Читать книгу Embrace - Rosario Picardo - Страница 5

This is so cool, I thought to myself. I can’t believe a church would hold a service in a vineyard! As I was visiting a growing suburban area of Atlanta, I came across a United Methodist Church plant’s preview service on Christmas Eve, which gave me a taste of what their weekly services would look like in the future. The place was packed with about four hundred people. There was plenty of excitement and energy in the air. The young pastor was formerly an associate at a larger church and had been sent out with a launch group to start the new endeavor. Before they even launched on Sunday mornings the church plant had staff in place, all the equipment they needed, the momentum to get the ball rolling, and a growing suburban setting with the financing from a supporting, established church to back them.

I heard the church continued to expand and was already talking about purchasing land only three short years later. We hear stories like this and get excited. And why not? While this isn’t the typical story for a church planter, stories like these are often presented as the norm. But I have to admit this was not my church planting experience. As I was watching new churches launch, like this one on Christmas Eve and others, I began to feel insecure and fearful. I had thoughts like I could never start a church like so-and-so, and I could never have that many people, and the list goes on and on. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I talk with planters frequently who struggle with similar thoughts. Ministry is tough no matter one’s context, but it is especially difficult when starting a new faith community. It is typical to have self-doubt, feel alone, and be tempted to isolate yourself when you feel like a failure.

Often books on church planting are about growth gimmicks, models, and an overall sense of how great someone was at starting a new faith community. A cookie-cutter methodology gets passed along as a one-size-fits-all method without considering context and the way the individuals involved are uniquely gifted and wired by God. The Christian culture has romanticized church planting to the point that it has done a disservice to aspiring planters. It becomes way too easy to forget that not all plants make it. I think this sets up younger people, especially, with the assumption that all church planting efforts are successful. Many young church planters enter the fray like I did. They like the idea of planting, have a grand vision, and big dreams about the church’s success, but when the work starts they quickly realize that their expectations were misguided. If you are a church planter, potential planter, or current church leader, I want to level with you about my experience. I hope you find this book informative, inspirational, and transformative as you approach your own challenges in starting a new faith community or being a part of a launch team. The planting season of a new work is incredibly difficult, and often comes with huge expectations and little reward. Planting a new faith community requires patience and endurance, especially when battling the many unrealistic expectations that surround the task.

These unrealistic expectations may come from denominational leaders or even from oneself. I have to admit that I’m my own worst critic. My self-doubt was exacerbated by the apparent expectation that every new church needs to be a megachurch that is immediately self-sustaining financially and building its own facilities. Honestly, when I launched Embrace Church I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I didn’t receive training or many resources. I didn’t have an auditorium full of people or even a house full of them, but I had a compelling vision that I felt God had given me. It was that vision that would not let me quit even during the numerous times when I wanted to give up. It is my personal experiences in the field that have given me a special heart and burden for those who are brave enough to answer the call and start new faith communities in hope of reaching people who need it most.

Before I dive into the nuts and bolts of church planting along with my rollercoaster journey, I need to help you get a glimpse of who I am. Years before I had ever thought about church planting, while I was in recruit training for the Marines at historic Parris Island, South Carolina, I discovered the fire of evangelism inside me. I quickly became the prayer leader for the platoon. At night, when the other recruits would hit the rack, a few would wake me up out of my sleep. This is never a good sign in boot camp because it usually means a blanket party, where you get physically pummeled. Thankfully, that never happened. I was shocked when they wanted prayer. I would pray for these recruits to pass their fitness tests, for their home life, and even for my drill instructor’s house to sell—and guess what? It sold! The drill instructor was so convinced I had a special connection with God (I didn’t. Part of me thought it was luck, but I took the drill instructor’s word for it.) that he had me pray on graduation day that the sky would clear up from all the rain. About five minutes later, it did. God was answering my prayers. Since then, I have never seen anything like it. When I left recruit training, I was being called “Rev” by my fellow platoon mates and even the drill instructors.

When I returned to Houghton College for fall semester, I started thinking about military chaplaincy. However, I still had some growing up to do. I was hanging with the wrong crowd even though I still had a pocket of good friends who surrounded me and loved me no matter what I did. As a student, I was known for making a few of the resident assistants cry. As a freshman, I was taking seniors out to get drunk who had never even had a sip of alcohol touch their lips. I knew I had a decision to make. By the end of my sophomore year, I decided to surrender my life fully to Christ and to pursue his calling. I quit hanging out with my old friends and quickly became a leader on campus. After all, I wanted to be a Navy chaplain (the Marine Corps is a department in the Navy), so I needed to straighten up.

In order to accomplish my goal, I had to go to seminary, but before I could go to seminary I actually needed to study. By the start of my senior year, I managed to raise my cumulative grade point average high enough to get into seminary. I was accepted into Asbury Theological Seminary near Lexington, Kentucky, where many of my college professors had attended. I was released by the Marine Corps and raised my right hand in May 2003 as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. I left Western, New York, the place I had lived my entire life, to come to a state I had never even visited before: Kentucky. Little did I know what God had in store.

Shortly after moving to Kentucky, I heard about an urban church on the north side of Lexington. Many seminary students were attending and walking away in awe of what God was doing there. I started going weekly and never looked back. I think God tricked me! I didn’t want any part of the local church. I wanted to work on the institutional side with the military as a chaplain. I would never even have gone to seminary if it weren’t required for becoming a chaplain. While attending this congregation, I started developing a heart for the local church, specifically for churches in urban settings.

I was glad I got plugged into a church when I did because I also discovered seminary to be one of the most selfish places in the world. The emphasis seemed to be it’s all about me and not about service to others. I wanted more of a transformative experience than a strictly informational one. Seminary was the first place where I saw people get into downright heated altercations about theology, which is not always a terrible thing, but it seemed to happen on a constant basis. Don’t get me wrong: seminary is not a terrible place. I grew a lot there. It was this season of preparation, paired with applying what I was learning in the local church, that helped keep me sane. Part of it had to do with me being impatient. I’m the type of guy who doesn’t necessarily plan where he wants to go out to eat until he hops in the car and drives down the road a bit; the one who would rather assemble a complicated piece of furniture without reading the directions.

As my heart for evangelism and the local church grew, I became further involved with this urban congregation. After my second year of seminary, I married a fellow seminarian, a woman who had been on the mission field and was attending the church. After marrying, we moved into the urban neighborhood to live out ministry. She was on staff at the church, and I was the custodian and youth worker performing whatever grunt work they wanted me to do.

During our first year of marriage, she had an affair, which ended our marriage. Subsequently, she left the church and her role on the staff. I was devastated. The years that followed involved me pursuing wholeness and healing via prayer, Scripture, an accountability group, counseling, and mentoring. I had great friends—a married couple that let me live with them for an entire summer. They looked out for me, and made sure I was taking care of myself and making sound decisions. I learned a lot about community from them and the role a community can play in the healing process. My confidence took a blow and I continually asked myself the question, “Do I take a break from doing this whole ministry and church-planting thing before I ever get a chance to start it?” After all, it was spring of 2007, and I was in my last semester of seminary. I was working two part-time jobs, volunteering at the church, and taking five classes. God confirmed to me that his calling on my life didn’t change because of the circumstances I faced. I left the marriage a broken man, but my heart for ministry was still intact.

When I graduated, I went from being the church custodian to being the associate pastor of the church, preaching regularly and stepping up in leadership. The people in the congregation didn’t know I had these types of gifts and graces for ministry. Yet, fortunately a new senior pastor took a risk on me.

My life and ministry experiences gave me a unique skill set and desire for church planting. I was able to empathize with hurting people and I knew the value of being part of a genuine, caring community. I always had friends that were different than me, and I had the ability it seemed to have a wide circle of people in my social network. My skills were developed while working at the church in every role from custodian to pastor, where it was instilled in me to serve whether I was cleaning toilets in the bathroom or preaching the Scriptures in the sanctuary. My heart for church planting was fostered through experiences that had left me a broken man. I had found healing in my brokenness through my relationship with Christ, and I wanted other broken people to experience the same healing I found. I encountered people who I came to befriend, people who were awesome friends, yet didn’t have faith because they had been burned by Christians in the past. There were also friends who did have faith but wouldn’t set foot in the church because it represented past hurts to them. I wanted others to experience a loving community where they could come as they were and walk together on a quest for transformation. This desire spurred the vision for a new faith community, a place that was authentic, messy, and not worried about itself, but was focused on blessing others. It was this vision that helped me birth Embrace Church.

I had connections to a few denominations, but I had to choose which one I would work with in this new venture. I settled on the United Methodist Church primarily because I was intrigued by the emphasis they had on starting faith communities through their New Church Development office (NCD) in Kentucky. NCD was established to encourage church plants and planters within the United Methodist Church in Kentucky because the Kentucky Conference had been slow in planting churches. Many of the existing churches could hardly show any professions of faith or new people coming in. I pitched the idea about planting a church to NCD, and they supported it. The need for a new faith community was overwhelming because many of the churches were not reaching new people. About 63 percent of all United Methodist churches in Kentucky had fewer than fifty persons in membership, with an average attendance of twenty-five before Bishop Lindsey Davis started his tenure.1 Also, the conference had been losing young people who grew up in the church because it had failed to meet their heartfelt needs or answer their real-life questions. Young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five—especially men—were virtually nonexistent in the church. Without younger people coming in and taking the reins, churches will begin to die. I had a challenge in front of me but knew with God’s help Embrace Church could make a difference in people’s lives.

I got to work right away. I started meeting everybody and anybody to ask them to be a part of this new church. My first recruit didn’t exactly work out, which you can tell from my journal entry, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”:

There are some things seminary just doesn’t teach you. I paid $50,000 for an education I could have gotten by just living in the 40505 zip. Life in the “05” has been my schoolmaster over the past few years, especially in the last 48 hours. It all started when I came home from Aaron’s house where we were watching Office Space. I came in about halfway into the movie, and then another friend came by a few minutes later. We were all cracking up hysterically, specifically when I said the boss Lumbergh looked like one of my seminary profs. After the movie, my friend took me home. I noticed my roommate, Steve, was out. I started getting worried because I noticed his bike was gone and it was 11:00 p.m. I was alarmed because he’s usually in bed by 9:30 p.m. I knew something was wrong at that point. I decided I was going to look for him around 7th street because it is a huge drug-trafficking area. I grabbed my keys and left the house only to say, “Dude, where’s my car?” It was then that I knew Steve took off with it. I called my friend back because I knew he was still up. He picked me up around 12:30 to go look for my car and Steve.2 As we were driving along, we were being solicited for drugs left and right. What are two young white guys doing creeping in a vehicle after dark on 7th Street? There was no sign of Steve so I went home. I decided I was going to call the police and tell them my car was stolen. While on the phone with the police officer, there was a knock on the door. It was Aaron along with Steve. Steve had been up all night and wanted a place to lie down for an hour. I couldn’t let him in because I knew as soon as he got up he would need another fix and my whole house would be empty. Steve told me my car was at a house nearby, close to the Lighthouse Recovery Ministries. Steve had taken my watches, knives, some money, and sold my car for $20! Here is where it gets weirder. Aaron and I went on a reconnaissance mission to steal my car back. When I got into my car, I noticed a burn mark on my floor from crack that had been smoked and fallen out of the pipe on to the floorboard. Then as I was pulling out, a prostitute tried to get into my passenger seat. When Aaron and I finally got back to my house, we called Sarah, the director of the Lighthouse. Sarah said that the guy who bought my car was complaining to her about how two African-Americans came and stole his car. (This is hilarious because Aaron and I are both white, and just a few days before when we were doing evangelism visits some guys got mad at us, calling us Mexicans.) Since I couldn’t let Steve in the house, I made him sleep in the garage. I came and sat with him a few hours, and I could tell how sorry he was. The person who stole from me and sold my car was not Steve, but the cocaine that had a grip on him. I loved him like a brother and still do. I could tell that he was repentant. We ended up taking him to detox. I am still going to work with Steve because I believe in God’s plan for his life.

Church planting didn’t seem to be off to a very good start. I was left hurt and in disbelief again. I knew I couldn’t give up and needed to develop a strategy quickly before discouragement set in. I needed God’s wisdom to help plan what he wanted this church to look like. All I knew to do was pray.

Then along came a guy named John. As I was going out to meet people at coffee shops by day and at bars by night, I encountered a young guy in his twenties who was into many different types of drugs. John was a fun guy who loved to party and was conversant in many subjects. John didn’t have a job, but always seemed to have money. I was a bit skeptical about him, but he was even more skeptical about me. Eventually, I discovered John did not believe I was a pastor trying to start a church because he thought I was an undercover cop trying to bust him. After spending more time with John and introducing him to some of the friends in my community, he began to believe my story and was intrigued by this whole church concept. John had never been to church in his whole life, but he had always believed in God. A year and half later, I had the privilege of baptizing John in a horse trough (with no traditional baptismal pool available, a horse trough holds a lot of water and an average sized human being). I had never baptized anyone before, and he had never been baptized, so we both found ourselves on a new journey. As he became a new creation in Christ, I was on my way to starting this new faith community called Embrace.

1. Davis, “Bishop’s Vision.”

2. Some of the names of people in this book have been changed to protect their identity.