How It All Began p1

I set out three years ago to start a church with my now closest friend Doug Swan. With high hopes of changing the world in a little over 18 months (maybe two years tops if we got distracted) we launched using almost every church growth and marketing concept known to man.

Our first goal was clear. Try to convince every Christian we knew and a whole bunch we didn’t know, to leave their present churches and help us get off the ground. We spent several months attempting to round up our 300 mighty men, but we ended up standing in the corner of a big empty room feeling like our prom dates had stood us up. With no where near 300 mighty men, we had to figure out a new plan that would convince the dirty dozen to stay with us. These faithful twelve have proven their heart for Jesus is bigger than their heart for us as we have lead them into failure after miserable failure.

With twelve people we quickly realized our 18 month timeline might have to be extended by at least a few months, but still had high hopes. We recruited all we could and began taking fliers door to door and sending out thousands of dollars in mailers. After all our efforts the big Sunday came. All of the experts seem to indicate that our return from our efforts would end up drawing a minimum of 300 people. The signs were out and banners were up. We had volunteers ready to move chairs and help out in the nursery. We were prepared to face the reality of offering a second service for all those first time guests that were not early enough to get a seat. We purchased gift cards to Starbucks and decided we would tell these late comers that they could have a cup of coffee on us while they waited an hour for the second service to start. With sheer excitement our team stood in ready position, all prepared to face the masses that were to arrive at any minute. Finally at five minutes before the service was to start we began to realize that we were not going to get the return that the experts had promised. Finally, at two minutes till, a man showed up. One single man. He was gracious enough and sat through the whole service. We never saw him again. Thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours were spent for him and he never came back.

One would think that after such a brutal experience we would have learned our lesson. 

 This wasn’t the case.

We went on to do a phone campaign that played a message from Doug, inviting people to come and check out this new church in the area. Those that were interested in hearing more about the church were supposed to press one and leave a recording with their information. A handful of people did this.  We then followed up with a phone call and talked to each of these folks who were interested. This proved to be only a couple people after we realized one was a local pastor from another church interested in hearing about the new competition, another was my father leaving a little note of encouragement and there was one message from a guy who threatened to call the State Attorney Generals office if we ever called him again. The rest were very promising because they were people that were new to the area and genuinely looking for a church to join. Despite the fact that we had four points of contact with all of these people, none of them ever showed up to a single service.

After this experience, we decided it would be best to try and engage the community a little more directly. We went around to children’s neighborhood parks throughout the community. We delivered thousands of invitations for people to bring their children to a “party in the park.” And this was no simple party! We had arts and crafts, face painting, water toys, a free drawing for bicycles for children of all ages and to top it all off, pony rides! It was an event to end all events! Surely not even the Ringling Brothers have had as much anticipation over a single event as we had in the days leading up to our first party. We had kids coming out of the woodwork!  Families would come and we would talk with parents while children enjoyed the festivities. It was awesome the number of people we got to know through those events. The only problem was that none of them came to our church. Not one!

I know by this point you must be thinking that we are weird. You must be thinking that we are in someway freakish to look at or be around. This is not the case. We all are normal people who have held normal jobs and have very healthy families. The people we met seemed to genuinely like us. We conversed with them for hours. We sent mailers out to all the folks we met and invited them to visit during our series on the family. Still no one came.

It was at this point that we realized it was going to be decades at best before we saw the global effect we were hoping our church would have and many around us began to ask us if we felt we should go on. It was at this point that we had to really get still and do some soul searching.  We decided that it had nothing to do with our performance and had more to do with our call. God had called us to do something different to reach unreached people and so far we had done everything the same as everyone else. We were competing for the same people that every other church in the area was trying to reach. It was at this point that we were able to get out of the way enough to see God do some pretty cool things around us.