3/31/2004 07:56:00 PM

{capturing comments for later use}

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d:

i'll stick my neck out for a moment. i appreciate the passion and realism in your words. allow me to be equally so for a moment.

i think a shift in vocabulary may be helpful for your situation. you are already living within a faith community. you are in community. you have faith. what it seems you are setting out to do is start a sustainable religious gathering. is that the case?

if this is the case, this is a very different endeavor, in my opinion, than simply nurturing the community(ies) of faith you inhabit. in many ways the difference is comparable to that between having a garage sale on the weekend and opening up an antique shop. the garage sale flows out of and is executed within the context of your normal life and, while it is commerce in the broad sense, you do not expect it to bring about much more than a bit of pocket money and less clutter.

these expectations are quite distinct from starting an antique shop. starting up a shop is a more public act than a rummage sale. there is a lease involved. there are bills to pay. you will likely have to quit your job to run the shop or hire someone to do so in your stead. you are taxed differently. etc. etc. etc.

both the garage sale and the antique shop are acts of commerce, yet they involve fundamentally different expectations. the work products, outcomes, time-scale, criteria of success, and a host of other things are totally divergent between the two. neither the garage sale nor the antique shop holds an inherently more valuable place in the pecking order of commerce. they serve different ends. they have different constituencies. they begin with different visions. it would be silly to try to create a successful shop on the front porch of your house just as it would be overkill and odd to rent the civic center for your family garage sale.

often, it seems to me, those who set out to "plant churches"--especially relational, emerging, connecting, whateveryouwanttocallthem churches--do little to determine what they, their friends/core group and their supporting constituents really expect and in light of said expectations assessing their own capacity to execute to bring the vision about.

if you are seeking to begin a faith community just let it flow from the normal course of your life (it already is i would suspect).

if you are seeking to create a religious corporation or commons of some sort that pays you a salary, files in compliance with the state and has a branded identity you need to be explicit about the fact that these are your expectations and realize that you are starting a business. as much as you don't want to think so, if the later example is what you are functionally seeking, a business you are starting and to succeed you will be required to speak and act in certain patterns that produce revenue.

businesses fail because people are not competent to execute, are not honest with themselves about expected outcomes or are hit with a generalized market disinterest due to saturation, incumbent monopoly, etc. religious non-profit corporations fail for the same reasons.

you need to figure out what you and your (potential) congregants want, why, whether you are honestly the person to make it happen and what alternatives/exit strategies you can put in place now to cushion the tumultuous ride that is moving past the garage sale.

thank you for forgiving my completely unidealistic presumption in these my ruminations on demythologizing church planting.

cheers.

2004-03-30 16:35

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d:

i am very much with you in the travail over how one goes about, "begin(ning) a new faith community"--as your original post put it. there seem to be few good examples of such endeavors that satisfy many of the unspoken hopes we bring to such questions. it may very well be that these unspoken hopes are the real issue and our dissatisfaction with the examples of faith community we exist within already the last vestige of a dieing gaggle of expectations as to what it is to be of Christ in community.

i was a community pastor and elder at Axxess for a few years. these structural discussions were some of the most regularly occurring topics to grace our leadership gatherings. i think that organizational purpose and sustainability are natural fault lines as new configurations of the modes of human religious existence are being born.

one of the real challenges that i see, in what is often described as the emerging church, is that our stated purposes and our proposed vehicles of actualizing said purposes are often incompatible. for example, when we state that community is a purpose that we organizationally drive toward we begin spinning our wheels because the insemination, gestation, birth, life and death of community is not purpose-driven. community is outside of our direct volitional control. it is a second-order effect of other things: proximity, common cause, familial and filial love and, most fascinatingly, those sparks of intriguing difference that seduce our imaginations and beckon us to go deeper with a person.

much more could be said anecdotally and otherwise in service of this proposed vehicle/purpose disconnect, but in this context, i have rambled on enough. all the best to you as you continue to enact the kingdom.

blessings,

d

2004-03-31 19:49