Great thoughts from Tim Chester, co-author of Total Church and a leader in The Crowded House – an international family of church planting networks

1. Recruit a team
   You can’t do it on your own! It doesn’t need to be a big team. Half a dozen people would be enough. What does matter is that you have people who are on board with your vision. We routinely ask people not to join us. (Our rule of thumb has been not to have Christians from other local churches join us just because they fancy a change of church.) We want people to feel a sense of coming to be part of missional team (even if they have a full-time secular job).
2. Develop a vision
   Start to develop a sense of what kind of church you want to be. What principles or values will shape you? Try to express this is in a clear way so that everyone in the team can articulate it for themselves. We don’t have much in the way of programmes, plans, structures and buildings. But we do try to set a clear vision so everyone knows what they should be doing and has the freedom to innovate within the vision.
3. Hang out in your area
   Walk the streets, prayer walk, spend time in local cafes (do your reading and prep there), join community groups, talk to people about your area. This serves a double purpose: (1) it will help you contextualise and (2) it will begin to build bridges with people in your neighbourhood.

From Jonathan Dodson of Austin City Life. This is great advice to work through at Grace Ann Arbor and beyond.

• Don’t forget to ask the pagans! If you are fundraising, remember that God used the pagan king Cyrus to fund the rebuilding of an entire city. He can definitely handle your church planting needs. Most pagans know more about your city than you do, and some of them love it more than you.
• Spend more time with people and less time with books in the first year of church planting. Learn your city, know its lostness, love your city, re-learn how to share the gospel in your context. Fall in love with your target people. The more you know and love them, the better your witness to the gospel will be, including your preaching.
• Identify the top 10 Obstacles to the Gospel in your Context. Don’t do this from the armchair, do it from anecdotes (conversations) and cultural exegesis (spending time in pockets of resistance or indifference).
• Identify the top 10 Obstacles to the Church in your Context. Anecdotes and exegesis. Learn the history of hypocrisy in your city or town so that you can apologize and distance yourself from mockeries of the Church. What do people think of when they think “church”?  Have they ever gone to one? Why did they stop?
• Don’t spend ungodly amounts of money or time on developing your first website. It will all change anyway, several times. You should be with people, not websites and blogs (!). Here are two good, inexpensive web solutions for early stage church planting: Church Root & Clover Sites.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been seeking God intently as to what I feel is His call on my life to plant a church in Ann Arbor. One of the steps in that process was finding a new church, which resulted in our home at Grace. Another step in the process is applying to the Acts 29 Network, a church planting network started at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA. Part of the application process is submitting a preaching sample. Since I don’t have any recordings from when I preached in Virginia at either Image or to the youth at CRBC, I have been praying for an opportunity to preach.

God answered that prayer last Monday. Pastor Larry Mattis, from Briarwood Baptist Church, called me and asked if I would be available to preach on Sunday, May 24. I visited Briarwood in October 2008 during our search and talked to Pastor Mattis about being called to plant in Ann Arbor. I greatly appreciate this opportunity and am looking forward to presenting God’s word. I’m unsure yet as to the passage I will preach on, but that should be determined in the next day or so.

If anyone out there in blog-land wants to worship God with Julie, Malachi and I through singing, reading the bible, and my very rusty preaching, join us at this Sunday at 11 a.m.  The address is 7950 Warren Road Ann Arbor, MI.

From MSNBC

America’s 124 midsize metros, with populations between 250,000 and 1 million people, have a total of 60 million residents. That puts them in the shadow of the nation’s 51 major metros, those in the million-plus category, which contain 54 percent of all Americans.

The study compared the 124 midsize metros in 20 statistical categories, using the latest U.S. Census Bureau data. The highest scores went to well-rounded places with healthy economies, light traffic, moderate costs of living, impressive housing stocks and strong educational systems.

These are the top 10 midsize metros in terms of quality of life:

1. Provo, Utah
2. Boulder, Colo.
3. Madison, Wis.
4. Bridgeport-Stamford, Conn.
5. Ann Arbor, Mich.
6. Ogden, Utah
7. Fort Collins, Colo.
8. Boise, Idaho
9. Colorado Springs, Colo.
10. Des Moines, Iowa

This is a fascinating stat

Ann Arbor, site of the University of Michigan, has the nation’s strongest concentration of adults with master’s, doctoral and professional degrees, 27.7 percent.

which is born out by Grace’s recent congregational survey and must impact my plans to plant in Ann Arbor.

I got an email last night from Daniel Yang, who found me online and is a web programmer and a prospective church planter in the Detroit Area who is getting assessed by Acts 29. Kind of like looking in a mirror

I’m constantly amazed how much smaller the Internet makes the world. The challenge, then, is to remember the bigness of God and the need to find ourselves in Him, not in our connections.

Here’s Daniel’s ministry site – http://dwellindetroit.com

Keep him in your prayers as the Spirit works through him and his church to reach Detroit with the Gospel.

So, the Ann Arbor News is closing, to be replaced by AnnArbor.com. Good thing? Most definitely no. There will be less true reporting, and more opinion, more attitude, more candor, which is not a good thing.

I think this will negatively affect coverage of U of M sports. I’m not all that impressed by their coverage now, and there’s no way that they can compete against sites like mgoblog.com, mvictors.com, and umhoops.com.

I think this will negatively affect coverage of high sports. Who will be out covering the Huron girls’ soccer games, or the Pioneer swim meets, or Ypsi track meets? By reducing this coverage, and the lose of the “Ann Arbor News Player of the Year”, students will have less media coverage and less exposure to recruiters from colleges. Could some students not be able to afford coverage because the scholarship that they would have received with more coverage wasn’t available?

I think this will negatively affect coverage of religion. Right now, the AA News does an okay job of reporting about religion. By moving things online and relying on citizen journalists, there’s no incentive for people to report on things they don’t care about, and as I’ve written about before, Ann Arbor doesn’t care much about religion.

I think this will negatively affect people who don’t have access to technology. Do we really think that people will take a bus to the library to read AnnArbor.com on a public computer? There has already been a study examining the closing of the Cincinnati Post and they reported that

The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.

Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, the researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office.

Does this mean that the only people who will be involved and truly in the know will be elite?

It’s a sad day when a newspaper closes. I like sitting down and reading a physical product, feeling the paper and getting dirty from the ink. It forces me to think local. When they ask people from where they get their news, they always say “TV” or “Internet”. No reporter ever follows up with “Where do you get your local news?” Very soon, the answer to that question will be “Nowhere”

Mark Driscoll, of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, has often said that Seattle is the least-churched city in America. I’ve always wondered where he got his stat, not because I disbelieve it, but because I would like to look at that data to see where Ann Arbor stands.

I did some searching yesterday for demographic data, and found the Association of Religious Data Archives, whose “goal is to preserve and provide access to high-quality data on religion in the United States and abroad.” You can search by Zip Code and see, for that county, the number of adherents to particular denominational groups or none. Here are the stats for Washtenaw County, Ann Arbor’s county

I was stunned by those numbers. Only 6.5% of Washtenaw County residents are adherents of an Evangelical Protestant church. I then checked those numbers against King County, which is Seattle’s county.

At least according to this data, Washtenaw County looks less churched than Seattle. It’s entirely possible that the data is completely accurate, but it definitely isn’t encouraging.

This is why I feel called to plant a church in Ann Arbor. The church is basically invisible in this area. Jesus calls us to change that, to make Him visible through the church — His bride and body. I have been praying about this and, Lord willing, I will attend an Acts 29 Boot Camp in the fall to be assessed for being a church planter. I have no clue how God will work all of this, or if He is indeed calling me to plant a church. What I am committed to, though, is to seeking Him, and submitting myself before Him, that I would be a humble servant before Him and before man.

Part 2 of my Church Planting in Ann Arbor series. See Part 1 here

This page has moved to here

Our new church, Grace Bible Church in Ann Arbor, is currently searching for a new Senior Pastor. They handed out a survey in the bulletin yesterday asking for demographic info from the congregation as well as thoughts on what members of the congregation want in a Senior Pastor. I’m trying to organize my thoughts on that question so that my survey submission will be clear and concise. So, here goes

• Meets elder qualities as set down in Titus 1:5-9 and 1 Timothy 3:1-7
• Has passion to reach the lost in Ann Arbor with the gospel
• Has a specific vision to reach the lost in Ann Arbor, a pre-Christian town
• Sees the local church as having the primary responsibility for theological education and raising up leaders in the church (following the Paul/Timothy model)
• Commitment to creating and nurturing a culture of discipleship and mentoring at Grace
• Passion for planting church-planting churches
• Firmer-than-average grasp of core Christian doctrines (from Mark Dever)
• Firm grasp of doctrines distinctive to particular church (from Mark Dever)
• Firmer-than-average grasp on doctrines that are currently under cultural pressure (from Mark Dever)

I have intentionally left off educational requirements like seminary or bible school degree, for education isn’t specifically mentioned in the Bible as a quality of an elder. That doesn’t mean that an elder should be uneducated, but we shouldn’t be more strict than the bible when identifying and raising up leaders.

Pride and arrogance are probably the sins with which I most struggle. I’ve tried to rationalize it by saying that I don’t think that I’m better than other people, but I expect a lot of myself. Frankly, that’s baloney. Any time I think of myself highly, that is sin. Every time I am prideful and seek my own glory, that is sin. It’s clear as day in verses like

Proverbs 16:18 - Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall

Proverbs 29:23 - One’s pride will bring him low, but he who is lowly in spirit will obtain honor.

Mark 7:22 - And he (Jesus) said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. ²¹For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²²coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

Those verses need to affect me, they need to convict me of my pride and arrogance. I can’t read these like they are good advice or only for other people. I need to know in my heart that these are written for me, that God is speaking to me through His word, telling me to die to self and live in Him.

These sins of pride and arrogance come to surface especially when I think of planting a church in Ann Arbor. When I hear of other churches planting, I sinfully think that they are doing what I should be doing, that they are stealing my idea. Then I am reminded that “I am the worst sinner I know” (paraphrase of 1 Timothy 1:15) as I attempt to put myself above God’s providential plan. I should rejoice that other men feel called by God to plant churches in Ann Arbor. Praise God that there will be new congregations proclaiming the gospel – the good news that Jesus, the Father Son, came in human form to freely offer salvation through repentance to a rebellious people who would otherwise be rightly condemned to hell. I need to pray for the success (faithfulness) of these other church plants and see their work as FOR God’s purposes, and not against mine.

PS – The impetus for this post was the Insight Podcast interview with Young Pastors. I was greatly encouraged by two pastors who, while being only miles apart, did not see each other as competition. The quote was something like “There are 950,000 unchurched people in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. If their church has 900,000 in attendance, that still leaves us with 50,000 people to reach with the gospel.” What a great attitude and a stark contrast to mine, where I see other church’s work as inhibiting or preventing what I think is my work. That is me limiting God, thinking that He won’t reconcile all of Ann Arbor to Him. My prayer is that God will bring all in Ann Arbor to Him, that Ann Arbor would be known as a city devoted to God and His purposes.