.  These people are not just people who don’t believe in existential truth, but live according to that reality.  These are people who have not heard a single positive message about authority, church, or traditional structures like marriage in 30 years - which is the lifespan of the majority I work with.  These are hard-core people.  It’s almost easier to reach new immigrants with a completely foreign paradigm and religion, because at least they believe there is truth out there, and have a greater connection and understanding of family and structure.

For all of its weight, this book feels light.  Too light to be very useful but I will finish it out before passing final judgement.

Another thought by someone else:

• Matt Jones’s glowing review.  I’d actually agree there are lots of good points.  How many are original to Ed?  I don’t know.  Maybe I am being spoilt by how much reading on the internets and such on missional ideas and church planting methods.  Since I had already read these ideas, I wasn’t as blown away by Stetzer’s presentation.

On the weekend we had a meeting to shake down the way our small groups will look this fall.  As our church grows I don’t know how long this way of deciding groups will last.

With regards to my group, there are several things I feel we did wrong last year.  And there are several other things that I want to incorporate more effectively this year.

First, we never established a group covenant.  That will be high on my agenda list this fall.  Probably by early October at the latest I want to have us decide on one.

Second, with regards to getting to know everyone.  Last year, we took the first 8 weeks and had each person share their testimony in 10 minutes, one per week.  It was good, it got us deeper quickly, but as the year went on, things became shallower and shallower.  What I would like to do this year is have some probing testimony-related questions that we all share about, every week.  I am hoping that this will allow us to get to know each other but at the same time maintain that deeper focus throughout the year.

Thirdly, I wanted to lead a quick before meal devotional on our first meeting.  I was reading through James 3 this morning, and it occurred to me that James’ discussion of the tongue would be a good theme to start the year on - that as the mouth goes, the body often follows.  Godly talk will lead to Godly growth, but if we let our talk dwell on the base, we may not see the change we want to see this year in each others’ lives.  Maybe the quick before meal devotional will set a standard for the rest of our meetings.

Phil just reminded me to invest in our apprentice leaders at both the Awana level and the small group level this year.  Good advice.  We need to look at our schedule and set firm goals for those too.

I’ll say this right up front, while I am calling this a book review, it is more of a reflection on the book in light of my church planting experience so far, and an attempt to digest what I learned to aid in looking forward to how we will do things differently.

I picked this book up from the Trinity Western Library a month or two ago, then I got on Amazon because there were a couple of books that I had encountered that were not available at the library.  I wound up ordering it from there too (because I didn’t realize it was in my bag of borrowed books), but it will prove useful to me long-term as we look to planting our own church.

Nelson and Searcy I understand used to work on staff at Saddleback Church with Rick Warren, which explains his glowing reviews of this book.  The book is quite an easy read, and designed overtly as a step-by-step type of book, with not a lot of theologizing about what they are doing. The parts about calling were riveting, probably because one of the critical elements I am pursuing is a confirmation that this is what God wants from us.  This chapter helped considerably.

I was surprised at how much their material tracks with what we did to launch Community of Hope.  From early team formation to the launch, many things seemed similar.  There were several differences between approaches though.

Firstly, they highly recommend between 3 and 6 months of monthly “pre-services” which give you a chance to build buzz and prepare your team for going weekly.  It occurred to me as I read this that perhaps this was what we were missing last summer.  We had two well staffed pushes with volunteers from the USA to reach out into the community, and a major source of frustration for us was that while we did make some solid contacts with people who might have come to church, because we had no church to bring them to, we lost contact with them and dropped the ball completely.  Had we used these two short term missions trips to prepare people for a pre-service, then utilized them to staff the pre-services, then this could have greatly aided out ability to retain and move forward with those contacts that were made.

As an aside, I am a great believer in short term missions for their benefit to those who go on them - I mean it was instrumental in actuating my wife and I into taking more seriously our role in the Kingdom of God.  Also, looking around at the team we travelled with, many of us took huge steps forward in our walks with God as a result of that trip.

Another area of difference which I wasn’t as excited about was small group philosophy. The authors maintained it was a bad idea to start with small groups immediately.  In fact, they recommended that the plant wait at least 6 months before trying to initiate a small group structure in the church.  Their main objection to small groups seemed to be that it would turn the core team’s focus inwards and they would cease to be as outward focused on new people.  We didn’t experience this - we launched with a full battery of small groups.  The instruction pre-launch was so clear that we must stay completely outward focused that it never became an issue.  Then again, maybe this was because we were launching with a relatively mature group of Christians rather than brand new Christians or even seekers.

But I tend to agree more with Phil, our pastor.  Given our church’s philosophy of small groups, and given the reality that small groups are absolutely critical to integrate and make part of your church’s DNA, waiting and letting people get used to life without them could make much more trouble than it helps.  It needs to be programmed into the base-level of expectation - you go to this church, you are in a small group.

One other comment I will make about the book - it seems that launching a successful and rapidly growing church somehow made them instant experts in this field.  It is a good book, and I appreciated the reinforcement of a number of concepts, but they overlooked one critical component that I think largely led to their successful launch.  Right up front, they make clear that within 6 months of arriving in New York, 9/11 happened.  They try to downplay the effect this had on their church’s growth, but I think it had a much larger role than they seem to think.  That disaster had a massive impact on the psyche of the residents of New York and left them much more spiritually open than they would have otherwise have been.  I don’t doubt God was in their church’s timing, and that God was using, through them, a disaster for good by bringing people to him.  But that kind of element is not replicable for other church planters.

Some other reviews of this book:

• Lou Canchicola (who’s got some great quotes from the book highlighted)

Where was this book four and a half years ago?  I could have certainly used it and saved myself from tons of mistakes.

• Andrew Kulp (glowing but brief 2 parter)

…it’s VERY practical and is going to stay on my shelf as a long-term resource as we continue in the process.

• Scott Himes (Good bullet points and summarizes better than I have)

…is a very practical guide for anyone that is planning to start a church or is in the first few years of a church plant.

• Austin Porter (superlatives abound)

If you are looking for practical, down to earth, applicable principles for launching a church then this is the TEXT BOOK to get you on your way.