Fellow San Diegan Jason Evans wrote a thought-provoking piece the other day on missional discernement. It’s good stuff, as usual, from a talented leader. You should read it.

I do have some thoughts on what he wrote regarding being missional, but I’ll share those in more depth later. His post comes at an interesting time for me: today marks one year since announcing the close of our missional church plant, Ikon Community, and that has prompted me to conduct a little ‘missional discernment’ of my own:

What is the status of our ‘mission’ one year after closing our official ministry?

I’ve finally settled into a post-ministry career

Unlike a lot of planters, I didn’t seek to be bi-vocational. For better and for worse I decided to become an entirely non-professional minister. I was (and still remain) convinced that the future of professional ministry in the United States is grim at best, and problematic for trying to connect with post-Christian groups.

But for 2.5 years, and all during our church planting effort, I worked feverishly in vain to find a new career after 12 years in professional ministry. It was more than frustrating, it was humiliating.

Then, not long after closing Ikon, a new opportunity presented itself at my workplace. I’ve been in that new role for 7 months now and I’m hopeful about our family’s fiscal prospects for the first time in years.

Another funny irony is that I am now, essentially, a professional fundraiser – exactly the task I dreaded most while trying to plant a missional church. I went from struggling to raise $40,000 a year for the church plant, to being responsible for raising $9 million a year for a local nonprofit.

(As an aside, what I have learned about fundraising in the last 17 months has immensely impacted my perspective on how we could be funding missional work. There is a great deal missional leaders could learn from the nonprofit sector. Moreover: there is a gigantic window of opportunity to capture massive amounts of wealth as it is transferred from one generation to the next. And that window is rapidly closing; that transfer is happening right now. Churches in particular are doing a poor job of securing that wealth, and by all accounts the next two generations won’t have nearly as much disposable wealth to give.)

We’ve finally settled into our local community

For 2.5 years we really struggled to connect with people. But almost immediately after shutting down Ikon, local relationships began to open up to us in a remarkable way. In fact, in this past year, our family has somehow gained a larger and deeper network of friends than we’ve ever had in our entire lives – mostly with people in our neighborhood.

I recently had lunch with a local church planter and I mentioned this curious development. He asked, “Why do you think this happened immediately after closing your church plant?” I answered, “Because we don’t have an agenda for people anymore.”

And it’s true, we really don’t. At least, not a one-sided agenda for enlisting them into our own little fiefdom. I definitely have a personal interest: I want their friendship, and I want to give them mine. I deeply desire the fraternity and equality reciprocity brings to neighbors.

Almost none of them attend church – certainly none of them are committed to any kind of faith community – and, to be honest, I have no interest in converting them. The idea alone feels like a form of betrayal.

Also, I’ve been humbled by the quality of their community. By and large, Jenell and I agree that these people do friendship and community better than any church we’ve ever been in. I’ve come to realize it is a conceit of the church that we are the authority on ‘true community’, and it may very well be a particular conceit of the missional/emerging church. Just as with nonprofit fundraising, I think Christians have a great deal to learn from secular communities on this matter.

I am starting to gain an interest in Jesus again

In my conclusion to the missional postmortem, I said I needed to learn how to be a Christian without getting paid for it. Well, I still haven’t. My personal faith has been radically stripped. I could write whole books on what I don’t believe anymore, but would struggle to fill a fortune cookie with what I do.

Yet, recently I’m experiencing an interest in Jesus again. In fact, I work with people of all kinds of faiths, and I’m more convinced than ever that we could all learn a great deal about life and love from Christ, regardless of our creed.

Along those lines, our family has started sporadically attending a local Presbyterian church. The place is so uncool it makes me want to weep for joy. Like Lewis once said, a good liturgy should be like lacing up an old shoe; you hardly notice it’s there – which is exactly what I need right now.

So, what is the state of our ‘mission’?

Well, in some ways, I suspect, it’s better than ever. In other ways, not so much. I successfully transitioned out of the professional side of ministry, but dropped ministry along the way. We’ve connected with an unchurched community, but have no desire to get them ‘churched.’ I’m more committed to Jesus, but less committed to Christianity.

Actually, I really am more keenly aware than ever that different Christian groups mean subtly but significantly different things by the word ‘mission’. For now, suffice it to say that our ‘mission’ is simply to be decent people; that is, good partners, good parents, good friends and good neighbors.

As far as that goes, I think we’re doing alright.

Technorati Tags: Ikon Community, missional

For those who aren’t up to speed, here are the series installments:

• So when does the fruitfulness begin?
• Ikon timeline
• Intentionally unorthodox decisions that may have led to morbidity
• Complicating factors and personal reflections
• Some personal struggles, part 1
• Some personal struggles, part 2

These posts apparently struck a nerve. I’m grateful for the long list of people who wrote. Most of those correspondences were private, but a few were public and added significantly to the insights I was trying to capture:

• Jamie Arpin-Ricci: Surviving Missional
• David Fitch: Death of a Church Plant – Some Reflections and Hope for the Future of Missional Church Planting
• Everyday Mission (Mike Bishop): An Open Letter to Jason Coker

My sincere and humble thanks to all who have written.

Conclusions
Why did Ikon fail? Why after about a year of strong momentum did we experience a fairly rapid loss of energy and decline? There are, I think, a few essential reasons:

1. We didn’t have partners.
Over the 18 months we gathered we had at least three individuals or couples who expressed some level of interest in joining me and Jenell as leaders – but the timing just wasn’t right for any of them. Moreover, ultimately everyone lived too far apart to spend much time together and everyone (including us) was too busy working and raising kids to commit the time necessary to build the strong sense of community that might bring this about.

If I could do it again: I would hold off calling our gathering a “church plant” (or anything) until there was a small core of truly committed people – even if that took years. In fact, I think Ikon would still be meeting if I hadn’t impatiently raised the stakes by declaring we were going to become a “church.” Doing so prematurely increased the pressure on everyone, especially on myself and my wife.

2. We didn’t have an aesthetic element of worship
I’m a good teacher, and I can facilitate contemplative practices – but that’s not enough to enrich most people’s spiritual lives. The absence of this element in our gatherings took a toll on all of us.

If I could do it again: See #1. By prematurely calling our gig a church plant, I elicited an expectation for “worship” in people. It would have been better to wait until we had the gifts we needed to fill out a church mission. We should have just gathered, dialogued, laughed, played, broken bread, drank wine, and made some waves by serving in the community now and again…in short, we should have just had fun being a fringy group that didn’t have to be defined until enough people came along who had the gift mix and commitment to be more.

3. I ceased to be a disciple
Three years ago when I left my job as an Executive Pastor in a large church I set out to become a non-professional pastor – what I found out was I didn’t know how to be a non-professional Christian.

As a pastor, I loved spending all my time, energy, and thoughts on my faith. I loved going to my office every day of the week. I loved the pace, the studying, the constant contemplation of theology, the time for prayer, the counseling of distraught people, and, most of all, the preaching in front of attentive crowds. I loved doing this for a living. It was a great life.

But I’ve discovered that was a privileged life that shared little in common with the people I led.

I’ve found it is incredibly difficult to be that kind of Christian when you’re not getting paid for it. When I work 50 hours or so a week (at one or several jobs), and have a family to attend to, and constantly stress about not being able to pay the bills, it’s incredibly hard to spend time reading scripture, or being attentive to the work of God around me, or think in a disciplined way about theology, or be involved in a ministry… or even pray meaningfully.

So, I didn’t do much of any of that. After about a year of leading the group that way I simply ran out of steam. I’d lost my spiritual depth and that, coupled with the professional and financial difficulties I encountered, led to a pretty severe crisis of faith.

If I could do it again: I wouldn’t. Frankly, I don’t have any business leading any kind of discipleship group until I’ve learned to be a disciple myself (without getting paid for it).

What’s next?
I really don’t know. What’s interesting is that while I’ve had very little favor with the church effort, I have had tremendous favor in my professional life in the last 10 months since getting hired on by my current employer. Last week I was offered a promotion to a high level position in the organization, which I’ve accepted and that new job will be completely engrossing, so it’s hard to imagine being involved in any kind of ministry effort on the side. Maybe that is the direction God has for me.

So I’ll work and wait – and try to learn to be a Christian again.

Technorati Tags: Ikon, missional, Missional Postmortem, postmortem

Not that A View From the Back Pew isn’t good.

Actually, Tim is a solid writer. He tells engaging and often funny stories about his journey of faith. His prose can get a bit labored at times as he guides the reader through the basics of various religions as he sees it, but that’s just because he wants us to accompany him on his journey.

Tim writes with a missionary zeal, partly because he wants to spare others the demons he wrestled for the better part of forty years. Tim understands that the nuns who so rigorously constrained him as a child in Catholic school were well-meaning, “But mostly fear prevailed. I was afraid of Hell, I was afraid of yardsticks, and I was afraid of nuns.” Tim doesn’t want that fear to be the prevailing spiritual condition for anyone else seeking God.

And let’s face it: he’s right. Fear is often the motivating dynamic in religions of all stripes.

What made this book so interesting for me was that Tim’s message is basically identical to the gospel of American Evangelicalism – “Knowing religion is not the same as knowing God” (xiv) – except Tim jettisons any and all blind allegiance to the authority of the Church (as he was taught as a Catholic) or Christian scripture (as he would have been taught if he were Protestant).

The end result is that Tim crafts a spirituality for himself, governed entirely by himself. Typical of Modernist thinkers, Tim requires a reductionist kernel; an epistemological foundation that can be unimpeachably and universally applied from the bottom-up to serve as the prime mover in a causal-chain that reliably governs his life. For Tim, that foundation ends up being, quite literally, a feeling in his gut – “that trusty vibration in my solar plexus” (233).

Many Christians will scoff that this as nothing more than subjective emotionalism (others will just call it heresy, since Tim is heavily influenced by the gnostic gospels), but, frankly, it’s not all that different from the fundamental rationale I’ve heard from countless other Christians (and leaders) over the years. Tim just has the courage to admit that he really is the final arbiter of truth according to his worldview. In reality, religious fundamentalists are no different; they’re just playing a mental shell-game where Descartes’ cogito ergo sum wears the guise of tradition or scripture (or tradition about scripture, really) and is re-imagined as a delusion of objectivity.

What Tim is lacking is a nuanced view of truth as a tapestry of meaning that weaves together threads of culture, tradition, enquiry,  relationships, and circumstances, etc., as well as personal experiences in a pattern of ever-emerging knowledge and wisdom. My hunch is that Tim would embrace the idea – right up to the point where he had to submit to it in the form of someone else.

Still, although I think he misses the mark theologically and epistemologically, A View From the Back Pew is full of culturally relevant and brutally-honest (and, I think, often true) critiques of religion. If you can read it through a sympathetically critical lens, I recommend it as a window into the world of hyper-modernist spirituality and a partial peek into the landscape of a post-Christian future.

(I received a galley copy of A View From the Back Pew free of charge by the publisher in return for agreeing to review the book. I was not asked to offer either a positive or negative review.)

Technorati Tags: A View From the Back Pew, Books, Christianity, Epistemology, Gnosticism, Religion, Tim O'Donnell

So here goes. A bit more honesty.

The first struggle – my two-year long effort to find solid work – was the least significant of the two. I’ve written a bit about this already, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll of being in prolonged unemployment and the crisis of faith it would trigger. Until June of 2008 (at which time I was 37 years old), I’d never applied for a job I didn’t get. I took pride in that.

No more. For over two years I submitted hundreds of resume’s without a meaningful response. I cobbled together a part-time income doing freelance writing, web work, and other odd contract jobs and temporary gigs, but was never able to fully provide. This seemed to flatly contradict the deeply personal sense of calling and promise I felt God had given us.

There were legitimate complications – I was a part-time student, I was looking for work outside my established career, our relocation coincided with the onset of the Great Recession – blah, blah, blah (quit yer whining). But despite ready rationalizations, I took this as confirmation of the lifelong fear that I am utterly inadequate.

How do I express this?

The need to fulfill (to fully fill) the daily renewing void of hunger and desire in oneself and those nearest your heart is intrinsic to being a human animal; but the need to do so creatively and productively – and (let’s face it) to be recognized for it – is intrinsic to being made an image (or ikon) of God.

The void itself is a gift, which anticipates the gift that fills it. This what we are: empty begging bowls; that are periodically filled to overflowing; that fill others from our abundance; that do it again. This is literally our human vocation. It’s a noble humility.

Imagine, then, the agony of pushing one’s empty bowl toward God, in faith – day after day and year after year – only to bring it back still empty, or merely dribbled with the spittle of one’s own desperation (some of you don’t need to imagine, you know this feeling). Now, faith itself drives you to a fairly limited number of unpleasant explanations for this cosmic stinginess.

My temptation is to suspect divine rejection, the emotional by-product of which can only be God-loathing, self-loathing, or both.

Don’t worry, I’m not there anymore and I do have a theology that helps me reconcile this (insert parable here about blindness and sight). But it turns out that rational convictions and irrational ones are rival siblings that rarely reconcile. Besides, I know what you’re thinking and you’re quite right: this is bigger than vocational angst. I have been looking for the epistemological bottom-line for quite some time now and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

So the loss of certainty is the price I’ve paid for a career in ministry, a theological education, and a long and painful walk of obedience to a God I seem habitually unable to disdain despite his apparent indifference. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look people in the eye again and give easy answers. There’s no un-eating the apple. Yet that’s what most people want to hear from a pastor; the simple innocence of Eden before the fall, not the scarred wisdom of Jerusalem after the eschaton.

Still, I did gain something from the loss.

I’ve begun to see this sense of futility as one of the significant challenges to faith in the courtroom of postmodernity. Once you feel the agony of unrequited faith, I think you begin to apprehend the general perspective of atheism.

We tend to see Modernity as the age of anti-faith rationalism, but I think it was actually the age of mans most earnest supplications – risks of faith that largely went unanswered. ‘Postmodernity’ is the resulting malaise. Modernity’s bowl of faith was returned empty time and time again, and that emptiness indicts the cocksure certainty of our Janus-headed enlightenment cults of religion and science, which often conspired to deliver the emptiest promises of the past ‘Christian century.’

And I’ve begun to see that while atheists call religion a crutch, atheism itself is a big warm blanket, comforting its wearer from the bitter cold of an empty universe on the one hand and the horror of divine contempt on the other. I don’t mean that as a denigration. More than once this past year I begged for that blanket. But that bowl came back empty too.

In a world where the promises of gods and scientists fail to fully fill the empty ikons of the earth, what remains? For now it appears that ambition replaces creativity and entertainment replaces exaltation. I know because that’s what people I meet settle for. That’s often what I settle for. It doesn’t satiate, but for many it’s better than nothing.

And It just so happens these are the only two incarnations of science or religion that enjoy much popular currency today. Give them ambition and give them entertainment, for God or for profit, and you will earn a living.

I’m still not satisfied, but in a land of famine the one with a little eats like a king. So I keep pushing my bowl toward the sky, praying for a little to fill myself and a little to share.

Technorati Tags: gifts, ikons, image of God, Missional Postmortem, personal, Vocation

Here’s a quote from the court’s opinion:

Overall, a reasonable observer viewing the memorial would be confronted with an initial dedication for religious purposes, its long history of religious use, widespread public recognition of the cross as a Christian symbol, and the history of religious discrimination in La Jolla,” McKeown wrote. “These factors cast a long shadow of sectarianism over the memorial that has not been overcome by the fact that it is also dedicated to fallen soldiers, or by its comparatively short history of secular events…. The use of such a distinctively Christian symbol to honor all veterans sends a strong message of endorsement and exclusion. It suggests that the government is so connected to a particular religion that it treats that religion’s symbolism as its own, as universal. To many non-Christian veterans, this claim of universality is alienating.

Predictably, conservative Christian activists are decrying it.

Here are questions that bother me:

What are the truths, untruths, and half-truths of this case, and which truth is weightiest?

And, what public stance on this issue is required of Christians who adopt an incarnational posture?

Technorati Tags: Church and State, Court decisions, Mount Soledad Cross

I started this postmortem with the timeline of our missional church plant and then covered certain unorthodox decisions that I thought should be taken into consideration. Today, I want to cover some factors that weren’t illuminated by those posts.

I don’t offer these as excuses. They didn’t cause us to fail. But they did contribute to the complexity of trying to establish a missionally-minded, post-Christendom community of faith.

1) We started from scratch in a town where we had no roots or relationships
I could rattle off a list of “missional” and/or “emerging” churches that are established and succeeding after several years on the ground – but a large majority of them were birthed in familiar contexts. Many were kick-started from an existing congregation. Many were started by a small handful of disgruntled ex-pastors and church leaders who already knew each other. Some merged with existing, struggling congregations.

We didn’t know anyone in Oceanside. We have some family in Carlsbad and Vista, but we’d never lived in this area before. I am now asking myself this important question for the first time: “Why would anyone in this town be interested in walking down some alternative church path with me?”

Answer: “Because I’m a pretty good communicator.” That’s it. Let’s face it, that’s not enough.

2) North San Diego County is a relatively conservative context
The strongest churches here extoll conservative evangelical tenets: the inerrancy of scripture; the submissiveness of women; the threat of evolution to the faith; God’s divine blessing on capitalism and Western democracy; an understanding of salvation as the assurance of heaven after death for those who confess specific boundary-marking tenets.

In my observation – precisely because our culture is in a liminal time – one of the best ways to carve out a market niche for new churches in America right now is to preach the revival of Christendom values over-and-against the evils of culture and dress it up as “missional.” As far as I can tell, San Diego is a great place to do that.

Good missionaries adapt to culture. I’d just prefer to adapt to the future of our culture rather than it’s past. That’s a tough gig and I still haven’t figured out how to connect effectively with people on the fringe. I do know this: It’s easier to build coalitions for restoring former glory than it is to lead people into the uncertain possibilities of what could be. I’d rather fail at the latter than succeed at the former.

3) We were a geographically scattered group in an overly busy culture
For the first year or so Jenell and I followed a series of organically occurring relationships that eventually became the group we gathered. That’s was always the plan. So far so good.

However, as Modern suburban Americans we don’t live in the neighborhood – we just sleep there. We live at work, at school, at family gatherings, and at recreation spots. Americans also live incredibly busy lives, so these are the places we tend to meet people “organically.” Consequently, the community we gathered was scattered. Our people lived in Oceanside, Vista, Bonsall, Escondido, Carlsbad, and Encinitas (we only had 7 households!).

This not only contradicted our vision (neighborhood-based missional communities), it made it tough to cultivate a strong sense of community. I think it also placed an implied pressure on our people to move toward becoming leaders in their own neighborhoods. I don’t think it was wise to do that.

4) We mostly tapped into a network of existing Christians
Because we didn’t have deep roots in the community, the few networks we could tap (mostly family and denominational connections) yielded connections with people who were already Christians and (very often) already attending church somewhere.

I’m grateful for these relationships. They’re people exploring different perspectives of the faith, or coming out of difficult situations with a previous church. It was valid to gather with these folks and they’ve become important friends to us.

But, among other things, this meant we quickly took on the nature of being some sort of rogue small group in the area – and Jenell and I could never be reconciled to that. We weren’t interested in wresting people away from their churches and we weren’t interested in remaining a house church either.

We did a fair amount of work in the community that exposed us to new people, but probably because we were so scattered and busy we were never very good at folding people in.

5) De-institutionalizing did not solve the attractional problem, it just informalized it.
If you have any kind of gathering (and I think you must) most people will default to a passive mode. Most people still want to hear from the most inspiring person in the room. Most people still cling to the shelter of silence or anonymity.

Getting out into the community helps. Setting the room up differently helps. Telling the right stories helps. Asking the right questions helps. Food helps. I think this patron/client posture is a challenge that can be overcome and I think it’s imperative to overcome it. But we are swimming against a very strong tide.

And.

Someone must take responsibility for the work of creating that safe, enriching, more egalitarian environment. Because it is work and it requires gifting, character, time, and most of all, willingness. If you don’t want to call that someone a “leader” because you can’t find that word in scripture, or because it’s too laden with corporate/power baggage, fine (I’m sympathetic). But you’re still going to need those people, they still have to shoulder a weight of responsibly that most folks eschew.

In order to avoid the attractional tide, no one person (or couple) can fill this role. You must refuse to do it, and you must establish some form of plurality early on – even if it’s a small plurality that others can observe for a time.

This is what we failed to do and, in the end, it’s why we shut down Ikon. We had people with the gifts and the character, but not the time or the willingness to bear the burden of responsibility alongside us. Probably because we didn’t have deep enough relationships.

Technorati Tags: Ikon Community, Missional Church, Missional Postmortem

We didn’t recruit a team
From the beginning we felt God was leading us to abstain from recruit a classic church-planting team. In some ways this made sense: We knew very few people from our home church in Columbus who would have affinity for a non-institutional, postmodern community of faith. Plus, I knew I’d likely never be able to pay people who came along. In other ways it didn’t: Jenell and I are very good at some things, but not, by any means, good at everything.

My belief was that we would be able to grow leadership in the first three years (building relationships for the first year before gathering a group, followed by two years of leadership development within the group). I seem to have severely underestimated the length of time it would take to do, well…everything. Two and a half years into this, we still have nobody to truly partner with.

We didn’t establish secular work beforehand
For years this was my excuse for not church-planting: before this experience, I wasn’t professionally qualified to do anything but minister – and church planter’s (even institutionally-minded ones) need to be bi-vocational. Well, it was even harder than I thought. It took me two years of scraping together a meager living in a variety of communications, management, and design-related gigs before I landed a full-time job (it didn’t help that I was in school at the time).

We didn’t wait until I finished school
With my school workload, freelance gigs, financial stress (not to mention a little blogging on the side), I wasn’t a very good leader over the past 18 months since starting the group.

I didn’t preach or teach
Most church planters want to get their people into pews (or whatever) as soon as possible on a Sunday morning so they can preach great sermons and create loyalty. I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything that resembled classic preaching or bible study at our groups. We read a passage and I tried to facilitate a fairly open dialogue about it. Now don’t get me wrong, I still gave my two-cents – and as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I suspect lots of people came just to hear my relatively odd (compared to conservative evangelicalism) perspectives on scripture – so, in that sense, I did teach. But you know what I mean: I didn’t “bring the word” every week.

The irony here is that teaching/preaching is far and away my strongest gift. However, I was highly committed to avoiding a unidirectional flow of information entertainment in the group. Our dominant metaphor was a potluck, and I worked hard to try to cultivate that. In the end, I found it’s much harder than I thought to get people to contribute to the cooking.

We refused to provide a ready-made solution for kids
From my answer to a question from yesterday’s post: “As we grew initially there were a few incidents where kids were in conflict. Once we solved that problem it turned into parental stress over the perception that they “weren’t being discipled” – a concern I shared, but nobody really seemed interested in participating consistently to providing the solution. My biggest concern – again – was ownership. My bottom line to the group was, “I don’t care what the solution is, as long as we’re all pitching in.” I was willing to settle for a less than ideal solution as long as everyone, at least all the parents, were taking responsibility for it. People said they would pitch in, but more often than not they failed to follow through. Right or wrong, I interpreted this to be a lack of regard for others in the group, and therefore a lack of genuine commitment to the group.

I refused (it really was just me) to provide a musical worship experience
At first this decision was both strategic and pragmatic. Strategically, I wanted us to have a time of “fasting” from the typical white, contemporary, soft-rock concert experience that passes for worship these days. Pragmatically, we didn’t have anyone who could do it anyway. I believed God would eventually provide someone organically (silly me). After about 9 months the strategic value had long faded and the pragmatic reason had become a serious leadership deficiency.

We didn’t advertise
Not in any way. No logo or branding to speak of. No servant evangelism (which, in my opinion, is really just a PR stunt), no flyers in Starbucks, and certainly no paid ads on Google or facebook. If you don’t already know why, you can read my post 5 Arguments Against the Use of Media and Marketing in Church. In a nutshell: advertising is a function of the marketplace and faith is not a commodity.

Thoughts? Questions?

Technorati Tags: failure, Ikon Community, Missional Church

• A narrative timeline of the effort (Tuesday)
• Intentionally unorthodox decisions that may have contributed to morbidity (Wednesday)
• Complicating factors and personal reflections  (changed to after Christmas)
• Lessons learned (after Christmas)

Please note: The time has passed for condolences (if you feel compelled to share well wishes, please add them to my previous post). Ask questions. Make clinical observations. The patient can’t be any deader. This is a time for learning.

March 2007
Jenell and I launch twoshirts.org in Columbus (where I am the associate pastor of a 1500 member church). It grows very quickly and exposes us to people we normally wouldn’t have met doing typical church outreach. I’m in the midst of several rather radical theological and ecclesiological shifts that have been brewing since 2002.

May 2007
On campus at Fuller Seminary for a two-week intensive, I find myself fighting with God in prayer over an increasing sense of calling to plant a church. My experience with twoshirts.org has ignited my imagination for alternative forms of organization, but I’m struggling with a total lack of confidence in my ability to be bi-vocational and an increasingly strong distaste for evangelical ecclesiology in general and entrepreneurial church-panting methods in particular.

I experience what I believe to be the “voice” of God saying, “I don’t want you to plant a church, I want you to plant a network.” I interpret this to mean that God is calling me to start a network of discipleship groups rather than a more typical centralized, hierarchical church. I call my wife Jenell and tell her about my experience. She’s open to the idea.

I return home to Columbus, Ohio where – in a staff meeting – the senior pastor tells me that I am being called to plant the kind of church God has placed heavily on my heart. I am stunned. Jenell and I start making plans.

June-December, 2007
Jenell and I spend this time talking and praying about where to go for our planting effort. Ultimately we feel called to move back home to California, partly because Jenell’s mother enters into a second bout with cancer in December of 2007. We feel it’s important to be back near family after being away from California for 15 years.

October 2007-May 2008
We develop our strategy for planting a network of discipleship in the San Diego area: use twoshirts.org to meet people; start a missional group; multiply groups; share a public space for all-network worship one weekend per month and operate it as a community center during the week.

I begin to make contact with a variety of San Diego area pastors and leaders. By May of 2008 we have raised $3,300/month for our first two years on the ground.

June-October 2008
We move our family to North San Diego County. We plan to spend the first year connecting with people organically and looking for opportunities to transition into non-ministry careers. We settle in Oceanside in September. We love it.

We connect with the local Vineyard areas pastors group and build some good relationships of support.

November 2008
The bottom falls out of our financial support when our two biggest supporters lose their proverbial shirts in the fallout from the recession. These two supporters alone constituted 60% of our monthly support. This begins a month-to-month financial crisis for our family that will last until September, 2010. We cobble together whatever work we can find.

March 2009
Twoshirts hasn’t gained any real traction in San Diego like it did in Columbus, but it does open all kinds of relational doors for us. We meet a few other people who seem to have a similar heart for a church that is deeper. We start to gather and get to know each other. There is energy and excitement.

June-August 2009
We gather every Sunday night in our home for a common meal, communion, discussion around scripture, and prayer. People bring friends and co-workers. We are highly focused on serving the poor, advocating for justice, and reaching into the community creatively. We organize the first Micah Film Festival in August and have over 200 attendees.

I land a good paying job and put school on hold so I can work full-time. Within 3 months they start paying me late due to faltering accounts and severe internal mismanagement.

September-December 2009
We start focusing on Jesus’ teachings. We use the website to facilitate daily “spiritual exercises.” We host a “progressive advent” in December (advent services held at a different home each week). We’ve grown to about 14 adults and 15 kids.

Jenell and I notice several problems: a) The kids (mostly ages 2-12) are a challenge to the group dynamic, b) we don’t have any kind of emotional component to worship (particularly music) and it’s wearing on some folks, c) I suspect the newer people come mostly to hear what I might say, and d) hardly anyone prays aloud in the prayer time.

By December my employer hasn’t paid me in nearly 3 months. I quit and go back to school, taking out loans to finish. I patch together more contract work. We are nearly out of savings.

January-April 2010
I begin a month-long series on “prayer.” Hardly anyone prays openly. We continue our weekly rhythm. I have my eye on a few potential leaders; one couple is relatively new, so I don’t approach them yet; one couple shows reluctance due to the overwhelming busyness of their life; one couple shows real interest, but travels 25 miles to come every Sunday. They start talking about moving to Oceanside.

May 2010
We lose three families including two of those we were hoping to see develop their own groups someday. Two of the three move out of state. The other family decides they can’t afford to relocate and can’t sustain participation from 25 miles away. Those who remain are only marginally involved outside of Sunday nights.

Jenell and I seriously discuss shutting Ikon down but we realize we’ve never attempted to recruit partners. We put the weekly gathering on hold for the summer so we can recruit, and so I can go to school full-time and work a new temporary half-time job.

June-August 2010
I find myself in conversation with two men who show interest in joining us. Both have a long history in ministry and are both in transition. Both have strong pastoral gifts that compliment mine. The first is in his 50′s. The second is in his 30′s. The second man and his wife are talented worship leaders. It feels like God is at work in these conversations.

At the end of August I finish my Masters degree and land a full-time job working for a local nonprofit. For the first time in two years it feels like things are coming together the way we envisioned.

September-November 2010
We begin gathering again, spending the first five weeks in a planned series of conversations about the vision. I do this for two reasons: a) I want to create a line of demarcation between casual attendance and definite commitment, and b) I want to give the two new leadership prospects an opportunity to engage.

The first man is cautious. He makes it clear to me that his family needs the stability of a steady income. He is interviewing for full-time senior pastor jobs out of state. I can’t blame him.

The second man is enthusiastic. He quickly builds relationships. However, his wife doesn’t attend and it becomes apparent that they are not in this together. By early November he regretfully informs me that his family is not ready to participate in a church-planting effort.

All of this happens in the weeks leading up to the second annual Micah Film Festival. This event is to be a funnel for our Advent gatherings where we planed to have worship lead by this couple. The man informs me that he and his wife are still willing to do so.

However, at this point I know we’re done. I’m not willing to bring in hired guns (even if they’re free) to make Ikon seem more impressive than it really is. I know that losing this person will make Advent anti-climactic and painful for the group. Mostly, I realize that Jenell and I can’t keep carrying the group alone and I know we have no new prospects for partners.

Jenell and I decide to make the film festival our final gathering as a group.

Time of death: 11/21/2010, 5PM.

Questions? Observations?

Technorati Tags: failure, Ikon Community, Missional Church, postmortem

Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it remains just one seed. But if it dies it becomes much more.

~ John 12:24

Seasons change fast. It seems like just yesterday I wrote that my new job was finally enabling us to move confidently into a missional church plant with Ikon Community.

Today, I’m here to report that we have shut Ikon down.

More details later. The short version is this: we were simply unable to either internally cultivate or externally recruit a viable leadership core. In recent months we’d gained momentum with two experienced leaders showing interest, but a few weeks ago that changed suddenly.

That was a tough blow.

Losing these people caused us to re-evaluate everything. Over the past 18 months, internal leadership candidates had either balked or moved away and we’d exhausted our local network for recruiting potential external leaders. Ultimately Jenell and I decided we were unwilling to carry the burden of leadership alone.

Without the gifts and camaraderie of a well rounded leadership team we simply can’t grow in a healthy way to the level of a mid-sized group (40-50 people) with the critical mass necessary to share a creative liturgy and have an impacting local mission. In my mind these are the two things we needed in order to be more than just another small group, and these were the two things we were never able to either initiate (a creative liturgy) or sustain (an impacting mission).

We could have continued Ikon as a rogue small group or house church in the area, but frankly that has never interested us. Besides, for better or worse, Jenell and I have never had much patience for propping up corpses. It was time to bury this one. Hence, we will no longer be gathering as a group and we’ve shut down the church planting process with The Vineyard Community of Churches.

What more can I say?

The personal cost to undertake this effort – starting over two and half years ago and begun 2200 miles away – has been nothing short of enormous. Peering into the coffin is painful and confusing. After 17 years in professional ministry and a graduate degree from seminary, I don’t know what this change means for my ministry vocation. I don’t know what this means for our family’s worship life. Honestly, I don’t know what it means for my faith.

It feels like a death or a divorce. In the end I suppose it’s a bit of both.

I was like an angry drunk for about a week while processing this decision. Some of you may have noticed (I should stay away from Twitter when I get that way). It didn’t help that my wife was out of town at the same time. Sorry for that.

I’m good now. Surprisingly good actually.

Some final notes: 1) In a day or two I’m going to write a post-mortem for our missional church plant. With all the missional bravado out there I figure someone should write about failure. Who knows? Someone might learn from it. Hell, maybe even me. 2) As coincidence would have it Mike Breen sent me his book Launching Missional Communities. I was reading it the very same week I was wrestling with the decision to close Ikon. I told Mike I would review it here, and I aim to fulfill that promise. Perhaps a perspective of the book from this side of the church planting experience might be helpful.

Technorati Tags: Church Planting, Ikon Community, Missional Church, Vineyard Churches

It’s a long article, but well worth the investment. Here are my random thoughts:

I found myself growing angry with the tactics used to bring children to Christ. Specifically, the way they separate kids from family members is just plain creepy. Also, I was struck by the way they use story and metaphors to perpetuate a closed concept of God. Does this bother anyone else?

The missionaries are communicating an increasingly untenable worldview. It’s a social imaginary of God – namely, an individually incubated form of superstitious certainty – that won’t hold up under the weight of a pluralistic society, the hardships of life, or, for that matter, the goodness we regularly encounter through others.

They are creating little fundamentalists. The only way to maintain the beliefs being conveyed by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (at least, as they’re represented in the article) is to sequester oneself in relative isolation with others who adhere to the same set of narrow beliefs. This doesn’t bode well for the cultivation of a just and peaceful society.

The author was on her own faith journey. I thought Aviv seemed to be grieving the loss of her own childhood faith, while simultaneously coming to grips with its dysfunction. My impression was that she was longing for a faith that is intelligent enough to make sense of a complex world and exist with integrity alongside other forms of knowledge in a way that reflects sociological/cultural adulthood. I think this may be true of our culture in general.

I was (and continue to be) haunted by the way Aviv wrote about story and narrative:

The Fellowship, too, equates children with a more primitive phase in our culture. It reaches backward in time, creating a community that is still vulnerable, prone to magical explanations, and free of secular learning. Children are predisposed to the fundamentalist’s literal mode of reading. Unlike adults, they are not yet suspicious of the way that stories—with their seductive yet predictable arcs—try to capture our imaginations. They can still surrender to the world of a narrative.

Story/narrative is a major thread throughout this piece, which is interesting to me because it’s a rather popular topic in the theological world too. The author essentially tries to expose the use of narrative as a way of perpetuating a more primitive (that is, inferior) social imaginary and she seems to believe that story itself is a more primitive (that is, inferior) medium.

If her perspective is typical of educated post (or hyper) moderns (and I’m not saying it is, I honestly don’t know), this creates a serious problem for Christian mission because much in the current formulation of postmodern mission hangs on the belief that people long for and relate to story better than data.

But, Aviv’s remarks made me realize that it’s one thing to indulge in story (clearly we are a culture that is obsessed with narratives of alternative realities) – but it is another thing entirely to have faith in a story, especially a fantastical one.

(Seriously. We poke fun at people who organize their entire lives around fantastical stories, and for good reason. We recognize there is something juvenile about this. Think of “Trekkies.” More and more, the secular Western world looks at conservative Christianity as one giant version of Comicon. Yes, I know – these sorts of sub-cultural communities are hugely successful and lucrative. But is that really what we want to emulate? Is Christianity just another successful juvenile fantasy niche market?)

As Christian leaders and missionaries, do we realize that “growing up” necessarily involves the process of calling simplistic narratives into question? Furthermore, to what extent are we seriously interrogating our own use of story to convey the gospel in a way that is true in a mature sense?

For example, some of the tension between Christianity and culture boils down to the Christian community’s insistence on holding to an immature understanding of biblical stories. We often use these narratives to communicate immature simplicity, societal preservation, and individual confinement, when the same stories can be used to communicate mature complexity, societal possibilities, and personal freedom. The creation story is the most obvious example.

So, when Jesus said to have “faith like a child” did he really mean we ought to shut our eyes and cover our ears the way children do when they don’t want to deal with difficult or unpleasant things?

Or did he mean something else?

Technorati Tags: Child Evangelism Fellowship, creation, Harpers Magazine, Myth, Story, Truth