So This Is How It Starts... Church Planting 101

This is terrifying. No way around it. But let me explain a little background first.

I helped start a church in Burlington. I invested a lot in that group, and leaving it was really difficult. It was 45 minutes away, and frankly, it's just hard to be in community with people 45 minutes away. You'd think that I could find something delicious church-wise here in Montpelier, but you'd be wrong. So for three years or so now I've been keeping my eyes and ears out for the possibility of starting something new. I've been in a variety of iterations of Bible studies and discussion groups and established churches all of which were precious and valuable in their own way, but they all stopped eventually (or I stopped going). No judgement. I enjoyed those iterations for what they were.

But it seems now that I have a core group of spiritually homeless Christian folks who would like to start something in the Montpelier area. I know this may sound shallow, but I think it's actually kind of important: We're all in the same demographic. Specifically, we're all mid-twenties, young professionals, relatively open-minded to what church means and looks like.

Truth be told, there are at least 13 others who I would like to invite once we have something more established, but we'll see... let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Another point I feel is important: In no way do I want to "steal" people from established churches. Of those 10 folks only two regularly go to church elsewhere, so I want to be very sensitive about what I may be asking of those two... we'll see. No pressure. Let's not burn any bridges. Even so, I'm not including myself in that count. I will need to have a difficult conversation with the pastor of the church I currently attend and for which I lead worship. I'm sorry, but it's just not home. I think they'll understand.

We have no real pastor for our group, though we do have the blessing and potential oversight of an area pastor, so it might be nice to involve him somehow, though I'm hesitant, because in no way do I want his or any currently established pastor's influence in the structures we set up for ourselves.

I write this for my own good as well as anyone reading this... here are my "must haves" in a church. (I feel like I'm writing a personal ad). haha.

Church should:

• Engage people with multiple learning styles (ah, differentiated church)
• Rely primarily on social construction (People learn through talking with each other, finding meaning for themselves)
• Be about something in the community (feeding the homeless, CSA's for low income families?, etc.)
• Be intellectually and spiritually stimulating
• Be a safe place for people to disagree, be heretical, & express doubts (Don't belittle someone's thinking on account of it being different).
• Be a place where all voices matter and can be heard (maybe the pastor isn't always the one who leads)
• Be FUN! (I think we may need to sponsor a condiment war - see below: chocolate sauce vs. ketchup)
• Must love dogs

This is my list, but I KNOW that I will need to be open to the lists of 10 other people. We will need consensus... at least on some core issues.

I met with two of them yesterday, and three more this coming Saturday. One more on Sunday. So far it's looking like meeting Sunday afternoons at 3pm may be best time to gather as a whole group. The couple from yesterday volunteered their place to start. Welcome to church in Montpelier. Now, I've never given birth, but I hear that at some point during labor there's an uncontrollable urge to push. It seems like we might be about there now...

ORE, CAN, and Service Learning

First for some odds and ends:
I think I'm going to video tape the students' water rockets and analyze them in Logger Pro. hahaha. This is going to be awesome. We'll predict the velocity vs. time graphs ahead of time, and then compare them to what we actually get. Yes!

Service Learning (not to be confused with Community Service or Community Based Learning) is addressing authentic community questions/problems through topics embedded in the curriculum. The Service Learning Team in our district is attempting to increase the number of teachers participating in Service Learning type projects, and one of the biggest sticking points we have (and there are a few) is connecting community problems with teacher's curricula. Teachers are often simply unaware of the needs in our community.

Enter the Onion River Exchange (ORE) and Capitol Area Neighborhoods (CAN).

ORE is a time bank, where people offer services (I offer physics tutoring and wine-making help) and needs (ex: could I borrow your car every Sunday? your vacuum?). Basically it's a list of needs in the community.

CAN is a network of Montpelier neighborhoods attempting to plan for winter heating and financial crisis. We're canvassing this weekend, knocking on every door to make sure that people have information about 211, the energy/heating hotline, local foodshelves, etc. We'll do some asset mapping, meaning we'll give out a survey which asks questions like "Do you have a shovel? Snow blower? Are you willing to help a neighbor without a snowblower? Would you like help shoveling?" and my favorite "Do you have expertise in plumbing ... so we can call you at 3am when someone's pipes burst?" I'm TOTALLY excited about getting my neighborhood more connected.

These are two groups that will be very in touch with the needs in our community, which makes them an easy place to look for curriculum connections.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with Ken Jones for ideas of how to connect weatherizing with thermodynamics, so I'll more ideas then, but for now I'm thinking we'll need to put out a survey to student's families to see if there is any interest in us going to their homes to weatherize. There is a residual question about who would get priority for weatherizing materials and labor - first come first serve is easy, but it would have to be dependent on a pre-labor site visit to make sure it's the kind of work we can do, and safe (no viscious dogs or verbally abusive grandmothers, stable floors, and no asbestos, etc.).

Enjoy the lovely day! :)

Energy Town Meeting Day in Montpelier

This morning I saw the upcoming environmental engineer, Andrew Laing, on the bus to Montpelier, and it reminded me that I haven't blogged in a little bit, so here we are: 

Recently there was an article in the Bridge about me, my teaching, and the working I'm doing with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. So that was very encouraging. Since then I've had lots of people come up to me saying, "You've got me convinced. I've got a couple acres of land we could grow grasses on!" Ha! Most excellent. 

And as long as we're talking VSHI, the last Thursday in Montpelier was the Energy Town Meeting Day with Ken Jones and the Montpelier Energy Team. We were hoping to start a pellet-purchasing coop that night (ideally 100-150 homes participating). Unfortunately, we only had six families sign up. I mean, it's a start, but more work needs to be done. 

Some of my students presented their work to the community, which was ... a little comical since many of the students thought they were sharing new information, when really the audience was abnormally well-educated. This was most poigniant when a student who had built a wind turbine had a diagram of the insides of an industrial turbine in his PowerPoint presentation. Someone from the crowd asked, "I normally see fins on these turbines to make sure they face into the wind, but there's not fin on this one, how does it turn?" The student didn't know, he had merely tapped the picture to make the point that his was much simpler, but to everyone's surprise a guy in the back corner piped up, "Well, I happen to be a windmill designer, and you can see there on the back, there's a little anemometer and a sensor there, which sends information to a computer inside the turbine, which tells it how to turn." hA! Wow. This was not your typical audience. 

Anyway - back to VSHI - the VSHI kids ran a session called "How can we move in the direction of locally produced pellets", which was sorely under-attended. Or at least it felt that way at first, there were only 3 people in attendance, but they were the right three people: Jeff Beyer, the Tree Warden and head of the Parks and Rec Department, and Rick Barstow an East Montpelier farmer who recently bought a small pelletizer so that he can pelletize grass from his farm. Jeff was saying, "We have hundreds of yards of woody biomass that's just getting buried right now because we don't have anything to do with it, but it's got to be worth something. We've got to use it!" And Rick was saying that he'd like to go into production very soon - by the fall he hopes. And ideally, the right blend of materials in a pellet would be mostly grass and a little bit of wood for lignan, which acts as a binder. Getting these two guys together was just fabulous. There was a lot of potential there. 

Thus far VSHI has been mainly focused on Bristol and Addison County, and I think I need to start dreaming about the Montpelier community and its potential heating future.