State of the mission – one year later

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

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

Missional Postmortem: Complicating factors and personal reflections

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

Missional Postmortem: Intentionally unorthodox decisions that may have contributed to morbidity

There were some decisions we made in our failed missional church planting effort that were less than typical. Some may have been wise. Others, perhaps not. You be the judge:

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

Missional Postmortem: Ikon Timeline

Our missional church plant failed. Now comes the autopsy. Bring your scalpels and a brown bag lunch. I’m counting on this being a group effort. Here’s the plan:

• 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

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

Announcing the 2010 Micah Film Festival

Some of you know that last year folks from Ikon put together a weekend film festival of documentaries here in Oceanside, CA. Well, It was so much fun, we decided to do it again.

For the 2010 Micah Film Festival we’ve found three incredible documentary films to screen this year – one about Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, one about emergency medical work in conflict areas of the world, and one about autism -  along with some amazing non-profit organizations to spotlight.

Check it out:

The Micah Film Festival spotlights excellent documentary films that celebrate justice, mercy, and humility and also serves as a forum for connecting people with non-profit organizations who are making a difference locally and globally.

Our mission is to help restore the human spirit through art and advocacy.

Over the course of one weekend we will screen three award-winning documentaries that compellingly represent the spirit of Justice, Mercy, and Humility. After each screening we’ll have post-screening Q&A sessions and panel discussions about the important topics addressed by the films. Click here to learn more about the 2010 film selections.

We’ll also use the weekend to spotlight several local non-profits that are working working toward these values around the world, and we’ll use proceeds from your ticket purchase to raise money for these amazing organizations. Click here to learn more about our featured non-profits this year!

If you are going to be in SoCal the weekend of Nov 19-21, please consider coming. Your ticket purchase goes toward some great causes, and I promise you’ll be inspired by the films and the post-screening discussions we host.

I’d also like to ask you to help us spread the word. If you’re on facebook or Twitter, please help spread the word.  If you have a blog, please post about it or link to us. We have lots of tickets to sell and every little bit helps!

Thank everyone – hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: Autism The Musical, CA, Holy Wars, Ikon Community, Living In Emergency, Micah Film Festival, Oceanside

Galatians Series at Ikon Community Starts Today

This week at Ikon we began a series on Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians. We kicked it off last night with a gathering centered around one of the major themes of the letter, and today I started the daily reading with an introduction of why I think this should be an important series for our little group.

As usual, any of you are welcome to join us!

Technorati Tags: Galatians, Gospel, Ikon Community, Paul

Holy Week, Day 6

Today is our final reading before Easter, and much like yesterday’s chapter, today’s is packed with action as Jesus approaches the climactic moment of his earthly ministry. Take time to read through Matthew 27 today and reflect on the questions below:

Questions for Reflection:

1. What scene or character in this chapter do you most identify with? Why?
2. Imagine you were one of Jesus’ disciples, and expected him to be the anointed one who finally overthrew the Roman oppressors and vindicated you and your people. How would this series of events impact you? How might you have made sense of it all?
3. There is a tension that runs throughout Jesus’ ministry between him and his followers: they want him to conquer with power but he typically serves and sacrifices instead – including giving the ultimate sacrifice. That is, Christ’s strength always looked like weakness. How does this tension continue today between Christ and his followers?

Technorati Tags: Easter, Holy Week, Ikon Community, Jesus, Matthew

Holy Week, Day Two

Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.

Questions for Reflection

1. In this passage Jesus quotes part of the Jewish Shema from Deut 6, the most important prayer practice in Judaism (you can read more about the importance of the Shema here). How do you think reciting Deut 6:4-9 three times daily might affect your thoughts and life positively?
2. How can we know if a religious practice, like reciting the Shema three times daily, is effective for good spiritual formation or if it is merely an empty religious ritual? How are Jesus’ words in Matt 21-22 helpful in making this distinction?

Technorati Tags: Deuteronomy, Holy Week, Ikon Community, Jesus, Matthew, The Shema