By Peter Sung, Conference Coach, PacNWC

Over time, I became disgusted with my family’s immigrant church. Politics, status, money, legalism, hypocrisy, judgment, emotionalism – these are the things that I witnessed week after week, and soon enough, enough was enough. In protest, I left.

In college, I openly spoke out against ethnic-specific ministries that spoke English and accused them of being social instead of demonstrating the reconciling power of the Gospel. Why can’t I bring my non-ethnic, non-Christian friends here? These so-called ministries became dead to me.

So I started starting churches, churches that were truthful, diverse, gracious – better.

When I first came upon the Covenant in 1999, I was promised fewer fleas on this dog. Over time, I found some fleas. Sometimes, it seemed like a lot of fleas.

When I was a little boy, when my Sunday school teacher put his warm hand on my bloody knee and prayed for God to comfort and heal me, I remember believing. When I was in middle school, I remember looking up into the Pennsylvanian night sky and feeling really small. When I was in high school, I remember the moment I felt the conviction of sin. When I was in college, I remember giving my life once again to God as I switched grad school plans from medicine to theology.

God’s been walking with me for 45 years and this year, God took my heart of stone and put a new spirit within me. He removed my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh. How he did that is another story but here and now, I want to remind all of us, as we enter into Advent and wait for his coming, that Christ can be everywhere but he is nowhere if he does not enter in and give you a heart of flesh. Nothing can really change if you don’t. But, if you have a new spirit, behold, all things will be made new.

I was listening but unable to hear; sighted but unable to see. How wondrous are the works of God!

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26

By Peter Sung, Conference Coach, PacNWC

Sometimes it can feel like there is only one way to play the game, and the church has to play by their rules.

They make the rules because:

• They have more money;
• They are connected to mainstream culture; and
• They work towards a concrete product.

The church is, on the other hand:

• Lacking money;
• Working with volunteers; and
• Working towards a less concrete product.

In other words, most entities play the short game while the church is tasked with playing the long game.

There are 3 kinds of games: the short game, which seeks to achieve immediate results, the long game, which looks to build something greater, and the infinite game, which works towards gains beyond now or later. The longer the play, the less concrete the product.

Guess which game the church is called to play?

In the work of the church, every short game is to be framed within the long game which itself is framed within the infinite game. Without the long game, the short game is meaningless. Without the short game, the long game is impossible. Both games are steps of faith towards the infinite game.

In the church, the telos, or end of all games, is ultimately Christ.

Actually, in all games, within and without the church, the end is Christ, according to scripture. No org can persist with just the short game. Even the long game runs out (just ask Bill Gates). So ultimately, there remains only Christ, anywhere, everywhere.

So maybe the church has been set up by God to play the only game that ultimately matters. The church is playing the ultimate game.

A new church tends to focus on the short game and make plans for the long game. An established church tends to be familiar with the long game but may have lost its touch in the short game. A question that emerges is: How can both categories of churches partner up to level up in the eternal game of being the church?

By Mark Meredith, Church Planting Coach, PacNWC

“We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.” Not just an ad slogan, but don’t you think it is just true? Isn’t it part of God’s design, that we acquire wisdom as we go? I am counting on it and it’s why I get great joy out of coaching and meeting with church planters. So, what’s the thing or two I have seen?

For one thing, as a church planter, I saw how discouraging it could be. There is an old saying in church planting: “the highs are higher and the lows are lower.” And I would add, the lows last longer in the soul.  Without infusions of encouragement on a regular basis, church planting is hard on your soul. I was fortunate to have two great encouragers who were intentional about giving me an infusion on a regular basis. I don’t know where I would have been without it. As leaders, we owe it to ourselves and those following us to put ourselves in places we can be encouraged. It gives me joy to be a supplier of encouragement for church planters.

But the second thing is wisdom. Wisdom is so needed and it comes either from experience or learning from others who have experience. In general, it is much less painful to learn from others. As a church planter, my encouragers were also wise. They weren’t always right, as each context is different. But they helped me process decisions with greater wisdom, decisions which had a huge effect on the church and its mission.

So, my hope and joy is that I can bring some encouragement and wisdom to church planters. That is the thing or two I have seen in my own life. Of course, we all need encouragement and wisdom. These are wonderful gifts from God.

By Don Robinson, PacNWC Associate Superintendent

Headwaters Covenant Church, Helena, MT, celebrated its 10th anniversary as a congregation this month. It was a full day of celebration. Here’s a description from Pastor Seth Dombach:

“Thanks for all your prayers and support. We had a wonderful day celebrating God’s faithfulness in all that he has done in our past while looking forward to all that lies ahead. We read notes from our planting church, Life Covenant, from the Pacific Northwest Conference and had a video from our founding pastor Matt Randles. We know that without these and many many others partners we would not have reached this historic milestone. Following the special worship service, we went out to a private water ski lake, had a BBQ and tons of fun connecting with old friends and sharing stories of all that God has done in us and through us. This is just the start and we can’t wait to see all that our Triune God has for us in the future as we continue to embody Jesus in love truth and action together!!”

By Anna Hoesly, Church Planter Exploring Partnership with ECC.

When my toddler graduated from a crib to a toddler bed, we were terrified by what this would do to our lives. Surely, those crib rails were the only thing standing between a peaceful little girl who sleeps at night and a tyrant who does what she wants, when she wants. We took off the rails and waited with bated breath. But a fascinating thing happened. Every morning, she sat patiently in her bed for us to come get her out. Sometimes she even called to us to let her out. The crib rails were gone but she had gotten so used to them, it was like they were still there. Somewhere along the way she had constructed an invisible glass wall that was just as powerful as the actual rails. Eventually we had to train her to deconstruct the invisible wall too, so she could see past it and get her own darn water. 🙂

This reminds me of our world. We have invisible glass walls all over the place that artificially divide our world into little cultural microcosms. The walls are human constructions. Invisible, but powerful.

Invisible walls between our nuclear family and the village of people that lives outside our door. Invisible walls between socioeconomic bubbles that exist geographically in our communities. Invisible walls between the American Western Christian culture in our churches and the local culture just outside them. Invisible walls that run solidly between the political echo chambers in our current world. We’re so used to these glass walls, so soaked in our own cultural microcosm, so busy with the needs of our particular bubble, that we don’t even think about these walls very often, let alone make a point to walk through them. For most of my time in ministry, I was pretty comfortable in the cultural bubble of my church and my nuclear family. Both kept me very busy.

My journey toward church planting started when I began to walk outside. Not figuratively, I’m ashamed to say- literally. I rarely walked outside my front door except to put my head down and get into my car (sometimes to drive to an outreach meeting at my church!).

Statistically, I’m not alone. Research shows that the longer an individual is a part of a church community, the less and less relationships they have with those outside the church. This was happening in our church so clearly. The more I recruited people into good church activities, good small groups, good volunteer opportunities, the more distanced they got from their neighborhoods. This realization hit me like a rock. I was pulling people out of their neighborhoods and into a world with glass walls.

I knew if this was going to change, I had to go first. I had to walk outside. And so I went to my front door with this simple charge.

Walk outside. See where God is working. Join Him.

And then I summoned all my courage and said, “You know… it’s almost dinner. Maybe tomorrow.”

As I reflected on my reticence, I realized I was afraid. I was afraid that if I crossed over this glass wall, it would take over my life. I was afraid I’d have no time for my family because I was already spread so relationally thin in my role at the church. It was like I knew… that if I crossed the proverbial threshold, it would change things.

That night I had a dream. When I woke up I couldn’t remember exactly what happened in it. I only remembered two things. The important things. A) It featured Ryan Reynolds. Obviously. B) it was a rich emotionally salient image of the parable of the talents. And I knew clear as day what it meant. All around me, right outside my door, outside my glass wall, were relationships placed right in front of me. It was like I saw a beautiful landscape that was active and alive, ready to burst outside my door. And I was staying inside, in the dark, burying my call to invest in those relationships.

That morning I felt grief. It was a real heavy sadness at the beauty I was burying by making my world small. But I was still afraid too. And then it was as though my whole body sensed God saying to me,

“Yes. You’re right. This will change things.

And. I. will. protect you.

I will never call you to hurt your family. I will not call you somewhere that will break you.

But I will call you out.”

So finally I walked outside. I began to just “be” out in my neighborhood. I walked with open eyes and open heart. Without agenda, I began to develop acquaintances, which led to friendships. I began to really see and enjoy the lovely people right outside my door. I felt alive and a part of my neighborhood, and found that spiritual conversations emerged quite naturally as we began to care about each others’ lives.

And I wasn’t wrong. This changed things. It shifted my home base from my church to my neighborhood. It shifted my sphere of influence. It shifted my understanding of the world I was trying to reach. It ruined me for my current way of doing life and ministry.

The more I spent time “out there,” the more I realized the culture of my church would be a giant cultural leap for anyone outside those walls. We, frankly, had geared our church to our most present audience… those raised in the cultural microcosm of the Western American church. Anyone raised outside of that would feel like a complete foreigner walking inside those doors. They would trip over all kinds of cultural trappings standing between them and Jesus. Many of my friends were interested in the spiritual- in being a part of something bigger than themselves, but they weren’t interested in my cultural microcosm.

One day, one of my neighbors sat me down and told me she wanted to have a talk with me. This neighbor is someone who has all kinds of spiritual rumblings and had a beautiful sense of spiritual intuition, but had had less than positive interactions with institution of the church and no real interest in being a part of it. She sat me down and said “I don’t know if you know this, but you have the ability to foresee the future”.

Now, normally that would be a weird way to start a conversation. But I knew exactly what she meant. She had noticed that there was something bigger taking place in our interactions. I had just given her a small gift, that was tailored to her in a way I couldn’t have planned, and it brought her to access an emotional place deep within her. She went on to tell me that she has been thinking about this, and she had this vision that I am meant to create a place- a community for people right around us. She talked about how in our current culture, so many of us wouldn’t walk into a regular church, but that something in us is yearning to be grounded. To have a community where we can tap into something bigger than ourselves and grow together.

At that moment a seed was planted in me that increasingly, I could not deny. Here was my friend, who was not a church-goer and was not drawn to Christianity but was drawn to God. And she was asking me to bring the church to her.

Fast forward to present day.

We started not long ago, driven by that seed, that call, that passion, to meet people where they are. To step outside of our cultural bubble and go to them. To create a place for them to meet God right within their own cultural microcosm. And to be honest, that call was mildly to highly terrifying. This was completely unknown territory. Our team did not go into this with dazzling confidence, a giant network, or well… resources. We went into it with a call we simply couldn’t deny.

Now we are a very small little church plant, just at its beginnings, trying to hold a laser focus on that call. We are in a rustic little starter space where there’s no heat and the electricity shorts out sometimes. But what we seem to be developing is a place that feels like home to people outside the church bubble.

One couple is made up of an atheist and agnostic who are discovering God in unexpected circumstances. Another is a couple who gave up on going to church years ago, but when they heard our vision it sparked an excitement and hope for a place that might be able to come as they are, and belong.

As we grow as a church, we are committed to keep “walking outside”. Our fiercest call is to continually look for the glass walls around us, and not stop crossing the threshold. We took months just listening to our community, discerning what God is calling forth and already doing in our neighborhoods. We are finding who is doing good and partnering with them. Our home base is in the bedrock of the hopes, concerns, and good work of the people of our community.

I will be honest, I have found that this is easier to do when you are planting a church because you aren’t rowing upstream against an established cultural microcosm. You have the opportunity to embed in the community right where you are. Statistics bear this out. Research shows that a church plant gains 60-80% of its members from people new to church, whereas an existing church gains 80-90% of its new members by transfer from other congregations.

This is not a knock on the existing church by any means. We need both existing churches and new churches. This is simply a call to all you pioneers out there. The church is meant to reproduce. We are made to open our doors to every culture on earth, to see our creative God do His thing in a whole new context, among a whole new people who will light up our world in a whole new way.

Do you feel that call inside you? Do you feel like your voice yearns to speak to an audience outside your bubble?

Go outside. Start spending more of your time living outside the bubble. Say no to some things inside the bubble. Do what it takes to begin to shift your home base. See what happens.

Fair warning- it might ruin you.

Anna Hoesly is a church planter in Milwaukie, OR who is currently in the process of exploring a partnership with the ECC. She has worked as a Discipleship Director and as a counselor with an MFT in Marriage and Family Therapy. She also spends her time working as a certified Mediator and consultant for non-profit organizations and living life to its fullest with her husband and two little ones.