It is hard to tell people the truth sometimes. But building up the body, building the church requires truth telling. I have been coaching planters and sometimes that requires saying things about their baby…any mother will tell you that is high risk. One of the guys I have coached has just posted one of the most insightful reflective self evaluations I have seen in a long time. It was a pleasure to read:
It’s been a wild year by: Mike Knott
Last year (’06) in November I hosted the leaders at our house to have a meeting about the direction of the church and it turned into an all-out brawl.
This year I hosted the leaders at our house in November and it was … beautiful. We wore formal attire, Theresa provided a gorgeous vase of flowers, I cooked t-bones and prime sirloin on the grill (with Mike’s help!), we served potatoes, cheesy vegetables and ‘vintage’ apple cider. Anna brought an apple tort and my wife made chocolate mint brownies. It was a feast to celebrate the harvest and all the Lord has brought us through. I had the opportunity to thank everyone personally for their dedication, commitment, and love. It was so precious. After the meal we sat in our living room and took turns toasting the Lord for the various gracious deeds he has performed and the ways he has worked in our lives. My one regret is that I forgot to take pictures!
That meal and all it symbolized was the purest delight (James 1:2) because of what we went through to get there.
In the summer of 2006 about half of the young families in the church moved away – California, Hong Kong, Willmar, wherever. It was tough. We had been in ministry for three years at the time and we had roughly a dozen young families (twenties and early thirties), five older (late forties) families, and twenty singles in the core. So six young families moved that summer as did some of our very best, brightest, most talented and most committed singles.
Financially, giving dropped by over a third – almost in half, and we lost a lot of talent and five of the ten men who had been through about two years of leadership training. We had a bare bones budget at the time and we were hardly making that to begin with. I was doing substitute teaching one to three days a week to make ends meet for our family. When those leaders and their generosity moved away we faced a significant challenge.
On top of that, I had made a number of mistakes in leading and organizing the church for the mission God has given us and that caused us a number of problems. These mistakes frustrated three of the older families, so they left. But worse, much worse, it cost us a ton of momentum and a painful number of missed opportunities with seekers.
I think I can say that I am effective at communicating the gospel to my generation and I know that our worship team does a great job with our music. So we have a decent worship gathering to which we can invite people. But here’s what would happen: Pre-Christian God-seekers would come to check us out, they would groove to the music and connect with the message, but we had no structure/organization to help them connect to the body. They weren’t being greeted well and there were no classes or small groups for them to join where they could learn and form relationships. When I think back on our four years of church-planting, that’s what hurts the most. We had gained a hearing for the gospel with a number of spiritually hungry people but lost it because of poor design and follow through. As the leader of this church, that was entirely my fault.
In the first year of ministry, I had gathered a core team of men and we spent the next two years meeting at least weekly, to encourage and challenge one another to grow. It was a powerful time. We confessed sin to one another, we prayed for one another, we bore one another’s burdens and we grew together. Several guys got free of pornography, we grew in our marriages, and God provided some significant healing to us as well. Over all, it was pretty cool.
Here’s the problem though: this Wesleyan-style holiness group, which we called Pottery Class, was my only channel for leadership training in the church. So when half of those guys moved in one summer, and two or three others got completely busy with new babies and new businesses/careers, it created a total leadership void in the church.
Moreover, I kept telling these guys they were the leaders of the church because we were meeting together each week but with few exceptions, they weren’t leading. One brother was fasting for the team four days a week, which was really awesome, but most of the others were “busy” with work, family, and recreation and not taking much time to shepherd the flock or serve in a significant capacity at HOP. I thought that by meeting with them weekly and calling them leaders I could get them to help me shepherd. I was wrong. According to Tom Nebel and Gary Rohrmayer (whom I respect for their work as church planters and equippers of church planters) in their book Church Planting Landmines, giving people titles without seeing first how they handle responsibility is one of the greatest mistakes a planter can make.
Now, in their defense, I will say that these were good men and they wanted to help. The biggest problem was that I wanted them to be creative, aggressive, and entrepreneurial – just go out there and love somebody! When they needed more direction than that. Andy Stanley (whom I respect for his incredible wisdom) says in his book 7 Practices of Effective Ministry (co-written with Reggie Joiner and Lane Jones) that if you give good people clear goals, they will reach them every time. I failed to do that. These guys needed to know that I needed them to help shepherd and they needed me to show them the concrete, simple steps to take.
With that leadership void and a lack of clear, stratigic thinking on my part, trouble came calling. A series of conflicts ensued. I was resentful because guys I was counting one weren’t helping and others were resentful because the church was floundering without appropriate direction from me.
Proverbs says a man is praised according to his wisdom. I wasn’t getting a lot of praise then.
At times it was ugly. It hurt quite a bit. I sat in front of our fireplace one day last fall thinking about a very close friend who was leaving the church, not-so-manly tears in my eyes, wondering, “Lord, why is my friend being so mean to me? Why is he so angry?” I really couldn’t understand it at the time, but the Lord gave me a word that didn’t make me feel really great, but at least it gave me some direction:
When David was on the run from his usurping son, Absalom, Shimei the Benjamite came out to curse David as he and his entourage passed by. One of David’s loyal soldiers, Abishai son of Zeruiah said, “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me go over and cut off his head.” And honestly that’s how I felt some days too. But David’s response is instructive and this is the word God gave me: “What do you and I have in common, you sons of Zeruiah? If he is cursing because the LORD said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who can ask, ‘Why do you do this?’” So the sense I had was that as painful as it was, what was happening was the Lord’s work to discipline me and I needed to trust him and accept it. Of course, I’m not very good at that kind of thing, and maybe that’s the point.
Another time a close friend of mine informed me he was leaving the church because of my preaching. ”I need meat, not milk,” he informed me. I take a lot of pride in my preaching (I know, I know – that’s a problem! Don’t worry, God is dealing with it and that’s my very next blog post.) and to have that threatened, especially by a close friend, hurt quite a bit. What hurt more though was losing a dear friend, someone I confessed sin to and everything.
I could say that I felt better when I read Vic Antonucci (whom I respect a lot for his moxie and his zeal for the lost) say you’re doing something right if whiny, thumb-sucking Christians leave your church because they claim they need meat, not milk. He says it means you’re succeeding in your mission to reach and disciple pre-Christians and we should let other churches babysit coddled, tantrum-throwing, self-righteous evangelicals. Yes, it’s kind of carnal but that did help me feel better. Didn’t bring my friend back, though.
That’s where God entered the picture.
Well, that’s not entirely true. God had always been in the picture. The book of Genesis tells the story of a weasely, small-minded dude named Jacob chosen by God for God’s cosmic purposes. But, being tragically small-minded, he couldn’t wait for God and instead insisted on manipulating people and circumstances in his favor. It all came to a head when Jacob put on the carcass of a dead goat and tricked his almost-dead dad into giving him the patriarchal blessing which rightfully belonged to Jacob’s mono-syllabic, manly-man brother Esau. Enraged, Esau was target practicing with his bow, probably a Matthews, hoping to stick Jacob but weasely Jacob caught wind of the plan (probably all the glaring, grunting and stomping around) and slipped away.
Here’s the best part: Jacob, “a man of the tents” was sleeping in the dark of night out in the open country with nothing for a pillow but a rock. Sometimes the Bible isn’t very subtle. You know times are hard when all a brother has for a pillow is a rock. Weak, scared, weasely Jacob, on the run for his life, sleeping on the ground with a rock for a pillow encountered God. That night Jacob had a vision in which he saw a ladder reaching in to the heavens and the angels of God ascending and descending on the ladder. Above the ladder stood the LORD, who made several significant (understatement!) promises to Jacob.
“When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’”
That friends, is where I have been. Scared, foolish, weasely, unlikable and unlikely. But the Lord was there. The whole time. And I was so blessed by that.
August of ‘06 I was at a clinic hosted by the district leadership of our denomination (whom I respect for… just being there!) to train church planters to be coaches. Yes, you see where this is going don’t you. Just as you’re thinking right now, I was thinking then, “Hey! I’m hearing all about the benefits of coaching and I would love to provide that for someone, but I need coaching!“ And that’s when God provided help in the form of my now good friend Mark Bjorlo (whom I respect greatly as a very effective leader).
Part of Mark’s gift is his facility for organization and implementation which meets me in one of my areas of weakness. So Mark continued the trend of people being mean to me (or so my self-pitying self felt!), but this time it was really helpful. He forced me to think hard about organization and it has helped tremendously.
At about that time God led a really, really wonderful woman to step up to take over the children’s ministry. It had begun to really wear my wife and I down but Sarah’s leadership of that ministry has been incredibly inspiring. She loves people and children so much and she is a total workhorse.
This was one of the first steps in a really positive trend of very capable, committed people stepping up and doing phenomenal ministry. The past year has been incredibly encouraging.
Nick has been discipling people (”So, how’s your heart?”) and leading worship. Dennis passionately leads the prayer team and a small group. Mark brings vision to the worship team. Bob and Jill lead a small group that is incredible. Anna gives vision and leadership to the hospitality ministry. Mike trains and organizes the roadies. Jonathan supplies us with the best techie a worshiping family of believers could hope for. And that’s just the start.
As the clarity of the vision and the level of organization has improved, people have been able to find the right places to use their gifts and I’ve done a better job supporting their ministry. That’s been really fun. In fact, I’ll post a really great piece about a revelation God gave me about this.
Despite the chaos, mistakes and even sin, God was still in it. God was faithful! When we were in a financial free-fall God provided a number of people outside our church family who trusted us and continued to believe that God could use us and they began to make great sacrifices to provide the funds to keep us in ministry. To this day, this was one of the most stunning and faith-building experiences of my life. To all of you who sacrifice so that I can study, pray, preach and disciple – THANK YOU.
One of the things I have had to face is my sinful need for approval. When things were going to crap and good friends were moving out of town and other good friends were getting angry and storming out of the church my vision of God was obscured. My vision of God was eclipsed by my longing for success and approval. As painful as it has been, it’s been really nice to get some of that back in perspective. I’m afraid this may be a temptation for the rest of my life, but that’s for a future post. For now, it’s enough to say that I’m growing, I’m more aware, and because of God’s grace and his faithfulness to me I’m doing better.
And I’ve learned so much about leadership! I have a stronger sense of the direction God wants us to take the church, I have a clearer sense for the steps we will need to take to get there, and I am more hopeful about the future. We’ve even had the privilege of baptizing a few people and we hope to baptize a few more.
Throughout all of this, God has been refining me and equipping me for the next step. Hopefully, it’s less painful than the last step, but I’ve gained so much through the pain of being disciplined by the Lord. I don’t want to do it again, but I wouldn’t trade the last year for anything!
Thank you, Lord, for your faithfulness. Thank you for seeing my faults, my mistakes, and my sin and loving me regardless. Thank you for clothing me in the righteousness of Christ and equipping me for your mission. I am so grateful for this opportunity and the people I serve with. We are having the time of our lives and we can only look to you in awe and say, THANK YOU!
