Chicago Church Planter Mark Willis Interview

Here is my latest interview with Mark Willis, a church planter in Chicago. He moved to Chicago in June and just planted a church a couple of months ago. He is 25, he has works with all types of Christian groups and coaches church planters. Please use the interface on the right to listen to the audio or download the mp3 file.

Matt: First question, how did you get involved in church planting?

Mark: I went to college in Texas, Abilene Christian University, and went through their graduate school of theology, which is sort of their seminary there. One of the tracts that I chose was the Missions Residency for North America. That was in addition to the Master's in Divinity that I got, so it was a specific tract that they let me study with. So, it was sort of a residency, in terms of a medical residency where students are actually doing church planting and doing mission work while they are learning about it, along side mentors and coaches.  

I guess I got involved in church planting in the practical day in, day out experience of what it looked like and felt like and they joys and pains of all that.  The good part was that I had some friends, teachers and mentors to pick me up when I fell.  I had a few scraped knees through the process but really enjoyed it. 

Matt: What is it about Chicago that drew you to start a church there?

Mark: Well, I felt drawn to Chicago.  And I use that word (drawn) specifically because there was no specific call to Chicago from God.  A lot of people say "well, I felt called to this, or called to that," but we kind of walked backwards into it.  We felt drawn by God to Chicago to plant a church.  It was a remarkable series of events that told us this is where we were going to end up going.  It started with us just circling a bunch of cities on a map and asking God to give us some direction.  One by one he started taking cities off the list. 

We had a few things we were looking for-we wanted a global city, a place where the world was coming and being sent from.  We wanted a post-Christian and metropolitan area  where we could spread the gospel in a post modern area, because that is sort of my bend and our passion.  My wife is a portrait artist, so we were also looking for a city with a portrait market.  

Matt:  Which Chicago neighborhood are you in and how did you go about selecting that?

Mark:  We new it would be north somewhere, we loved the neighborhoods along the red line (Chicago transportation system.)   So we ended up choosing Evanston, due to some renting snaphoos that happened. So, we almost ended up here by accident.  We knew we wanted to be near a Christian group here called the Reva Place Fellowship, they are connected with the Mennonite group here in the US.  Part of our vision for church planting is networking with other families of Jesus that believe in a redemptive community, common work and social justice.  Reva Place really embodies those things and have a track record for commitment to the Chicagoland area.  We moved here without full intention of staying here in this neighborhood forever but we wanted to get to know and experience the Reva Place Fellowship and learn more about what it means to be an intentional Christian community.   

Matt: So, you are living in Evanston.  Is that where you are actually planting right now? 

Mark:  Yeah, that is part of our vision, not to see just a church plant but to see the whole region churched.  So we intentionally picked a place that was not at the center of all the commotion.  We didn't want to be the hub of everything.  And all ready there are little groups of Christians popping up in different areas. 

Part of our vision is to  partner with those networks and leaders. Like this afternoon,  I am going to go to the Greenhouse Church Planters Conference, which is a place where you can connect with other organic church planters and regardless of denominational lines you can help serve each other, find ways to collaborate-work together on projects, you know common worship, or service projects for the city.  Part of the reason we chose Evanston is because we knew we would be moving all over the city helping little communities. We have one in Hyde Park that just started a month and a half ago, a little house church there. There is another one in Albany Park that is mostly made up of Somalian refugees.  There is one in Logan Square that is mostly artists and poets.  There is another on the west side that is almost all Hispanic and working class.  

So these groups are very different and our intention in not to try and lump these groups together and make them look like us, but to give them the tools they need to be a vibrant family of Jesus in their neighborhood.  

Matt: Now, how did you identify and get involved with these groups?

Mark: It seems that is has happened differently every time.  The one we are directly involved with is in Hyde Park.  We got connected through a friend, through a friend, through a friend.  So just through indirect, natural relations that we have.  She is a Christian and she has a lot of non Christian friends who are working with her in a very low income public school, here in Chicago. Her desire is to share the gospel with her co-workers, other teachers.  To do it, we feel that sharing the gospel happens in community and as community-that the best evangelism is done in a family of faith verses one person handing out tracts to another.  So, we are directly related to the church in Hyde Park and we have discovered the other ones along the way. 

The big question now is how do we all relate and work together, because it is important that we do not become isolated.  This may bring up a totally different point here, but I think there is some health in small group centered church planting but I think it can get unhealthy if we refuse to allow those groups to mingle and work together.  

Matt:  How did you get people to help you/ is there any type of team that is helping you with that?

Mark: That is a good question and I would recommend a team for those who are looking to plant a church.  In this model, I would not recommend a large, parachute style 20-person team, but I would recommend at least 2 couples-6 couples at the most.  We have 2 couples on the north side and 2 couples on the south side and we meet together once a week.  My wife and I moved here by ourselves and that has been the hardest thing in all of this.  The good news is we have a couple moving here in January and another in the summertime.  So we feel like we are laying the ground work, just planting some simple seeds.  My recommendation would be to do it a little different than we did it.  

Matt:  How are you connecting with non-believers and what are you bringing them into in terms of someone who is interested in the gospel and they are coming along in their faith, what does that look like? 

Mark: Our hope is that we are sending Christians to non-believers.  That these simple churches find there way into their space.  So, rather than inviting some people we met at a bar to our house, lets start regularly attending this bar, and being salt and light in that context.  So that is kinda our mission that we live by. 

You know, we believe that each house church should have a mission that they live by, whether it be teachers, a pub, dance hall, a coffee shop, skaters, or the elderly,  whatever it is, that is the planting process for each house church.  But to say all of that, we are attracting people with an attractive gospel  and so we are asking ourselves constantly what makes the good news good.

The gospel is about reconciliation between God and man and man and man, the gospel is about peace, forgiveness and cleansing.  So we are trying to do that attracts non believers.  We have been inviting them over for a dinner party, the teachers in Hyde Park, and asking them out for coffee. Last weekend we went up to a apple orchard and just spent the day out there with them and just got the chance to share life for a bit.  

Matt:  How do you effectively communicate the gospel to people?

Mark:  I think a big piece of this is to let it be a community that preaches the gospel.  One of the things we've talked about is taking a piece of the gospel and finding a way to communicate that in our lives.  Kind of carnate that to the city of Chicago, to the world.  So, lets say it is peace making, how could we embody peace making?  So, we might stop buying coffee that wasn't fair trade, or maybe we are an advocate for spousal abuse.  At the end of it we hold a coffee night where we invite non believers into a discussion about what it was like for us to embody that piece of the gospel. That is one of the ideas we have had for doing communal evangelism.

Matt:  What is the format right now for what you are doing?

Mark:  It is still evolving.  On the micro level we have a life-transformation group model where we meet together for accountability and prayer.  That is where discipleship and teaching takes place.  We have the women in the house church meet together and the men in the house church meet together.  The key there is that these are brothers and sisters that will be fighting for my heart, they will be helping me through the hard part.  On a mezzo level, we get together once a week, share a meal, pray for each other, share about the week, and talk about it.  We talk strategy for what we feel called to.

Right now our house church is going through some major healing and it is amazing to see what God is doing.  We worship, do art, poetry, devotions...it kind of depends on the group. On the macro level we have plans for this, this is starting in June,  but we will start to network with other groups in the city.  As we plant more house churches we will hopefully find a way to bring these groups together for worship festivals, kind of a weekend long party.  Maybe there is line dancing, or a big banquet table, similar to the Jewish festivals...that is sort of a long answer...

Matt: How many salvations have you seen or baptisms?  What are your goals?  You talked about these girls groups/guys groups, what kind of numbers are you looking at and how do you know when to multiply a group?

Mark:  We have an idea that this is going to be bigger than just our little group which speaks of the kingdom, which I think is good to instill into every Christian. God is doing something much bigger than what we can see.  As far as our cutoff point...I think it will depend on the specific group. Once it gets beyond 15 it becomes more difficult to have true honest, deep relationships. So, we tell people once the group gets between 12-20 people to start thinking about what the next steps are. Once a group gets to that size a group will start to taper off in their desire to bring in new people anyway, so that is when we start asking people to ask the Lord if they have a burden to do this elsewhere. I am speaking more from my training in my residency here. Almost always when we approach people with this question, there is normally 1-2 that are already thinking that way. So, instead of dividing the groups we ask them to discern in the Spirit who is the 1-2 people to go and start another group, to send out. 

As far as salvations and baptisms, like you said it is a new group, so we have not seen any of that yet in our time so far.  We are working alongside a few non Christians with the Hyde Park group. With the refugee network, the Hispanic network and the poet network, I could not give you specific numbers on those because we are not directly tied to those groups. As far as I can tell every group has about 70% Christian and 30% non Christian.  Our hope it through time and gospel sharing we will see more people come to Christ.  

Matt:  How do you divide your time during the week? 

Mark:  Right now, it is busier because I have picked up a seasonal job to pay some extra expenses and then I have another part time job that I work throughout the year.  I do have some support from individuals and the church planting organization that focuses on the Chicagoland area.  So my time is pretty fluid.  It is in the afternoons and evenings when I really focus on the church plant.

One thing that has been helpful is I have been taking days to walk through different neighborhoods. I feel that every church planter should take some time to do this, where they are fully immersed in the mission field in another context. Chicago is amazing for this. It is none as the "city of neighborhoods" and is made up of about 200 different communities. So, I have this city map on my wall and then go to it. I travel public transit, eat lunch there, and just try and discover what people's needs are. Another big piece of how I spend my time is creating training tools for other church planters. One of those is Pray for Chicago Project. It is using wikipedia style technology and allows people to prayer walk through different parts of Chicago. So, I guess half/half. Half the time I am doing things on my own and the other half is working on website development. 

Matt:  In your groups do you speak every week, do you have a traditional sermon, or is it more of a discussion format?

Mark:  I would say the majority is dialogue.  Sometimes we go through a specific topic and one person decides they are going to research that topic.  Right now it has been more dialogue.

Matt: What would be your advice to me?

Mark:  Don't put the model before the maker.  There are pluses and minuses to every model.  I don't know what your dreams are, but I would say to every church planter to not put your passion for church planting before your intimacy with Father.  Without that deep rooted intimacy you are up the creek without the paddle.  I am talking from experience.  It is easy to forget about what is truly important.  

Matt:  Well, thanks so much Mark.  I really appreciate your time. 

Checkout Mark's site: godgrown.net

Interview with the Director of Church Planting for the Vineyard, Steve Nicholson

A couple of months ago I interviewed Steve Nicholson, who is the national director of church planting for the Vineyard. Steve is originally a church planter. He planted in Chicago and from that church there has been more than 17 other churches planted out.  Steve also does training globally with church leaders, so it was huge privilege to learn from him. Use the interface on the right to play the latest podcast or download the audio here.  

Matt: Steve, how do you express your wanderlust for church planting even though you are not planting churches yourself right now?

Steve: For me, mostly it goes into training and coaching church planters.  So I am pretty much always coaching and training church planters all the time. 

Matt: OK, so how does that look on a week to week basis?

Steve: We have phone conversations and exchange emails.  Usually, if I am coaching someone, I visit them from time to time. We start far ahead and keep going until they get the church up and running.

Matt: I see.  Now, have I got that number right about your church planting out 17 other churches? Is that correct?

Steve: I think that is right, yeah.

Matt: Have you been involved in all of those? 

Steve: Yes, to one degree or another, I have been involved in all of them.

Matt: How do you go about finding guys who are church planters and then training them to do so? 

Steve: For me, I tend to start fairly young.  So, with some guys I figure out that they are a church planter when they are still in high school. Even though they may not plant for another 10 years.  But you are looking for people who are leaders, who can articulate themselves, who know how to put a team together, who can break a vision down into steps which they can actually do.  You are looking for catalytic people who tend to start things and lead people everywhere they go.  A good church planter looks like a good business entrepreneur.

Matt: Do you find that you get a lot of guys from the business world who are interested in church planting?

Steve: Sometimes we do, later in life. They spend time in business and then feel like they are ready for a change. They always make good church planters.

Matt: Now, this is your main preoccupation, church planting.  What do you find yourself thinking about the most when it comes to church planting?

Steve: Just to clarify, I am still leading a church.  I spend most of my time leading on my on church. I do spend time thinking about church planting and the biggest default is still about finding the right people. There is a lot of knowledge out there about how to plant, certainly more than there was 30 years ago.  The steps to take our fairly clear.  There are plenty of places to plant.  The bottle neck is finding people to plant.  So, that is where most of my thoughts are.

Matt: What is your strategy for getting the DNA of church planting into the church that you are leading?

Steve: First of all, when you plant 17 churches it kind of gets into the DNA.  A lot of times you get it in the DNA by doing it.  Two, you have to build a church where people have a kingdom mentality, where people know that we are not just here for ourselves...we are not here to be religious consumers, we are here to build the Kingdom of God. When people get that mentality they are going to want to express that in some form.  The third thing, I think if you teach people to listen to the Holy Spirit, He calls them.  He puts it in them.

Matt: What are your plans for increasing your church planting efforts?  Is that in your thoughts? What are your plans for the next 5, 10 years for church planting?

Steve: Church planters are kind of like evangelists.  You know, if 100 people come to Christ an evangelist will celebrate for about 5 min and then they are thinking  I wish it was 1,000.  It is never enough.  The same can be for church planting, you know, it is never enough.  You always want more.  Like I said, I mostly try to make sure that I spot every potential planter I can and help them move in that direction.

Matt: What changes have you seen in the church planting scene?  Are there any concerns yo have about the church planting scene and how have you seen it evolve?

Steve: The thing I would say, no matter where you get it, the training is basically the same.  There are a few magic bullets that everyone has to do it doesn't matter what brand of church you are planting.  The only different situation would be, say a Catholic church moves into a new area where there is already 10,000 catholics and start a new parish...but for everyone is it pretty much looks the same.  It is a function of doing it.  

On the plus side, I think that there does not have to be as many failures as there was 30 years ago.  30 years ago there were many churches being planted and a lot of them did not survive.  Generally, the survival rate is higher than it was even though the general climate is more negative.  My main concern, is that once in a while you get people who don't want to do it the regular way, they want to skip stuff.  Or, they want to plant the "non-church" church.  "We want to plant a church, but we are not going to call it a church, it is not actually going to meet...etc."  Of course, you get nothing.  So, we have seen more of that in the last 5 years, which concerns me because it does not work.

Matt:  Have you seen much of that in the Chicago area?

Steve: No, I haven't. Part of it is that it is the mid-west.  Mid-westerners tend to be more conventional.

Matt: What is your vision for Chicago?  What is your heart for the city you are in?

Steve:  Well, we would like to have 50 Vineyard churches, which would be about the same as the Catholics and Lutherans. It is still pretty modest. Along the way, we want to be a friend and assistance to other churches.  Every once in a while we will help a church that is not planting a Vineyard church, but some other kind of church.  I am always happy to do that too.

Matt: Have you done much with the emerging, multi-site approach to churches?  What is your take on that and what is your experience of that?

Steve:  My take is that it is certainly a way of getting fast, short term results.  If you have a strong church with a lot of momentum and a very strong preacher, you can get a lot of things going very quickly by piping in the preaching and that produces fast, short term rewards. 

My concern is, what happens in 30 years when those guys are not around anymore.  My experience is that it takes many years of experience to train up mature pastors that are capable of leading a large organization.  It takes many years for someone to become a good preacher, and I am thinking that if these gifted people do the multi-site thing and do it all electronically themselves, where are people getting any experience and training.  My question is, "yeah this works now, but what will happen in 30 years when they are gone?"

Matt: My wife and I feel call to plant in Chicago.  Steve, if you were me...I have never planted, I'm 28, married, we will have 2 small kids when we move...where would be a strategic place, in terms of reaching the city, to land...where would you suggest?

Steve:  Usually, I tell people...number one-go somewhere where there are people like you. Unless you have a very strong missionary gifting you need to go to a place where there are people like you.  If you go to a more upper class, intellectual area, then you have to be that yourself.  On the converse, if you are more of an intellectual and you go to a blue-collar area, you will struggle.  The leader and the place need to match. 

Secondly, really big cities like Chicago are a lot harder than medium and smaller size cities.  It is much more difficult to be noticed.  Word-of-mouth does not help you in really big cities.  If you start a new church in a city of 200,000-500,000 and your church grows to 200-300, your church will be noticed.  You could have a church of 2,000 people in Chicago and nobody would know who you were.  You don't get noticed here until you have 10,000 or more people.  It is very hard to create this wide-spread public perception.  And you can't do it using advertising because it is very very expensive, no one has that kind of money.  It is a hard place.  

Thirdly, you need to know that Chicago functions like 3 different cities. There is Nothside, Southside and Westside.  People of one section generally know nothing about the other sections, and never go there at all.  They each have their own culture and ethos and that includes the suburbs.  Not only do you have north, south and west sides of the city, but also the suburbs, so you need to look into that and figure out where you would best fit.  Southside tends to be more blue collar and Westside tends to be more coorporate, middleclass, republican.  Northside tends to be more wealthy, more educated, more democratic, more young professionals.  So, you need to know that is how Chicago works.    

Matt: Do you find that in your church that you have a lot of fruit amongst students? 

Steve:  Yeah, we've always have had a lot of fruit amongst students.

Matt: What do you attribute that to?

Steve: Good music helps.  Our style of preaching appeals to students. Our leadership is more educated people. And then once you have some you get more. So, even though I've been doing this for 30 years and am 30 years older, our median age is still only 32.

Matt: What are some of the idols of Chicago?

Steve: Money is a biggie.  The whole city is really constructed of immigrants who came here to make a better life.  Chicago is very much the immigrant city, it still is and they are coming here to find money.

Matt: Have you had much fruit from other nationalities being added to the church?

Steve:  My church has people from around 35 different countries and is about 42% minority.  So we have a very divers church.

Matt: Do you find that you have leaders, church planters emerging from those people groups, or do you find that is a harder step to take?

Steve: We have some. We have leaders and some church planters also.

Matt: What are some of the contemporary approaches that you have found that help to connect the way people think to the gospel?

Steve:  One of the biggies is ministry to the poor.  People love being apart of giving to the poor.  You have to understand that I am a north side church...so most of the people are democratic, most are more educated and professional and have more of a social consciousness.  SO, they love being apart of a church that is involved in reaching the poor.  I think, the other thing is just talking about spirituality in a non-religious fashion.  People want to experience spirituality.  They do not want religion, or rules.

Matt: On a personal level, what would be your encouragement to me...you know we are on a church planting internship, we are in St. Louis, we are about half way through.  What would you encourage me to really focus on?

Steve: First and most importantly, you have to have your vision as clear as a bell.  You have to work out phrases and ways of describing your vision that you could communicate to someone in a coffee shop again, and again and again.  When church planters struggle, a lot of times it is because their vision is not very clear, or they have not worked it out, how to say it to someone.  Imagine yourself in different settings, describing what we are trying to do and get it worked out precisely.  Meeting someone in a coffee shop and they are asking, "why should I join you?" you have to be able to communicate clearly what the vision is to them .  

One guy I knew, he would start out every church service by saying, "this church started with a dream..." and then he would say something about what that dream was.  You have to be able to answer that question.  Secondly, I would say you always, always, always start with a team.  You need at least 12 people, min 10...but the bigger the team you have, the faster things can go.  But, don't take people who are going to need lots of hand holding.  People who need lots of attention from the pastor because they are not going to get it.  Thirdly, I would say include a prayer team. The Devil is not a sleeper.

 
Matt: When you say "prayer team" do you mean people locally, or do you mean something broader than that?

Steve: People who don't go on the church plant who pray for you regularly...because there is spiritual warfare.

Matt: Steve, I want to thank you for your time, it has been very beneficial.

Interview with Chicago Church Planter Rick Kuhr

Recently I interviewed Rick Kuhr who planted a church in Chicago and started gathering people in January 2007. Rick is 32, married and has a daughter. Checkout this podcast and learn from Rick's church planting experiences.

You can use the player on the right to listen to the most recent podcast, download the church planting interview or read below.

Matt: How did you know you were called to plant a church in Chicago? Why did you pick Chicago?

Rick: I did a year of mission work in Spain and after that year I knew I wanted to be in a place that was needy spiritually. Chicago is one of those places...it is short on the national average when it comes to churches and there is a lack of witness in that city.

Matt: Were there people that God used or events to help shape your vision for Chicago? Or was it more like, "this place needs God, so lets go." ?

Rick: I had a friend who was planting in Boulder CO and had asked me to come with him. I wasn't sure but I knew wherever I went I would need to be called by God, I wasn't going to move my family if I wasn't called. One day, this friend who had asked me to go with him said, "Rick you need to be unleashed from this. You just got to do what you have to do." And for the guy who had asked me to go to release me, that was huge. He encouraged me to get involved in Chicago. I called the national church director for church planting (for The Vineyard) in Chicago and asked if they were doing in work in the UIC area. That ended up being the only area they were doing work in at that time. So that was a big confirmation. A year before I had been praying and actually asked my wife what she thought about planting in the UIC area and then that was the only area they were planting in. After doing bible studies on the campus for 3-4 years and asking college students what churches were there, I realized that people would travel 4-5 if not 10-12 miles to go to church! I thought that was a little crazy and saw that the need was there. I found out there are smaller churches in the area but none of them are being a strong witness in that area. So we decided to do it!

Matt: When you got on the ground, how did you go about launching the church?

Rick: We did it a little differently. Usually a leader will gather a team and then they will go out. I came in on the middle of everything. The Hyde Park Vineyard had organized it without a leader and I found out about it after it had already started forming. I operate quite relationally so that was different because I didn't have much chance to get to know people I just felt called to the area and that was prodded me to interact with people. It was really the Hyde Park Vineyard who really had gathered some people who would be committed to the plant, so that is how we originally got together. Personally, I did not do much of the gathering. A lot of the people came through the UIC bible study which I had been involved with.

Matt: How many people did you have in that initial group? How did you get the word out amongst non Christians in the area?

Rick: Part of our vision is connecting people to Jesus. We try to focus everything we do to be centered on relationships. So we did kind of everything in the beginning, from doing water giveaways, handing out flowers, door to door prayer. and flyers. Ideally people to come because they know someone. Other people have come because we have been active in the community, being aware of people, talking to people on the streets, really founding that vision of being interactive and aware of what is going on. We have done pizza at a park where there are homeless and different things like that.

Matt: How many people are you gathering right now?

Rick: Well, Chicago is really transient so our numbers can be low because we are in the university area. Last week we had 15 the week before we had 27. So, our average is somewhere in between there.

Matt: You are bi-vocational (working full time job and planting a church) how do you manage your time? How does that affect your life and your ministry?

Rick: A mentor of mine says in church planting you either struggle financially or with your time and if you are bi vocational you typically aren't going to have the financial stress but you will have the time stress. We already lived in the area and I already had a job so for me it really comes down to time stewardship. I have to take advantage of every second I can. So, when I walk to work I talk to people. I usually engage with them using a question that goes along with the theme for the coming Sunday or the time of year. My commute is 15 min so I take advantage of it and talk to people about Jesus. It is doing stuff I already do but incorporating Jesus into it. I try to multi-task and be effective. I make sure that I get time with God, ultimately that is what will effect me, my family and the people I talk to. My second priority is my family, if my family health is not doing well that will effect the overflow of me being able to love other people.

Matt: How do you find time for the church and preparing messages during the week?

Rick: My main gifting is evangelism, so apart from my walking to and from work I would spend an additional 2 hours talking with people on the streets, getting into conversations. I make sure I am consistently in the word because the directly effects everything that we do and I believe it is good to speak on a Sunday what God has been speaking to you, so that is something I make sure to do. Usually, since we have a baby, I study late at night. I don't get the most sleep. It really comes down to time stewardship. I try to utilize every moment I have during the day, from meeting up with people on my lunch breaks to praying or reading the word.

Matt: What do you do for work?

Rick: I am a personal banker. Which is great because I've been able to talk to a lot of people about Jesus. In my work I talk a lot with other people about daily life, so I am able to bring Jesus into the conversation quite easily. The whole idea of being bi-vocational is not appealing to me because I see it more as a way of life. We are all ministers of Jesus.

Matt: What other challenges have you faced? What have been some of your lows and how have you pushed through them?

Rick: I am an off the scale extrovert and have always operated out of relationship with people. So, it has been hard for me is having come into the middle of a plant where I don't know anyone, they don't know me. I had not been around long enough for people to see my actions, because actions speak louder than words. So, it can be hard to speak into people's lives when they haven't had time to really see what you are about. Second difficulty has been we had a lot of individuals who had a lot of great ideas and because I came in later in the process I think that was something that was difficult. It was a situation where the leader wasn't established. People had their own ideas, their own agenda and when that didn't pan out to be the way that the plant was going to be that was very disappointing for them, which was then expressed to me or other individuals, which was hard.

I look at church planting can be a little bit like the bi-polar disorder-everything is magnified. The great things are incredible and the victories are awesome but the defeats are in the valley, they are deep. So where there is a lack of consistency or history there is those real highs and real lows and that is something I have really had to work through. My calling here is something that I am convinced that God has given me. And through human eyes success in a church plant would be getting the church going, getting all the activities and ministries in place and having that fly. In reality, if God calls us to an area, we need to be committed to that. God honors our obedience. We could look at church plants and think, "o they don't have this going or that going." But it is in the process that we are able to love God, that is what is important. I just heard about a guy who is planting out in Montana and things have flopped from a financial standpoint and almost ruined him. It you find your value in how your church then you've missed it. It is about the kingdom of God advancing and being obedient to him. Church planting is so intense and you can be so caught up in your own little world rather than focusing on the big picture and advancing the kingdom.

Matt: What have been some of the highlights/victories for you?

Rick: We have had homeless people come to our gathering, which is cool. About a month ago we had a meeting where 1/2 of the people there were either Latino, African American or Asian. For me to get to a point where we see a diverse group is exciting! My wife and I are both Caucasian, so sometimes it can be difficult to get people to come in a multi-diverse, multi-economic area when you look different to them. It is important to have different ethnicity's on your team because that communicates to people who are different to you that they are welcome. So, that has been really exciting.

Another guy came in off the streets, and we helped him get a place at the YMCA. We helped him a job situation, transportation and he has come and we helped him get established. Talk about social justice and ministering to the heart and spirit of an individual. I have not heard of to many stories of churches seeing someone so broken being redeemed in that type of way. He is helping us with music and serving in the church he is part of the community. It is obviously hard work and a huge investment but really encouraging. A lot of the conversations on the streets have been incredible. One question I have asked is "what makes people selfish?" I had 2 conversations yesterday about this questions and they were incredible. I think people like dealing with that question regardless about where they are on the spiritual spectrum because they realize selfishness is a problem and they want to overcome it. But, touching on those issues that are at the core who we as humans are. People are aggressive about lust and pornography and anger and jealousy, different things in how they live their lives. I believe we can be aggressive about living a life of love. I believe we can be confrontational with love.

Matt: How has God provided for you in terms of finances for the church? How have you covered your costs?

Rick: We have been really blessed in this area! It is pretty simple, I don't get a salary and we don't pay for our location. We are in the same location as another church, which is a huge blessing. They said to us that we could use their place, they want to use their facility for the advancement of the kingdom. I am sure it happens but I have never heard a church receiving a blessing like that. We are incredibly blessed to be the recipient of that. So, we don't have any huge costs. That makes things pretty easy. A lot of our money goes to outreach. We have a different starting time, we start at 4.30pm and we are thinking of that for a long term basis due to people's work schedule. But, anyways, we actually get together afterwards to have a bite to eat. And coming back to community, living life together and the vision to actually see that accomplished we use that as an opportunity to get to know people. And those who come and eat, for the most part, we buy them dinner. So, a lot of the money that we spend is on things like that.

Matt: What is your vision for Chicago? What plans do you have to expand?

Rick: Our vision is to connect people to Jesus, in a general sense. And that looks like, sharing life with people. I think sometimes with churches they can go for social justice but it turns into social gospel...where it is not ministering to the whole of the person, but they just talk about the spiritual aspect. Those things are all connected and we can forget to help out the physical needs. So we want to be a community that is able to merge that. Not neglecting social justice and also addressing the real issue of the spirit being redeemed. So, community, meeting the needs of the whole person, and also being really into the scripture, really understanding it. We want to be expectant for God to speak, for him to guide us and lead us but doing that with the foundation of the word. Having that mix, kind of a double barrel action.

Matt: I am doing a church planting internship, in St. Louis. You are already doing the stuff, out in the field. What would be your advice for me?

Rick: I would encourage and challenge you to have a team. The research that has been done shows that if you don't have a team you are setting yourself up for disaster. So, I would challenge you to bring a team, people that will help you along the way. Make sure you love God and loving Jesus and loving people as the main thing. Also, maintain that balance. We are useless as followers of God if we forget that we are following God. It may sound obvious, but if we are not receiving, others can't receive from us as easy. We need to be able to have a balance with our family, our wives. There is a huge witness in loving our wives and loving our families. That responsibility in the community needs accountability. You need an established overseer. Those would be my advices. Go with where you are strong. My most recent blog is about we as individuals are meant to live in co-dependence with God and others to advance the kingdom.

Matt: Rick, thank you so much for your time, I so appreciate it.

Checkout: nearwestvineyard.org

Interview with a Church Planter from Hull England

During our recent trip to Brighton England I took the opportunity to reconnect with an old friend Steve Whittington, who was my youth leader and mentor for a few years. Steve has planted a Newfrontiers church in Hull -- the number one worst ranked city in the United Kingdom.

Steve moved to Hull in May 2006 with 13 other adults to start the church. He now has 100 adults and a donated building in the center of the city -- you don't want to miss this story.

Use the interface above to play the most recent podcast or download the interview with Steve.

Matt: Steve, give me some information about how you launched the church and how you gathered people?

Steve: Great, well it was actually in Brighton, probably about 12 years ago, I heard a talk about church planting and it was at that time I really felt like God telling me to do that. So I went forward at a meeting and said "yeah, I want to be a church planter".

Well, it was a long process actually. I was in a great church in Brighton, a Newfrontiers church (Church of Christ the King), I learned a lot but got to the point I think in being in a large church that I didn't feel stretched any more, which sounds a bit crazy, being in a large church you might think you'd get stretched a bit more, but I wasn't.

Then I felt God call, actually an audible voice, something I'd never heard before, to go to Middlesbrough, which is up in the north east of England. I was very scared when I first heard the word "Middlesbrough" because I realized we didn't have a Newfrontiers church there when I looked on the internet. I thought "oh no, I still want to be a part of this family of churches". But I knew I wasn't ready to church plant.

The great thing was, it was in a region called Teesside, and when I looked again on the internet we did have a church. So I went to join a smaller church, about 60 people at that point, it was a great growing church. I was a full-time pastor when I was in Brighton but there wasn't a job for me so I went there, got a job and just started to serve in the church and after about a year I think, they did employ me and I would say that was my church planting training. Being in a smaller setting, being involved in leadership there and looking how to grow this church.

Matt: You took a real risk. Were you constantly having to come back to that point that God spoke to you?

Steve: Yes, definitely, because it was an audible voice, which I have never heard God like this before, and I don't think I'll ever hear him like it. It was so dramatic that it had to uproot me from Brighton, where my friends and family were. So that was the start of it. It sounds weird but I think the church planting process always took place because it was letting go of a large church were I had a lot of friends, grown up in and discipled in. But, to go to another city, another place where we didn't know anybody. To start from scratch with friendship and that was a great preparation.

So, we served in that church but still there was this inner thing I think God was calling me to church plant. And, different options came up at different points. I considered maybe God was calling me to Australia because I wanted to go were I had relationship.

Matt: How did you test that?

Steve: I tested that by just finding out about it. I went online "how do I get to australia" and what I realized is I needed a degree which I didn't have. So I talked it through with the guy I was leading a church with and we thought about going part-time and I could do a degree part-time. Looked at the options but really felt that it wasn't the way for me.

And also, having spoken to our apostolic team that were involved out in Australia it was like "we are not interested in church planting immediately, we've got to get a base [church] first" and the guy said to me "Steve, you need to do your own thing now". And it was right.

So then we looked at where to go. On the north east coast of England there is a little place called Hartlepool which was about 12 miles from where our church was and we were helping develop a church plant there. Could I go there? I realized immediately it was too small a place I needed a big city with plenty of room.

Matt: So when you said you realized "for me", what did you mean?

Steve: I don't have a small village mentality. I've lived in big cities like Brighton and Middlesbrough and the danger for me was that it was only 12 miles from Teesside, the church I was involved in, and my mission would be I'd want to reach back into where I had already come from. And so it wasn't me. I also felt like we had begun to form and shape the church and I thought "no, I want to put foundations in from the start. I want to be involved in that process". Which is what church planting involves.

So, we looked at different options, prayed about it and as a region of churches we had been praying for this city called Hull. A city of quarter of a million, with quarter of a million on the outskirts. And, a local Newfrontiers York church prayed, holding prayer meetings to pray for the city. I got stirred to think about it by the guy I was working with. My wife and I started to chat about it "is Hull the place to go?". We knew it was the right time, we had got to that place, now where is it?

We just prayed. We were going on holiday (vacation) and thought this is a good time to really reflect, have a great relaxing time, get some thinking time because often as church planters you don't get much time to think. We started watching TV, a program came on "the worst places to live in the United Kingdom", and they had done research on all different statistics and facts and come up with the worst places to go. So it was the 10 worst places. It got to number 5 and it was Middlesbrough, which is where I had already been, where we had moved to in Teesside, and when it came to the number 1 worst place to live in the United Kingdom -- and it was Hull!

It was that point that I felt God say to me "where would Jesus go?". Jesus would go to the places of bad reputation. I actually discovered it is a really nice place with fantastic people, although it does have its problems. So, I knew in that moment that God was calling us. My wife needed convincing by actually going to look at the place. I didn't need to know even before we had gone. We turned up in the city and we both felt at peace "this is the place to come". That is a long way to say how did we start.

Matt: How did you get other people involved?

Steve: What we begun to do, once we realized where we were going, was to ask "who are my best friends?" People I have a relationship with, people I trust. And I want leaders. I don't mind who joins us, who is part of us, but I need to have good leaders to start with. I think the secret of how we've been successful is by starting with a good core group.

What we did is, we spoke to some of our best friends, our small group leaders in our church at Teesside, youth workers, and said "will you come with us?" And they said yes. And I thought, if you are going to start a church plant the key thing is we are going to need worship and it needs to be good. There is nothing worse than starting a church plant with no musicians. A large part of what we want to do together is worship. And it does help having people who can help lead it.

Matt: You were very specific about targeting and approaching someone to help you with worship.

Steve: I thought "who are the best worship people in the country that I am friends with?". So I ran up and old person who used to be in my youth group, called Matt, not you Matt, another Matt, another good friend also involved in my youth group. And he was leading worship at Church of Christ the King in Brighton, leading the worship team, and I thought "he's ideal".

I rang him, totally out of the blue, I hadn't really spoken to him much over the years and just said "would you consider?", and to be honest I thought I didn't have much chance really. But the amazing thing was he had been to the North East and lead worship at one of our conferences and it was at that point they felt God stir them to move. And when I came and said Hull, to them it wasn't out of the blue, it was like "I think God is speaking to us!"

Matt: So God had already gone ahead of you and spoken to these guys about coming -- that's encouraging!

Steve: Yes. There were specific people I targeted and lot who said no. it wasn't the right time for them. In fact I asked your brother and he came up to Hull, to visit, Dan and Adrienne.

Matt: I remember talking to him on the phone when they were going through that process.

Steve: They went through the process but it wasn't the right time. And that is fine and I don't think there is anything wrong in that, to have a look, but in the end we gathered 13 adults to go with us.

There was one couple from Kent, which is down on the south coast of the UK, and he had been an elder in a church who felt like he had been called, firstly through business as a property developer, wanting to develop a house as an investment and they had looked around the country and thought where are the best cheapest properties to buy? One of those was Hull. He'd come to Hull, and as he was coming up decorating they just thought where should we go to church. They had looked around at churches but there was no Newfrontiers church and thought this city is in need of a Newfrontiers church. So they had begun to come themselves and it came to the challenge -- the doing it!

We had 13 adults and my wife and I moved in May 2006. We hit the ground. We were first.

Matt: As people began to move how did you gather people together and what did you do to form that team?

Steve: We had 2 prayer meetings before May in Hull. We said "come to Hull, come to see it" because people we having to find jobs anyway and find accommodation. Let's come and pray together, lets have food together. Some of these people were friends, but some where people I had never met in my life. At that prayer meeting everyone was coming together and I laid out some of the vision of what we are doing and we just prayed.

Right from the beginning in prayer "what are we believing God for?" The prayer was specific. We ate together. I said this is what we are going to do. We are going to pray and eat together as part of our church because I like eating! The people gradually moved up over the summer. And really we just spent a lot of time in our home, we have people around all the time, in fact not much had changed. A lot of food, a lot of gathering, and at the same time we are here for the lost.

So right from the beginning I got funding for the first year from Newfrontiers, to fund my salary, and other Newfrontiers churches in the region have funded us. £10,000 from our sending church. A few thousand from other churches which paid for our PA system. It paid for different things which was great. But I got the finance in May and I thought there is no church people. So, I am looking at venues, thinking about where we are going to meet for a Sunday thinking about when that is going to happen. One day I wake up and think I need to do voluntary work and start meeting people. So that is what I began to do. Also I wanted to get to know Hull and some Hull people.

Matt: You have a particular gift of being able to connect with lots of different types of people very quickly.

Steve: Yes. I am an evangelist. The best church planters are evangelists because you've got to be able to gather people and reach the lost. If you are a pastor, just a pastor, you are in big trouble. You'll love people, which is great, but you are not really out there for the lost. And church planting was about reaching the lost.

The first few weeks I was there, there was a guy who I met, a young guy, and he asked why I was here and I told him what were doing and he told me he was interested in first aid. I said "that is great! When I start on a Sunday I'll need a first aider", which was a load of rubbish!

Matt: So you created an opportunity for him to serve? Here is something you can do in our church.

Steve: He said I'd love to do that! I thought we'll never need him! But I'll come back to that a bit later in terms of the first Sunday.

My wife went to work for the refugee service one day a week voluntarily and she met a refugee from Zaire who had moved to Hull, actually from Democratic Republic of Congo, as they are referred to. He's a Christian church pastor and he said I'd like to come and join you. So, we gradually met people. What we purposefully didn't do is we didn't advertise.

All we did is we had one web page with my phone number on because what I didn't want is anybody turning up at any of our meetings. They didn't know where we were or what we were doing because I wanted to talk to them first. I knew it would be Christians and we needed to start with a sore group of Christians as well to find us on the web and I didn't want a load of fruit-loops because you know in every city, in every town you always get church hoppers, and they come to the latest thing, they have got past issues, they want to suck you dry, they want to take your time and we were there for the lost. We are on a mission. We will pastor on the mission like a field hospital. If people are hurt in battle they set up a tent and the tent moves on with them. You get healed in the process, on the way, we'll help you and care for you.

Matt: So, no formal marketing or mass-communication?

Steve: No because we are there to reach the lost. The lost in the UK don't respond to marketing, or very little. We wanted good relationships with other churches. If we started a mass marketing campaign all the other churches would be suspicious thinking we are trying to steal their people. We have no intension to steal people. We are there to reach the lost. That is our primary calling. And if other people want to join us on that mission that's fine, but we'll connect with them on that level.

Matt: Was there any particular group of people you were purposeful about trying to target?

Steve: Everyone. Everyone who is lost. If they are not a Christian they are our target. So the first week in the end we started with 30 on the first Sunday. It was public in terms of we were coming together. The morning we started, started setting up, we met in a church hall, I got a phone call, we had met a couple of times to pray, we hadn't done anything else.

Matt: So you had a core of 13, then you made connections and grew to about 30 with kids and then you started a corporate gathering on Sundays.

Steve: And, I would lay down a foundational vision every weeks on a Sunday. But the first Sunday I got a phone call while I was setting up from a guy who was a Christian who said "we just found your website and we are looking for a church, where do you meet?" I told him it was our first Sunday and that he was welcome to come.

Over the summer we had done a couple of outreach events. We didn't have any publicity remember. We thought lets go and pray and ask God to lead us to people. I went with a guy who is now my elder, Matt, who is the worship leader who hated doing street evangelism, more than I do, you know cold contacts.

We went up to people and said "would you like prayer?" And now again in the United Kingdom most people are never offended, everybody we asked received prayer which is amazing. It was encouraging but we thought that none of these people are going to come on a Sunday -- we are not going to connect with them. And I said to Matt why don't we just pray, we had a few minutes left before we were going to meet everybody. Why don't we pray that we will meet somebody who is a Christian who has just moved to Hull.

At that point, we hadn't prayed, we literally bumped into somebody and I said "I'm really sorry". And they were looking up on a building in Hull and looking at something written in Latin. And I said "Do you understand what that means?" And she said oh, it means God guides us. Totally cheese-ally I said "Do you think God guides you?" And she said yeah! I said "are you a Christian?" She said yeah! I said "ah, have you just moved to Hull" ... yes! ... "Are you looking for a church?" ... yes! It was a mother and her daughter from Holland.

Matt, who is fairly quiet and not into street evangelism, turned to the woman and said "have you got something wrong with your knee?" And she goes yes! He said "Well, I had a picture of you before I came up this morning of a woman in a floral dress having something wrong with their knee. Can I pray for you?" We prayed for her in the street and God healed her. So guess who turned up on the Sunday? The family with their kids.

We hadn't planned to have kids the first Sunday. I had a friend visiting to support us on the first Sunday and I said "you are running the kids work for me, is that alright". It was our first Sunday and we started kids work. So that was the beginning. It was a bit raw.

The first Sunday somebody came in, we meet on a very rough council estate in the center of Hull, and somebody came in with glass in there head -- they had been bottled. So my first aider dealt with him and we rang 999 and had an ambulance at church on the first Sunday helping him out. This is going on out in the foyer while I was preaching, which was great! Second Sunday, somebody came in with a stab wound. Ha! It was really good, it was great, I love that stuff, that's me!

Matt: So the first aid guy had a calling?

Steve: I don't think he had ever dealt with anything like it. He thought we might have someone with a cut finger.

But what we did from the very first Sunday is that we are going to eat together every Sunday. First we found a place, a church hall, with food. We wanted to build relationships, get to know one another, then the people who come can stay for lunch. And because we were busy setting up, you are always busy being a church planter, you have to transport all your stuff there. You've got to sort it all out. We thought if we tried to go back to some bodies house and be together we didn't have anyone with a big enough house. We thought let's eat!

What began to transpire is that these people coming in being 'bottled' and 'glassed' saw we had food and we said "come in for a meal". What happened is that the whole estate begins to hear about it and we had about 30 people come every week just to come for the dinner. They turned up at the end. They wouldn't come for the service but that's fine, I didn't mind that. So I said, "you come to church, this is church and we are eating here".

Matt: You spent all your money on food?

Steve: Everybody in the church brought pot luck. That's what we did. What began to happen was a couple of them began to come a bit earlier, and a bit earlier, and they started getting saved!

Matt: Now it's 2 years on from the beginnings, what have you seen in terms of conversions?

Steve: We've seen about 20 people saved now. We are up to 100 adults now and 20 are new converts.

Matt: How many kids?

Steve: About 35 kids. We've got quite a diverse thing, the people who are getting saved. Last weekend we had a young guy out of the pub culture who had become a Christian. A daughter of one of our church members who is 74 who became a Christian back in December we baptized her and her daughter came to Christ who is in her 30's.

Then we started a coffee morning. And started inviting people to come for coffee .What we did was we went out to the streets with free tea and coffee and invited people into the building. We invited two people, and they came along, came into the building, one was 76 and the other 82, didn't know Jesus at all and they loved it. Came the second week and asked to come to church and I thought they are never going to enjoy our church. We are quite loud, it's noisy and it's vibrant. It was their first Sunday and we always give a response of salvation.

Matt: Ok, so you are very purposeful about the gospel?

Steve: Every week we share the gospel. We give a good opportunity for people to respond. I gave a call for the response and who came forward? This old lady and gave her life to Jesus! Her husband couldn't walk forward, he's in a motorized wheelchair, he was waving. So I went over to him and he said I want to become a Christian as well. And so we baptized them as well.

We had had people saved from drug addiction. From that kind of background. One of the guys which I didn't refer to, had been in a Newfrontiers church, but had moved to Hull for University and fortunately wanted to stay with Newfrontiers. Please plant a church in Hull, we need a church in Hull! And so when I went to meet him I thought "he's got a vision in his mind" and I sat down with him in a coffee shop in Hull and said tell me what do you want to see in this church plant? He said what I want to see above all is my sister, who lives in Hull with a non-Christian partner, I'd love to see God work in my sisters family.

So I said "that's a good thing we can pray for them". So Warren, the partner who came from a drug addiction background, in fact was originally from Brighton, I made an immediate connection when I met him. We got on really well. He used to live in a place called Hangleton, which is where you are from, but you can't tell by your accent anymore! You used to be like mine!

Matt: Yeah, I'm a missionary!

Steve: You are a missionary, exactly!

We managed to get him (Warren) on Alpha. He was working where I was volunteering, that is how I got to know him. That is why I volunteered at this place to get to know him because he was out of work. Got to know him. Invited him to Alpha and he came along. He enjoyed it. Chatted, got to know people. Brought his kid with him which is a bit of a pain at Alpha but we thought we can put up with young kids at Alpha. He came along but didn't respond to the gospel. And then what began to happen is that he started coming some Sundays, occasionally.

One Sunday we had a guest speaker and again we were having lunches at the end. There was a word on knowledge for somebody with a kidney condition and a few of us who knew about it thought that's him! But we looked around and he wasn't there. I thought I don't understand nobody responded to that word of knowledge.

5 minutes before the end he turned up because it was dinner. They turned up as a family for the food. Somebody grabs him and says about the word of knowledge and says comes forward to the front. He came forward. We laid hands on him and he had never been prayed for in that way. He said there is a heat in my body! Mate, there is a heat! It's really warm, it's really hot! I said "ok, I think that is probably God", we didn't know what was happening. And God just came on him and we said "Warren, do you want to become a Christian?" And he said Yes!

He became a Christian that Sunday and went to the consultant that week for his treatment. They had to do a new scan and couldn't find the condition. It was a condition that couldn't be healed. They could only give him medication to control it. But he was totally healed. Now his partner, we married them, and it was our first church wedding. They have got 2 kids and have been together and we are still praying for his wife to come through.

We have lots of stories like that of individuals coming to Christ.

Matt: That's amazing! Let's wrap this up. It sounds like since you've taken a leap of faith God has been with you in some amazing conversions and miracles. What things, in hindsight, would you do differently, where are you headed now and what would be your advice to me as I prepare to plant out?

Steve: Well, you probably wont like what I have to say. You can have all the training in the world, until you do it you've got no idea. What we found is that we made it up as we went along. We had very little strategy. We knew what our church mission was, we knew what our foundations was, we knew where we were going. But, we had no idea what it looked like or what was going to happen.

And I made decisions, because I was the church leader, every week "how are we going to do it? ... Oh my goodness, we have people like this now we've got these people coming to see! Shall we let them keep coming? Shall we not? Ok, we'd like to start a social outreach project but we already have one! We don't need to create anything we already have. I think we made it up as we go along.

What would I do differently? I don't think I would do anything differently.

Matt: What is your plan for the next couple of years?

Steve: The plan is, we got given a building, by the brethren church , they gave us a facility. They are people of the word. But they were very generous to us. The church was closing down, well I told them to shut down, that's another story, and they gave us the building.

So, our plan now is we are going to meet there. It's in a strategic location in Hull, by the football stadium. Very visible. Everybody knows. We will use that facility more and more. Our vision is to just keep doing outreach. That is our main thing. We don't want to get distracted. And I think that is the key thing I learned from doing a church plant. The one thing is that it's the lost! Everything we do is mission. If it is not about mission then lets not do it. Let's no waist our time.

So for example, some of the girls in the church wanted to start a book group, let's get together an talk about book. I said "that's fantastic, only if you bring friends. If you are only going to do it once a month on a Friday that is fantastic, but only if you are going to bring friends." We need to keep meeting people. I think that is the key thing for me is that it's about mission. When you take your eye of the ball of mission and you get sucked into pastoring and all that as a church leader and that's the key thing, you have got to have people around you that are going to pastor people because you've got to lead. I just pray people in.

I have an older couple with us, in their sixties, he's been a pastor for 15 years, been a Christian for 50 years. Any problem, with any pastoral need that is going to take more than 1 appointment I say you go and see that couple because I don't want to be distracted because I am on a mission. I think Mark Driscoll said it this week at the conference, I have got to work on the church not in the church. If I am always working in the church I have not got thinking to think where are we going next?

Now within a year we became elders, myself and Matt, we became elders of the church which helped bring stability. But now we are looking how are we going to build our leadership. Where is the next elder coming from? It's got to be leadership. And within it, in the beginning, the DNA of the church, has been and will continue to be, where are we going to plant next?

From week one we say It's great you are all here, but in a couple of years you are not going to be here because some of you are going to be planting the next church. We are a church planting church. We don't get settled. And so now we have this small building, it only seats 150.

Matt: If you are 100 adults now, you are going to outgrow that place soon.

Steve: We are. We are going to go with multiple meetings probably -- multi-meetings. I mean, you come to a conference like this and you think, what are we going to do? God speak to us? You have given us this building in a strategic place but it is too small. Let's multiply the service. We are thinking now, maybe from January, let's just do it! Keep going on the mission.

Matt: Well Steve thanks so much for joining me on my podcast and it's been great to catch up with you.

For more info about the Newfrontiers Church in Hull visit: notdull.org

Interview with a St. Louis Church Planter: Jason Gardiner

Special update: I wrote a book for churches to give to first-time guests. It’s had a huge impact at bringing more people back as second-time guests and adding them into the church community. Get the Kindle version of Unforgettable: Your purpose in Christ here and the print version from unforgettableness.com. Those outside the USA may need to order print copies from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.eu.
I recently met with Jason Gardiner of ChurchSTL.org at a local Starbucks and interviewed him about the new church he has planted in St. Louis. You can use the podcast interface on the right to listen to my most recent interview, download the interview with Jason Gardiner or read the transcript below.

Jason is 39 years old and grew up in San Francisco, California. He was involved with YWAM for 10 years, on staff with a large church for 7 years and served an international parachurch ministry for 4 years before planting a church in St. Louis.

During the interview we met a local realtor out of the blue who is a Christian and loves to help new churches find meeting locations – what a great opportunity for a church planter! Jason and Angie exchanged details and hope to work together as the new St. Louis church looks for their own facility. They currently meet in an elementary school. The whole interaction is recorded in the audio. Listen (or read) and enjoy!

Matt: Jason, thanks for joining me today. Tell me the basics about the church?

Jason: We launched on January 27th of this year (2008) and the church really has a focus on community and also on young people. I surveyed the St. Louis church demographics and found there is very little being done effecting the college age on a city wide level. So the hundreds and thousands of people between the ages of 20 – 30 have very few churches with a concentrated effort.

Very few churches actually have a pastoral effort or pay pastors a salary to reach out to that age group. The kinda churches big enough to bring somebody on staff pro bono that age group. I kinda call it the generation who has been kicked to the curb – even though that's where our future and our leadership comes from.

That's where we go to college to be trained to be world changers whether it's secular or in our Christian lives. Yet the church fails to engage them with an intellectual-spiritual dialogue and make place for them and room for them to be a leader and trained. So, our church has very much a young leadership culture in it.

Matt: What got you thinking that way? (focusing on students)

Jason: Well, I've worked with young people of college age ever since I started ministry in the mid 80's. I love them because I find that college age is so moldable for the purposes of God. If you take a 45 year old who, whether he was saved when he was young or gets on fire again after he's lived life a bit, I find that most people in their 30's and 40's are still trying to repair their fyco scores, still trying to pay off their credit cards, they have 2.5 jacked-up kids and trying to replace the damage they did in their 20's.

So, instead of trying to fix these broken people let's just not let them get broken in the first place. Let's reach them before they screw up their lives and take a decade and a half to try to figure out what they did wrong. Let's just develop them into leaders then.

You see in the Bible a culture of young people whether it's Daniel or Jeremiah. Young people who were standing up in their generation and leading the nation. I believe that wasn't just a scriptural anomaly but I believe that is a pattern that God loves – taking people who will take him at his word. So if God says I can heal the sick they are just naïve enough to believe it. They don't have all this life experience that tells us "Well, actually I had 84 friends who died from cannibalism and, oh my goodness!" So often our experience dictates our theology instead of really just believing the word straight up on face value.

Matt: What was your strategy? How did you build up to the launch?

Jason: Over a couple of years I really built some relationships with some people. I would call them the disenfranchised, the kicked to the curb generation I mentioned earlier. So some of these folks didn't attend church, they loved God and yet there was no joy in their Christianity. Some of them were attending church like every other month. Kinda like the "I'm tipping God today for showing up, I'm doing the kingdom a favor!"

I started building relationships with some younger people and over the course of a couple of years developing some good authentic relationships. They even began asking questions "would I start a church here in St. Louis?" That really became the start of me thinking about it. It wasn't for me like "Oooh, St. Louis is needing my kind of church". I wasn't the start of the process. It was a number of people coming to me and saying "hey Jay, let's do it!" and I was like "alright". And then I spent probably a year praying about that and bringing it before the Lord and letting God confirm it through various different ways.

We started then meeting with several people in my living room. No bells and whistles or marketing.

Matt: How many people were you gathering at that time?

Jason: About 6. Then that grew to about 14.

Matt: Over what kind of period?

Jason: About 4 or 5 months. It wasn't like I had a meeting and 900 people showed up on the first day, it was building relationships and developing the integrity. I really learned that if I invest in people I have the right to speak into their lives. They will willfully place themselves in a submissive relationship were they are like pastor-talking so that you can start pointing out peoples blind spots.

Most pastors or church structures don't actually ever earn the right to speak into people so when blind spots are brought up it's usually through confrontation or an incident in a church. People just get offended and go instead of really receiving the correction, like the bible says: if you correct a wise man you make him wiser, creating an environment where you can actually bring up people's blind spots and work them through it, just like the proverb says: faithful are the wounds of a friend, well we want to be the kind of church that we stab each other in the chest not in the back. Where we can have the hard conversations but we grow through it and become stronger for it. So, people started growing and changing. I believe that one of the great tools for church growth is: changed lives, change lives.

Matt: How did you transition your house meeting to a weekly public meeting?

Jason: That is a great question. I am still trying to process exactly how we are doing this. One of the things that I felt we would have a large component in our church would be worship. There is whole boat load of doctrine behind that statement. I honestly believe the most fundamental and one of the great statements mankind has ever contributed to the Christian experience is the reduction of the Westminster's creed which says: the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I think that worship is the clearest expression of that which is of course the picture of the throne in heaven in Revelation which is of course worship. I believe that having a place created in the local church where people can genuinely have face to face encounters with God is the absolute foundation of us living out that expression: the chief end of man.

When I was a teenager I was a drug dealing punk. I was raised in a Mormon church, so I was in a cult.

Matt: So you were really messed up!

Jason: I was jacked-up – capital "J"! I had a father who was a Catholic so we were just a religious mutt. I was using drugs. I was completely confused and I had been to religion – I had been to Catholic churches and I've been to Mormon churches my whole life.

But when I had a genuine encounter with Jesus my life dramatically changed. Nobody needed to tell me to throw away my Black Sabbath albums or stop smoking pot and taking acid. It was just the overflow of gratitude that came from the revelation that I was going to hell and that he took my place on the cross and that if I would just exchange my dead life for his life and obey him and his word that I would have a wonderful purpose and a great life. It was like a do-over. It was like Jason 2.0! It was like a whole new opportunity ahead of me.

It took me a long time going to church to figure out that Christians didn't live Christianity very much – they appended Christianity. They pay pastors to perform and impress them with edutainment rather than being a church that gets them off the couch and into the game!

The thing is we want to create a place for genuine encounter in worship. So, I had a buddy of mine who was on my staff with me in California at the church, and before we started this bible study, we started to dialogue of the possibility of them joining me in this adventure and of course I went to the senior pastor, who is a good friend of mine, who of course I was associate [pastor] for him, asked his permission, did the whole I want to steal one of your guys thing. He went "go for it", and then I said "can I steal the youth pastor and inter director as well?"

So I started having discussions with these 2 buddies who I had pastored, I was their supervisor on staff. Over the course of 3-4 month they just really felt like they would move their families out here and be part of the team and once we started having a genuine worship component. Where it was a real life-giving experience for people who had heard good music, but there is a difference between good music and being in an environment of the presence of God in the area of worship. You have your Hillsongs and your Delirious. It's not about reproducing chord charts – it's about the atmosphere of life.

So in some senses I wanted to cut the middle man out of church – the pastor! No more priests, people needing to build their spiritual life depending on whether the pastor feed'em or not, whether they brought a life changing word on Sunday or not. But they have direct access for themselves in the presence of God. When that started happening growth was really very much the byproduct.

I really found that scripture as we lift him up he'll draw people and so changed lives change lives. People started weeping and crying. Not contrived, not forced and not one of these "Come on man, raise your hands, wave them in the air like you don't care", not a hyped up cultural style. But, just an atmosphere where without the hype and manipulation, people would start crying spontaneously in the middle of worship and after church they would be like "phew, I needed that! God really touched me." And we are like "Wow, really? Praise God for you!"

That's what we wanted to happen and so one of the first forms of evangelism that we saw is a person who's now a friend, 6 months into the church, raging alcoholic, living on the streets, homeless, he got a flyer, it was probably like a garbage flyer, you know what I'm saying someone threw it, but God's into recycling as well. This guy picked up this flyer, walked onto our church, there are like 20 of us, drunk off his brain, and umm, homeless, pretty much smelled, and ah we are singing "Rain Down" by Delirious and he just starts balling. No Christian background. Just pagan drunk, capital "P". All of a sudden this dude gets saved spontaneously because God drew him.

I am going to say this not because I am better than anyone else, because I'm not. He said "This is the first church I've been to where Jesus is at!" And right there lays the heart of our church. We want to make church as accessible with as little hurdles and religious forms as possible and if we can just show off how good he is to people and really make him famous and put him at the center of it. We found that Jesus is like a great banquet table. The more attractive He is the more we can make that banquet table people will just pick up a piece of fruit of that banquet table and take a little bite and taste and see that "God is good". He is not weird like I thought, He's not religious. Life is not a bunch of chance. Life is about "I can". There is potential.

Matt: What is the balance now of your method of reaching out? Is it still just relational and viral or is it more?

Jason: It's very viral right now. With the statistics on marketing and as a church plant one of the large battles anyone has, including us, is the battle of resources.

I was just talking to one of the national Christian ad companies, that is a church planting ad agency, there stats on mailers, flyers, cold calling is about .04 per action. So, for every 1000 you might get about 4. When you start breaking that out to 30-40 cents a hit you really need $50-60,000 to bring in 30, 40, 50 people into your doors. And even then, when you do, church planting research says 50% bail. So it's a low low return. I am not saying it is not right. I got a buddy of mine who started his church on his first Sunday with over 400 people. Dropped to 200. Then first year got a 1,000. Six years later got 9,000. So I mean hey, it works!

We are spending our financial resources on investing on our core group. Buying them book and CD's, having meetings, we are feeding them when they come over. We are actually training, again, I am not trying to sound arrogant, like "we are actually training unlike other church", but we are putting our money into our people and into our team and empowering them and helping them grow and experience Christ so that, again, I really just believe that changed lives change lives.

You know, before Jesus died the disciples denied him and fled. They were like rats of a ship when he was handed over to be crucified. Now you can say whatever you want at that point but as soon as they saw the risen Christ some fundamental changes, what happened between the cross and Pentecost? They were hiding in an upper room and then the Holy Spirit filled the church, whatever that looks like, something fundamentally changed in them where they were on longer afraid to be put to death or to talk about the change that had been brought in their lives.

[At this point a realtor introduced herself to us and wanted to help Jason find a facility for his new church to meet in. She has a specific passion to help churches find facilities. What a great opportunity. God is good at setting these things up! Listen to it at minutes 14:56 – 21:00]

We were kinda talking about how we are going from here and that kind of thing right there [God given opportunity with a realtor] is a great example. We are excited, we are talking about our lives being changed and about this church plant and so here you have a little encounter and somebody happens to eavesdrop. Church growth really happens naturally.

Matt: What have you tried that didn't work?

Jason: I am not big on what I call bandwagons. You have the "worship band wagon", and when I say worship I mean style, not the doctrine. There is the prophetic movement in the 80's. There was the seeker sensitive movement and now there is the missional movement. You name it. There is the apostolic movement in Pentecostal circles. There is a new revival in Lakeland Florida movement going on.

And you know, really, people are always not sure what they are looking for they just know they haven't found it. And so, I call it "rent a vision". When you don't have a blueprint for what you are doing and you reach out there and it's transferable, this or that, and you jump on somebody's bandwagon and a decade later you look back and go "wow".

I just believe that we just need to have as leaders a clear blueprint from the word of God of what Church is doctrinally and what the basic doctrines of Christianity are and put our head down and be faithful to it. I heard that saying, not sure who said it, but men are always looking for better methods, God is always looking for better [changed] people.

Matt: What have been the lows and how have you dealt with them?

Jason: Initially there is the fantasy perhaps that ah, you know the thing is going to takeoff; we are going to rock the city. Not that we are not doing great on that, we are 4 or 5 months old and we are 80 people which is on the bell curve we are doing ok. But there is that sense of we could have had a 200 people by now. So it's that kind of natural sense of the readjusting to the expectations that we can't depend on something, the false expectations.

And then there is that whole barrier of the resource. Both at a person level and at the financial level. That you overcoming, you are constantly. Here is a classic example, I met with a great family, they were tossing up buying into what we were doing or buying into a megachurch down the street that had 5,000 people. Now, I am not saying the megachurches are not great. Praise God for them. We are all on the same tea, the bells and the whistles that an established long-term church has.

So on that secular level you are kind competing with people with a consumerism mentality, kind like "what's in it for me?" I got Bobby here, he has youth group of 20 kids, and this one has a youth group of 100 kids so that consumerism is like McChurch. "I'll have a little bit of church with this and a big Mac and this and that".

So fighting the consumerism in the culture where people are looking initially to attend something that meets their needs instead of looking at it from a biblical point of view of what do they bring to the table like in Acts chapter 2 is says that people were selling their possessions to give to those who as they had need. So instead coming to the church of "here is how I can serve because I am alive in Christ" they are looking at it more like "how does the church meet my needs and fit into my busy schedule?"

Matt: How have you kept yourself spiritually close to God and feeding yourself?

Jason: Piper has a great statement that is one of my ruling personal values that: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. It goes right back to that Westminster confession: the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. When am I absolutely emotionally and intellectually enthralled and captivated by Him and I'm meeting with him on a personal level not just to put my sermon together or I've got a 3 o'clock appointment and I'm driving and thumbing through scriptures at the red light. You know what I'm saying? It's what Pastors do. Pastors.com! Again, it's like rent-a-vision.

When I avoid living the cheap life like that where I have to get up everyday at 6am, seek Jesus for several hours for myself, for my wife and my family and the sheer pleasure of hearing him say "Well done good and faithful, I love you son". That personal relationship. And so when I am satisfied, like obviously you can tell the excitement in my voice, it's not just because we are doing an interview, it's just where I am living. But, that overflow of excitement touches somebody fifteen feet away and they are excited, they speak up for Christ, and we have a great little conversation here. That is the magic for me, is when I genuinely tap in.

As a pastor here is the difference. I am able to lead my church out of the overflow of what is coming into my life instead of constantly emptying myself, giving out to all my people to the point of my reserve levels are like a drought starting to go under, you know, I am starting to run thin. So I've been in full-time ministry for 20 years and what I've learned is that I need to live out of the overflow of my personal relationship with Christ and not out of the mandate and expectations my people put on me to be their pastor.

I am living for an audience of one. I am not on call. I am not you know the person who if it's 11 at night and there is a couple who are having a big meltdown, you know, I had one of those recently and I loving said, they know me so they know my heart, and I said "look, you know, how long you've been married?", "13 years", "you are having a meltdown". Pastor come, its midnight! I said "here is the bottom line of it, this has taken you 13 years to get to this point so you've been making choices to get to where you are tonight, you actually want where you are, whether by omission or commission, you have been making choices that end up here and it can't wait until 10 in the morning? I'll see you in the morning. Do you have a knife in your hand? No I don't! Do you have a gun? No! Ok go to bed and we'll fix this in the morning".

But my point is this. My people in the church don't rule my life and neither do their expectations. I am living for an audience of one. I am living for treasure in heaven. I am not living for a large church where I can write a book, go on a speaking tour and have a big 401K. I am doing it for the sheer love of the game.

Matt: As a church planter you need to be a generalist. How do you manage your time?

Jason: Well, because I saw this battle coming there where a couple of proactive things that I did before I launched this church. If you will, my eldership, and by the way that eldership they are all on a one year kind of interim, you know they are trying out for the team. At the end of the day I have to like'em. I am committed to working with people that I actually like, you know what I am saying?

Actually I don't want to work with people that I want to fire on Monday. Like "dear lord, what happened to those PowerPoint slides" and then you know on Monday I am cursing their name! I want to work with people that I love and I like. You know what I am saying? And so what I did was I really took my time getting into this.

As I mentioned earlier I talked to a few people so my entire team, my first key level of leadership all have at least 7 years of full-time ministry in large churches and successful ministries. So I have a fully trained youth pastor who had a youth group of 500 kids who ran an intern program of 50 live-in students. A worship leader song-writer who had 4 services a weekend with big bands, reporting projects. I have a church administrator. I have an experienced cell group pastor who had always been involved in that.

One of my confirmations to do this is that I believe in New Testament team leadership and I want to avoid this CEO American church. You know the personality cult. Because of my former job working for a Christian celebrity, who shall be unnamed for the benefit of … them, I got to meet everybody famous in American running large churches and have one to one conversations with them, it was my old job, and we'd go into business right at them and one such person who had 30-40,000 people in their church opened up on an occasion and told me that there biggest problem was that their church was a personality cult. And if they advertised that the senior pastor would not be there because he is speaking somewhere else about a third of the church would not show up that next Sunday. And they can barely make payroll because their tithes go down so dramatically because that "man" isn't there.

I believe in team leadership. One of the keys for me to launch out and step into this is that I was not going to be alone trying to wing this. But, I asked God for a seasoned team of mature leaders who have proven gifting. 1 Timothy 3 talks about before you choose an elder, not just a deacon, first let them serve and be tested. And so I didn't want my soft spot for somebody become my blind spot in choosing my leadership team. "I like you, you're my buddy plumber Bob! And plumber Bob might have a call on his life but it might not be to church eldership. But, plumber Bob with the best intentions ends up jacking up half the church because he doesn't know how to communicate, he ends up getting into politics.

People play off one parent against another in leadership, they go "that pastor, not that one". He doesn't know how to squelch gossip. He doesn't know the basic human elements of church leadership. He gets caught up in stuff that offends people, wounds them. I didn't want to do that. Now, our second level of leadership have also been involved for years in running cell groups in local churches.

My core of 40 people for the most part all have extensive experience. So therefore they are able to rally people around them because they know what they are called to do and they do it well. I call it the KFC principle. Kentucky Fried Chicken, they do one thing and they do it well. So, they do Chicken right. And so one of our slogans is let's do church right! Let's just do a few things and do them well. Very few people would drive across St. Louis for a four. You've heard of the Marcus Buckingham concept about you know, live out of your strengths and not out of your weaknesses, so I have staffed my weaknesses. People will drive across St. Louis for a night.

I am able to focus my time and energy on developing a culture of leadership within the church. And I have individual leaders who can handle everything related to the worship, everything related to the cell development and training and the leadership development of the church. Somebody to handle all the ministry of youth. We just had a seasoned children'''s pastor join our church. So we have an experienced children's pastor, a youth pastor, an intern director, a worship pastor and a cell pastor on my team and there is me.

Matt: That's awesome! And you have 40-50 people!?

Yes. These leaders of mine are now the 2 Timothy 2:2 principle. Paul is writing to Timothy his disciple encouraging him to find faithful men that he can entrust the message to. So that they can find faithful people to entrust it. There are 3 or 4 generations there of leadership. In other words there is a culture and a DNA of leadership that God invests in people, not in processes and structures.

I spend 80 percent of my time with people who are moving the ball down the field. If I have somebody who has secret sins, they are addicted to cannibalism, they have weird stuff in their life, we are going to help them get free, but the first question I ask them is: are you involved in one of the 8 cell groups in our church and what is your cell group leaders name, have you called them? Because I am committed to helping people win. And by doing that, if people have to go above the cell group leader to the pastor and therefore get more quality ministry because it's the "senior pastor", look, people who have the addiction to cannibalism, of course I am mocking it but that's just my budding sarcasm – I'm working on that!, but I undermine and cut off at my knees my next level of leadership.

I am committed to raising up Ephesians 4 ministries which says that pastors, the five fold ministries are there to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. So my job is to equip you to win. You are the one on the field playing the game not me. Most churches have it backwards. Most churches are reverse engineering it. They are paying professionals to do it yet they are struggling to find volunteers to fulfill the roles in the church.

What I am doing is to purposefully not be the best at what I do. Because if you have a Martin Smith as a worship leader you'll never raise up another worship leader in that church because they will be intimidated to sing next to Martin. Because Martin does it better. So I am committed to leading in a weakness so God can be glorified as apposed to leading out of this big strength and I am the best counselor and the best preacher. I am pushing my team forward all the time and publicly being generous with my words. Man, these cell group leaders rock, this associate pastor rocks and we are building up confidence in a team as apposed to the a man.

So my time is spent with my leaders. How to encourage them, how to strengthen them, how to help them with a confrontation issue. Well, here is how we help people win. Be committed to completing instead of competing. And so I help teach to the team how to deal with confrontation and politics which is 90% of where churches fail and so my time is spent with my leaders. I am developing a future DNA instead of dealing with the people who suck those pastors will to live out. And those people are never what you build a church on.

Because let's say I placate Sister Sally now who has a complaint that the music is too loud, well, she is an offense waiting to happen. Experience tells me she is going to be offended 2 years down the road anyway so let's juss go ahead and have the offence now and get rid of her. Because she has 800 other churches in St. Louis she can take that opinion to.

The bottom line is I am looking for people who are willing to forgive and cover sin, not morally like "oh that pastors out getting drunk", I'm not talking about overt, I am talking about opinion. And the people that get offended over opinion and attitude are not the people who you are going to build the church on.

The bottom line is they are going to have that opinion, keep that opinion, this is probably church 3 for them in the past year anyways. I'd rather offend them now and just say "hey, I know a bunch of pastors, I'll call them for you, I know you think you are the greatest worship leader in the free world but hey look I am Simon Cowl, you are on Christian American Idol and the distance between your perception of your great gifting and why no one here has recognized it, and you actual performance is huge".

Most Christians judge themselves on their intensions but everyone else judges them on their behavior. Most Americans just need a good loving Pastor to just bust them out and say "that sucks!" No one is being edified by that by the way, the whole Litmus Test for Spiritual Gifts in the local church according to 1 Corinthians 12:7 is that your spiritual gift is given for the common good. So it's up to the rest, when you see people run for the doors.

You can think you are a worship leader but I'm telling you that 34 people are plugging their ears and running for the doors like rats off the ship, they are testifying that your gift is not as great as you think you are. I'm loving you enough to point out your blind spot. If you can't handle the truth, if you are a Jack Nickleson in A Few Good Men "You can't handle the truth", then there are probably 800 other churches in town ready to live with your deception. So, that is when we are set free anyways. The more true we are the more brokenness we live out of the greater our freedom is. I don't mean to pontificate. You can just tell that I have some passion.

Matt: It's clear that you have your priorities set. This is where you want to spend most of your time because it's the most fruitful.

Jason: I just believe that everything in the kingdom is based on "be fruitful and multiply". Now I am not making this a major doctrine, I just believe that everything in nature that in general is healthy naturally reproduces. And within that seed that falls from the tree isn't just a seed for one more tree but the potential that is within that seed is for hundreds of seeds given that right condition.

So in that fallen seed from a tree there is another forest of trees in that seed and over generations one seed drops a seed a makes two, those two before 4, those 4 become …, and thus the principle of multiplication not just addition. So I believe that if I invest my time into people who have the ability to reproduce then in the short term it might look like we only picked up 4 people this year, but next year it will be 8 people and the next year it will be 16, then 32, then 64 and within 8 generations we are at a 1,000. But it is quality not just quantity.

In Matthew 5 where Jesus says consider the lilies of the field and see how they grow, he is not just asking for a basic simple observation. The Greek verb he is using there is super intensive, it's not just an observational "look and see how they grow" it's a call to the super deep underground realities that caused that flower to grow. The root systems, what is not seen in the simple observation.

He is saying hey, study why the lilies grow. And the lilies grow because they are in good soil. They have enough sunlight and there are principles which cause that lily to grow. And that is what he is saying. He is saying don't live in an arbitrary carefree disconnected passion. He is saying look, study!

Now, what caused people to grow as well is setting you up for success. And when you succeed and you are being passionately filled with Christ, everything in nature tells people, I call it the all-by-itself principle, the lilies of the fields don't struggle to grow and grow a church, they just do that out of the overflow of health. Because they are according to Colossians routed and being built up in Christ.

Matt: Where have you been able to draw financial resources from and are you full-time?

Jason: I am full-time right now and we have a church in California called the Fathers House which is kinda acting as our covering church where I was on staff and a number of the other members where on staff. They have given us a couple of generous checks to help buy trailers and some sound gear and what not.

Basically what we did is before we launched the church in January (2008) we had about 3-4 months of that small in my living room meeting. And we encouraged people to start investing right away. So, in the 6 months we've raised $60,000 and all of that has gone into resources and tools and curriculum and books and trailers and gear and video and websites and Mac computers and you know flyers and posters. I am just now starting to take a minimal salary.

I positioned my life where I could live on a reduced salary for probably another 4-5 months based on current growth projections. The bottom-line to is how we structured the finances is that of our 100% we take in we are going to live of what I call the 80-10-10 principle the church. We are going to tithe 10%, we are going to save 10% and we are going to live our general budget off 80%. And, of that 80% only 30% is allocated to salary. Then the other 60% of that 80% will be allocated to local outreaches and investing in local areas like offices, curriculum, youth groups, we break down the budget from there.

I am not going to have a top heavy salary church. But we are only going to be using a third of the 80% to pay staff. So, when I can pay for more staff, that we have within that 30% a reasonable budget, then staff member number 2 comes on.

Matt: What is you long term vision for St. Louis? What is your advice for me as I train to start a new church?

Jason: My long term vision is, again going back to that healthy thing in nature, that my goal is not arbitrary like "oh I want a 1,000 people!". To me that is like walking up to a tree and saying "come on, produce more fruit!". It's arbitrary, you know. Me thinking of or conjuring up a particular number that that would make my own ego in ministry. And then therefore gearing everything around that, again that's like CEO Christianity.

But whatever size our church gets to, which I believe is if it's healthy it will grow. My real goal is to help my leadership team all become senior pastors with successful thriving local growing churches as well. And so, my goal is not just to have a good church, but to raise up and launch local healthy churches.

We are going to plant a church all the way in India. I feel that the best way for us spiritually to position ourselves for God to invest in us is to be investing in a third world mission plant environment itself. So, we have 18 people never been overseas, paying the money to help plant a church in India this year. We are all going and they are going to be involved in a long term mission work from day one in our church.

We believe in planting churches. We believe in local churches. My passion for long term vision is that we are planting successful, life-giving churches that are planting successful, life-giving churches.

Now, in terms of advice to you. Man, just find out what Jesus is saying and get your head down and get busy. Now, with that, if you join a network that can help fund you or you have relationship that can gather around you to help create funding you probably got to go either on of those two roads on a practical level.

What I am seeing from experience now, not just being on staff on a big church, but starting it on day one, is you probably need anywhere between $50-150,000 to get a church off the ground depending on how big you want to start. Like I said, my friends started with probably $100,000, the first service had 400 out the gate. He spent all $100,000 on that first service. So, big risk, but it paid off. Now, 6 years later he has 9,000 people in his church. Go figure!

Or you could do it more of the way I am doing it. I just gathered in some friends, some interested people that had bought into a vision and into my life. Here is a philosophy that helps me. The Greek culture was interested in information, amongst some of their highest goals, therefore we have the Platos, the Socrates, we have the great philosophers that where informational.

The Jewish culture wasn't so interested in what information that you know, they weren't so much interested in what you know, they were more interested in who you know. So in the Jewish culture you didn't get a degree in information you got a degree in someone's life. It was: who are you mentored by? You are a protégé of who? And we see that played out in where Paul was trying to minimize some of the debate that was being created by "I follow Apollo's, I follow Paul" but yet the invitation was follow me as I follow Christ.

The Jewish culture was big on doing life together. One of the best ways to plant a church is to find a core group of 10, 12, 15 people and do life with them. And based on that relationship, and if it has life to it, God can give gifting, character is earned. And so if you have people of character and commitment it speaks life and people are hungry to be apart of something that has life and that has legacy. The unbroken chain of 2,000 years of church history. They want to be connected to something ancient and yet relevant and when people find genuine community they will buy in and it doesn't matter if it is 25 people in a living room or 400 in an elementary school or 600 in a new built sanctuary.

Anyway, those are some ramblings. At the end of the day I don't know, I haven't got a clue!

Matt: Jason, thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

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