Si se Puede

About five years ago, I learned something of vital importance. Our church was going thru Natural Church Development, a powerful systematic tool for analyzing church health and function. The author, Christian Schwarz, has massive information on over 12,000 churches on six continents, all sizes, all denominations. With that much information, they began to have information to answer questions they had not intended. NCD focuses on 8 Quality characteristics of healthy/growing churches. But the large data set let them answer other questions, or maybe they began to discover some things about the 8 quality characteristics that they had not anticipated answering.

The one that intrigued me was that they discovered, universally, the optimum size for a church is 200-400 in worship. After that, you have taxed a pastor’s ability to keep up with his flock. Further, the fastest growing churches were around that size, and they were also busy starting new churches. The simple math is this: a church can split, start a new church and those churches can double and split again. It is much easier for a church of 200 to double than it is for a church of 10,000. The Kingdom principle revealed in the data is that Jesus’ mission is being accomplished better by 50 churches with 200 than one church with 10,000. We see this principle at work in America, or at least we suffer from its not being in effect: no county in America has more people in church today that it did in 1990. So in spite of Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and the other mega-churches, the Kingdom is in worse shape now than 15 years ago. A mega church may be impressive, but it is a drag on the growth of the Kingdom. This is an incontrovertible fact.

So, from that time on, Melissa and I began to pray about church-planting. Every day. Looking for discernment. After five years, this is where I am in discernment. I am not sure that I am to be someone who pastors a brand new church. But I know for sure I am supposed to facilitate it, to encourage and equip others in that work.

So imagine my delight in being at The Rock La Roca, itself a new church, albeit coming from a previous church. Part of the genesis of The Rock La Roca was that it would at some point start a new congregation. And starting new churches is like having children: if a church waits until it has the money or is “ready,” they’ll never do it.

I was bandying these kinds of ideas around, and Rosario Picardo indicated some interest. We talked about it a little bit. I wasn’t sure what would come of it. Then I started talking to Tom Eblen, the director of New Church and Congregational Development for the KY Methodists. We had some “what if” discussions. Pretty soon we were all getting excited, realizing that maybe there would be money to help, because Rosario was hot to trot.

So here we are. At Conference in a few weeks, Rosario will be appointed by the bishop as a pastor to The Rock La Roca for church planting. He’ll be entering an intentional process of visioning, building a team, and scouting locations. The Conference will provide most of the resources, and the Rock will provide space, supervision, some values DNA, and some interested volunteers to start the new work at the appropriate time.

My hope is that we are able to craft a model of churches planting churches that can be used in other places. Starting new churches is the most effective evangelism tool, and if we are going to stop the rot at the heart of Christianity in America, then it will have to include lots of new churches.

The Rock La Roca is also working on supporting some church starts in Mexico and Honduras that have come from our people here, or from their relatives. At the end of the summer, we will have a church-wide (i.e., the whole United Methodist Church) conference on Honduras in Frankfort, KY, and we will be working hard to connect with the Honduran Methodist pastors so that we can support their work through connecting our people here to Methodist churches back home.

The powerful thing about this work is that it is also what we will be doing in partnership with our African refugees: figure out how we can work with their families in the camps in Africa, connecting with the global reach of the United Methodist Church. Curtis Book, our Missions Pastor is stoked about the possibilities of dong all kinds of mission simply by mobilizing who we already have with us.

The Rock La Roca is a church that experiences some anxiety; that is, there is still some confusion about how it got started; some pain for the old church that died; a marginal population that doesn’t always dream big enough; and then some huge changes in the past year—not just a new pastor and a new associate pastor, but a whole new population, a new culture and language, and new directions. So no doubt there are some who wish we would not take the step of starting a new church; some who think it can’t be done. Si se puede! Because this is not a cockamamie scheme of man, but a response to Pentecost—people are coming from all over the world. They can hear the gospel. And we hope to send them out to spread the word, whether it is across the ocean in Africa, or down the road in Lexington.

We are hopeful, but we need help. Please pray for us, especially for Rosario and the new church. We need your prayers and support.