I’ve just posted a new post on some breakthrough we’ve had with Missional Communities. Enjoy.

Lastly, my good friend Ben Sternke did all the work on customizing this new blog and has obviously done a GREAT job and is a blast to work with. If you are interested in getting a customized blog, you can get a hold of him here.

See you on the new site.

Recently I was reading my friend’s blog (JR Rozko)…and a blog post about the problem of church shopping and it playing into Christian consumerism. You can read that post here. He finished the post like this:

It can be argued that Christians, at least those of the evangelical persuasion and who have been shaped by modernity, shop for churches based on whether or not they “preach the gospel,” or “believe the Bible.”  Therefore, these churches get evaluated based on peoples experience of attending a handful of worship services.

Conversely, younger Christians, who are more shaped by postmodernity are more inclined to shop for a church based on whether or not it is actually attempting to live out the gospel and seeking to enter the story of Scripture.  The only way to evaluate a church using these criteria is to actually enter into community – to get to know, have conversations, and share life with the people who make up the community.

To me, it seems that this is not a good postmodern strategy, but is actually more in keeping with biblical faithfulness of what it means to be the church- that we want to attract people to how we live and not what we say. Some would say, “We need modern churches to reach modern people and postmodern churches to reach postmodern people.”  It seems to me that this runs the risk of taking our cues from culture rather than from the gospel.  Incarnation, in my estimation, is not an attempt to play by the rules of culture, but to enter into culture and subvert it with the ways of Jesus.  Ok, please, your thoughts.

I really liked this discussion and responded on his blog. I’ve been thinking about it more and more since then, and thought about writing a post on it. But then I thought to myself, “Self, that’s just silly. You wrote a half-way decent response. Just post that instead and save yourself some time.”

So consider this re-posting of my comment an effort to save some time:

I think the question of church structure has to be brought up in this discussion.

The fact of the matter is that our culture shapes people in such a powerful way that pretty much everyone is going to evaluate whether they “visit again” or engage deeper with the community based on what they see in the worship service. More and more, as people are shaped in our consumeristic society, that’s how they will respond, post-modern or not. I actually think it matters very little what we say in the service to offset this fact. As the person on the stage we might say, “This service is just one expression of the wider community. We invite you to come into community with us and then decide if our community lives out what we say.” That sounds good, but practically, that’s just not how people think. They think to themselves, “based on what I just saw in this worship service and the people I’m looking at, would I want to hang out more? Did I have a good time? Did they do worship in the way that I like worship?”

Most people don’t walk in and think, “Well OK, I’m going to listen to the teaching from scripture this morning, but my real decision is whether people live it out in this community. So I’m going to be patient, I’m going to dive deeper, and I’m going to allow for the discernment of the Holy Spirit.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people with that level of maturity when they are checking out a new church for them/their family!

For me, the real problem here is that our churches have made the Worship Service the front door to people “visiting” the community and our primary vehicle for mission…whether they intend to or not. What is it that Churchill would say? Something along the lines of, “We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.” With the church, we’ve built the church structure and that structure is now forming us.

If we make the worship service the front door, the first touch of our community, just expect people to evaluate the community based on whether they like the worship service or not. That’s how they walk into the service, shaped by culture to be a self-centered consumer, and that’s what we’re giving them to evaluate first. Not the texture of our lives, but the “event” that is the worship service.

We can’t be surprised that people church shop! That’s how the structure is built. But if we want people to engage with, experience and see the incarnated teachings of Jesus in the community and do what the writer of Hebrews says (judge a teacher/community based on how they see them living, “consider the outcome of their life”), we’re going to need a structure that’s built for that.

As it stands now, we’re built to get exactly what we’re getting.

I’ll keep you updated.

Enjoy.

_________________________

Have any of you seen the movie Waiting for Guffman?  It’s one of my personal favorites.  Depending on your sense of humor, it’s a great way to spend an evening.  For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a mockumentary about a small town in Missouri called Blaine who are preparing to celebrate their sequicentennial anniversary and the central part of the celebration is a musical put on by the locals.  You’ll have to watch the movie for the full effect, but it’s quite funny.

Most sequicentennials aren’t that funny, but this one is funny because of what they are celebrating.  The irony is in the fact that Blaine is celebrating it’s history of being a group of people who never made it to their destination! This group had set out to reach California, and never made it because their leader somehow managed to convince them that rural Missouri was, in fact, the shores of sunny California!

This particular story is quite funny and fictional. But if you do a bit of research into the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, you’ll find that this story happens to be quite real.

In the early part of the 1800’s gold was found in California and word began to reach the east coast that there was gold and beautiful land and oceans and warm weather – essentially they found paradise!  Don’t think modern LA, this was before all that.  You can only imagine living on a farm in Pennsylvania and hearing that you could be farming land in a place that has warm winters and gold just waiting for your shovel to be found!  People began the race to get out to California.

Some people made it, but not as many initially as you may have thought.  Only several thousand made it out in the first years of the gold rush, as we know it now.  But there was a fascinating by-product of the gold rush: The population of the Midwest went through the roof!   Settlers set out with reports of gold and lush farmland located right on the Pacific Ocean, but most didn’t make it.  Most stopped in places like Kansas or Missouri or Denver.  Just like the town Blaine in the movie, many towns across the Midwest were started by groups of people who gave up!  People who set out for California, but never made it to their destination.

Some didn’t make it because their leaders didn’t know how to lead them there.

Some didn’t make it because their leaders duped them into thinking they had made it to California.

Some didn’t make it because the journey was simply too hard.  (Could you imagine coming across the plains and seeing what we see from here?)

In Waiting for Guffman we laugh at this story.  But in real life it’s actually a sad story.   Those who never made it to California were doomed to suffer two fates:

1. Some were doomed to live under a false belief – believing that they had made it to California or that in fact, California did not exist.
2. Some were doomed to live in Kansas knowing that they simply didn’t have they didn’t have leaders who could get them there.

I can’t tell which I think is worse: settling by a lake in Kansas and being told that I made it to California.  Or settling by a lake in Kansas and being told that our leader brought us all this way, but doesn’t know how to navigate the rest of the way!

One way, I spend the rest of my life wondering – this is it?  This is as good as it gets?  Or the other way, I just spend my time resenting my leaders and myself for not possessing the knowledge or courage to get our group to the promised land.
Many towns across the Midwest and rocky mountain region, if you trace back their history, you will find similar stories about their founding.

Though this part of history is past, the stories of the early pioneers seem to parallel that of the American church quite well.  In generations past, the church has been in the business of telling people that California existed and showing them how to get there.  The Church, while not providing hope of a life in California, has been in the business of providing the Good News!  of hope of a better life – a Godly life – telling people that it’s possible to have a life that is eternal in both quantity and quality. Telling us that we can have lives that are dominated by love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control – and that you don’t have to wait until you die, but you can have it now and you can have it FOREVER!!!

And they weren’t just there to tell you about it, but they were there to show you the way.

But we don’t hear much about that life anymore when we go to church on the weekends.  And we don’t see much of it in the lives of those who still attend.  If the Good News that Jesus has to offer us – that through his death on a cross that we can have real LIFE – why is it that when we come to church the main topic discussed in our sermons is not how to have LIFE, but how to deal with your sin!?!  Or that faith is really about getting you to heaven??! Why is it that when people are asked to describe Christians, the top phrases they use are: “anti-homosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, too involved in politics, out of touch with reality, old-fashioned, insensitive to others, boring, intolerant, and confusing.”
And why is it that generation after generation we are seeing attendance at church drop – so dramatically that only 4% of my generation – generation Y or Millenials – are going to church?

65% of the Builder Generations
35% of the Boomers
15% of GenXer’s
Only 4% of millenials.

Looks to me that just like those early pioneers, the Church is struggling to reach its destination.  It seems to me, that just like those early pioneers, the Church has stopped short, setup shop on the plains and resigned themselves to the same fates as the pioneers.

Living life believing that the life Jesus calls us to cannot be had. Living life believing that that life is possible, but just not knowing how to get there.

In his book The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis sees this same pattern and notes:

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

I can’t count the number of people I’ve spoken with who have come to know Jesus and read about the life that he offers in the Scriptures, only to be sorely disappointed when they go to church.  And it’s because they read the Bible and the read stories about what life is like on the beaches of California, and they come to church and find a group of people who are content to make mud-pies in Kansas.

The church began in power, moved in power, and moved along just as long as she had power.  When she no longer had power, she dug in for safety.  But her blessings were like manna.  When they tried to keep it overnight, it bread worms and stank.  So we have had monasticism, scholasticism, institutionalism – all indicative of one thing: absence of spiritual power.  In church history every return to the New Testament has been marked by a new advance somewhere, a fresh proclamation of the gospel and an upsurge of missionary zeal. . .It is the church that is willing to die to worldly standards that will know the power of Christ’s resurrection.  It may be envied for its depth of loving relationships, or for its spontaneous joy.  It may be hated and persecuted for its revolutionary lifestyle, exposing the hollow values and destructive selfishness of the society it seeks to serve: but it certainly cannot be ignored.
–J.B. Phillips
**I disagree with Phillips’ comment on monasticism.

The specific part of it, “It is the church that is willing to die to worldly standards that will know the power of Christ’s resurrection”…I feel like that is so crucial for myself and the community I lead to live into right now. I wrote about it a day or two ago, but there is still that ingrained desire to be successful according to the current metrics of Christendom’s business model. Yet I find each day I need to die fully to that, understand new metrics and vehicles need to be built and be at peace that obedience in doing this is, in and of itself, is what God requires.

David Fitch wrote an excellent post today on his thoughts regarding missionary churches in the Western world through the lens of Jason and Janell Coker (they recently closed their church plant in San Diego), but what really grabbed me is the tension between the metrics. When I find myself judging what I’m doing by the old metrics, as well as everyone else judging me by those same old metrics…it can be difficult at times to steadfastly hold onto pioneering a new way and understanding of being the church in the 21st Century. It may be the darker parts of me, but I have to be honest that:

1. I want to feel I’m successful
2. I want others to think I’m successful

The way we’re going about planting a church certainly doesn’t play to those two things happening for a while (which on a personal, character level is actually probably a good thing for me as they are both ego-centric and primarily about me receiving credit).

What does that mean practically? Well, it probably means many things, but it probably needs to start with shifting expectations and Fitch’s thought here was probably a good way of understanding this:

Nurturing community with an external focus and vibrant missional life often goes against the cultural assumptions of denominations and support networks. Denominations/American business want to see (immediate) results. They think like business people. Jason never said the Vineyard people placed these expectations on them. But the pressure is there regardless. It’s an American church cultural thing. Yet has anyone ever doing missionary work in India ever been expected to produce a self-sustaining church in three years? Overcoming these cultural pressures is hard.

• I liked the environment that night. I had a strong sense of God’s Spirit heading into the night and during the service.
• The musical worship had been really strong and tied in beautifully with the theme we were weaving through the night.
• The stories were great, people grateful to God both for small things he’s doing and BIG things he’s been up to.
• I thought the teaching was particularly strong that night.
• We had new people and had people who don’t know Jesus yet.

But as I was driving home and was reflecting on the night and praying through it, one of the main things I thanked God for was that we had a really good turnout.

“God, I’m thankful we had a good turnout tonight.”

Now I’m not saying this, in and of itself, is a bad thing. More people sharing in a worship experience is a win, I suppose. But immediately on praying this, God showed me where that “thankfulness” was coming from. I was thankful because a good turnout made me feel better about myself and what I was doing, not whether or not I had simply been obedient with what God was trying to do with the night itself.

For almost two years we’ve been planting this really unconventional church that really flies in the face of consumer Christianity. It never ceases to amaze me how deep those roots go and how I’m still pulling them out of myself. My knee-jerk reaction is still to judge the “success” of a night, not on obedience, but on a metric I can neither control or numbers that don’t really tell me what they mean. I’m finding sometimes it still isn’t enough that the people of God have gathered to worship, be instructed from scripture and enter his house with thankful hearts. I still seek affirmation outside of obedience.

Why is the church broken?

Because we are broken.

Our goal is to be in 30 cities in 15 years. (If you’re anything like me, this is where the eye-rolling begins. When I read people spouting off goals like that, my cynical side usually comes out because it’s so freaking rare for churches to come close to hitting any of their goals. So, in case you just rolled your eyes…I’m right there with you). The point of the goal is this: We are building our communities and infrastructure in such a way to make that a reality.

We may fall short, we may not. But it’s where our leaders sense God taking us for the long haul.

So it is with great excitement that we are announcing that Eikon is planting into its’ second city this January in Denver, Colorado.

I’ve known Alex Johnson 10 years now (he was my college roommate at Wheaton) and after actively discussing, praying and going back and forth about this for 6 months for discernment, even having him and his wife Katey come out for an extended stay with our community, they will be the couple (+baby coming in March) leading this plant in Denver.

They have started to gather a Core Team in the past 4 weeks and have seen some really cool things come together and their first Core Group meeting is this Sunday, January 9.

What, you might be asking, is their plan/trajectory for launching? Well, I’m glad you asked! Earlier in the year I wrote a post on “How to Plant a Church”. It essentially tried to answer this question: If I could do our church plant all over again, how would I do it? I talked it over with several pastors who have worked with Huddles and Missional Communities for a long time and they all felt like this was a strong plan in pretty much any mission context. So if you’re interested in seeing what this path is going to look like for Alex and Katey, spend a couple of minutes and read this post.

Also, if you know anyone in the Denver area who might be interested in being part of the Core Group (or if YOU are in the Denver area!), feel free to shoot Alex an email at Alex@eikoncommunity.com.

Lastly, we have slightly revamped our website given this addition, which you can check out by clicking here.

There will be much more to write about in the weeks, months and years to come about this process and what a network of churches with common DNA means and looks like, but I guess this post can serve as a decent start.

So here was my criteria for deciding my favorite worship albums:

• I had to love listening to the whole album. It couldn’t include just a few tracks that I really like and then I skip the rest of the album (though I gave myself a pass if there were 2-3 songs that weren’t terribly good). This narrowed it down considerably. For whatever reason, almost all worship albums I run into are generally filled with lyrical and musical drivel except for a song or two.
• It has to stand the “test of time” litmus test. Do I honestly believe I’ll still love this album in 5-10 years.
• The worship album has to be geared towards congregational worship. In other words, the songs have to be written in such a way that a group of people could sing it together and they could follow along fairly easily. I’m not saying it has to have a killer hook, but that wouldn’t hurt their cause. This particular criteria cut out another considerable number of favorites. Mike Crawford and his Secret Siblings was down the hole, as well as Jon Foreman. Gone!
• I thought about making some sort of criteria for musical ingenuity or lyrical content and originality, but that could have pruned it to almost nothing. So, I kept it to lyrics that orient my heart to God and his coming Kingdom (whether simple and meditative or theologically complex and thoughtful) as well as pleasing to my musical ears.

This left me with eight albums. Eight. And even within that, I gave myself some wiggle room because I’m not sure any of the albums were 100% on each of those criteria. I think many people would say we’ve made great strides in the past 10 years in becoming more musically artistic within the church. I guess we have, but this process has given me a moment of pause on that thought. But what I quickly found were that some of my favorite artists (those with proper indie cred, anyway), rarely venture into the world of mainstream, congregational worship.

So…here they are. My favorite worship albums from the past 10 years (in no particular order).

1) Psalms by Shane and Shane. 2003. This was a hard one to fit into this list, though it might be my favorite of all these albums. Essentially, Shane and Shane take about a dozen Psalms and turn them into actual songs and then throw in a few other songs from passages in Job and Hosea as well. It’s the two of them killing it on an acoustic guitar and it is some of the most lyrically stimulating and moving worship songs I’ve found.

2) Alive by Ian Macintosh. 2009. This album probably couldn’t be much more different than Shane and Shane. Ian Macintosh is a cross between Sigur Ros, LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead. Ambient is something he definitely does well. Currently, it is the most listened to album of 2010 for me. While there are a few annoying tracks, overall it’s fantastic, with most, if not all, of the lyrics being slightly more meditative on scripture. However, my one caveat with the criteria I set is that this would be the hardest of any of the albums to sing in a public worship service. You could do it, but it would definitely be outside of the norm.

3) How Great is our God. Live at Passion. 2005. I feel like Chris Tomlin gets a bad rap. Granted, he’s not going to give you the most musically creative songs you’ve ever heard and his lyrical progression tends to be “V1, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, V2, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus” which is about as predictable as you can get. But come one, let’s be honest: The man can write a mean hook. And besides that, pretty much all of his best songs are coming directly from the psalms. So at worst, we’re talking about someone who writes songs from the scriptures the people in our communities like to listen and sing to, remember, and are easy to play! (Ok…I’m officially off the soap box). So Tomlin has 3-4 of his very best songs on this album, all of which are live (the whole album is live, which is good, because his studio produced stuff is awful). David Crowder, Matt Redman, Charlie Hall (blah) are also on it, with perhaps the highlight coming at the close, with Shane and Shane unleashing a staggering version of ‘It is Well.’

4) Illuminate by The David Crowder Band. 2003. Yes, his voice can be a bit grating at times, but let’s give the man a little credit…he has been trying new things musically and lyrically for more than a decade and while this probably wasn’t his most ambitious/successful experiment (I’d argue it was A Collision), this is the most accessible for congregational worship. He also happens to be one of my favorite lyricists.

5) More than Life by Hillsong United (live). 2003/4. I have to admit…I’m a little embarrassed about this one. Lyrically, you can rarely find a “band” more comical than some of the junk that Hillsong United puts out. There are 2-3 songs on this album that are downright laughable. Moreover, for every album since this one, it’s the same formula over and over again. Make and album that sounds like Coldplay and U2 had a lovechild, sound as earnest as you can, say Jesus enough times, produce a mean hook, mic the young teens screaming and singing along and you’ve got yourself a wicked seller of an album. To their credit, they put out an album like once every 9 months?? And on each album, there is probably 1-3 legitimately good songs. For me, before the Coldplay/U2 worship sound had become common place like it is today, this was the worship album that accompanied me as I found my way back to faith, so it will always have a special place in my heart. Plus, accept for those 2-3 songs, I really can put it in and listen to the whole album. That’s just not true of any other Hillsong United album.

6) Visions of Choruses by Philip Rice. 2009. No one is going to know who this is (though you can now purchase it on itunes). This is a guy I met on a trip to Oklahoma and this album is unlike any other worship album I’ve ever heard, which makes it difficult to describe. It’s definitely indie…sort of The Smiths meet Jeff Buckley meets the Arcade Fire meets the best Weezer hook you’ve ever heard. Phil’s voice is singularly unique and the lyrics are beautiful. I’m positive you haven’t heard of it, so you need to pick it up! Best song is probably “You are the King.” You can listen to the album on myspace as well by clicking here.

7) Singalong by Phil Wickham. 2008. I can’t stand his studio albums (they are sooooooo overproduced) but this is a live concert where he cranks off 15 songs and everyone knows every lyric to every song and every nuance of every note and the mic placement is quite good. Personally, I think Phil has done some really imaginative stuff with the acoustic guitar and is a great storyteller on this album. He’s doing what he does best on this album. Lastly…I got this album free. It was a free download he did. Always a bonus.

8) Hymns Ancient and Modern by the Passion Worship Band. 2004. This album probably best fulfills all criteria on the list better than any of the other albums. It takes some of the best hymns of the last 1000 years and gives them a modern spin. It’s beautifully understated and has probably been the go-to album for worship leaders looking to blend the ancient and modern elements of our faith in a gathered worship setting. This album was probably also the watershed moment where creative, blended worship became more mainstream as Gen Y (though other generations as well) sought to bring the old and the new together in a seamless way.

So that’s what I’ve got. So what do you think? Looking at my criteria, what’s missing? What would make your list that isn’t on mine?

Before I get into the lessons, let me clearly state what our goal was when we started this project. We were sent to Austin to launch a self-supporting church that would also help start other new churches. When I talk about success or failure in this post, I’m speaking relative to this goal. There were lots of good things that happened because of Fulcrum, but ultimately we did not accomplish our stated goal.

In no particular order, except for the last one, which is the most important, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

1. Some experiments fail. Seems simple and obvious, but it still doesn’t negate the shock one feels when it happens to your experiment. We had a saying about Fulcrum from the very beginning: Everything is an experiment. This wasn’t just rhetoric, we really meant it. We had at our disposal a body of conventional wisdom about church planting that–had we chosen to follow it–would have increased our chances of success. Rather than plant a “textbook” church, we chose to chart our own course. While jumping off the map led to some initial wins and intriguing possibilities, we ultimately died on the side of the mountain because we chose not to walk the time-tested path discovered and marked by others. While this was done in the name of exploration and innovation, I must admit there was more than a little hubris involved as well.

Doug’s thoughts: Couldn’t agree more with this one. While we say “Everything is an experiment,” I don’t think most people saying that believe that theirs is the experiment that will fail. I remember the first year of our church plant and how surprised I was to be so frustrated and inept at pioneering this new way of doing church. As Wade says, I think we started our church with a certain amount of hubris as well.

2. Having sufficient funds doesn’t guarantee a successful church plant. When we started I thought that fund raising would be the hardest part of the job, especially during a recession. Yes, we got off to a slow start, but eventually God provided plenty of money to get the job done. We were careful not spend too much too soon and we had some generous donors help us meet all of our fund raising goals right up to the very end. Some church plants fail for lack of funding. This was not the case with Fulcrum.

Doug’s thoughts: We were well funded for the first two years and then most of our funding went away. While this was a difficult time, it was an important time. We became very frugal, and dare I say, creative in how we used money. In fact, I’d say this time of paper-thin budgets (which is where we are still at) has helped us immensely for the future: We aren’t under the impression that you can buy your way to a successful church plant. Money (i.e. more staff, the best stuff for “the show,” scads of marketing) doesn’t buy relationships, which is how our community has expanded.

3. You don’t have as much time as you think you do. When things start to go downhill in a new church, they go downhill fast. There is not much time to make corrections. If you make a major strategic mistake you may not have time to recover from it. There were a number of good things our team talked about doing that never got done. Part of the reason for this is that I think we kept telling ourselves there would be plenty of time to do these things later on. There wasn’t.

Doug’s thoughts: Agreed. In our situation, my wife has proved really crucial to this has she seems to have a 6th sense. She seems to know when things are headed south before the signs are actually there. It’s allowed us to course correct before we got to the point of no return. She’s helped me develop that some, but she’s one of the greatest gifts our community has.

4. A well articulated vision can come back to haunt you later on. Be careful of what kind of initial vision you cast, because people are listening. Early on, we talked a lot about being a different kind of church that would connect with people not currently connected to existing churches. We gathered a launch team that was interested in doing something “different.” When we started to look more and more like existing churches, they called “foul” and rightly so. One of the reasons I think we lost momentum is that mid-project I unwittingly asked people who had signed up for something unconventional to help launch something conventional. Many of them said “no.”

Doug’s thoughts: Our experience was that many people came aboard and joined the Core Team and really liked to think we were going to be “different.” But when we actually started to plow that route, there seemed to be a collective, “Oh…wait a second. You were actually serious about doing it different??! I thought you meant cooler worship services and teachings and small groups and stuff. This is REALLY different.” We probably lost at least 25% of our Core Group because of that reaction.

5. Just because God is with you doesn’t mean your project will succeed, and just because your project fails doesn’t mean God was absent. Others may choose to interpret events differently, but at no time was I ever tempted to call our project “Ichabod.” There was never a sense that God wasn’t with us in this endeavor. In fact there were plenty of instances in which God proved himself faithful to our needs.

Doug’s thoughts: Amen.

6. Just because God is with you doesn’t mean you can get away with bad strategy. The biggest strategic mistake I made was to lead us away from an experimental, unconventional approach to launching a church and toward a more conventional, textbook approach. Once we started down the unconventional path, we should have stayed the course.

Doug’s thoughts: Ugh. We had the double whammy at the beginning. I had never truly been discipled (which I didn’t really know at the time! TRAGIC. Fortunately, have been in a strong discipling relationship in a Huddle for the past two years), so while God was “with us,” it was probably in a looser sense than Wade is saying. And man did we have great strategy on paper in our first year, but not a lick of it worked. Moving from theory to practice is really hard.

7. Momentum is precious, don’t lose it. Dick Vitale taught me this years ago. You gotta keep the BIG MO baby! If you start losing it, call a T-O and regroup fast. If you lose the BIG MO, it will be twice as hard to regain it as it was to build it the first time around.

Doug’s thoughts: Can’t say that we’ve figured this one out. We seem to go in seasons. We see a lot of breakthrough and fruit for a season, and then we are pruned back. Now this seems like it should be, but I don’t think we’ve learned to squeeze all of the breakthrough and momentum out during our seasons of fruiting. Still learning that one.

8. Success at one phase of the project doesn’t mean you’ll be successful at the next phase. We did a really good job of attracting a crowd that was interested in what we were doing. We did a very poor job of turning that crowd into a cohesive community that could overcome the obstacles inherent to starting a new church.

Doug’s thoughts: Agreed. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, we were “successful” in that we learned how to do Huddles pretty well (and are still learning), but we are still very much in the beginning stages of learning to do Missional Communities well. In the perfect theoretical world we’d be able to do both at the same time.

9. A quick death is better than a slow one. If our project was doomed to fail, I’m glad we found out quickly, rather than limping along for another year or two before finally having to call it quits anyway. In hindsight, I see this as a blessing from God that preserved resources, relationships, and my sanity.

Doug’s thoughts: Can’t speak to this one, per se, but would definitely agree based on what I can say as an outsider.

10. There are some things you’ll never know about yourself (or God) unless you step out in faith and try something new. I’m going to unpack this lesson in a separate post. Partly because it’s going to take more than a few sentences to do it justice and partly because I also think it is the ultimate answer to the question of why Fulcrum failed. Therefore, I want to give it the attention it deserves.

Doug’s thoughts: Yes, yes and yes. There are times when we don’t realize our utter dependance on God until put into a situation when we’re incompetent, lost and outside of ourselves. These seasons of stretching and unbelievable challenge, at least as I’ve experienced in my life and the people I’ve discipled, are the ones that provide the most transformation and personal breakthrough. Discipleship seems to happen best in trying times.