Bi-vocational Church People

What's up party people. Well I'm sorry I haven't been posting on this blog, but summer time is when the livings easy, yet at the same time it's, as usual, chaotic. That said it's been chaotic in wonderful ways.

The Rainbow Gathering was incredible. We met all sorts of wonderful people, met all sorts of Santa Cruz people, worshiped God, served a ton of hippies veggie food, prayed & saw an ear healed, bathed in a 40 degree creek, & drank rocket fuel coffee.

Tomorrow night we are going to host our 2nd open invited Kirtan. A Kirtan is an Hindu time of worship; however, we worship Yeshua through the form of Kirtan & so host Yeshu Kirtans. We expect 20+ people to come worship Yeshua with us, which will be amazing.

When we moved to Santa Cruz we knew church would be different. We didn't expect to go to Rainbow Gatherings & sing songs to Jesus in Hindi. However, our plans get us to a place where God is able to shape us into what He desires for a specific local. "Plans are worthless; planning is paramount." 

That's about it; I'm off to my landscaping job, which is in a good way keeping me busy & well fed. I would assume many more church planters in the Bay are going to be Bi-Vocational. I wish I could devote more time to other things like this blog, but that's not where God has me.

I hope to write soon, but would love for anyone who wants to post on this blog to send me an email & I'll put it up.Got any thoughts you'd like to throw up on this blog?

Namaste

The Rainbow Family

Hey everybody I hope you're doing great. One of the things church planting has taught me is that you never know where the relationships you create are going to lead you. More than that, you never know how your plans will lead you into the incredible dreams God had for you & your church plant.

This week my family & I, & some friends from our church, are off to the Rainbow Gathering in Washington. This is a festival dating back to the 60's where people from all walks of life gathered together in a national forest to pray for peace. Now, several years later, this event hosts upward of 10,000 people from all over the world to eat, drink, pray, smoke weed, & enjoy life.

We're headed up there with a great group called the Bread of Life. They are a "Kitchen" who serves the Gathering by sharing both food & Jesus. This will be our first Gathering as a family & we're excited to see what God is going to do as many of the Rainbow people hail from Santa Cruz. We're not sure what to expect, but sharing food & Jesus seems simple enough & both have a special place in our hearts.

This last week I sat at the graduation of some of our church family. One of the speakers shared a quote I thought was very applicable to church planting: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” -- Dwight D. Eisenhower We never planned to share a week of our lives with 10,000 hippies in the forests of Washington; however, in our planning we decided to see where God wanted us to go & see what doors that led to. Our plans might not be totally worthless, but our church plants, lives for that matter, are often less the result of our incredible ability to predict the future & more the result of our willingness to be prepared.

Namaste,

Sean

Steven Hamilton: Thoughts on an upcoming plant in Pittsburgh

I met Steven at the latest National Conference & we had some great talks. He recently wrote some great thoughts on what he & his team are wrestling over as they consider their call to plant in Pittsburgh. Check it out & share your thoughts; I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Once again this is a experimental blog to serve church planters. If you want to create ongoing dialogue, comment & check back to see what's going on, & comment again (if time permits). I'll keep posting stuff I find relevant, but please reference us to any other cool stuff I could post. 

 Blessings,  

the Pitt 37: the Missional-Orientation of Worship

Over the last few months, our conversations among our friends called to Pittsburgh have taken a turn toward what we might call "back to basics."  We decided to turn our conversation toward three things that will undergird everything we do as a faith community in urban Pittsburgh.  Those things are: Worship, Prayer, Stewardship.

We start with Worship and the Missional-orientation of Worship.  One of the things I kind of like about the whole "Missional" conversation (as well as the Emerging Church conversation lo, those many moons ago) is the perspective that has taken root regarding worship.  The missional church conversation isn't obsessed with style and yet there is an expansiveness, maybe inherited from the Emerging conversation, with a simplicity that endeavours toward a worshipful experience in a "worship gathering."  I think most significantly, the missional/incarnational orientation is interested in context and culture and while renewal/redemption is a key aspect, it's welcoming and not all about themselves. Thus, a missional-orientation begins with a reversing a common phrase: the church doesn't have a mission, the Mission of God has a church, right?  Of course, as we've seen this changes our perspective on many things, and worship is probably a key one.  

So: where would being missionally incarnational orient us - posture us - in terms of worship?

 

I have several specific suggestions in terms of trajectories to explore and discover, but I want to start with a bigger perspective.

First, the missional orientation seems to assume a public context for the Missio Dei, and so that goes for worship as well. In the churches with which most of us have experienced and been a part of, the primary context is private. Worship many times is done (and thus modeled) and witnessed as a part of some kind of inward aspect of the church.  There's nothing particularly wrong with this sort of trajectory until it runs into individualist worship experience momentum and consumer critique.  Yet I think worship in a missional orientation would assume a much broader landscape. It would worship in the presence of and for the sake of the world because we are joining God's Mission in and for the world.  There is a "priesthood of the believer"-aspect to this that Mark Love has been really helping me explore and I want to really get into that a few posts from now. 

But I'm wrestling with how exactly missional worship would integrate all of life, and thus perhaps a connecting point between God and us and the world (again, more on that in the next few posts).  Also, in keeping with this integrating-impulse and what The Tangible Kingdom significantly invested in: missional worship would welcome the stranger, the sojourner.  This is also about the Presence of God-factor, which undergirds all of life as worship, with God, His People and the world set for redemption.  The Presence-factor oriented missionally, seems to be involved in all three, and not to the exclusion of any one.

But what does that look like?  For today, perhaps this takes us along three distinct trajectories:

• Service: This expansive trajectory has to do with life as an on-going act of worship, which would include seeking justice as an act of worship and the Romans 12 issues of "being a living sacrifice" as we live our lives...this is our spiritual act of worship.
• Hospitality: Maybe if we can see hospitality as something more than just the "welcome person" at the doors of a Sunday gathering or the person making coffee?  If so, we might see that hospitality would include what Jesus did so much of with strangers and sojourners: table-fellowship as a center of worship experience. This is the place of God's welcome. At weekly, monthly and seasonal parties in ancient Israel (Sabbath meals, harvest festivals, etc.) it was a place to welcome the marginalized, and be inclusive of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the priest.  It should be a place where faith, hope, and love are put on public display, right?
• Creativity: some of the more immediate questions regarding worship, intersecting the really significant creation of space/place and aesthetics in a fuller worship experience of God beyond (but astill including) corporate music: creating space for creativity: so poetry, painting, dancing, etc., that instead of always being "performance art" might look a bit more like a jam session.
   

So questions to start us off:  What do you think about some of the actual practices that this orientation suggests so far: worship gathering with expansive and inclusive art/music (something like what our friends Bill and Ashley Hoard have hosted at home in the past that had an invitational and inclusive nature and this sharing nature about the gathering.  This - to me - resonated with what I hear as the organic nature of a gathering (by no means the only way to do it, of course) in 1 Corinthians 14 - where when such a gathering takes place, each one has a song or inspired word or something they have learned or a testimony of God's action in their lives or lives of their friends, etc.; and what can we imagine regarding serving the vulnerable as an act of worship; and what about dinner-parties/house parties/neighborhood block parties are public acts of worship?  What are other concrete practices and initiatives that we can be intentional about as a community?  Are there other large, organizing impulses and practices for worship that inform our incarnational, missional and relational orientation?

Failure?

My friend Jason & his family set out to plant a Vineyard Church in San Diego. Things didn't work out how they thought they should. That said, Jason has a great deal of wisdom to share with all of us who desire to be a part of following Jesus with & from within a community. Here's one of his blog posts. I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

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.

Now you tell me...

“Pastoral work is slow and tedious. Be patient. It’s not easy or exhilarating. It’s plodding. In some ways its easy. Just stay there and be faithful. Pray. Know the names of the people in your community. Trust them and see them as blossoming saints, even if they don’t act like it.” Eugene Peterson