God Gave the Growth

Susan Brown Snook

Description

Practical and theoretical instruction for mainline church planting.

The Episcopal Church has recognized that planting new churches is a high priority through the Mission Enterprise Zones initiative, which provides grant funding for new worshiping communities, in partnership with dioceses. While there is significant literature and training available for church planters in evangelical contexts, very little is available for planters in the Episcopal/mainline context.

This book addresses how to rise up and train leaders for the difficult task of planting new churches in the twenty-first century. It answers the essential questions, such as why should we plant churches, what models of church planting are most successful, what kinds of leaders are necessary, and what problems can be expected. Through the author’s personal experience and interviews with diocesan experts and leaders in mainline denominations, it provides strategies, approaches, and problem-solving techniques.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Evangelism
• Leadership

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780819229984
• Langue: English

Extrait

God Gave the Growth
God Gave the Growth

Church Planting in the Episcopal Church
S USAN B ROWN S NOOK
Copyright 2015 by Susan Brown Snook
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Morehouse Publishing, 19 East 34th Street, New York, NY 10016
Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated. www.churchpublishing.org
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown Snook, Susan.
God gave the growth : church planting in the Episcopal Church / Susan Brown Snook.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8192-2997-7 (pbk.) - ISBN 978-0-8192-2998-4 (ebook) 1. Church development, New-Episcopal Church. I. Title.
BV652.24.B766 2015
254 .108828373-dc23
2014050181
Cover design by Laurie Klein Westhafer Typeset by PerfecType, Nashville, TN
This book is dedicated to the first four pioneers at Nativity, four intrepid souls who dreamed of a church and helped it come to birth: Mark and Jennie Dobbins Alastair and Mary Longley-Cook
And to my husband, Tom, and daughters, Sarah and Julia, without whose support none of this could have happened.
Well done, good and faithful servants.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 1 Corinthians 3:6
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: The Leap of Faith
Part One: Planting Churches to Join in God s Mission
Chapter 1: God s Mission Has a Church
Chapter 2: Why Plant Churches? Let s Do the Numbers
Chapter 3: Why Plant Churches? Six More Good Reasons
Chapter 4: What Kind of Churches Shall We Plant?
Chapter 5: How Shall We Do It? Models of Church Planting
Part Two: Factors That Contribute to Success in Church Planting
Chapter 6: Church Planters: Servants Through Whom You Came to Believe
Chapter 7: Faith and Vision: Mission Discernment in the New Church Plant
Chapter 8: Gathering and Empowering a Team of Leaders
Chapter 9: Evangelistic Outreach to the Community
Chapter 10: An Energetic Launch
Chapter 11: Forming Christian Disciples
Chapter 12: A Worship Facility
Chapter 13: Finances and Stewardship
Part Three: Where Do We Go From Here?
Chapter 14: Church Planting for Diocesan Leaders
Chapter 15: Church Planting for Denominational Leaders
Chapter 16: Dilemma Flipping
Index
Acknowledgments
I am not an expert on church planting-merely a practitioner. On my own, I would only be able to tell you the story of Church of the Nativity in Scottsdale, Arizona, which a team of lay people and I planted in 2006, and which I now serve as rector. This book is possible, however, because many other wise and gracious people agreed to let me interview them and learn their stories. I am grateful to those I have spoken with, not only for their time, but for the courage, perseverance, prayer, and sheer hard work it takes to plant a congregation, or to support others who are planting. Without their wisdom, this book would have been much diminished. My thanks go out to these interviewees: Jimmy Bartz, Tom Brackett, Christopher Carlisle, Andy Doyle, Carmen Guerrero, Anthony Guill n, Kellie Hudlow, Clay Lein, Frank Logue, Lang Lowrey, Mary MacGregor, Katie Nakamura Rengers, Ema Rosero-Nordalm, Kirk Smith, and Daniel Velez Rivera. I am also tremendously grateful to The Episcopal Church s Director of Research, C. Kirk Hadaway, for invaluable help in supplying important statistics related to the church.
I am grateful also to the team of intrepid pioneers who have shared this journey with me, from 2006 to the present. Church planting is never an individual endeavor; it s a team project. The folks who formed a committed team to plant Nativity, populate its many ministries, and transform lives with the love of God in Jesus Christ have much to be proud of, and they have earned my eternal gratitude. They are too many to name, but their names are written in the book of life. Thank you to all who have created a labor of love at Nativity.
And of course, I am grateful to my family for putting up with my hard work for lo, these many years. Thanks to my dear daughters, Sarah and Julia, for being the first members of Nativity s youth group and Sunday school, and for helping pioneer a new Christian community. And most of all, thanks to my husband, Tom Snook. Without his love and support in so many ways, none of this would have been possible.
Foreword

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: Listen A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen Matthew 13:1-9
How many times have you heard the story of the sower of seeds? How many times have you heard it in terms of church planting or the good news? We are the sower, our preachers and teachers interpret. Or, are we the ground? Either way we often turn the parable into a lesson where we are at the center and we are either a good or a bad sower; or, we are good or bad soil.
What if Jesus offers us a different picture of the reign of God with the parable of the sower? What if God is the Sower? God the Creator flings the seed far and wide. God the Father indiscriminately sows the seed-even doing so without the earth s or our own authorization. 1 Furthermore, God is sowing Jesus. Theologian and priest Robert Farrar Capon says that we typically read this as if the living Word, Jesus, is not in the world until we get there. 2 The Most Rev. Rowan Williams once said we tend to lead the baby Jesus by the hand into the world; however, God is already present in the world. 3 We are not the ones bringing Jesus to the world.
The living Word of God is present in many kinds of soil, working mysteriously in the world, and we may be witnesses or not. Moreover, the power of the seed is not undone by its placement. 4
If the Episcopal Church is to experience the fullness of God, we must leave familiar soil and go out into God s world where God is present. We must bear witness to the mysterious and wonderful things that God is doing in the life of God s creatures. Surely we will see that some of the ground is harsh indeed. The Word of God is found among the rocks, weeds, and thorns, and may be in need of some tending there. We are faithful when we seek out these new (and sometimes uncomfortable) places to look for the living Word.
The Episcopal Church is not afraid of a little gardening. We are the kind of church that tends the soil so seeds can take root; that pushes back the thorns so the seed has room for light and water.
We are the inheritors of a tradition that has found the living God out in the world and has courageously followed him away from the safety of home and hearth to build altars in the wilderness. Will we leave the same legacy as Abraham and Sarah?
In every era the church has had to figure out its unique context. In every time and in every place for more than twenty centuries, the church has fearlessly, tirelessly, faithfully walked out into the world, found a plot of earth and set up a table and there made communion.
This time is no different. We may be in need of courage. We may be in need of new economies. We may have to restructure. We will most definitely need to leave the building. All in all, this time is no different than the time that has come before.
It is our responsibility to build the church for and of the future, to fund it, and to nurture it into life abundant. We are the vine tenders and the vine growers. We are the harvesters and we are the laborers. We are the ones to whom a new generation of Christians, who call themselves Episcopalians, will look upon and give thanks to for such faithfulness.
The Rev. Susan Brown Snook has offered us a unique and energetic template for our commitment to build these new communities in the world-grown from the seeds of God s living Word. Our church, with its great tradition of evangelism and mission, has in recent years looked to other denominations for guidebooks to map our new context and to discern how we could raise up new missional communities. Snook gives us a resource from our own tradition using our vocabulary and the depth of our own theology to show us exactly how we might begin to see God working in the world.
I believe that the Episcopal Church is being remade, reformed, and rebirthed in this era. It is not dead, nor is it dying. It is alive. We have not seen such a great opportunity for mission since the very first years of the Christian church. There has never been a greater time than this to be a Christian and to share our faith with others. I would not choose another place or context in which to work. We have been chosen for just such a time as this. Even now God is praying for laborers to be sent out.
With courage, commitment, and faithfulness in one hand and Snook s book in the other, we have the tools to nurture and harvest what God so graciously has sown in the world about us. That being said, books do not plant churches-peop