Equipper Blog

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.

Adam Wood serves as the lead pastor at The Neighborhood Church in Garland, TX. A native to the Dallas area, Adam served as a worship leader and young adult pastor before joining the community that would re-plant as TNC in 2016. Adam loves music, the Dallas Mavericks, nights out with his wife Amy, and dance parties at home with his two red-headed daughters.

How would you describe the area your church is in?

Garland is a large suburb just to the northeast of Dallas and TNC is smack dab in the middle of it. Our area can be described by a lot of “Multi’s” — multi-ethnic, multi-socioeconomic, and multi-generational. We do most of our community engagement and relationship-building in and around an ecumenical community center situated in the middle of a dozen different low-income apartment complexes.

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

The Neighborhood Church relocated and re-planted with a core team that had a strong sense of who we were called to BE before we ever determined what we were called to DO as God’s people together. That season of discerning our identity — of a “being” that precedes “doing” — almost directly parallels my own journey as a pastor.

Like many church plants, we built TNC with wet cement. Our identity, place, and core convictions are a strong foundation that also gives us just enough flexibility to figure things out as we go. But “going” out into the neighborhood together was a vital shift in our early days. If we were ever going to live up to our name, we had to get out into the neighborhood. The wet cement of how we do what we do has taken different shapes in these 3 years. We’ve hosted block parties, picnics, movie nights, VBS for neighborhood kids at a community center and we’ve made significant partnerships with two of the largest homeless ministries in Dallas. Most significant, however, is our Neighborhood Clothes Closet. By offering free clothes, shoes, and toiletries we’ve been able to pray with and build relationships with over 250 families in our community.

Ultimately, we’re just trying to follow Jesus together for God’s kingdom in our neighborhood. What I’ve discovered is that cultivating a Jesus-centered culture of embrace, transformation, and mission takes time (especially in the land of consumerism and mega churches). We are really good at raising money to support our kingdom partnerships or to start kingdom experiments. Now we’re in a season of learning the slow work of building a kingdom presence and a kingdom community.

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

That it is NOT all up to me! The church’s vitality is not solely contingent upon my preaching, my leadership, my guidance, or my amazing ideas. Because our church was moving through significant transitions and toward an eventual re-plant, I believed the lie that it was up to me to fix it, build it, and hold it all together.

Every time I’d sit with Jesus I’d be reminded of my identity as a beloved son of the Father’s… but then I’d stand up, walk away, and try to earn it. God used that time to remind me that 1.) I’m not alone and 2.) He’s always working. It took some time for that to sink in.

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?

We launched a Neighborhood Clothes Closet that has provided clothes and toiletries to more than 250 families and school uniforms for almost 200 children. Really, though, it’s about the slow work of building relationships, praying with our neighbors, and seeing God’s kingdom come in unexpected ways.

We’ve seen physical and relational healing. We’ve seen lonely neighbors find a friend. We’ve seen new Christians in our church catch a fire for loving their neighbors as themselves despite socioeconomic or ethnic differences. After 2 years, however, we’re still asking the question, “How can we become more effective in helping our neighbors become part of God’s family?”

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

What hasn’t worked well is the move from serving our community to incorporating our community into the life of the church. We thought it was because our neighbors we met at the Clothes Closet or VBS just needed a ride to our worship gathering. What we’ve seen so far is a lot of interest that have translated to only a few visits.

I think Verlon Fosner of the Dinner Church movement is right when he says that our churches have a sociological problem. Are our worship gatherings hospitable to all people and not just young, white, middle class Christians? Is our church building hospitable to seekers? Are our worship gatherings really the best “front door” to our church?

In an effort to re-imagine the expectation that “they” should take a step toward “us” — we’re trying to take a step toward our neighbors by creating space for relationships to grow in our shared space within the neighborhood. This Fall we plan to launch our own expression of a Dinner Church we’re calling The Neighborhood Table. We started with the relationships we’ve already formed through the Clothes Closet and we’re excited to break bread together and see where God takes us.

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

When I became the primary preacher in what would become The Neighborhood Church, I doubled the amount of sermons I had ever preached in only four months’ time. We were in a season of transition and I had placed some unrealistic expectations on myself. I thought I had to preach my way into becoming a vibrant church and pastor. I soon found that I couldn’t sustain my unhealthy rhythm of work and rest, nor could I live up to the emotional, spiritual, and functional qualities I had judged myself on.

All of this led to a panic attack moments before I was going to preach one day. So there I stood on stage in a very awkward and pregnant silence, unable to speak with all the anxieties still swirling in my head. Eventually, I said I’d pray and that we would just sing again. (Of course, that’s the service we had a guest worship leader!) That’s when someone said, “No, we’re going to pray for you.” Our community surrounded me and as they laid hands on me, the idol of self-reliance began to crumble.

I’m still learning to create space for healthy disengagement. I’m still learning to follow Jesus’ rhythm of work and rest. I’m still learning to let go of the unrealistic expectations I put on myself and others.

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

The phrase “Give me an undivided heart to revere your name” from Psalm 86.11 has been echoing in the back of my head for the better part of a year. God is continually inviting me to stillness, rest, and contemplation to allow him to put the disparate pieces of my life into something that is both holistic and wholly his.

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

My hope is that we would become a life-giving church in the neighborhood that would one day reflect the neighborhood in all its diversity as we follow Jesus together. Basically, we want to live up to our name as we invite all people into life with Jesus in the kingdom of God.

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.

John is the Pastor of Love Carrick. He and his wife Charity together lead a house church that meets at the Concordia House. John graduated from Trinity Bible College with a BA in Intercultural Studies and Biblical Studies and went on to get a MA in Intercultural Studies from Asia Pacific Theological Seminary. He is currently working on his doctorate in Intercultural Studies/Missiology at Fuller Theological Seminary. John has over 17 years of ministry experience, serving in the N. Mariana Islands, the Philippines, Nepal, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Pittsburgh. In 2015, the Trotters moved to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Carrick with their 3 year old son Amos.

So your church is in Pittsburg, PA. Tell us a little about it!

We are in the Carrick neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Carrick is an urban neighborhood within the city limits and is home to about 10,000 people. We are a low-income, blue-collar community with one of the most diverse schools in the metro. We are home to 1500 Bhutenese-Nepali refugees who have moved to the area in the last decade. There is a lot of civic pride here, a good bus line, and is the destination for a lot of people to get back on their feet again. Though violence, heroin use, and poverty are realities no one can deny, there is a lot of collaboration and resilience among the residents.

Talk to us about when you starting feeling the pull towards church planting, and the process/discussions that followed.

I have been involved in church planting internationally and domestically for a number of years now. I assisted in a church plant in the Philippines, did work among unreached people groups in Nepal, planted an AG international church in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and my family of course launched Love Carrick a little over a year ago. The call to plant Love Carrick was birthed out of a desire to see our community come together through neighborhood focused initiatives revolving around the discipleship process. After living in the community for 3 years we realized that there simply was no church presence that reflected the make up of our community and culture. The story is long but little by little God began to birth the dream of Love Carrick in our hearts.

What are the distinctives you are hoping to embed in the DNA of this new church?

We would like to be neighborhood focused and Gospel centric at the same time. The confusion and cross over between neighborhood org and local church is truly a distinctive we are after. Being hospitable and gathering in homes is somewhat of a distinctive as well; this sets the tone saying to each other and our community that we will know and care for each other deeply. Extravagant prayer is a distinctive that we seek as well. Ensuring that women in leadership is at the top of our list of distinctives is important as well. Community dinners, neighborhood involvement, extravagant prayer, and our Bhutanese-Nepali focus are distinct points for us.

As you think about what you’ve been able to do so far in getting this church plant off the ground, what are some things you have done/tried that have worked well?

Being involved in the neighborhood and partnering well with secular and religious organizations has gone exceptionally well. Being visible and building relationships with neighbors and serving in practical ways seems to be working and bridge building is happening in people’s attitudes towards the church.

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

The balance between gathering and scattering has been a real challenge. In the first several months we were great at scattering but had not developed a great way to gather. Also it is tough in an inner-city neighborhood because you are dealing with a lot of people in dire need where their lives feel like they are falling apart on a frequent basis. I feel like we could improve on seeing some more stable folks from outside of the neighborhood commit to Love Carrick and help balance things out a bit. So there is definite room for growth in that area.What is one failure you experienced and what did you learn from it?By far the biggest challenge this last year has been some inter-personal challenges amongst our leadership. We are still doing all we can to communicate and understand each other well and it has been difficult. What we have learned is that we must own our own sin and shortcomings, apologize well, forgive well, and assume the best in each other.

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

I am learning that a healthy team equals a healthy church. If we can each individually stay healthy, and even better if we as a team stay healthy, the church and community grows and blossoms. Easier said than done.

What do you dream/hope/pray this new church looks like in five years?

I hate this kind of question. I don’t know that I care a great deal what it looks like in 5 years. If we can just keep doing what we have done over the last year – know our neighbors, be involved in the community, multiply house churches, meet people at the point of their need, address our dysfunction appropriately, I will be satisfied in five years. For the sake of the question though, this probably looks like multiple house churches, larger community events, more attendance at community meals, a multiplication of more leaders and hopefully a community that is not so racially divided.

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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