Bob Hyatt

The question was one I’d answered countless times before… but the response to my answer was one I’d never heard.

I was speaking at a church planter’s training when Chris Backert, the National Director of the Ecclesia Network asked me “How many years has your church plant been going?” I told him we had just hit our sixth anniversary.

“Oh… Year seven in church plants is traditionally the worst.”

At the time I nodded and laughed nervously. We had recently hit a few bumps in the road so what he was saying made some sense. In retrospect, what I wish I had done was to sit down and grill him on every aspect of what I’ve come to think of as the Seven Year Slump.

Chris’s anecdotal wisdom, gained through observing countless church plants and church planting networks in his Ph.D. work proved to be exactly on the mark. In truth, year seven was hellacious for both me as a pastor and for our community. I wish we could have seen it coming. But then again, he tried to warn me, didn’t he?

For us, year seven was marked by relational breaks in the staff, people leaving, and a general malaise as we drifted unable to focus on vision or mission while we worked exhaustingly to put out fire after fire. It seemed like we had reached a point where the way we had been doing things, and doing them successfully, no longer worked.

In the midst of all that, I remembered the one other thing Chris had told me about all this. “Year seven is all about endure, endure, endure. If you can make it through, years 8-15 are generally pretty great.”

I clung to those words.

Since then I’ve seen this pattern repeated in church plant after church plant. I wouldn’t call it an absolute law, but rather a general truism: somewhere around year seven, a new church hits a place of crisis, a place where what got them there in terms of leadership skills, structure, and ways of dealing with problems no longer works.

Why does this happen?

There are a number of reasons having to do with both the pastor and the people. Generally speaking, years 1-2 are years of excitement. Even in the hard parts, there’s a novelty and a joy in working out the issues, in finding the ways that this new church will handle problems, talk about the hard parts of community and together become who they are becoming. In years 3-4 that community and its leaders are finding their footing and in years 5-6 experiencing the fruit of their work and enjoying having hit their stride.

But by year seven the cracks are showing. The leaders are tired. There are some natural churn points where people leave and year seven is one of them. In fact, it’s often the point where some of the last of the core group who helped start the church decide to move on. This can have a huge effect on both the pastors and the congregation as these folks whom everyone thought were so central to the life of the community decide to leave.

This is also often the point of pastoral burnout. Regardless of how many people are helping, the emotional and psychological toll of the previous seven years often means that at this point a pastor will feel he or she no longer has anything to give, that the well has run dry and worse, because the church has changed drastically over the last few years, the lessons and skills learned at the beginning no longer seem adequate to take the community forward.

Year seven is where the impatience and unrealistic expectations of a community are often revealed– we thought we’d be farther along, better able to handle problems… more mature as a community. Even harder, as the pastor is tired and butting up against the ceiling of their own skill set, the community begins to feel the restlessness that often hits leaders around this time.

Even established churches are not immune to this seven-year cycle. I recently heard of one church on the east coast that has existed for 200 years, and with the exception of two pastors, every pastor’s tenure has lasted between six and eight years. The cycle repeats itself.

How do we handle this seven year slump? How can we navigate the twists and turns of what one pastor friend of mine recently described as “the worst year of his life”?

First, as was mentioned earlier, year seven is all about endure, endure, endure.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and the issues you face during this time will not be easily resolved in one elder meeting, or with some quick changes. This is a time to throw yourself not into problem solving and working harder, but into a deeper dependence on God and a heightened listening to the Spirit. God is at work, both in the hearts of the leaders and in the community itself, and year seven is a time to pay special attention to that.

Second, realize that this is a normal thing.

You are not the first leader or community to experience this. It’s not an indictment on you or your skills or your walk with God that you are hitting this rough patch. It’s a natural phase in the growth of a church, and more, it’s a necessary phase.

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward, says

“So we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. We must actually be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. This kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering… It is well dramatized by Paul’s fall on the Damascus Road, where he hears the voice “Why are you hurting yourself by kicking against the goad?” (Acts 26:14). The goad or cattle prod is the symbol of both the encouragement forward and our needless resistance to it, which only wounds us further… Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream… There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand.”

The seven year slump then, is not so much a problem to be managed or fixed, but a necessary part of our journey. It is a period of life that God uses to get our hearts and the collective heart of our church off of the grandiose dreams of “success” we held at the beginning and onto something deeper, onto God Himself.

Third, year seven is a good time as a pastor to revisit and re-evaluate your call.

Some people excel at planting churches and new works. Some people excel at maintaining and growing to slow maturity what has already been planted. Not everyone can excel at both. Year seven is a great time to look in the mirror and ask yourself what type of leader you are. Are you a planter/pioneer who needs to be involved in new things to stay vital? Are you a shepherd/homesteader who can plant him or herself for the long haul? Are you someone who has thought of themself as the first but now is being called by God to do the hard work to become the second? The key to asking and answering these questions fruitfully is brutal self-honesty. There’s no point in just cutting and running from the seven year slump as things get hard. No matter where you go it will be waiting for you just down the road.

These kinds of soul-searching questions of call need proper space to be processed, and that’s why…

Fourth, year seven is the year you should take a sabbatical.

The natural burnout of this season, combined with the need to do some serious thinking about the church and about yourself as a leader demand time and space, away from the urgency of ministry. You need time to be alone with God, time to rest, time to find clarity.

Someone might say that year seven, with all the turmoil I’ve described in the life of a church is a terrible time for a leader to be absent. On the contrary, it’s a great time- not only because the leader him or herself with all their tiredness and anxiety is often an underlying source of the turmoil, but also because another necessary part of church maturity is allowing others to lead, to make mistakes, and to learn. Letting go and prying your white knuckles off the wheel for a season is the best thing you can do.

Year seven and the period directly after it is a wonderful time for corporate reflection as well. It’s a time to evaluate our expectations over and against reality. We thought we would be that type of church, at that size, at that place of maturity… But we’re not. Can we give thanks and enjoy being the church God has allowed us to be and let go of the church we thought we would be?

It’s also a good time to evaluate the practicality of structures and skills. What works in a church plant doesn’t necessarily work in a church 7 or 8 years along. What needs to be let go of? What needs to change and grow? What’s missing that needs to be addressed? Working through these questions can aid greatly in dealing with the emotional slump that is often felt in year seven communities and bring back a sense of excitement and forward movement. In addition, as leaders, it’s a time to look not only at our call, but at our skill set. As we are becoming and have become a very different community than in the past, do I need to learn new leadership skills, new ways of leading and loving these people? Can I admit to myself that if I am to remain and lead this community in its next season of life I need to learn some new things, read some different books than I have been reading, take a class or in some other way learn to lead in a different way for a different time in the life of our community?

Lastly, the seven year slump is a call to see, and to help our congregations see struggles and problems, from relational issues to questions about how ministry or leadership should be structured, formationally.

In other words, it’s a great time to remind a congregation that growth, not numerical growth but spiritual maturity as a community, comes not through the easy times, but through the hard ones. That as much as we’d just like to fix everything and move quickly on, the reality is that if we do that, we run the risk of missing what God is doing through the growing pains, through the relational struggles, through the mess.

For our community, the seventh year was an incredibly hard and painful one. But as we moved past it, we began to see how God had been at work, stretching and growing us. For me personally came the realization that while I thought I had gotten the pastor thing pretty much down, I really hadn’t, and in fact needed to go back and unlearn some things, rethink some things, and generally stop thinking I/we had “arrived.”

The gift of the seventh year was to humble me and make me into a learner again. I took a sabbatical, took my hands off the wheel for a season, and came back more relaxed, and more trusting of God than my own skills. I did reevaluate my call during this time, wondering if it was time to hand things off to the leaders I had helped raise up in our community over our seven years together. Ultimately, I decided that there was more for me to do in this church, but not in the same way. Whereas I had been the “Lead Pastor,” after this time we transitioned to more of a team leadership where the elders as a whole led the church. And those elders freed me up to try some new things and take on some new roles outside our community; coaching other pastors/church planters, and working with our church network. This allowed me to feel good about staying, but also scratched the itch I had to do some new things. It allowed me to continue to lead, but in completely new ways, alongside others, rather than over them.

Due in part to some hard decisions we had to make, and in part to communicating them poorly, during this period we lost about 1/3 of our people. Those who chose to remain, however, were committed. They had been taught through this time the necessity of praying for their community, its elders and its pastors. We all together had learned valuable lessons about how we communicate with each other, support each other, and what it means to be formed by God together through the pain of community.

As we emerged from this painful time, we began to realize that life was continuing, our community was still there and most all, God was still present and working.

One of the real beauties of the year seven season is that year eight comes after it. It’s tempting to think when you are in the middle of the mess that the mess has become your new reality- that this is how it will now always be. But take heart, endure, listen to what God is doing in your midst, and know that should you choose to stay, years 8-15 are generally pretty great. And should you go and your community continue on, both you and your community get to start over. In either case, God is present and at work, bringing you and your church to further maturity in Christ.

I was in a Red Robin restaurant awhile back with my family.

It was dinner-time, the place was packed, and as we were standing around waiting for a table, I noticed another family doing the same. Mom, Dad, two teenaged kids. They were all standing facing each other, all looking down at their phones, none of them saying a word to each other. Later, after we had eaten, I got up to use the restroom and noticed the same family at their table, eating, still all with phones in hand, not saying a word to one another.

I’m assuming they were Instagraming pictures of their food so everyone would know what a nice meal they having together…

Here’s the thing about technology that we want to consider today as we discuss its uses in mission and the life of the church.

Technology makes it so that we can do so much, that we often are unable to do what we should do.

My general experience with trying to get work done these days is that I have 15 browser tabs open at any one time. I’m simultaneously trying to catch up on the news, respond to email as it comes in, catch up on the shows I missed last night AND get some work done. And I can do so much through technology that I often fail to do what I should.

Right now the Church is in the midst of some massive sea-changes in regards to the use of technology. It’s opened up new possibilities: I can be a pastor in Seattle, WA, or Atlanta, GA or Grapevine, TX and speak weekly, be the teaching pastor for groups of people in Albuquerque NM, or Colorado Springs, CO or Miami FL. I can now holographically project myself onto a stage in a church a thousand miles away from where I am, and only the most perceptive in the crowd will notice it’s not really me. I can extend my congregation through the magic of the series of tubes known as the internet to people sitting on their couches, in their pajamas, singing along, worshipping as part of an internet “congregation.”

And so we as a church CAN do so much through technology- but is it keeping us from doing what we should? And more to the point- is it forming us, both as individuals and communities, in ways that it shouldn’t?

None of this is new.

In the early 1950s when Robert Schuller and others across the nation combined a growing car culture with “Church,” they believed they were reaching a segment of the population traditional church wouldn’t or couldn’t. “Drive-In Church” allowed parishioners to hear a sermon, sing some songs, even receive communion and give—all without the fuss and muss of face-to-face interaction. Except for a through-the-window handshake from the pastor as they rolled away.

And while they may have been able to point to a number of folks who “attended” who otherwise might not have, the question of what was being formed in these car congregations through limited interaction, a completely passive experience, and a consumer-oriented “Come as you want/Have it your way” message, meant that (thankfully) after a brief period of vogue, “Drive-In Church” has remained a niche curiosity.

The problem with the drive-in church model isn’t that it isn’t church—it’s that it is just “church” enough to be dangerous. What this almost-church does is park people in a cul-de-sac where they have access to the easiest and most instantly satisfying parts of church while exempting them from the harder and more demanding parts of community. And in that, it became a malforming influence on the people involved. Church became consumerized. Something to ingest, critique, consume, but with only the minimum amounts of commitment being asked.

And in my mind, it’s exactly those same malforming influences we need to beware of as we integrate technology in our communities. Whether it’s the simple stuff like putting the words to Scripture on a screen all the way up to starting an internet campus of our church. The question is: How is this forming us for mission or failing to form us for mission?

Here is a maxim of technology that we need always to be mindful of: Technology, when taken to its logical end, reverses on itself.

In his book, Flickering Pixels (which I encourage you to check out!), Shane Hipps makes this point:

“Every medium, when pushed to an extreme, will reverse on itself, revealing unintended consequences. For example, the car was invented to increase the speed of our transportation, but having too many cars on the highway at once results in traffic jams or even injury or death.
The internet was designed to make information more easily accessible, thereby reducing ignorance. But too much information or the wrong kind of information reverses into overwhelming the seeker, leading to greater confusion than clarity. It breeds misunderstanding rather than wisdom…
In the same way, surveillance cameras, when there are too many that see too far, reverse into an invasion of privacy.”

In other words, what was originally meant to make us go fast now slows us down, what was meant to make us smart now increases our ignorance (well, never our ignorance… just other peoples’, right?) and what was meant to make us feel safe now makes us feel exposed. 

This is the rule: Technology, taken too far, creates the opposite of what it was intended to create. 

Ask yourself- Email was meant to keep you in touch and ease communication, right? But when you are trying to process 100 emails a day, you don’t feel in touch, you feel crushed. You’re not communicating- you are wading through spam, forwards, fyi’s… Your emails get shorter and shorter, more and more terse, and mis-communication happens more often than not. 

Reversal.  

Here’s what was happening in Drive-In Church. More people were being gathered because of the magic of technology- little speaker boxes on their windows allowed them to drive-in, and avoid the hassle of ever having to leave the parking lot. And as much as many of us have had the experience of driving up to church, sitting in our cars and wishing we didn’t actually have to go in, the point is, we actually have to go in. The point of church is not hearing a sermon. It’s hearing it together. It’s not singing a worship song, it’s worshipping together. It’s not being changed by the Word of God, it’s being changed by it together. And that particular use of technology, as innovative and creative as it was, actually produced the opposite of what it was intended to create. Whatever it made, it didn’t make church.

In Part Two, we’ll talk specifically about how technology mis-shapes the church, and what we can do about it.

There’s one thing that’s vital for every church community- but in particular, for communities that see themselves as “missional.”- It’s a non-negotiable for those that want to move beyond being a “congregation”- literally just a gathering or grouping of like-minded people, to being something more radical- a community which follows the Spirit of God out into to the world so that they might cooperate with what He’s doing.

But it’s not something we talk or think about very often.

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Oak Church, Durham NC

Chris Breslin serves as the pastor at Oak Church in Durham, NC. In the summer of 2014, the Gathering Church sent Chris and Rachel Breslin along with a core team to plant a church in the Lakewood neighborhood of Durham. Oak Church launched on October 26, 2014 after a huge neighborhood block party and pig pickin’. The church gets its name from Isaiah 61: “Oaks of Righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His Splendor,” and strives to be a community of “hope, healing, and hospitality in and through Christ.”
Chris is the proud husband to Rachel, dad and jungle gym to Noa June (2011), Titus Eliot (2013), Emett Ruth (2015), and Simeon Holmes (2017). He enjoys reading and learning about intersections between theology and the arts, tending a small flock of laying hens named after pop divas, adding to his vinyl music collection, following FSU football, Bulls baseball, and Duke hoops.

How would you describe the area your church is in?

Urban/University Neighborhood

How would you describe the journey of pastoring Oak Church? What have been some of the milestones/different seasons?

Our journey has been a patient journey of learning how to be good neighbors. We had a place before we had a church, and a block party before we had a worship gathering. For that party, about 300 neighbors/strangers showed up. The next morning, 2 new people came for worship. This disabused us of the notion of “if you build it they will come” or that being neighbors and building relationships of trust and care would be quick and easy.

Looking back, what do you know now you wish you had known when you first started Oak Church?

To some extent, I’m glad that our knowledge and understanding of this place has been gradual and ongoing. It’s forced us to pay more attention. I probably would have prayed for and invested more in an older contingency for our initial core. Relying on tested wisdom and stability.

As you think about what you’ve been able to do so far in ministry there what are some things you have done/tried that have worked well?

1) Experiencing liturgy/church year as hospitality- this framework has connected us to Church beyond ourselves, oriented us to a steady backbeat bigger than our emotions or timeframes, and created space for folks at every stage of their journey of faith in Christ. 2) Partnering with other institutions in the neighborhood and experiencing others not as rivals, but as neighbors, people of peace, and potential collaborators for the good of our neighbors.

What hasn’t worked so well? What have you had to rethink/reimagine/rework?

I think we drastically underestimated our ability to develop stable leadership in such a highly transient area. We invest and equip quite a bit, but often don’t get to experience the fruit of this work. I would have imagined much more stability and continuity in our leadership. This has caused us (in an ongoing way) to reconsider how we structure and what we expect.

What is one failure you experienced and what did you learn from it?

To a large extent, these past (almost) five years, have been haunted by a sort of “Spiritual FOMO.” I fight the feeling that I’m/we’re missing out on something the Spirit is doing or someone the Spirit is giving us as a gift. That I don’t have eyes or an imagination for receiving, developing, and deploying these gifts. There have been many failures which validate this fear. Folks who’ve showed up on our doorstep in need who I’ve simply not had an adequate imagination for what the Spirit wanted for them and for us. Folks who’ve showed up on Sundays looking for an invitation either socially or vocationally, and my timidity (mostly shrouded as “humility”) has prevented me from calling them into something deeper. Or relational limits, which have caused us to miss out on digging into deeper healing and participation in God’s renewing work. These failures, also help me to want more and be more open in the future. They’re constant “teaching moments” to be more and more open and attentive and grateful and skilled at receiving.

What is something you’ve been hearing from or learning from God in this last season of leading?

Continue to make space and hold tension. Perhaps there’s even a tension in those two things. Making space requires so much patience and courage. Holding tension similarly asks for endurance and imagination. In this time of dissonance & fragmentation, we’re tempted to rush and resolve. But instead we’d be wise to trust that the Jesus holds all things together (Col 1:17) and that there is more than enough.

What do you dream/hope/pray Oak Church looks like in five years?

I pray that our churches continue to know and love not just their neighbors (in some hypothetical sense) know and love their neighborhoods- the real, complicated people and places with conflicting motivations, but common hopes and desires. That this work would plunge us headlong into trusting in God and into the patient work of seeing and receiving gifts from the Lord who provides.