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...

Transitioning to a New Church

For about three years now I've commuted to go to church. I know. I bought a place so near to my work that I didn't have to drive even all last winter (I know, I'm crazy), but good church communities are like wild blackberry bushes. They're a delight to find and you certainly keep a mental note of the location and keep going back. So I've been commuting the 50 minutes or so to attend St. Andrew's regularly on weekends to participate in a delightful blackberry bush-like church.

But this hasn't exactly proved sustainable for me on a few levels. It's quite a bit of travel time. It means I don't end up hanging out with the people there very much, so I'm only loosely in community with them. I can't really invite my interested friends to church cause it's such a time commitment. And as any good gardener knows, the proximity of your garden to your front door directly affects its productivity. So being in charge of the "church garden" from 50 minutes away wasn't, perhaps, a great plan.

Of course, I wanted to see St. Andrew's grow into health, and with regular attendance over 40, and our finances starting to become sustainable in the foreseeable future, I feel pretty good about their future. Meanwhile, what blackberry bushes do we have here? I'm sure there are lots of good churches, but I hadn't found one I felt at home at until recently. Well, feeling "at home" may not be quite the right word.

My former youth pastor, Tom Friedrichs, recently took over the Alliance church in Barre as well as continuing to pastor his own church in Orange. Every Sunday he races from the 9am service at Barre Alliance to the 10:30am(?) service at Orange Alliance. Barre Alliance had been in kind of a tough spot, so he called me up to say, "hey come play music for Barre Alliance." So I went, and though it's no St. Andrew's, they are in an unusual and interesting spot where they are highly flexible and open to change - quite a delightful opportunity.

I mean how often do you find a church (particularly in Vermont) who is open to new ideas? Gosh. It's awesome. I mean, fair enough, they were in a tough spot for a long time. Shockingly since Tom took over preaching and I started coordinating the music they've more than doubled their congregation. WHAT? Yes. More than doubled.

St. Andrew's knows that I'm stepping down from my position on the leadership team in March when my term is up. But until then I'll be doing double duty.

So far I've been able to influence the meeting time at Barre Alliance, advocating for discussion questions during church, but how do I influence them to be more green. Granted the culture of this church is significantly different than the hip young progressive culture of Burlington, VT. This is a church where I had a lengthy dialogue about whether or not it was appropriate to have an American flag on the stage. In the same Sunday I had to call out a guy for not recycling (his excuse: "Well, I'm a bachelor". My response: "Do you care about people? Then recycle. Living alone has nothing to do with whether or not you recycle.") as well as calling a different guy out for burning his garbage (me: "dude, that's so not cool. Don't burn your garbage, dude."

So they've got a little further to go. That's ok. I guess I can make a bigger difference here by teaching them how to set up more sustainable systems for themselves. We'll do it as a church at first and hopefully they'll see this as a value at church and thus a value for their day-to-day lives.

Church Farm Update & Sustainability at St. Andrew's

As usual, I have lots to update about, but because of recent comments (yay!) :) I'll bend this post towards the relevant topic: Where is St. Andrew's at with our efforts to be and advocate for sustainability. 

There's lots on the bill for this summer.

Awesome thing #1: Canoe trip down the Penobscot river, learning about the environment, ending with a stay with the Penobscot tribe and learning about how the land and Western civilization impacts them. As far as I know lots of people are interested in this.

Awesome thing #2: We just started reading Wendell Berry in our Discussion Group, which (of course) has sparked lots of fascinating conversation. 

Awesome thing #3 (and this one is my baby) hehehehe: We're hoping to partner with another local church - specifically North Avenue Alliance Church, which has land, to start a "church farm".  

This is a major part of our vision for the future of our church. We're finding that our big thing is helping to fix broken systems in our community, and one of those systems is food and cycles of poverty, and so... let's address them both and start a farm! 

We went back and forth about the models for making this work: 

Do we do family-sized plots and let people be responsible for their own square of earth? or do we let the whole space be planned by people who know how to do agriculture and then get volunteers to dig in the dirt on "volunteer days". I think it will be the latter. Hopefully we'll get connected with NeighborKeepers to involve people in poverty. Then the food will go towards the people who helped (they'll get paid according to the hours they spend perhaps?), cooking classes, and canning classes. I also hope we get to include some seed-saving classes. 

Or... perhaps in order to not duplicate what's already happening in our community, we might collaborate with a group like Burlington Community Gardens, or Permaculture Burlington.  

So now, I've just got to finish the proposal and get it to North Ave's elder board before the 3rd Monday of the month(!). 

Is Your Life Sustainable? Reflections on busy-ness

This evening I met with one of the pastors of St. Andrew's over tea at Uncommon Ground in Burlington, and I told him all about the latest excitments in my life:

Recent trip to Chicago for a Knowles Science Teaching fellows meeting; I just got interviewed by a woman from the Bridge for an upcoming article about Capitol Area Neighborhoods; VSHI is hosting a rally for sustainability this Friday and KSTF's advertising company caught wind of it and so they've managed to interest the Times Argus sometime before the rally; and apparently Vermont Magazine is interested in an interview in the near future.

Meanwhile I'm working on weatherizing the homes of St. Andrew's goers, visioning where St. Andrew's should go next, and just today I met up with a guy from the Roots school in Calais which teaches primitive and survival skills. I'd really like to have him come to my classroom to teach students how to make fire, in conjunction with our unit on force and friction.

In the course of conversation he said, "Do you think your life is sustainable?"

I said immediately, "no", but I was really just referencing the gasoline in my car and the propane heating my house. Of course, that's not what he meant, and so it gave me pause to wonder if I could continually bite off more than I could chew indefinitely. Maybe. I've been doing it for so long that I don't know what else I would do, how else I would live.

Maybe if I ever decide to date someone, then maybe I'll slow down. What's more important relationships or changing the world?