One of those days

Well, today was the day I always heard about. It's the day when everything that could have gone wrong in church planting did. I started off the day tired already. It was a late night, getting back late from a long drive from Virginia. One of the Sunday morning rituals for me is to move the van out of the driveway to make room for the truck that comes in and pulls our trailer out of the garage. And so it began - a dead car battery. We were able to get it jumped pretty quickly, so disaster averted. Once we got to the school, things continued to go south. We had sound issues, a broken guitar that led to a weird mic situation and feedback. Then it was the computer's turn to go haywire. For some reason all of a sudden the display on my computer went crazy. Every slide for every song and every announcement suddenly went crazy and resized itself, including changing the size of the font. With a mad scramble we managed to fix it. But then about 5 minutes before we started I realized that one of our songs was wrong. We were playing "Nothing but the blood" - but not the old version, but the newer Matt Redman version. In other words, wrong lyrics, wrong order. We scrambled to type it in as fast as possible.

It was a wild morning. And I suppose we should have expected it. It was the first time we celebrated communion as a church. It turned out to be a very powerful morning. A morning that I will never forget. We experienced something this morning that I haven't seen yet. Despite all of the things that went wrong - the presence of God was powerful. As Alastair Vance tweeted - "Egg on your face, devil."

As we were cleaning up, one of our key leaders said "It's over! Nothing can go wrong." We had a good laugh. And then we noticed that this week's message failed to record. Geez.

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Up the Middle

I have a friend named Matt. He wrote a book called Up the Middle Church. Though Matt's a diehard baseball fan, for some reason he wrote a book with a football analogy - but we'll forgive him for that. Anyway, here's the deal. Planting a church is hard. I hear stories about churches that just explode in growth, and I learn about leaders who seem to never make mistakes and everything they touch seems to turn to gold. But you know why we hear those stories? Because they are the exception - not the rule. Stories get told about things that stand out, that are different than the norm. The fact is that the norm for church planting is one yard at a time, up the middle. Most of us experience a grueling, tough battle where we gain a little bit of ground, then get sacked for a loss, then we get back up and gain it back and hopefully make some first downs along the way.

Leading up to Easter, we did a huge marketing campaign as a church. We spent a pretty good amount of money to do a huge mailer to our community, we hung door hangers on close to 2,000 homes, we put out yard signs all over the place, and we did Facebook ads like nobody's business. And you know what happened on Easter? We had two less people than the week before Easter. Sack.

I was in a coaching session yesterday with about six or seven other church planters, led by the same friend Matt who wrote the book. Everyone was sharing about the last month's "wins" - the things that went well. Many of the guys had record attendances on Easter - 250, 350, etc. When I shared about our Easter I'll be honest, it felt a little like we had failed. But here's where talking to other people is so important. One guy shared that two years running they went down in attendance on Easter, and this year they finally had a good one. You know what that little admission does for someone like me? It reminds me that this church planting thing is an "Up the Middle" process. The gains we are making in seeing individual lives being changed is amazing. I'm learning to celebrate those one yard gains more and more all the time.

I'm thankful today for community. For guys that are out there on the field with me and struggling with me for one yard, two yards, a first down. Make no mistake, we're winning the game.

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Easter Recap

At the risk of being way behind here, I didn't want to let Easter squeak by without saying a couple things about how things went at STORYCHURCH.

First of all, I couldn't be more proud of our team. Many people worked very hard in order to make it a really special morning. We had a really great celebration of Resurrection. We kicked off a brand new series on Easter, called EPIC. It's basically an exploration of the story of God and our role in it. Easter Sunday proved to be like one of those movies that starts with the pinnacle scene of the story, and then the rest of the movie is spent showing the build up to that moment. Resurrection is the pinnacle scene of the Story. It changes everything, and it's the filter through which we interpret everything else in the Story.

We promoted the heck out of Easter. We did a huge mailer in the community, spent several hours out hanging door hangers, had signs up all over the place, and ran Facebook ads like crazy. Despite our efforts, we didn't see the huge number of visitors that we had anticipated. For me it was just one more reminder that you can't manufacture the movement of God. I'm certainly not anti-marketing. I think it's important to let people know we exist as a church and that they are invited. But the fact is, that God doesn't need a mailer to build the church. And for me it was just a gentle reminder that He is in control, and this thing is in His hands. It's so easy to get caught up in the belief that crowds equal success or God's favor. It just isn't true.

The most exciting thing for me about Easter was the growth we DID see. Not numerical growth, but growth that took us deeper as a community. After the service we did an egg hunt for the kids and one for the adults as well. I know, kind of silly. But this wasn't your average egg hunt. It turned into a giant community building day. Aside from the hunting of eggs, people were laughing, playing, joking, and seriously having a great time. I was really proud of our leaders that put it together and even more excited by the relationships I'm seeing form. Community doesn't happen in the hour on Sunday mornings when we gather for worship. I mean, it's part of it, but sometimes it takes a crazy egg hunt to get people to begin to open up and do life together. And that happened on Easter for us.

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Resurrection

Resurrection: Rob Bell from The Work of Rob Bell on Vimeo.

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