We will celebrate the ninth birthday of our church next month. Our first service was held on Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000. You would think that after nine years we’d have a pretty good handle on what we’re supposed to be doing as a church and how to do it. Every church, of course, has the common calling of making disciples. The Great Commission, in various incantations, can be found in all four gospels and the book of Acts. No church has the right to opt out of disciple-making. But within that über-calling, each church has its own unique calling because every church is different due to its location, size, culture, personalities, gifting, resources, etc…. Because every church is different, each one must carefully listen and discern who God is calling them to reach, and how he wants that church to reach those people, and what to do with them once they’ve been reached.
We’ve been trying to figure that out at NewSong for quite a while. This post, and a few to follow it, will tell the story of how God’s vision for NewSong has unfolded. It’s kind of a long story, so I’m going to break it up into pieces. This is the beginning of that story.
NewSong started with a Christmas party at our home in December of 1999. I believed God had called me to plant a church so Donna and I invited a few families we had gone to church with before to our house and we asked if they’d pray about helping us plant a church. By the end of the evening we had agreed to start a Bible study and see if people would come and if God would open doors for us in terms of a location to meet and all the other resources we’d need to actually plant a church since we had no denominational or other outside help. And so in January, 2000 we began meeting on Wednesday nights for a time of worship and Bible study at what was then known as the Sawnee Community Center here in Cumming, GA.
As for the mission of the church, I had one in mind when we began the church but in retrospect I now think it was more of a generic mission, "make disciples," gleaned over a few years of reading, working in other church settings, and from planting another church. Because we didn’t understand god’s unique mission for our church at this point we ran off in several directions in the early years. Thankfully, God continued to open doors for us. We made some good decisions and a few bad ones too. Overall our numbers remained fairly steady. We’d gain a few people, and lose a few. We attracted some people who had left other churches and then found us and were happy for a while before the same unresolved issues in them caused them to get disgruntled with us too, and so they left. We had a few people who came to us “wounded” and we provided them a safe place to “heal.” Once they healed some of them moved on, others stayed. We also attracted some strong, spiritually-mature believers. Some of them stayed, and a few of them left too; probably because we were all over the page with what we were doing (or not doing) as a church.
During this timeframe we spent a lot of time and other resources doing what Stan Self (in the Summer 2008 edition of Unfinished, the Mission Society’s magazine) calls the “chicken-house approach” to ministry. Self recalls growing up around chicken houses and how he’d watch the chickens spend their days pecking around in the wood shavings on the floor of the chicken house. As they did, they’d cluster in groups of 10-15 chickens. Every so often, for no apparent reason at all, one of the chickens would look up, then break and run about 20 feet from where it had been. When that happened, all the other chickens in that bunch would dash off en masse in hot pursuit. By the time they caught up, the lead chicken was pecking away in the shavings again. For a moment the other chickens would look around as if they were trying to determine what that was all about. Then they’d join the first chicken in pecking the wood shavings. A few minutes later the same thing would happen in another part of the chicken house, as one group after another would break, run, stop, and peck.
Self’s point, of course is that chickens aren’t the only ones guilty of this. How many churches have set their sights on being the next Saddleback, Willow Creek, or Northpoint? I admit I was guilty of that at NewSong. Not as blatantly nor as badly as I was at a former church plant I was a part of (that’s another story for another day). The point I’m making here, and it’s nothing you probably didn’t already realize, is that these are great churches and there are definitely transferrable principles we can learn from them. But there is only one Saddleback, Willow, and Northpoint and there is only one Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley. Those churches and their pastors didn’t get the way they are by chasing the lead chicken. They got that way by discerning and focusing on God’s unique calling for them and their churches.
Here is the good news – as far as NewSong is concerned. I believe we are finally beginning to get some clarity about our unique calling and mission. We are finally doing the hard work necessary to discover who God is calling us to reach and how he wants us to reach them. God has also led us to a process where we can take people from being non-believers all the way to the point where they are mature disciples of Christ capable of reproducing other disciples.
In tomorrow’s post I will begin telling the exciting story of how this unfolded. It will hopefully be helpful for me to sort out as I write it, and for our church and its leaders to hear, and, who knows, it might even help some other church leader some day.
Until Then…
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