Category: Church Development

In this episode (the second of two) we sit down and finish our conversation about the multi-congregational model New Life Church has developed over the last several years. Why we did it, how it works, and what opportunities and challenges it presents.

This model is not your friend if you value speed and scale… if you want to go fast, this isn’t for you… it’s a crockpot not a microwave… it’s also not a model for scalability… there’s a cap on it because of built-in relationships…

What we’ve decided is that there’s a circle around in our city that we’re willing to plant congregations inside of… outside of that circle the best use of our time and resources would be to plant autonomous churches…

Another thing about this model is that if you don’t like people telling you “no,” you should stay away from it… but if you want to be collegial, familial, and do the slow work of building the kingdom together, then this is a great model for you…

Another challenge is that I’ve sent out a lot of really good leaders and so I have to constantly make sure the leadership pipeline at New Life North is replenished… I can’t just keep sending people out and ignore the leadership pipeline here…

So you have to move slow, but also think five years ahead… it takes 3-5 years to send out a leader like this with this much trust…

There is a sense in which we’ve multiplied one another’s trust… there are people here who trust Brady because they trust Daniel Grothe…

The reason our congregations are different is because Glenn and I are different… I’m not forcing Glenn to be a Brady clone…

Every house is different, but there’s a great sense of safety when you get to go back to your parents’ house, and I think that’s what New Life North feels like to these guys…

In order for us to be under one family covering, it has to be under one eldership, one family covering… each congregation has a “wisdom council” full of non-staff people who are watching them and their marriage…

I encourage all our elders to be present in our congregations from time to time… but I like the wisdom council because it gives people who are actually listening to the sermon and watching the pastors interact with the congregation… it gives a second layer of accountability which is super important…

The genius of this model is that it allows a lot of people to be taken care of very personally… it allows us all to live in proper pastoral work without silo-ing to much… we all are in all the work…

In this episode (the first of two) we sit down to talk about the multi-congregational model New Life has developed over the last several years—why we did it, how it works, and what opportunities and challenges it presents.

PART 1 SHOW NOTES

We stumbled into this, quite honestly… we knew we had a deep bench of teachers and preachers on our staff and we needed to infiltrate our city…

Brady was really taking a risk with me… he gave me a space to experiment and grow…

For us, we decided that the church should look more like a family model than a franchise… we wanted to create an environment for our “children” to thrive within their strengths…

We had a burden for a location and a leader who was willing to go… you have to have that… if the leader isn’t called to the location, it won’t work long-term…

I am not suggesting that everyone do it the way we did it… it requires a lot of vulnerability, a lot of honest conversation, and a great deal of trust… if you don’t have that, don’t even try…

All of us had to agree that when we had aggravations, we were going to talk about them… most relationships fall apart because we don’t know how to deal with conflict… this model is ripe with potential conflict…

We believe that to be a pastor is to be attentive to place, to the soil of where you’re planted… and so we CENTRALIZE our administrative [functions] but we CONTEXTUALIZE ministry…

If you’re in a church where you have a group of friends and you’re wondering how to expand, then this model will work for you… but if you’re in a church where you don’t have any preachers or teachers, this model is not for you… you need to spend a lot of time building relationship with each other…

The flip side of this is that we need to get clarity where clarity is possible… financials, percentages, benchmarks for hiring, etc.… you need to work that out as much as you can…

The tension came in when New Life Downtown was bringing in enough money to sustain them separately from us… so we came up with some percentages that would keep Glenn motivated and also kept finances coming back to us…

Big Church, Small Church. Is one better than the other? In this conversation, we talk about the valuable lessons we’ve learned from comparing church models.

ECP Show Notes – EPISODE 003

Big vs. small church

“The fight is the same everywhere…we’re trying to figure out how to speak compellingly to people about robust kingdom life and then develop patterns of community life that invite people in…”

“There’s no escaping the spirit of our age…we are trained to be consumers…”

“One of the things that this conundrum did to us is it forced us to wrestle with a theology of vocation…’church participation’ is not always an accurate index of how people are participating in kingdom life…”

“Pastors notoriously measure the wrong things…you can’t measure every facet of discipleship…”

“One of the things that we constantly wrestled with [in our small church context] was hubris—pride… that we were the pure ones… when we saw that we had many of the same warts as other churches it was a real moment of reckoning… it made us humble…”

“The temptation in the megachurch is attributing success to attendance…sometimes we put on a big event and a lot of people flood in, and it feeds a part of my soul that is not good for me… because I start feeling like that is the moment of success…the megachurch is prone to events and the ‘big thing’ that feeds our ego…”

“Having a building full of people is not the end goal…”

“The tension of every church is the tension between simplicity and hospitality…there’s a point at which simplicity becomes inhospitable…”

“There’s a lot of self-righteous behavior in the church…we had better start working together or we are going to die alone…”

“Reality is always more interesting than caricatures…”

“A lot of this boils down to lazy analysis…even surveys and statistics, you can’t totally trust them because they don’t tell a whole story…you have to press in and look a little bit closer…”

“Here’s the bottom line: our desire is the same… let’s take care of the people the Lord sends us… and that’s the common ground…”

Questions for you and your team
1) What are some of the ways that consumerism has impacted your model?
2) How do you and your team understand “the bullseye” for your ministry work? Does that understanding need to shift in any way?
3) What are the unique temptations and vulnerabilities of your model?
4) How can you more clearly articulate kingdom-life into your context and develop patterns of community that match that kingdom-life?
5) What are some ways that you can begin to learn from other church models?