Gideon Tsang on taking risks, failing and starting again AN AUSTIN PASTOR REFLECTS ON THE CHALLENGES OF A NEW CHURCH PLANT
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Episode 4: Gideon Tsang on taking risks, failing and starting again
What do you do when you don't know where God is leading you?
The Rev. Gideon Tsang's tale is one of risk and reward -- but it isn't just a success story. The pastor of Vox Veniae shares some painful failures and struggles he and his congregation experienced as they planted a church and then tried to figure out how it could serve the changing city of Austin.
In his conversation with co-host Laura Everett, he also talks about self-reflection, creating a learning community and moving forward without a grand vision.
Listen to this episode of "Can These Bones" »
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Laura Everett talks with Gideon Tsang, pastor and teacher at Vox Veniae in Austin, Texas, about the challenges of a new church plant.
What do you do when you don’t know where God is leading you? The Rev. Gideon Tsang’s tale is one of risk and reward -- but it isn’t just a success story. The pastor of Vox Veniae shares some painful failures and struggles he and his congregation experienced as they planted a church and then tried to figure out how it could serve the changing city of Austin. In his conversation with co-host Laura Everett, he also talks about self-reflection, creating a learning community and moving forward without a grand vision.
In his conversation with co-host Laura Everett, he also talks about self-reflection, creating a learning community and moving forward without a grand vision.
Listen to this episode of "Can These Bones" »
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Laura Everett talks with Gideon Tsang, pastor and teacher at Vox Veniae in Austin, Texas, about the challenges of a new church plant.
What do you do when you don’t know where God is leading you? The Rev. Gideon Tsang’s tale is one of risk and reward -- but it isn’t just a success story. The pastor of Vox Veniae shares some painful failures and struggles he and his congregation experienced as they planted a church and then tried to figure out how it could serve the changing city of Austin. In his conversation with co-host Laura Everett, he also talks about self-reflection, creating a learning community and moving forward without a grand vision.
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Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Gideon Tsang
- Vox Veniae leadership(link is external)
- Q Ideas: Tsang contributor profile(link is external)and articles
- Faith & Leadership: “Austin church is a ‘voice of grace’ for a rapidly changing city,” by Eileen Flynn, on Vox Veniae and Tsang’s role in its evolution
- New York Times: “Breaking the Evangelical Mold at a Church With Ethnic Roots,”(link is external) by Mark Oppenheimer, on Vox Veniae and Tsang
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is episode 4 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields.
Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”Bill Lamar: Today we are hearing from Gideon Tsang, a pastor at Vox Veniae in Austin, Texas. You spoke with Gideon about the experience with Vox. Give us a little background about it.
Laura Everett: Oh, Bill, it’s a really good conversation. I got to talk to Gideon Tsang, who is a pastor and teacher at Vox Veniae, a church plant in Austin, Texas.
Now, Vox Veniae means “voice of grace” or “voice of forgiveness,” and it’s been a generous invitation to Austin, Texas. Austin is a fascinating city. It’s full of artists and creative types, and it’s young. And this changing demographic has really posed a challenge to this congregation, because Vox started 11 years ago as a church plant of the Austin Chinese Church.
When they began, their membership was really young, and it was primarily Asian. But they wanted a church that reflected the city in which they lived, and so they made some pretty significant moves to new neighborhoods and noticed that their community was changing around them.
They wanted to be what Gideon calls an “indigenous church plant,” so they moved from a downtown office building to an abandoned nightclub in a mostly black neighborhood in East Austin. And then they had this task before them of figuring out what it meant to authentically be in that neighborhood.
All the while, Austin is this city of artists, and suddenly all of these artists showed up at church as well, and they had to figure out how to serve both communities. So Vox is just a fascinating example of a church that really struggled with their identity as the neighborhood gentrifies, as the congregation reflects the demographic changes in the city.
I really appreciate this conversation with Gideon, because he’s honest about the failures, and honest about how hard it was to become a learning community.
I think even if you aren’t starting a new church, there’s a lot to learn from Gideon’s experience of experimentation and evaluation and paying close attention to the changing community around you.
Bill Lamar: Let’s hear your conversation.
Laura Everett: Gideon Tsang, we are so grateful to have you on “Can These Bones,” a Faith & Leadership podcast.
Gideon Tsang: Thanks for having me.
Laura Everett: So, Gideon, the original congregation of 300 to 400 people was 99 percent college student and 99 percent Asian, and then you went through a massive change, a change even down to 70 members.
When you lose half or more of your church, how do you know that you are on the path that God’s called you to?
Gideon Tsang: That’s a good question. You don’t. And it feels terrifying. It kind of feels like you’re doing something wrong, actually.
Laura Everett: Why did you make those changes? What was the precipitating factor or event that led you to not just move neighborhoods but really change who you thought your congregation was?
Gideon Tsang: Well, I think what happens is you have, you know, these young, idealistic notions of what you’re going to do when you start a church. And so in our minds, we thought, you know, “We’re going to fix the church.” Here are all the problems, and then, “Look out church, look out world, we’re going to come solve all these problems.”
Then you take a step into it, and, one, you realize, “Oh man, this is way harder than I realized.” And then, two, you just really begin to ask questions of, “OK, this is taking a lot of time and energy and resources. What is the church, and what are we called to, together as a community, in this city, in this time?”
And you know, you start asking a lot of those questions and you don’t really have a lot of answers, and then along the way you just start saying, “OK, we’re paying rent on this fancy office. It’s comfortable. There are coffee shops and music studios and film studios, and it’s kind of hip. But we don’t have much money, and we’re paying rent. And our impact on this neighborhood, being in this comfortable little space, is zero. Like, no one knows we’re here. We’re not serving anyone except paying rent for ourselves to sit in an empty office.”
And so you go, “OK, resources are limited, and we’re trying to figure out what it means to be the church here now.” And so our lease came up, and we said, “Well, let’s find a space to better serve this city that we love, we live in.”
And so what happened was we didn’t have options, we didn’t have money, and when our lease came up, we just said, “All right, we’re not going to renew it. Let’s move all of our office furniture into people’s homes, and let’s begin this journey of discovery.”
So that’s really what started it off. It was very pragmatic. Unfortunately, we weren’t smart enough to have a grand vision of what this community was going to be like and how it was going to be in the city. We really didn’t know. We had a lot of questions, and not too many answers.
Laura Everett: And so there’s something about the constraints you were under that forced a kind of creativity, right? Like, you could not afford a worship space and an office space ...
Gideon Tsang: Mm-hmm.
Laura Everett: ... and an event space. And so I’m curious about how the constraints informed some of your decisions.
Gideon Tsang: Yeah, that absolutely -- because we came from an established mother church, the immigrant church, and they’ve been around 20, 30 years. It was a community of 1,000, and a lot of established families and resources, and so you just throw money at problems.
And then suddenly, we left the nest, and none of that was available. And as hard as it was, it was probably the one thing that really fostered us to move beyond what we were comfortable with or knew, because we really didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t just find a problem and throw some money at it.
Laura Everett: So you ultimately ended up in a place that became known as Space12. It was a shuttered nightclub. It had been a place of violence, even a place where a police officer had shot a black teenager, right?
Gideon Tsang: Mm-hmm.
Laura Everett: That is an unlikely space. I mean, a nightclub is an unlikely space for a church, but a place of violence, too -- I’m wondering, what changed for you because you were in that place?
Gideon Tsang: I think what changed -- so again, our stumbling into it wasn’t that we had this grand vision. Honestly, it was the only place that looked affordable. And we had known of the story of Kevin Brown, but when we stumbled onto that building, we didn’t know it was that building. And then after we made the call, connected some dots, we were like, “Oh, wow -- this place has a history.”
I tend to be the optimist in the community, and I’m usually the one that’s like, “We can do this! It’s going to be hard, but this is us. Let’s do this.”
And honestly, when I stepped into the building, it was so overwhelming. I wasn’t even sure we had the capacity or the resources to take on something like this, or even just the education and the understanding and the history of that neighborhood, and the racial tension and what had happened.
And it was really -- at that time, the [church] community was small, and we would bring it back to the community and we would go, “What do you all think?”
And it was a collective decision. Without the community, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to step into it, but the community was like, “Yeah, I think this would be a great place to be a church. We can do this.”
Laura Everett: That’s remarkable, that communal decision-making process. One of the things that’s so fascinating to me about Vox is you are aiming to be an indigenous plant, an indigenous plant in your neighborhood, but that requires really knowing your neighborhood.
And so I’m wondering, what are the practices for you, for your congregation, of a close read or a close assessment of what will grow in a particular neighborhood, or what’s in the soil of a particular neighborhood?
Gideon Tsang: We didn’t do it well, starting off. You know, when we first moved in, we renovated the place, and people would drive by. We still had -- our community was probably majority Asian when we were renovating the building, and people would drive by and they’d go, “Hey, what is this going to be?” And then, you know, they’d roll down -- “Is this going to be a Chinese restaurant?” And we were like, “Would you like a Chinese restaurant? Would that be helpful to the neighborhood? We could think about it.”
[Laughter]
But we were young and naive, and we thought we’d fix up this place and the neighborhood would break down the doors and they’d be thrilled and they’d be, “Oh, we’re so glad you’re here.”
And in reality, we fixed it up, opened the doors, and then nobody came in. There was actually a cricket problem the first year, so it was literally me, by myself, sitting in the building, with crickets chirping in the background.
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: That’s so rough, Gideon.
Gideon Tsang: Yeah.
Laura Everett: If God wanted to give you a stronger sign ...
Gideon Tsang: … God would say, “Watch this; this will be funny.”
And so after a few weeks of that, we were like, “Well, maybe we should go meet the neighbors.” It’s a little embarrassing, now that we tell the story, because no one was coming in. We said, “OK, let’s start knocking on doors.”
So we started talking to neighbors and talking to nonprofits, faith-based, non-faith-based, talking to churches. We’re slow learners, Laura, but at each point, we kind of hit an impediment, and then we’d go, “OK, what is this? What should we do next?”
It reminds me of -- you know, Wendell Berry has that one line, “It’s the impeded stream that sings.” And that’s been true of our story. So mainly, we’ve had a lot of impediments.
Laura Everett: Yeah, and some communities that encounter impediments decide that the response is to do more and to go harder. As a community, how do you discern the difference between an impediment that informs a different kind of decision and one that’s worth sort of working away at?
Gideon Tsang: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, it’s probably just trusting that if we do the best we can to listen well, even sometimes things we do maybe even out of the wrong motive, God can use that, if that makes sense. And then there are still decisions that we’ve made that I’m still thinking through.
That’s really complicated. Austin’s a complicated city. It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. It’s quickly becoming more and more monocultural, so as all the educated creatives move in -- primarily white, middle-upper class, educated -- there's 100,000 people moving every year, and that’s who’s moving in. So it’s really pushing out diversity.
And then, as you ask that question -- What are the impediments that we’ve discerned well, or not? -- some of the conversation we’re having is, for better or for worse, we’re trying to be a part of the neighborhood and help, but we also help gentrify the neighborhood, and that’s not a good thing.
So we’re constantly asking these questions and constantly evaluating and then just hoping that our flawed efforts are the best we can, and God can use flawed efforts and flawed people.
But it’s a tricky one. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, and some have been redeemed, and some we’re kind of still wading through and trying to discern.
Laura Everett: It strikes me that that’s a mark of a learning community, that sort of active reflection, the reassessment, and even the ability to go back to former decisions and say, “Maybe we didn’t get that quite right.”
Are you conscious about what kind of pace of change your community can handle, and then what’s the stuff that you just don’t want to change?
Gideon Tsang: Yeah. So early on, we changed everything all the time.
Laura Everett: Like, every Sunday?
Gideon Tsang: Well, OK, so I know a lot of people aren’t into the Enneagram, but my Enneagram type is a 7, so I’m the optimist. I like change, and I like new things. Things need to be new and fun and fresh.
And so in hindsight, this is what happened. You start a church, or you’re a part of a community that starts a church, and then it comes with a lot of anxiety -- or I had a lot of anxiety. So the way to appease my anxiety is I start new things, if that makes sense.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Gideon Tsang: Which is a terrible -- it just gives you more reason to have more anxiety. So you start a church -- “Aah, what am I going to do?” Let’s start a nonprofit -- “Aah, what am I going to do?” Let’s start an intentional community -- “Aah, what am I going to do?” And you keep starting things.
And then in our first five years, just a trail of bodies burned out, and I almost burned myself into the ground. And then coming back, I took a sabbatical. We had a difficult staff situation. We had to navigate that.
And we were at a point where all of us just had our arms up, shrugging, and this sense of, “All right, we’ve given it our best human effort, and we don’t know -- if this thing survives or not, it’s not going to be us.”
And then, right around that time, God brought people who we really needed. Specifically, there’s a family -- he’s a spiritual director; she’s a therapist. She teaches at the Episcopal seminary now. And they really helped us take what was really hard and kind of hurting and wounded, a lot of open wounds still, and just start to give space and time to start healing, create a space that’s just safe enough just to talk about mistakes and things we really needed to process.
And so it was really kind of this frantic, anxious burst of life, you know, like a toddler, and then just running ourselves into the ground. And then God bringing people along the way to kind of pick us up, help us lick our wounds, and just to say, “OK, is there a better, more healthy way to do this? And can we set a pace and a rhythm where collectively we go, ‘You know, we could do this. This feels light, like the load is shared. We could probably do this for 20, 30 years.’”
That doesn’t feel terrifying to say that. So what is that? What is that version of a life together?
Laura Everett: Gideon, I’m so grateful for the story of a new church start that is not just a victory lap, that is a story of birth and death and rebirth, again and again, with a kind of humility. Because there’s so much shame in the church around failures of innovative efforts. And so to hear you talk about real places of wounding and things that were redeemed and were not redeemed, I think, is a gift. Thank you.
Gideon Tsang: Yeah, thank you. And, you know, to me that just feels like a better way to engage life and each other, right?
I remember thinking my parents -- I think a lot of people have this experience, [thinking] their parents have it all together, or their marriage. Or even, you know, folks in their 40s, when we were teenagers, it kind of felt like -- for a lot of us, not all of us -- like our parents kind of had it figured out and had it all together, but it just turns out they were really good at faking it.
Then you get to that stage of life, and you go, “Oh my gosh, this is so hard.” And you ask your parents, who go, “Yeah, that was really hard.” And you’re like, “Why didn’t you tell me? It would have been more helpful if you just showed me it was hard so when I get there I’ll go, ‘OK, this feels appropriate. Like, this is developmentally appropriate.’”
And so no one told me how hard starting a church is, and I think it’s probably more helpful if we just tell those stories. And then I do think that the stories in Scripture are so raw in that way -- the depth and the pain and the violence of life -- I think it’s so honest that sometimes we have a hard time even engaging those stories. But those are still our stories, right?
Laura Everett: Gideon, I believe that the story of Vox and the story of your leadership and the leadership of the community with you in East Austin is a story that will breathe life into the people that hear it this day.
I want to thank you for being with us on “Can These Bones,” a Faith & Leadership podcast. Thanks, Gideon.
Gideon Tsang: Thanks for having me.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Gideon Tsang, pastor at Vox Veniae in Austin, Texas.
As I listened to your conversation, it struck me how often Gideon talked about failure, about mistakes that they’d made, about things they’d done wrong.
One thing I found interesting is, how do you lead a community, an institution, with that kind of honesty? Willing not only to be self-reflective about failure internally but to share that narrative, and to invite people into failure as a learning opportunity and not as something that freezes activity and causes stasis. How did you experience that part of the conversation?
Laura Everett: I think it’s really profound, Bill. I actually think, especially for new church plants, there’s so much pressure to succeed, right? Like, the model that we’ve got in many places where there’s a denomination or a mother church that’s supporting it is you’ve got three years or you’ve got five years and then we’re pulling your funding, or you’ve got to be self-sustaining by that point. And it puts so much pressure on the congregation to thrive immediately and not experiment.
And so, that Gideon was really honest in talking about the places that just didn’t work -- I think that really cuts against the sort of church plant culture and also the tendency to only tell our stories of successes.
I appreciate that they are a congregation that actually takes some risks. And I know in my own institution, at the [Massachusetts] Council of Churches, there are many times, especially as I began, that I’ve felt like I was playing sort of safe and close. And that that first level of work is really cleaning up and clarifying what’s going on.
But taking the big risks and actually failing is something I feel that I need the sort of pastoral courage that I hear in Gideon’s story.
Bill Lamar: So as I look around Metropolitan, and I’m sure as others look around their churches and institutions, there are a number of risks that should be taken. And based on your conversation with Gideon, how do you know when it’s time to take the risk? How do you know when it’s time to really, really move in that different direction that you have been thinking about, praying about, and hoping to begin to engage? How does that happen?
Laura Everett: Part of what was so remarkable about the conversation with Gideon is they really did step out in faith, not entirely sure where God was leading them, right? Like, the move to East Austin to a neighborhood that was not yet the multicultural place that they wanted to be -- they felt like that’s where God was calling them, but they didn’t have any assurance that that was the right place to go.
I was really struck by that, that they were clinging to their core values. They knew that they wanted to be a church that reflected the diversity of their city, but they weren’t sure how to get there, and so to place a stake in the ground, to set out in a direction, is a really brave act. My sense from Gideon was that they knew what their values were; they weren’t actually perfectly convinced that that was the right direction they needed to be going in.
Bill Lamar: So sometimes indeed we have to move without having perfect clarity. That might be one of the perennial conditions of leadership.
Something else that struck me, Laura, was it seems like the community of Vox Veniae is a community of learners. How do you get folks, even in the midst of taking risks or in a more stable, older kind of situation -- as you have and as I have at the places where we are -- how do we develop these communities of learners?
Laura Everett: Yeah, that’s one thing that comes through really clear in Gideon’s conversation, that they are doing a lot of active reflection. Both Gideon is doing that on his own, and he’s doing it with his leadership team.
So I know for the Council of Churches, we had a pretty strong practice, when I came, of reflecting on what we were doing and asking good questions, but we were doing it casually. And at some point, I started to realize we were dropping some really critical bits of information. We weren’t retaining the evaluations that we were doing, and we actually had to formalize it.
So it’s not that we’re doing something new, necessarily; we’re trying to hold on to the information differently. We’re writing down our evaluations and keeping file folders, so that we can see what we’ve learned.
But I think the reality is that even for established congregations, established institutions, we are where Gideon’s community is; we are where Vox is, where there are a lot of questions and there are not a ton of answers. Does it feel like that to you at Metropolitan, Bill?
Bill Lamar: Very, very often I feel like I am afloat in a sea of more questions than answers. I’ve learned in my practice to become more comfortable with that. But still, decisions have to be made.
And so I think what Gideon reflects and what you share about your work at the Council [of Churches] is we seek to reflect -- and sometimes it seems like you can reflect ad nauseam -- but you do have to think about what you’ve done in order to chart a clearer course toward what it is you’re trying to achieve by way of vision, and trying as best we can to build consensus.
One of the things about being in a church is the leadership is not shielded, especially in my context -- maybe in others -- but I am not shielded from hearing the opinions of everybody. And so trying ...
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: Yep.
Bill Lamar: I love my job, but ...
Laura Everett: That’s real.
Bill Lamar: But trying to figure out -- you could really, really get into a place as a leader where you feel crippled. So learning to listen, but also learning what comments actually are the kinds of comments that will help you to develop as a leader and help the institution, and which comments just are a part of your being a leader and having to graciously and generously hear feedback, even if all of it may or may not be helpful.
One of the things that I thought, Laura, was very helpful was Gideon’s clarity around pushing back on having a grand vision. I know everywhere I’ve been -- Metropolitan is the fifth church that I have served as pastor -- but my first day, people wanted to know what was the vision, what was my vision.
Walking into an institution nearly 200 years old, what was the vision of a 39-year-old? Which I thought was a ridiculous question, because I didn’t know the people, and I didn’t yet know the culture.
And so Gideon being willing to say not having a grand vision could really make you more nimble, having a space where people are learning, where people are discerning, and where you’re struggling -- oh, it is very difficult to struggle toward consensus -- but struggling to get to consensus.
And then I think it seems to me that Vox Veniae got where they are by degrees, not so much leaps of faith as very small steps of faith, and now we are seeing a budding community that is still toddling in ways, but toddling in ways that invite people to come and participate in their forward movement.
Laura Everett: Bill, that makes a ton of sense to me, and ...
Bill Lamar: It’s the most sense I’ve made all day, Laura, the most sense I’ve made.
[Laughter]
Laura Everett: But look, I am -- I was talking to a younger pastor recently who was distraught by some feedback that he had received from a parishioner, some unsolicited feedback, and I asked him, “Is this someone you would seek out the opinion of?” And he said no. And I was like, “Well, then why are you taking seriously what he’s saying now?”
[Laughter]
Right, like -- and I do think that changes with age and experience, that wisdom about what feedback do you take seriously and what feedback do you thank and put in the bottom file and just leave.
I think that’s part of what I’m hearing about the sort of wisdom of discernment, but also that lack of a grand vision and living with the uncertainty -- I think that’s part of the new normal for the church. I really do.
I think if we’re to be careful observers of the community around us, and to really trust that the church is eternal but our institutions are not, then we’re going to have to get flexible in a kind of way that we haven’t had to practice before.
And I think that’s going to mean learning to live with a lot of questions, learning to live without sort of a grand master plan, and learning to cultivate a sort of spiritual discipline of flexibility that allows us to stay grounded in those core values that we heard in Vox Veniae. But also a flexibility about how those get enacted.
Bill Lamar: Well, I think, Laura, the church has to be less Hannibal from the A-Team, who always said, “I love it when a plan comes together,” and more like John on Patmos, which I love. As Revelation comes to an end, he says that he came to a city and there was no temple there, but the presence of God was there, and that was the light.
And so what encourages me is all of our institutions -- all of them that we serve -- they’re wonderful. Our churches are wonderful, but they are temporary. And they are meant to cast the light of God’s presence and God’s holiness in the world, God’s justice, God’s beauty, but the time comes when the institutions fall away.
And so I think you’re exactly right. We are grasping, but we are also being led, and that can be a very difficult space for leaders. But I think it’s where we find ourselves. And as much as it can be terrifying, it’s also exciting.
And as we read history and see history unfold in Vox Veniae through Gideon Tsang and those who are there worshipping with him and building that community, we see people taking small steps, and those small steps have indeed taken the church to wonderful places, and so we hope that we’ll continue to do so.
Laura Everett: Bill Lamar, I think that is a wise word preached and proclaimed, and I do think that is the first time I have ever heard anybody try to tie together Revelation and John of Patmos and the A-Team. So a deep bow of respect to you, brother. I appreciate that.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: I’m a child of the ’80s, a child of the ’80s. Born in the ’70s, but a child of the ’80s.
Laura Everett: Thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. There’s more about Gideon Tsang, including a Faith & Leadership story about Vox Veniae, on our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external). Bill, who are you talking to next?
Bill Lamar: I had a wonderful conversation with my dear friend Kate Bowler. Kate is a church historian at Duke Divinity School, and she’s an expert on the prosperity gospel. She’s also written a memoir about having stage 4 cancer.
Laura Everett: Oh Bill, wow, there’s going to be a lot to learn from that conversation with Kate. Thanks for speaking with her, and I’m looking forward to listening.
Bill Lamar: “Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external), and you can reach Laura on Twitter @RevEverett.(link is external)You can also find us on our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.How do I listen to a podcast?
A NEW OPPORTUNITY FROM LILLY ENDOWMENT INC.
Lilly Endowment is pleased to announce its Thriving in Ministry Initiative 2018, a competitive grant program open to any charitable organization committed to the support of pastoral leaders in congregations and located in the United States.
Charitable organizations are invited to submit proposals for up to $1 million that may be used for up to a five-year period to develop new or strengthen existing programs that help pastors build relationships with other clergy who can serve as role models and exemplars and guide them through key leadership challenges at critical moments in their ministerial careers.
While the Endowment is interested in supporting a variety of approaches, it is especially interested in supporting efforts that: 1) attend to key professional transitions in a pastor's career and/or 2) focus on challenges posed by particular ministry contexts and settings.
Request for Proposals
Lilly Endowment is pleased to announce Thriving in Ministry Initiative 2018. Through this endeavor, the Endowment seeks to support charitable organizations (especially organizations committed to supporting pastoral leaders in congregations) located in the United States in developing new or strengthening existing programs that help pastors build relationships with experienced clergy who can serve as role models and exemplars and guide them through key leadership challenges at critical moments in their ministerial careers. The primary aim is to help pastors thrive in congregational leadership and thus enhance the vitality of the congregations they serve.
Charitable organizations may submit proposals for up to $1 million that may be used for up to a five-year period to plan and implement programs. While the Endowment is interested in supporting a variety of approaches, it is especially interested in supporting efforts that: 1) attend to key professional transitions in a pastor’s career and/or 2) focus on challenges posed by particular ministry contexts and settings.
In this open and competitive grants initiative, the Endowment anticipates awarding approximately 30 grants to charitable organizations that submit exceptionally promising proposals that advance the aim of the initiative and demonstrate the capacity of the organization to design, implement and sustain a high-quality program.
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Proposals must be postmarked by June 1, 2018.
Links to Documents
The links below provide complete instructions for preparing and submitting grant applications.
Interest Form
This form indicates the organization’s intent to submit a proposal and names a key contact involved in this effort. Its primary purpose is to assist the Endowment in gauging interest in this initiative and in preparing for the review of completed proposals. Interest Forms are due by April 6, 2018 (postmarked).
Request for Proposals
This document provides guidelines for submitting full proposals to develop programs for this initiative. Proposals are due June 1, 2018 (postmarked).
Guide to Budget Preparation
This document is intended to assist organizations in preparing program budgets. Program budgets include two parts: 1) a detailed line-item budget and 2) a budget narrative that explains how you have calculated specific line items.
Lilly Endowment Forms
This document provides required forms that must be completed and submitted with grant applications. These forms include: 1) Proposal Summary Information Form and 2) Exempt Status and Foundation Information Status Form.
Deadlines
Interest Forms Postmarked by April 6, 2018
Proposals Postmarked by June 1, 2018
Questions
If questions arise as you develop the proposal, please email: thrivinginministry@lei.org.
Please send your completed proposal to:
Jessicah Krey Duckworth
Program Director, Religion
Lilly Endowment Inc.
2801 North Meridian Street
Post Office Box 88068
Indianapolis, Indiana 46208-0068, United States
Read more about this initiative and find the request for proposals »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: NEW CHURCH STARTS
'Divergent churches' are exploring innovative ways of congregational life
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION
Kara Faris: 'Divergent churches' are exploring innovative ways of congregational life
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: NEW CHURCH STARTS
'Divergent churches' are exploring innovative ways of congregational life
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION
Kara Faris: 'Divergent churches' are exploring innovative ways of congregational life
Detail of book cover
Across the country, creative, alternative congregations are doing church in unconventional ways, the co-author of 'Divergent Church' says in this interview. They may look different, but they are deeply rooted in tried-and-true practices of the faith.
Dinner churches, cowboy churches, farm-to-table gatherings and much, much more. Across the United States, new and alternative ways of congregational life are emerging.
Tim Shapiro and Kara Faris of the Center for Congregations in Indianapolis took a close look at a dozen of these creatively different congregations in their new book, “Divergent Church: The Bright Promise of Alternative Faith Communities.”(link is external)
Dinner churches, cowboy churches, farm-to-table gatherings and much, much more. Across the United States, new and alternative ways of congregational life are emerging.
Tim Shapiro and Kara Faris of the Center for Congregations in Indianapolis took a close look at a dozen of these creatively different congregations in their new book, “Divergent Church: The Bright Promise of Alternative Faith Communities.”(link is external)
As the book’s subtitle suggests, the two found much to admire, Faris said.“Today, the spiritual and congregational landscape in the United States is such that somebody’s got to innovate and take some risks and try to figure out how to make Christian life relatable,” she said.
The congregations she and Shapiro studied are doing just that, she said.
“They haven’t given up. They are driven by something outside of themselves to try this unusual thing.”
Although traditional forms of church are still greatly needed, “there are other ways,” Faris said.
Shapiro is the president of the Center for Congregations, and Faris, the center’s resource grants director and a resource consultant to congregations.
Kara FarisFaris spoke recently with Faith & Leadership about their book. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Tell us about the research that you and Tim Shapiro did for the book, and what you mean by “divergent church.”
We spent a little over a year identifying congregations that, at first, we didn’t call “divergent.” We called them “innovative” or “alternative” -- people who were doing something unusual and noteworthy in the congregational world but didn’t have a name for it.
We had different ways of finding them. Some were just Google searches for keywords like “creative church” or “unusual congregations” or “alternative congregations.”
We also asked people if they knew of any congregations that were doing things that were very nontraditional but still served the function of a congregation for the participants. By that we meant in some way providing spiritual formation, a connection to other people, having some sort of cohesive gathering or sense of identity, but maybe it didn’t look like a traditional church.
We ended up finding 12 congregations that ranged from what looked like pretty traditional worship gatherings to gatherings that didn’t look at all like a congregation. But they all had in common what we call “church plus” -- church plus something else.
One example is Galileo Church in Texas. They meet on Sunday evenings for a worship service that is liturgical. They don’t have a bulletin, but there’s an order of service and hymns and prayers. It’s very handcrafted, with a lot written by their worship team rather than using the denomination’s worship book or hymnal.
They’re part of the Disciples of Christ but are very consciously a Christian worship space that is about LGBTQ people and issues. That’s the “plus” part of who they are.
I went to their Sunday worship, and it’s very novel. It’s beautiful. It’s in a nontraditional space that they rent, which alone isn’t revolutionary or different. But their intentional focus on one particular slice of human experience -- the LGBTQ experience -- is their “plus.”
Another example is Simple Church in Grafton, Massachusetts. They’re a house church and a dinner church -- which, again, isn’t new. They have a liturgy that flows with essentially a potluck meal, so it’s a nontraditional worship experience.
But they’ve had to figure out how to be financially sustainable with a membership of 40 people. Because they were so homespun about everything they were doing, and because they are located on a farm, they started incorporating food into everything they do.
They made a conscious effort to be a farm-to-table church. Their focus is on the ethics of food and how we eat, and how we eat together. They have homed in on that.
But as they baked bread for communion, people noticed that it was exceptionally good. So they started selling it, and now a large portion of their budget comes from selling bread. They’re going to spin off a separate bread-baking business, and they’re moving into pizza making.
That doesn’t distract them from being a worshipping community, but it provides a vehicle for generating revenue and income beyond passing the plate.
That’s new. And it allows them to engage with their town and their neighbors by selling at a farmers market, and they’ve parlayed that into summer internships for kids in the juvenile correctional system in their area.
The “plus” part for them is the bread and the farming. Without it, they would be a dinner church that rents a space. They have incorporated their entire reason for existence into this other, “plus” aspect of what they do.
Q: The book says that whatever form these congregations might take, very traditional Christian practices are at their core. Tell us about that.
We revisited the work by Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass on practice. We did a lot of work on spiritual practices and named quite a few -- things like eating together, welcoming the stranger, and music, which we’ve expanded into broader and creative practices.
Some of these practices are a natural part of the DNA of the Christian tradition but maybe, over time, have lost the sense of feeling like deeply spiritual practices.
Eating together is a simple one to explain. You don’t need a big program about food for eating together to be a spiritual practice, but it does require an intentional awareness of what we’re doing when we sit down together.
Welcoming the stranger is another. For cowboy church, the stranger may be the person who’s out at the horse pavilion who happens to smoke, which is verboten, however moderately, in some strains of Christianity. In other divergent congregations, expected cultural norms lose their significance in light of the “church plus” and other key congregational values.
In other words, adherence to moralistic cultural norms isn’t the pivot point upon which a person’s welcome depends.
Q: What’s the role of innovation in these churches?
Built into the word “innovation” is a sense of risk taking. Major companies recognize the need to take risks. They know there will be risk and failure and learning, but it’s in pursuit of some long-term goal -- profit or perfecting a craft or something -- so the risk is accepted.
But in the religion world, we don’t have a place to give permission for risk taking in the way that some of these innovative clergy do. They are willing to take the risk of, for example, being criticized by their denominational counterparts or by others in the Christian world.
I respect the heck out of their willingness to take a risk. They’re not getting a whole lot out of it. These aren’t big, fancy places. They don’t have big salaries. Some are sticking around long enough and meeting traditional metrics of success, like people in the seats and dollars in the bank.
But it is a conundrum. You can talk about welcoming the stranger, but if you don’t have a viable model to pay for the cowboy pastor, how do you make it happen? In the religion world, that sense of innovation doesn’t happen on such a formalized level.
People can be skeptical: “This is a flash in the pan and isn’t lasting. How are they successful? Show me their metrics.”
Part of my response to that is, yes, it looks different and it’s innovative. It might even seem kooky, and it may not last. But what they’re doing is deeply rooted in tried-and-true faith practices.
Today, the spiritual and congregational landscape in the United States is such that somebody’s got to innovate and take some risks and try to figure out how to make Christian life relatable.
Q: The book says that “meaning making” is one the most deeply innovative aspects of these churches but that many congregations today are so focused on surviving, they’ve lost the ability to do that. Speak some to that.
My hunch is that for many congregations, everything worked well in a different generation, where institutions matched the social fabric. There was a social capital that matched the world that people experienced in their work and in their social life.
That memory gets ingrained and passes from generation to generation but doesn’t get updated. So many congregations get in this pickle where their numbers are dwindling. They’ve got this rich history and a great facility, but they’re in a quagmire about how to stay alive.
Even if they have enough money, they may lack vitality or purpose or identity. They can genuinely want to figure it out and be relevant, but it’s hard to dislodge people from an ingrained way of being.
You get good at doing what you know. It’s not that it’s bad, but they haven’t found a compelling reason to do something different.
Q: What does all this mean for churches, now and in the future? What are the lessons we can learn from divergent churches?
First, if the people featured in “Divergent Church” all fold in a few years, I would see that as a natural evolution of humans figuring out the best way to survive. All these people are tinkering around and doing unusual stuff out of a sense of great conviction.
Even if [their churches] all die, it is still a necessary part of the organism renewing itself. Somebody’s got to do it. It’s a natural function. Certain cells die off; certain cells get rejuvenated. It’s a natural, basic function.
But another part of me thinks that people can learn from these divergent churches to give themselves permission to do something different. If they read about these other people, maybe they will be willing to take a chance and do it too.
There is a place for them. There is a growing community of people like the divergent church leaders who are connecting and doing the work. It’s just more subtle than some other expressions of church.
Q: At some level, the book is about the question of what constitutes a church. So what does a church look like? What will it look like in the future?
There’s still a huge need for a traditional church with a Sunday morning time slot. But there are other ways.
We talked in the book about WAYfinding in Indianapolis, which is the farthest from what anybody would identify as a congregation, because they’re so decentralized.
WAYfinding is a group that identifies as spiritual seekers. They meet in small groups for eight to 10 weeks on a topic that usually has nothing to do with religion, but the curriculum comes at that topic from a faith or a spiritual point of view. The groups meet all around Indianapolis and come together a couple of times a year for larger gatherings.
It’s not a house church, and it’s not like a congregation. It’s not a book club, because they are engaging in some spiritual practices and doing the meaning-making work.
There’s not a liturgy, but there is a flow to every meeting that’s more than an agenda. It’s not a worship service, though the gatherings can be seen as worship to some.
Some would say, “No way.”
But I think, “Yeah, those people are engaging with ultimate questions of meaning. They are talking about God and reading different scriptures and texts that tap into the other or ultimate concerns.”
Are they a congregation? Are they a movement? Are they an alternative gathering for people who want to be spiritual but not religious?
I don’t know. People used to be derogatory about the phrase “spiritual but not religious,” but that phrase isn’t going away.
It may sound spacey, because it’s not rooted in traditional faith language, but those people aren’t going away. They want community. They want leadership and expertise and opportunity to give and to connect with their spirituality.
They’re not going to find it at a megachurch where they can’t get on board with the theology. And they may not find it at a mainline Protestant church where they can’t feel a connection because they didn’t grow up with it or it’s stale or something.
Q: In the book, you say that divergent churches are a summons to the church to loosen up.
Yes. Because it’s going to be OK.
We gathered together many of the pastors featured in the book earlier this year. They’re a fun group, which is delightful, but the intellect and theological knowledge and the heart that was present in those gatherings was deeply serious.
A lot of traditional church concerns and hang-ups like whether to have a beer at dinner are ancient history for people involved with divergent church. Like, “Why are we worrying about this stuff? Let’s think about what really matters.”
Some of it is a reaction to some of the moralistic strains of Christianity.
Q: What do you admire about these congregations?
The hopeful part is that somebody is willing to try. They haven’t given up. They are driven by something outside of themselves to try this unusual thing.
That feels really hopeful. Because otherwise, the only options are what currently exist, which are working for many and aren’t working for many others.
It also feels hopeful because they’re finding people. They’re finding kindred spirits who resonate with doing church differently, people who are willing to give it a go.
Another part that was really interesting is that many of these churches are attached to denominations. I was surprised by how many of them are connected to denominations and are getting substantial denominational support, both financial and otherwise.
Q: How can traditional congregations use this book? What’s in it for them?
It’s a tough question, because the book isn’t a how-to. But you don’t need to duplicate what they’re doing.
Sharing these stories contributes to a greater awareness that other ways are available to express yourself as a person of faith. And if you’re the kind of person who wants to create that sort of space, there are predecessors. You can take heart from what these other people have done.
Humans have a very strong need to make meaning, and they’re going to get that need met, one way or the other.
It’s not going away. It’s just changing, and somebody’s got to figure it out, which is where I get back to these divergent church leaders. I’m proud of them and admire them, because they’re willing to figure it out in the midst of a lot of ambiguity. There’s no formula, but they’re still trying.
Jacob's Well
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Jacob's Well
It's one thing to start a church; it's another to keep it going. As Jacob's Well has discovered, even the most cutting-edge, creative and vibrant church has to have organization and structure.
At first glance, Jacob’s Well, a nondenominational “emerging” church in Kansas City, Mo., would seem to be the most traditional of churches. On the outside, the handsome old red-brick building has been a comforting neighborhood presence ever since Presbyterians built it in 1930.
Inside, the sanctuary features stained-glass windows, the Lord’s Prayer in gold letters above the altar and velvet cushions on creaking pews, all witness to the saints who’ve gone before.
But every Sunday -- at least since 1998, when Jacob’s Well was launched and took over the building -- the place is filled with lively worship and a body of believers that earlier congregations likely never envisioned. The music is contemporary and the dress casual, even scruffy, with more than a few tattoos and piercings scattered among the crowd.
During his sermon, the Rev. Tim Keel -- the senior pastor and a founder of the emerging/emergent church movement -- strolls the aisle, talking in conversational tones as though engaging listeners in a theological dialogue.
But for the past five months, stirring beneath the surface, something else has also been going on. Throughout Jacob’s Well, bones are being formed; a skeleton is taking shape.
This extraordinary church, known for its theological rigor and its creative and dynamic ministries, has been engaging in the most mundane of endeavors. After months of preparation and study, it has launched a major reorganization that establishes clear lines of authority while empowering members to become more involved in the church’s daily life.
As Jacob’s Well has discovered, even the most cutting-edge, creative and vibrant church has to have organization and structure. It’s one thing to start a church. It’s quite another to keep it going. Reflecting the growing maturation of the emerging church movement, Jacob’s Well is navigating the transition between church plant and long-term sustainability.
‘A lump of tissue’
“All churches are both organism and organization,” Keel said. “We’ve always been brilliant at the organism part. We’re filled with life and creativity. But we’ve struggled with organization. And if you’re an organism without a skeleton, you’re just a lump of tissue lying on the ground.”
The church’s new structure, Keel said, is giving Jacob’s Well the bones that will enable it to move well, now and into the future.
To Keel, it’s part of a natural progression, an evolution that takes place with any new church start -- at least those that have any chance of making it.
Most church plants do not, Keel said. Typically, only one of five new church starts are viable after five years, he said. Of those that survive, most do so because they have had a strong leader, typically the founding pastor, who has been able to create and embody a vision that did not exist before. In those first critical years, that leader is the avenue through which members are drawn to and begin to identify with the church and its vision.
That was certainly the case with Jacob’s Well.
A Kansas City native, Keel decided in the late 1990s that he wanted to start a church in his hometown. Convinced that the Holy Spirit is still alive and active, he was guided by a single question: Where and how would people want to connect to a community that experiences and exudes the love of God?
With degrees in both art and divinity -- a B.F.A. from the University of Kansas and an M.Div. from Denver Seminary -- Keel envisioned a church for the head and the heart, a community with room for both.
Keel admits that his creative flair influenced his desire to think differently about how a church can engage with Christ, and ultimately shaped the blueprint for Jacob’s Well.
Immersed in literature and captivated by stories since his youth, he embraced the congregation’s decision to select an evocative name, drawn from John 4. The place where Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman, “Jacob’s well” is symbolic of the church’s mission to welcome all without bias or condemnation, Keel said.
‘Belong before they believe’
Keel’s vision is reflected in outreach materials that describe Jacob’s Well as “a church where people are allowed to belong before they believe, where people are listened to, not preached at.” The church sees itself as a place where “it is safe to share doubts and questions, struggles, heartache and pain, along with fun and parties and relationships full of meaning, purpose and connectedness.”
It was a vision that others found attractive. Under Keel’s leadership, the church took off. After seven years, more than 1,000 people a week were attending its various services.
But the factors that make a new church take root and grow are the very things that at some point, if not changed, will harm or even destroy both the church and its leader, Keel said. Early on, the congregation necessarily identifies with the leader; later, it needs to develop its own identity.
“We had a big staff, but we struggled to differentiate,” he said. “All the behaviors that made us successful became stumbling blocks as the church sought to mature.”
It’s a familiar scenario for church planters. As the church grows, many members still believe the founding pastor has to be involved in everything. The church and the pastor have difficulty figuring out their own identities apart from one another.
“So what typically happens is that the pastor either burns out or the community tries to differentiate itself and the pastor keeps grabbing authority back,” Keel said. “Most churches never figure out a way to help the pastor and the community move from what was needed when they started to what will be needed to sustain it.”
Keel wasn’t burned out, but by 2009 he felt like it might be time to move on. A year later he did, when he was offered and accepted a fellowship in congregational studies at Laidlaw College in Auckland, New Zealand.
“The overarching sense was that it felt like the Spirit was releasing us,” he said.
Sure, after 11 years as a church planter, he was tired, but he also wanted to explore the possibility of life in the academy. At the same time, he knew that Jacob’s Well needed more and different kinds of leadership to step up. As long as he stayed around, that was unlikely to happen.
Keel left on good terms, but he did not plan to come back. Instead, he saw the move to New Zealand as a hiatus in which he and his family could figure out the next stage in their life and ministry.
The organization goes flat
After Keel left, the church conducted an extensive search for a successor but never found anyone to fill the position. Eventually, they moved to a team-leadership model, a non-hierarchical, flat-organizational system in which leadership was shared by all the staff.
Last year, the church approached Keel about coming back, and to both his and the church’s surprise, he found himself wanting to return -- not as lead pastor, as before, but as primary teaching pastor.
When he came back in July 2011, he found that the congregation had matured. Attendance had held steady, a rare occurrence after a founding pastor departs. He was gratified to find what he calls elements of “the church’s DNA” intact: worship, creativity, learning, hospitality and justice.
But as the church had already begun to realize, the flat organizational structure was not working. Though well-intended, it created problems. With everyone in charge, nobody was in charge. It was not always clear who had authority to make decisions, often leaving staff frustrated and confused.
Jessi Marcus, then the discipleship director, said she was part of a five-member team that met for two years about how to train and form small group leaders. They were never able to make a decision, she said, because it wasn’t clear who was in charge.
“It was unclear who was accountable and responsible for different ministry areas, which then trickled down, impacting day-to-day tasks,” she said. “With the flat structure, you might have to consult several people just to make what should be a simple decision.”
‘Power is real’
But power abhors a vacuum, and one way or another it was being exercised, Keel said.
“Power is real,” he said. “Authority matters and always exists. When it is not named explicitly and not well-used, hidden power grows. Somebody needs to be responsible.”
Soon after Keel’s return, the church’s elders asked him to partner with Mike Crawford, the pastor of worship and arts, and Isaac Anderson, one of the church’s teaching pastors, to propose a reorganization. All three embraced the planning process, eager to explore how to best steward the body to fulfill the church’s calling.
Working together, they challenged each other to think differently about church structure, while remaining grounded in the Scriptures and establishing clear leadership lines.
The congregation at Jacob’s Well is known for being artistically, politically and intellectually gifted and engaged. The three were determined to ensure that the new structure would make use of those gifts, empowering members to become even more involved in the church’s daily life and growing outreach.
What they came up with is a structure that clarifies the various pastors’ authority and responsibilities while also opening up new avenues for lay involvement and leadership.
Under the new structure, ministry at Jacob’s Well falls into five broad spheres, or areas -- Kairos, Chronos, Koinonia, Kerygma and Youth -- with each headed by its own pastor.
Like the building’s appearance, the five areas -- Greek names aside -- are not novel, at least not at first glance, Keel said. They translate roughly to the areas of worship, administration, education and fellowship, outreach and youth ministry -- a not uncommon way to organize a church.
Naming the powers
What the new system does do is make very clear what the church’s priorities are in ministry and who is responsible and accountable for each.
“It empowers these pastors by explicitly naming these areas and saying that these are areas in the life of the church and that each has to have administrative support,” Keel said. “This increases the intentionality with which we are trying to steward what we were doing.”
Yet the Greek names are no gimmick. They reflect what Keel calls the church’s “creative impulse” and his love of narrative. Each area “invites a story,” he said. The names spark curiosity that, in turn, creates opportunities to explain how Christ is the center of the church.
“When someone asks, ‘What’s Kerygma?’ you explain that it means ‘proclamation,’” he said. “It creates an opportunity to say that the gospel is not just about nurturing our life together -- Koinonia -- but also expanding that to others.”
With the reorganization, Keel is now senior pastor in addition to primary teaching pastor. In his new role, Keel isn’t directly responsible for any of the five areas but leads the pastoral team, with each of the five pastors responsible for leading the church in their respective areas.
“I supervise the pastors, but it is their job to run the church,” Keel said.
From its inception, Jacob’s Well has been governed by a board of lay elders, with the church’s main pastor being a voting member of that group. Under the new structure, all the pastoral leadership team are members of the board of elders, though only Keel, as senior pastor, has a vote on the board.
Woven throughout the new structure are more opportunities for lay involvement, with the creation of new lay deacons and positions heading various ministries, such as small group gatherings and classes led by staff and community members. The goal, Keel said, is to identify, develop and release more people into ministry.
Already making a difference
The new structure is not set in stone, and Keel expects that adjustments will be made as the church lives out the new arrangement. But after only five months, the new system already seems to be making a difference.
“We’re early in the process, but we are seeing benefits, including better communication, lower institutional anxiety about change, and people more empowered to serve and lead,” Keel said.
Oddly, by naming and making explicit where power and authority is held and exercised, the new structure has also fostered collaboration, said Marcus, who was recently ordained as the Koinonia pastor.
“The irony is that now there is actually more collaboration than in the flat model,” she said. “Now everyone understands who they need to be collaborating with.”
But what may be most significant about Jacob’s Well’s reorganization is simply the fact that it was done -- that it marks a new stage in the church’s development, a move from church plant to sustainability.
Like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “God is a God not of disorder but peace,” Keel said. As Genesis suggests, disorder or chaos is essential in all acts of creation. From it, God creates order.
“Chaos isn’t the enemy, but it’s not the endpoint either,” he said.
Susan Marquardt Blystone contributed to the reporting and writing of this article.
Read more about the church »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
At first glance, Jacob’s Well, a nondenominational “emerging” church in Kansas City, Mo., would seem to be the most traditional of churches. On the outside, the handsome old red-brick building has been a comforting neighborhood presence ever since Presbyterians built it in 1930.
Inside, the sanctuary features stained-glass windows, the Lord’s Prayer in gold letters above the altar and velvet cushions on creaking pews, all witness to the saints who’ve gone before.
But every Sunday -- at least since 1998, when Jacob’s Well was launched and took over the building -- the place is filled with lively worship and a body of believers that earlier congregations likely never envisioned. The music is contemporary and the dress casual, even scruffy, with more than a few tattoos and piercings scattered among the crowd.
During his sermon, the Rev. Tim Keel -- the senior pastor and a founder of the emerging/emergent church movement -- strolls the aisle, talking in conversational tones as though engaging listeners in a theological dialogue.
But for the past five months, stirring beneath the surface, something else has also been going on. Throughout Jacob’s Well, bones are being formed; a skeleton is taking shape.
This extraordinary church, known for its theological rigor and its creative and dynamic ministries, has been engaging in the most mundane of endeavors. After months of preparation and study, it has launched a major reorganization that establishes clear lines of authority while empowering members to become more involved in the church’s daily life.
As Jacob’s Well has discovered, even the most cutting-edge, creative and vibrant church has to have organization and structure. It’s one thing to start a church. It’s quite another to keep it going. Reflecting the growing maturation of the emerging church movement, Jacob’s Well is navigating the transition between church plant and long-term sustainability.
‘A lump of tissue’
“All churches are both organism and organization,” Keel said. “We’ve always been brilliant at the organism part. We’re filled with life and creativity. But we’ve struggled with organization. And if you’re an organism without a skeleton, you’re just a lump of tissue lying on the ground.”
Questions to consider:
- How can you restructure your organization to create opportunity for better initiatives?
- What are three structural changes that would help your organization be sustainable over time?
- How is power hidden in your organization, and how might you restructure so that its sharing is a positive form of collaboration and not a necessary evil?
- Innovative leaders pay attention to cultural change. What are ways external factors influence your organization’s internal design?
To Keel, it’s part of a natural progression, an evolution that takes place with any new church start -- at least those that have any chance of making it.
Most church plants do not, Keel said. Typically, only one of five new church starts are viable after five years, he said. Of those that survive, most do so because they have had a strong leader, typically the founding pastor, who has been able to create and embody a vision that did not exist before. In those first critical years, that leader is the avenue through which members are drawn to and begin to identify with the church and its vision.
That was certainly the case with Jacob’s Well.
A Kansas City native, Keel decided in the late 1990s that he wanted to start a church in his hometown. Convinced that the Holy Spirit is still alive and active, he was guided by a single question: Where and how would people want to connect to a community that experiences and exudes the love of God?
With degrees in both art and divinity -- a B.F.A. from the University of Kansas and an M.Div. from Denver Seminary -- Keel envisioned a church for the head and the heart, a community with room for both.
Keel admits that his creative flair influenced his desire to think differently about how a church can engage with Christ, and ultimately shaped the blueprint for Jacob’s Well.
Immersed in literature and captivated by stories since his youth, he embraced the congregation’s decision to select an evocative name, drawn from John 4. The place where Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman, “Jacob’s well” is symbolic of the church’s mission to welcome all without bias or condemnation, Keel said.
‘Belong before they believe’
Keel’s vision is reflected in outreach materials that describe Jacob’s Well as “a church where people are allowed to belong before they believe, where people are listened to, not preached at.” The church sees itself as a place where “it is safe to share doubts and questions, struggles, heartache and pain, along with fun and parties and relationships full of meaning, purpose and connectedness.”
It was a vision that others found attractive. Under Keel’s leadership, the church took off. After seven years, more than 1,000 people a week were attending its various services.
But the factors that make a new church take root and grow are the very things that at some point, if not changed, will harm or even destroy both the church and its leader, Keel said. Early on, the congregation necessarily identifies with the leader; later, it needs to develop its own identity.
“We had a big staff, but we struggled to differentiate,” he said. “All the behaviors that made us successful became stumbling blocks as the church sought to mature.”
It’s a familiar scenario for church planters. As the church grows, many members still believe the founding pastor has to be involved in everything. The church and the pastor have difficulty figuring out their own identities apart from one another.
“So what typically happens is that the pastor either burns out or the community tries to differentiate itself and the pastor keeps grabbing authority back,” Keel said. “Most churches never figure out a way to help the pastor and the community move from what was needed when they started to what will be needed to sustain it.”
Keel wasn’t burned out, but by 2009 he felt like it might be time to move on. A year later he did, when he was offered and accepted a fellowship in congregational studies at Laidlaw College in Auckland, New Zealand.
“The overarching sense was that it felt like the Spirit was releasing us,” he said.
Sure, after 11 years as a church planter, he was tired, but he also wanted to explore the possibility of life in the academy. At the same time, he knew that Jacob’s Well needed more and different kinds of leadership to step up. As long as he stayed around, that was unlikely to happen.
Keel left on good terms, but he did not plan to come back. Instead, he saw the move to New Zealand as a hiatus in which he and his family could figure out the next stage in their life and ministry.
The organization goes flat
After Keel left, the church conducted an extensive search for a successor but never found anyone to fill the position. Eventually, they moved to a team-leadership model, a non-hierarchical, flat-organizational system in which leadership was shared by all the staff.
Last year, the church approached Keel about coming back, and to both his and the church’s surprise, he found himself wanting to return -- not as lead pastor, as before, but as primary teaching pastor.
When he came back in July 2011, he found that the congregation had matured. Attendance had held steady, a rare occurrence after a founding pastor departs. He was gratified to find what he calls elements of “the church’s DNA” intact: worship, creativity, learning, hospitality and justice.
But as the church had already begun to realize, the flat organizational structure was not working. Though well-intended, it created problems. With everyone in charge, nobody was in charge. It was not always clear who had authority to make decisions, often leaving staff frustrated and confused.
Jessi Marcus, then the discipleship director, said she was part of a five-member team that met for two years about how to train and form small group leaders. They were never able to make a decision, she said, because it wasn’t clear who was in charge.
“It was unclear who was accountable and responsible for different ministry areas, which then trickled down, impacting day-to-day tasks,” she said. “With the flat structure, you might have to consult several people just to make what should be a simple decision.”
‘Power is real’
But power abhors a vacuum, and one way or another it was being exercised, Keel said.
“Power is real,” he said. “Authority matters and always exists. When it is not named explicitly and not well-used, hidden power grows. Somebody needs to be responsible.”
Soon after Keel’s return, the church’s elders asked him to partner with Mike Crawford, the pastor of worship and arts, and Isaac Anderson, one of the church’s teaching pastors, to propose a reorganization. All three embraced the planning process, eager to explore how to best steward the body to fulfill the church’s calling.
Working together, they challenged each other to think differently about church structure, while remaining grounded in the Scriptures and establishing clear leadership lines.
The congregation at Jacob’s Well is known for being artistically, politically and intellectually gifted and engaged. The three were determined to ensure that the new structure would make use of those gifts, empowering members to become even more involved in the church’s daily life and growing outreach.
What they came up with is a structure that clarifies the various pastors’ authority and responsibilities while also opening up new avenues for lay involvement and leadership.
Under the new structure, ministry at Jacob’s Well falls into five broad spheres, or areas -- Kairos, Chronos, Koinonia, Kerygma and Youth -- with each headed by its own pastor.
Like the building’s appearance, the five areas -- Greek names aside -- are not novel, at least not at first glance, Keel said. They translate roughly to the areas of worship, administration, education and fellowship, outreach and youth ministry -- a not uncommon way to organize a church.
Naming the powers
What the new system does do is make very clear what the church’s priorities are in ministry and who is responsible and accountable for each.
“It empowers these pastors by explicitly naming these areas and saying that these are areas in the life of the church and that each has to have administrative support,” Keel said. “This increases the intentionality with which we are trying to steward what we were doing.”
Yet the Greek names are no gimmick. They reflect what Keel calls the church’s “creative impulse” and his love of narrative. Each area “invites a story,” he said. The names spark curiosity that, in turn, creates opportunities to explain how Christ is the center of the church.
“When someone asks, ‘What’s Kerygma?’ you explain that it means ‘proclamation,’” he said. “It creates an opportunity to say that the gospel is not just about nurturing our life together -- Koinonia -- but also expanding that to others.”
With the reorganization, Keel is now senior pastor in addition to primary teaching pastor. In his new role, Keel isn’t directly responsible for any of the five areas but leads the pastoral team, with each of the five pastors responsible for leading the church in their respective areas.
“I supervise the pastors, but it is their job to run the church,” Keel said.
From its inception, Jacob’s Well has been governed by a board of lay elders, with the church’s main pastor being a voting member of that group. Under the new structure, all the pastoral leadership team are members of the board of elders, though only Keel, as senior pastor, has a vote on the board.
Woven throughout the new structure are more opportunities for lay involvement, with the creation of new lay deacons and positions heading various ministries, such as small group gatherings and classes led by staff and community members. The goal, Keel said, is to identify, develop and release more people into ministry.
Already making a difference
The new structure is not set in stone, and Keel expects that adjustments will be made as the church lives out the new arrangement. But after only five months, the new system already seems to be making a difference.
“We’re early in the process, but we are seeing benefits, including better communication, lower institutional anxiety about change, and people more empowered to serve and lead,” Keel said.
Oddly, by naming and making explicit where power and authority is held and exercised, the new structure has also fostered collaboration, said Marcus, who was recently ordained as the Koinonia pastor.
“The irony is that now there is actually more collaboration than in the flat model,” she said. “Now everyone understands who they need to be collaborating with.”
But what may be most significant about Jacob’s Well’s reorganization is simply the fact that it was done -- that it marks a new stage in the church’s development, a move from church plant to sustainability.
Like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “God is a God not of disorder but peace,” Keel said. As Genesis suggests, disorder or chaos is essential in all acts of creation. From it, God creates order.
“Chaos isn’t the enemy, but it’s not the endpoint either,” he said.
Susan Marquardt Blystone contributed to the reporting and writing of this article.
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FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Humble Leadership: Being Radically Open to God's Guidance and Graceby N. Graham Standish There comes a point at which leadership can break down precisely because of our success as leaders. When confidence turns to pride and arrogance, we lose sight of the people that we have been called to serve and become consumed with following our own vision.
Graham Standish offers a way forward that moves us through this paradox by seeking to humbly follow God's plans rather than our own. Humble leadership, grounded in the teachings of Jesus, means recognizing that what we have and who we are is a gift from God, and our lives should reflect our gratitude for this gift. It requires us to be radically and creatively open to God's guidance, grace, and presence in everything. When we lead out of such openness, God's power and grace flow through us.
The path Standish proposes is not easy. Humble leadership can be personally dangerous, exposing our weakness, powerlessness, fear, and anxiety. Our cultural need for strength infects Christian leaders with a pride that causes them to ignore biblical teachings on humility. But a humble leader says to God, "I'm yours, no matter where you call me to go, what you call me to do, and how you call me to be. I will seek your will and way as I lead others to do the same."
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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