Rethinking Missional Church Planting

Learning From Experience
So what have we learned from planting a missional church in an incredibly secular setting?

Well, first, that it can be done.

When we moved to Missoula in 2006 to plant a church for people who had given up on church – the un-churched, the de-churched, the post-churched – some folks thought we were crazy. “If you want to plant a church,” they said, “you have to go after Christians.” (There are not many Christians left here in Missoula, which is increasingly the case everywhere else too).

And what we've discovered is that Jesus is bigger than that. The Gospel still speaks to our post-modern, post-Christian culture (thank you very much!). After 7 years we were a vibrant little church of about 120 folks. 85% of our them didn't come from another church. On a given Sunday, 10% of the people in attendance were non-Christians. We've seen 30+ conversions. We've seen people who had given up on church (or never considered it at all) embrace both the biblical Jesus and his not-so-spotless bride. So in short, we've seen a real live church sprout and prosper in a place most people would consider to be very hard soil.

How? Why? Well, Jesus is always big enough to reach those he wants. At the same time, when it comes to reaching lost culture, there seem to be some common themes in how he does it.

First, we realized that you have to create a gospel ethos: everything a church does needs to be beautiful, thoughtful, intelligible, challenging, compelling. Not just in our music, liturgy, preaching, and way we explain things in worship (definitely all those!), but also in the way we live the rest of the week. We need to embody the gospel, to create a real counter-culture. So our little church was provocative, raised lots of questions, and refused to be pigeonholed. We are old-school in what we believe. But we also feel very safe. You can ask questions and not get shunned, you can be honest about your doubts and struggles. In short, it was both comforting and challenging and orthodox, all rolled up in one. Ethos.

Second, we learned you must also be highly visible: people have to know that you're there. As our culture becomes increasingly jaded about Christianity in general, fewer and fewer are looking for answers in a church. That means you have to go to them. It's incarnational. You have to find ways to enter their world, to see life through their eyes, to build relationships, to be their friends (even if they never come to worship!). To live in such a way that they ask you what makes you tick. So we threw parties, cared for the poor, AND talked about Jesus. We invited people into our lives. And many responded. Visibility. Buzz. Gospel. Growth.

So it really is doable, but there are some problems...

First, being a missional church is slow: it may take years for friends to show up in church; and those who do are often very broken. They may seem miles away from discipleship, let alone membership (or leadership!).

Second, being a missional church is costly. Most of our church models still assume full-time, highly trained pastors. Make no mistake: seminary is valuable for a church planter (I am SO thankful for my time at Westminster). But time is money, and full-time pastors are the most expensive part of a church plant. The more missional the plant, the more costly it is.

Finally, we are often victims of our own success. As the church grows, we start caring for our flock, our attention shifts inwards. Outreach dries up because our most significant relationships soon exist only in the church. We gradually become invisible to our broader community.

In sum, missional church plants are slow, expensive, and hard. No wonder so few make it.

Doing More With Less 
What if we only had $100K to plant a church? In traditional church circles (at least Presbyterian), we wouldn't even try. The obvious problem, of course, is that it's getting harder and harder to raise money for church planting, while our culture is rapidly becoming more and more secular. So if we stick with conventional wisdom, we'll probably plant fewer and fewer churches.

And this is where I'd like to propose an experiment. What if we took a seasoned church planter with an entrepreneurial spirit, gave him a modest amount of seed money, and said,

“Go embed yourself in a community (incarnate!), in a provocative-yet-intriguing way (visibility!), one that will allow you to sustain yourself long-term ($), and maybe even generate resources for ministry (space?), -AND- give you all sorts of relationships with the un-churched sorts people you'd like to reach? (growth)”

Is something like this even possible? What if God himself is inviting us to think outside the box?

We think so, and this is exactly what we intend to try. We'd like to start a small, neighborhood micro-brewery in the heart of a world class city (Austin, TX).[Details over here].

• The goal is to make high quality craft beer that is consumed on premise (not through bottling or distribution), bringing people together through a taproom experience. This is something most people today can appreciate regardless of their spirituality. 
• Creating a brewery from the ground up would give us the opportunity to design it right (so that it could host gatherings, concerts... or public worship of 150-200 people). 
• It takes several years to find investors, get a location, then open the doors (during which time you're connecting with all sorts of people in your target community, and getting to know the city intimately). 
• That gives us a great reason for being in the heart of the city (besides just, “I'm here to start another church;” most cities see churches as drains on community, not assets). 
• It takes several years to start turning a profit – but once it does, how much can a small brewery generate? A lot. We think this is a business with a significant revenue stream, one that helps us support ourselves (as owners), but that also gives us real resources to help meet needs in our city – both physical (mercy) and spiritual (church-planting). This is both attractive and intriguing. Buzz. 
• KEY: The brewery is not the church; it's an independent business that supports the church. And by doing it this way, we'd be doing something both new (for Americans), yet old (for the church – think Luther, monastics, and Guinness). [Note: a helpful, interesting read here is The Search for God and Guinness, by Stephen Mansfield.] Again: Intrigue. Visibility. Buzz. 

We think this will allow us to also start another church (very similar to All Souls in terms of who it reaches, but very different in terms of how it unfolds). Here's how a brewery helps plant a church...

It will take at least 2 years to get a brewery up and running. (Note: this is where the seed money comes in - basically, we'd need to raise about $100K this as personal support, allowing us to live as "missionaries" for those first two years, while laying the groundwork for both the business and the church).

But during this time, we're not simply starting the business – we're getting to know the city, we're building relationships, and we're starting to gather (via parties, bible studies, missional communities, etc). We're also hiring and training people to keep the brewery running once the church gets going (freeing us up to serve the church). All these things are very important.

And after 2 years, we should have a core group, preparing to launch worship - but with a revenue stream, a seeker stream, and most importantly the time we need to grow organically. All those things are huge for a missional church. All for $100K.

We think that puts us in very a different place 7 years down the road. And this is what Marilyn & I would like to try here in Austin, TX.