Missional postmortem: Conclusions

It’s been 5 months. I’ve taken my time with this postmortem because it’s been tough to separate my emotions from my observations, but after stepping away from blogging (and from my faith) for Lent, the time has come to wrap this up.

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

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: Some personal struggles, part 1

After reading last week’s installment Jenell informed me that I hadn’t been honest. She’s right. The truth is, I failed to mention that we face two of the most difficult personal hurdles of our lives during the past two years.

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

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