Intro to Planting 101

Have you ever had one of those days, where you feel that you have taken 3 steps forward and 50 steps back?  How about an entire year!  Well that has been my experience this first year of planting.
First of all, let me give you some background on what kind of planting I'm talking about and how this entire adventure got started.
 I am the daughter of missionaries.  Reaching out to people is in my DNA.  I can remember being 8 years old and teaching Sunday School to 3 and 4 years old in a remote village in Guatemala, Central America.  I also remember going to school with the rest of the village children, carrying my own chair and sharing a one room classroom with 80 other students.  I would not trade that experience for the world!
I finally came back to the mainland when I was in my sixth grade to a country I barely new and to a reality that I never realized before --- discrimination!  I never realized that because I was a girl there were certain things that I couldn't do both in the church world and in society in general.  I really never realized before that people went out of their way to point out that I was a Latina.  In fact, before coming to the states, it never really dawned on me what I was.  So needless to say, I was going through culture shock and an identity crisis.
To make a long story short, high school happened.  Although I had taken a real big break from the Church as I had come to know it, God had other plans and in my last year of high school, it all caught up to me and I began to see my own faith take root in my life and I started to hear God's voice calling me to ministry.
So that is what brings me here -- church planting!  After college and seminary, and after pastoring several congregations, working with young people, urban ministry and all of those other things, the call of church planting came knocking.
I knew what my parents did, but the truth is that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  All I knew was that I felt called to do something different and to reach people who were not seeing themselves as part of a traditional church.  People who were jaded by "institutional church" and yet kept being drawn to answer a spiritual thirst and hunger.  I knew that if I felt this way, perhaps there were other people who shared my love/hate relationship with the Church.  It wasn't that I didn't want God in my life or that I didn't have faith, but the idea of a group of old (mainly white men) sitting around telling me what I should believe and how I should think about God, uh, not so much.
I was captivated by the person of Jesus and his teachings.  I wanted to be all about that and I wanted people to discover this Jesus I had begun to uncover in the gospels.  I knew that if planting meant turning people on to Jesus, then I was down for it!
Don't get me wrong, I still am!  I am a sold out disciple of Jesus Christ and I am committed to everything that Jesus is about.  I am especially all about how Jesus always stood up for the voiceless and unprotected in a largely religiously dominated society, which is so much like ours today.

So here I am a year into this church planting thing...and did I mention to you that it is incredibly hard?  I have been sent to a great location, where there are new families, young people, professionals, homemakers, yuppies and college students.  It is diverse culturally, economically, in age and in religious experience.  It has been a blast getting to know the community and for me and my 8 year old son, it has felt like home in many ways.  However, my struggle this first year and some, has been not with the community, but with the existing congregation that I have been assigned.  They are a group of 10 to 12 straggling, lifeless, depressed and exhausted and lovely members of the congregation that see me as their last hope, but are scared to death of me!  They are those parishioners who sit around and talk about how things used to be back in the day and how people just knew to come to church on Sunday morning.  A group who have been so afraid of all the changes that have occurred in their town that they have chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the community and have made the church and their worship experience, like General Custard's last stand.
The truth is, they were not ready to have a new church start even if the community was, and to their defense they were not really prepared to be.  So what does anyone do when they are afraid and unsure? Fight or Flight!  Unbeknown to them this group has taught me more valuable lessons as a new church start pastor than any book, boot camp or coach has ever taught me (although my coach has been great, I'll share more later).   This blog is about these experiences and what I am experiencing now as I continue on this journey.  I will be sharing with whoever cares to listen how a community of faithful, allowed themselves to be filled with fear, lose their faith and have sold themselves to the highest renter and forfeiting their presence within their own building and community!

Just in case you're thinking,  "this is the start of a depressing story", there is a happy ending to this story I have begun, or at least its starting to shape itself that way.  Yet, clearing the path has been the hardest task and not one I particularly signed up for, but God has a great sense of humor and they say that God never gives you more than what you can't handle.  So who knew?
My commitment is for this blog to serve as a learning tool for anyone else that is thinking about church planting or in the middle of it.  My hope is that you will share your comments, because I have a lot to learn and I want to know that I am not alone.....

Lydia