I’m Sorry: My mistakes as a church planter

If your experience as a Christian isn’t a humbling one, you might be doing it wrong.

Over the many years now I’ve been journeying with Christ and the Church, the most consistent single theme that seems to resurface for me are the varieties of ways I’ve been wrong:

I’ve been wrong about how spiritually and emotionally mature I was.

I’ve been wrong about how I’ve unintentionally treated people.

I’ve been wrong about how to understand a Christian’s relationship with politics.

I’ve been wrong about how to take care of myself properly while ministering to others.

And now I’ve been wrong about how to plant a church.

Any Christian who’s been practicing for a decent amount of time should have a similar story – one of the deep truths of Christ’s Kingdom is that our human tendency is to get things backward and mixed up, so if we aren’t finding different ways in which we’re being corrected, we should probably ask ourselves how genuinely we’re following Jesus and opening ourselves up to repentance.

My point in writing this piece is to offer an apology to anyone who found themselves connected in any capacity with the church I’ve been attempting to plant and to hopefully offer some words of wisdom for those considering planting a church. 

I’m sorry.  I messed up.

I messed up mainly with a lesson I’d learned in part quite a while ago, but one that I apparently didn’t learn deeply enough, and that is that God expects us to join in the ministry and work God already has started, not to create our own franchise (so to speak) and ask God to bless it.

I’m an idealist at heart, so that’s always been difficult for me.  What I mean by that is, my default setting is to try to pursue what (in my mind) is “the best” way of doing something.

So in my attempt to start a church, I wanted to reflect the best ecclesiology and worship practice I’ve discovered on my journey.  I had a lot of great reasons for making the worship choices I did, from the liturgy I selected to the regular observance of communion to the topics I preached on.

To summarize the gist of my mistake, I created a church I wanted to be a part of, but not necessarily one the people I was in community with wanted.

And the most basic foundation of ministry is to meet people where they are – we never want to remain in the same place Jesus finds us, but we have to start there.

That’s the basic lesson I take from this. 

For me, personally, though, I’m not sure what next step to take.

Because while the root of why I made the church decisions I did comes out of a form of idealism, it’s also intimately connected to this reality: I’m tired of “doing church” the way pretty much everyone in America does it, even if most American Christians aren’t.

What do I mean?

Well, think about it: what do worship services in the vast majority of American churches look like?

In general, something like this: open with one or two hymns / worship songs; have some announcements; pray; have another song; have a sermon; closing song.

That’s it, whether you’re non-denominational, a house church, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, or Presbyterian.  Throw in communion if you’re Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or Lutheran.

And I get that doing worship like this seems to “work” for most American Christians (at least, it “works” insofar as people regularly show up for worship like this – whether it’s doing a good job truly molding disciples of Christ is a whole other question).

But it’s dead to me.  It has been for a little over a decade now, ever since I burned out on leading worship after (also) a little over a decade.  It feels fake and contrived to me, even when people have the best intentions behind it.

I was (voluntarily, I might add) part of the “church growth” movement in the early 2000s that focused on attracting more people to worship by turning them into what I flippantly call a rock concert with a TED Talk – putting on a worship “performance,” essentially, and having a relatively generic motivational talk passing for a sermon.

And while that version of worship in its various guises seems to remain popular with the vast majority of people who have any experience with church, they aren’t very popular with the unchurched or with me.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to sit through worship services patterned in this way which makes me uncomfortable in nearly every variation of American worship.

The exception so far has, indeed, proven to be my experience with Christian worship outside an American context: I’ve loved my experiences with both Greek Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox worship, patterned as they are after the ancient practices of other cultures.

I share all this as an explanation for the choices I made while forming a worship service for a church plant, choices that were wrong for the people I was ministering to and with, but choices that I could be comfortable with within the context in which I currently find myself.

So I’m stuck in this “no-man’s land” – wanting to start a church for those who are either burned out on “church as usual” or have an aversion to the stereotypes of American Christianity, but unable to seemingly attract those kinds of folks where I find myself in rural north central Florida.

Maybe part of the answer for me is to proverbially “get over it” and just suck it up with a church that’s pretty much like all the others, though I confess it’d be difficult for my heart to fully be in something like that.

But while I work out my own situation, I do want to reiterate to those affected by my actions: I’m sorry.