Missional postmortem: some personal struggles, part 2

This has been a tough post to write.

As I previously mentioned, the past two years have brought two of the toughest personal challenges Jenell and I have ever faced. Last time I wrote about my two-year struggle with joblessness. That was tough.

This was tougher.

On September 30, 2009 Jenell’s mother, Nolie, died after a multi-year battle with cancer. I wrote about her at the time and I don’t want to be redundant, but there are some things that haven’t been said.

Jenell grew up in southern California as an only child. She and her mother Nolie were quite close. Even after we married in 1991 (she was 19, I was 20) Jenell visited her mother nearly every day and if she didn’t actually see her, they at least spoke on the phone.

Then, in 1993 I abruptly moved our fledgling family to Utah in pursuit of a new direction for my life – and we didn’t look back for 15 years.

Jenell missed her mother badly. I remember how much my wife struggled those first few years in Utah and, to make matters worse, over the coming years we didn’t see her parents more than once or twice a year because we were always several states away (first Utah, then Ohio). Over time this contributed to a growing distance between Jenell and Nolie and I saw how it took a toll on my wife.

I didn’t do much about it.

In late 2005 Nolie was diagnosed with cancer – about a year after we moved to Ohio. Jenell struggled with the fact that her mother was coping with the illness after we’d moved even farther away. But Nolie fought the disease and, thankfully, went into remission. However, by November of 2007 Nolie’s cancer returned and we knew it was more serious this time. We’d already decided to move back to California, but now we knew it was more important than ever.

Of course, I wanted to plant a church. A crazy, grassroots, missional, quit-my-career, screw-the-system, it-will-never-pay-our-bills-in-a-million-years kind of church. So I bundled the two together (moving back near family/planting a church) and sold it to myself and everyone else as a package deal. We moved in the summer of 2008.

The first year was a Godsend. We settled into the Oceanside community, enjoyed the beach, and built new friendships. Jenell re-connected with her mother as much as possible. It was tough for Jenell to see Nolie’s health deteriorate, and, I think in an effort to protect Jenell emotionally, Nolie was rather guarded about her condition – but Jenell pushed through the awkwardness. It was a very good thing.

It was right smack in the middle of all this that we attempted to start Ikon Community.

Actually, Ikon went very well initially. Our group started heating up in the Summer of 2009 – right when Nolie took a turn for the worse. Jenell started spending more and more time helping her dad with Nolie, and I began to wonder if we could maintain both efforts. Jenell said we could, and I ignored my better judgement.

When Nolie passed away in September 2009 I thought to myself, Jenell is going to need at least a year to really grieve so we should probably hold off on moving Ikon forward. But again, I ignored that impulse. Instead, I tentatively brought it up to Jenell, but she quickly dismissed the idea. She seemed to be handling the loss extremely well.

But Jenell didn’t know what she needed and I heard what I wanted to hear. I should have known better. I should have pushed through her dismissals and really cared for her. But, mired in my own emotional crisis, I was desperate for some kind of win in my life. Jenell knew that and she suffered silently.

The truth is, Jenell was in emotional shock. Outwardly she remained the rock she always has been, but inwardly she was processing her grief in complete isolation. I wasn’t there for her and, to be perfectly frank, we hadn’t allowed ourselves to grow close enough to the Ikon group to lean on them like we should have in a genuine community of faith.

So, for the better part of a year – from the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2010 – Jenell and I were each struggling with our own very serious individual grief. We weren’t completely available to each other or to the people of Ikon. As our frustrations grew on several fronts (personal, professional, financial, missional), we increasingly withdrew.

Things are better now.

Nearly 33 months after moving to California, 18 months after Nolie’s death, 6 months since I finished grad school and landed a stable job, and 4 months since closing Ikon Community, our lives are just now beginning to feel somewhat healthy. My perspective is better than it has been in a long time and Jenell has allowed me to share in the processing of some of her grief. I’m grateful for that.

I don’t know what lies ahead. But I don’t ever want to go back.

Technorati Tags: Church Planting, Family, Ikon Community, Missional Postmortem, Nolie

So when does the fruitfulness begin?

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

The Most Important Church Planting Book I’ve Read (Isn’t About The Church)

In May of 2007 I was on campus at Fuller for a two-week seminar with my cohort when I overheard one of my classmates recommend The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. For some reason -  despite the fact I had a stack of books to read over those two weeks – I found it at a local bookstore and read it that night (it’s a small book).

By the next morning I knew I was going to plant a church.

I’d been fighting this impulse for years and the books I’d been reading on church planting didn’t help. They all basically boiled down to, “10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, over-bloated, top-heavy, pastor-dependent bureaucracy.” I just wasn’t interested. But Brafman and Beckstrom were able to catalyze my imagination where a dozen church planting books had failed.

The authors claim that in the emerging world of the Internet-driven thinking decentralization – that is, the diminishing of hierarchical structure and formal leadership – has become a major asset. The authors call this a “starfish” organization, taking their cues from the decentralized biology of this curious echinoderm, and contrast it with “spider” organization which may look superficially like starfish, but are still essentially command-and-control driven.

There are several features of “leaderless organizations” that give them a major advantage: When attacked they tend to become even more decentralized making them difficult to kill; they spread their intelligence or authority throughout the system, making them easily adaptable to different contexts; and this adaptability makes them exponentially subversive, a dangerous factor in business since starfish organizations tend to decrease profitability. The authors take the reader on an entertaining and fascinating tour of various starfish organizations from the Apache Tribe, to Napster, to Al Qaeda, making a compelling case along the way.

Perhaps most interesting, according to Brafman leadership in a decentralized organization isn’t absent, it’s just earned rather than entitled. Authenticity is the only real qualification for leadership – good news for an institutional church whose leaders often fail staggeringly, and publicly for lack of character.

There are some obvious applications to ecclesiology, not least of which is how these kinds of organizations tend to empower people at the grass roots level and redefine leadership in terms of catalyzing and nurturing rather than dominating and controlling. This is where I found my sense of calling coming alive in response to this book. For me, reading it from a church perspective was both thrilling and terrifying. By and large, churches are clearly spiders: centralized, top-heavy, and leader-dependent.

Perhaps most challenging and frightening to Church institutions (and professional clergy like me!) is that in a world moving toward decentralization, the very institutional nature of the church is threatened, along with the institutionally protected artifacts…like professionalism itself.

So, some question for discussion:

• How have you navigated the tension between centralization and decentralization as a leader?
• What books have most influenced you as a church planter?
• Do you think decentralization is a technology driven fad or a genuine cultural progression?

Technorati Tags: Church, Church Planting, clergy, Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider