The Ecclesia Network

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The Church as a Three-Legged Dog

By Winn Collier

In our first year, my wife Miska described All Souls as a “three-legged dog.” She meant it an endearing way. Miska has always been drawn to those of us who hop along in life; and she’s always eschewed the pretensions many of us so easily take on. Somehow, All Souls became a refuge for burnt, weary, broken people. Most people had some measure of church experience (we are in Virginia after all). Some weren’t sure what they thought of God. Some felt beat up. Most all of us wanted a space where we could know love.

Into our second year, we’ve actually seen a little community form. For me, the beautiful things are when I see that glimmer of hope or joy return to someone’s eyes or when someone joins us at Jesus’ Table for the first time. Just the other day, one woman told me. “You know, for the first time, I don’t feel like running away from church. I feel like I’ve been allowed to be a person here.” Another woman told me simply, “I think that now I know God is real.”

Our community is about as simple as they come. We read the Scriptures each Sunday. We pray prayers and gather around the gospel. We always pass Jesus’ peace to one another. Sometime someone will have a reading or a piece of art or a story to share. We gather around the Scripture, either through a pastor teaching or through (and these are fun moments) a guided text conversation. Once a month, we have a shared meal. We meet in smaller communities in various nooks and crannies around the city, asking what it means to live as Jesus’ disciples in our world. Most who are with us believe. Some are beginning to believe. Some don’t care much but think there might be something here worth hanging around.

Soon, we’ll turn from Lent to Easter, and on Easter morning we’ll have our second Easter Party downtown. We’ll have music and give away hot organic apple-spiced donuts from our local donut artisan, Carpe Donut. We’ll be out in our city, among neighbors and friends and soon-to-be friends, celebrating that Jesus rose from the dead. We’ll be out there, hopping along.

Winn Collier is the pastor at All Souls Charlottesville and blogs at http://winncollier.com/ and is pretty much a great guy. You can follow him on Twitter here.

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Dallas Willard on Jet-Lag

by Dustin Bagby

Dallas Willard isn’t an easy man to create small talk with.

What do you say to a distinguished professor of Philosophy at USC who has chosen in his spare time to write life-changing books like The Divine Conspiracy and speak to Christians regularly about spiritual practices and disciplines?

But as I got stuck sitting by him, against my will, at the Ecclesia National Gathering I felt like I should say something to him rather than endure the awkward silence that surrounded us. I didn’t realize our short conversation would leave me thinking for weeks.

I opened with, “So, did you get in from California yesterday?”

He said, “Yes.”

I waited for a few awkward seconds but that was clearly the only thing he intended to say. I followed up with: “Still on California time?” An innocent and somewhat silly question, but I was nervous and was feeling pretty wrecked myself after having just arriving from Portland the day before. His response was not what I expected.

“Let me tell you something” he said gently as I can imagine a grandfather saying to one he loves. “I used to travel a lot, and I particularly remember a 14 hour flight to South Africa where they practically had to scrape me off the plane. It was then that I heard the Lord tell me very clearly, “Dallas, when you travel I want you to do three things: fast, prayer, and memorize scripture. And if you do those things, I will sustain you.” He continued, “And so I started doing those three things anytime I flew longer than 2 or 3 hours and since then I’ve never felt the effects of jet-lag again. He has sustained me.”

At this point in the conversation I felt about a half-inch tall. Dallas wasn’t trying to make me feel small, it was simply that in his presence there was no way for me to not feel small, and petty, and trite. You can sense when you are in the presence of someone that is genuine and real, just as easily as you can sense when you are in the presence of a complete phony. And Dallas is the real deal.

People like Dallas Willard are special not just for what they say, but because they model what a faithful Christ-follower looks like. After you hear or interact with such people, you’re not just left with great ideas, but with a desire to be the quality of person that they themselves are. It’s easy to find pastors who are wise and give you great ministry advice, it’s a lot harder to find pastors who you see and think, “I want to be like that person because they are like Jesus.” I hope that when I’m 75 years old, people will say that about me. But I know for now I have quite a distance between where I am and what I aspire to be. I also know that Dallas Willard didn’t become the kind of person he is naturally or easily.

I don’t aspire to be a “famous” pastor. Nor do I aspire to write a great book, speak at conferences, be known by a lot of people who have tons of twitter followers, or make a name for myself. I simply want to be the kind of person who has the depth of friendship with God that people like Dallas Willard have cultivated over the years. If I can model for people what that looks like as I grow older, I will feel more than successful.

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Sink Yourself Into the Work You've Been Given

Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. – Galatians 6:4 (MSG)

I’m doing a memorization challenge in 2011 through the Living Proof Ministries blog and this is the verse I chose for the second half of January. I came across it in a morning devotional and the more I have meditated on it the past few weeks, the more I can see why God led my eyes to this verse.

As we seek to live missional lives, it’s important that we first know our mission. Not just the overall mission of the church and the specific mission of the church we attend, but our personal mission – who we are and the work that we have been given by God.

That is what we are called to sink our lives into, according to Paul.

At times this can be a struggle for me. I wrestle with competing urges on what I want to be involved in. I dream big dreams of how God might use me. I can easily get pumped after attending a conference or listening to a message. But this verse reminds me that while those are great things, the most important work that I can do is the work that God has given me. Not the work he has given my neighbor, my pastor, or my best friend. The work he has given me.

I’m a crisis counselor at a community college, and I realize that part of my mission is to be the hands and feet of Jesus on a daily basis. Sometimes I can talk about my faith during sessions, sometimes I cannot. But regardless of my words, my actions can always show the love of Jesus.

Wendy Chinn, an associate (fancy word for volunteer) staff member at NLCF in Blacksburg, Virginia, earns her paycheck working part-time as a personal and crisis counselor at New River Community College. She blogs about life at the houseofchinn at http://wechinn.blogspot.com/

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Church Planter Interviews – Jason Malec

Jason Malec

So your church, New Denver, is obviously in Denver, CO. Tell us a little bit about where you guys are planting in the city.

Well Denver has 2.5 million people, but it still has the feel of a small city. It’s pretty young, very transient. People don’t come here to commit, they come here to play. It’s like an adult playground. The people are highly-relational, distrusting of institutions and highly secular.

Our church is located in a semi-urban place, about 3 miles outside the urban core. We’re in the first ring of suburbs that were built when the city first expanded. It’s actually kind of funny, the place where my family live is about 2 miles away from the city and originally it was where people in the city would build country homes to escape the city…2 miles away!

Anyways, we are located where people are fairly wealthy, want the amenities of the urban setting without the messiness, grunge or “riff-raff” of the city.

People tend to be fickle, have a hard time committing and are always looking for something better to do at the last minute. They really like to keep their options open.

Tell us about the process you used for planting your church. What did that time look like? What did you do?

Well my family came with 2 other families, we were all on staff at a church in Atlanta. The 3 of us are co-pastoring the church together (which we know is a little unique. I like to say, “Co-pastoring isn’t the way to do it, it’s just that it’s the way for us.” For whatever reason, it works really well for us). Before we moved here we probably visited the city once a month for about 6 months. During that time we just worked at building relationships. Psychographics. Figuring out where we wanted to live and plant.

I was actually the last of the families to get there; we arrived 6 months after the other two families. When I got there we already had a core of about 20-25 people and we started small groups.

How did you build that core team? I’m always interested how people gather core teams when they are “parachuting” into another city they haven’t lived in for very long.

I’d say about 25% simply came from networking. We were constantly meeting with people and “pressing the flesh.” Another 50% came because they were familiar with North Point or were transplants from Atlanta and had attended North Point in the past. And the other 25% came from Facebook microtargeting. We’ve actually had a lot of success with that.
But getting back to the question about how we started…we took this core group of people and developed weekly small groups, and in March of 2009, we started bringing these small groups together once a month for some very light worship and then on October 4 of 2009 we began our semi-weekly worship service.

Obviously the focus of this blog is more towards the missional church and looking at different church structures. What is the structure of your church? What would the average month look like?

Honestly, it’s very much like your average evangelical church. This Fall we will have 4 weekly Sunday gatherings and have a few small groups distributed around the city and we’re looking at starting a Huddle and seeing how that goes. Maybe start a Missional Community? I guess we’ll see. We also have informal gatherings. I’ve tried to really tap those who are strong people-gatherers and have asked them to be proactive in getting people together to do fun things. Just trying to make it organic.

So as you think about the last 12 months of planting, what do you think worked really well?

That’s actually kind of a hard question to answer. I still feel like we’re caught in between our megachurch roots and the more missional, organic style.

We have certainly dug into our toolkit and can “put on” a good worship service. What we’re doing is pretty stripped down, though, but we feel good about it. One of our core group recently commented that she feels like she “can bring all of me” to our gatherings. And that was a big compliment. She meant that her doubts, questions, and earnest pursuit of God – whatever that looks like – was welcome. Again, that was very encouraging to hear.

But the best things have probably been the organic, relational connections. I think there’s been a lot of life in that. It really seems to tap into the reality that people in Denver are often anti-church, yet hyper-relational. So the relational connections tap into the vibe that you find around here.

In the last 12 months, what hasn’t worked?

You know, I think we were pretty idealistic at the beginning. I guess that’s normal for church planters, right?

Before we were here we had people tell us to expect 80% of the Core Team to vanish within a year or two. And of course we thought, “No, that won’t happen to us.” Yeah, it definitely did.

We also tried something for 6 months where we didn’t have a worship service once a month and encouraged everyone to get involved with a mission project we were all doing together. It seemed good on paper, but never quite got off the ground. We might have had 20% of the people come out on those Sundays. I’m glad we tried it and I know there’s actually another church in Denver that has had unbelievable success with that; it just didn’t work great for us.

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

Some people might guess it’s been in the leadership aspect with three of us co-pastoring together, but that’s actually been great.

I think finding the right teaching rhythm has been hard with three of us. We tried to team teach the same message on one Sunday, that didn’t work. We alternated weeks, I taught for a week, then Stephen taught the next week, then Norton preached. Yeah, that didn’t work either.

Now we’re teaching for blocks of time, so I’m teaching for something like 4-5 weeks straight on one series. That seems to be working much better.

Ok. Let’s imagine it’s 365 days from now. What needs to be different in your community?

The key for me would be discipleship. We’ve got to disciple people. I just don’t know of many people who are doing this well. We’re looking to explore Huddles and that could really help, excited about that prospect.

We also really need to be sustainable. We’re top down right now and need to employ people who are evangelists and multiplying influence so we aren’t the only people carrying the banner. People are following right now and we need people who will lead with us.

What is the biggest thing God has been teaching you in the past year?

I think it would be easy for me to get caught up in creating a spiritual place for others. I think God is constantly reminding me that it starts with me. It’s the only way I can replicate anything, it has to start with me. One of the axioms we had in our last church that really stuck with us and gets to the heart of this: “Is what is happening here on staff worth exporting?”

So let’s think 5 years into the future. What does New Denver look like? What’s happened?

Man, 5 months from now would be awesome!

Well there are 3 of us on staff right now. I would think in 5 years we could have at least three networked churches, but maybe 6 or 8 that have spread and multiplied out of this (we can already see some of that starting to happen). Even now on a map of the city, it’s so interesting: There are three clusters of people with each cluster around where each one of us lives. And it’s not like we planned it like that, it’s just happened.

These interviews were originally published on Doug Paul’s blog:http://3dchurchplanter.wordpress.com/

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Church Planter Interviews – John Chandler

So your church, Austin Mustard Seed, is obviously in Austin, TX. Tell us a little bit about where you guys are planting.

Austin in general is a creative class city. Its’ main industry is ideas. University. Software. Design. Film. Technology. It was an intentional choice over 100 years ago with how to compete with Houston. Houston is about oil. Austin is about ideas.

The particular place we live is a neighborhood of Austin proper. We’re halfway between downtown and the city limits. Our house is about 5 minutes south from the place where everything bumps up to more affluent neighborhoods and better school systems. I like to refer to it as the do-nut. Where other churches don’t go. They either go into the city (downtown) or to the suburbs. The people in our area value being closer to the city but are protective about being around all sorts of different people. So it has a quasi-suburban feel but an urban mentality.

Tell us about the process you used for planting your church. What did that time look like? What did you do?

When we got to Austin (we moved here from Seattle) we just started inviting people into our home for a meal and a time to read scripture, talk and pray. Coming here, we knew one grad student and one family that was also moving to Austin. The student is still here, the family has moved on. We were incredibly intentional about relationships as I am bi-vocational and we started to ask how these things tied together: church and relationships. It’s very casual, very relational. It has structure, but wrapped around relationships. I guess now we have about 35 people who regularly are a part of our community, with about 20-25 each week.

Obviously the focus of this blog is more towards the missional church and looking at different church structures. What is the structure of your church? What would the average month look like?

Currently it’s meeting in our home on Sunday and encouraging people to move into smaller spaces during the week. Women doing tea together and talking. Triads or accountability groups. We’re trying not to be rigid, but organically moving towards those smaller spaces.

So as you think about the last 12 months of planting, what do you think worked really well?

Taking our time.

Being bi-vocational lets us do this. We haven’t felt the pressure to be something we’re not or get to a specific place quickly. We can approach people and help them find a place, whether it is with us or another great church. With that posture, we’re starting to see the dividends of people feeling cared and loved for and doing the same in return.

We’ve also been really intentional about forming relationships. We have a structure but the structure serves our relationships. Our primary focus is to cultivate relationships. Inherent underlying all of this is we want to be cross-cultural missionaries in Austin. So we think about it like we would if we were in another country. If we were in another country, we’d have to make everything about relationships. So that’s what we’re doing.

In the last 12 months, what hasn’t worked?

We’re not trying to be underground, but we don’t have an open, visible presence in the city. I mean, our home is open, and it’s the stage where we are probably at, but how does Austin know we’re here? It’s a shortcoming to how we’ve started. But then, we’re also reaching people who wouldn’t go to church even on Easter.

The second thing is that we have lots of relationships with people who aren’t part of the church, but currently we don’t have people coming into our community, being a part of it, who weren’t at least somewhat open to faith or Jesus. We primarily have people who left the church or were detached from it but did have some church background.

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

I think we have failed to find a way to be the church outside of what we do on Sunday, which goes back to the presence in the city thing.

Ok. Let’s imagine it’s 365 days from now. What needs to be different in your community?

If we’re still in our house only, I’ll be concerned.

We would have allowed ourselves to get comfortable with who are here. Things that are living reproduce and multiply. I think we’ll be meeting in a public space and at least another group meeting in a home.

We also need more people meeting in groups of 2, 3 or 4′s to study and pray together. Our gathering is now at a place where we don’t have that kind of intimacy.

What is the biggest thing God has been teaching you in the past year?
Listen to me.

Trusting that the structure and the project list for how our church works isn’t going to be found in a church plant book written in some other context. That the Spirit is actively shaping this. When I listen more to God, he certainly seems to speak more!

So let’s think 5 years into the future. What does Austin Mustard Seed look like? What’s happened?

I love the parish model. I love what we’re seeing in Jon Tyson’s church in New York City. I see multiple worship settings in different parts of the city networked together with maybe 150 in each gathering. A pastor overseeing it and it being a community of 3-4 scattered, mid-sized groups throughout the geographic “parish” of that community.

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