If I had to sit through one more church leadership meeting, I was going to lose my friggin mind. Two hours here. One hour here. And still, nothing was truly accomplished or clarified. We discussed and brainstormed and collaborated and chit-chatted about our favorite coffee shops. I really, really hate chit-chat. We “celebrated” our wins (aka people serving on Sunday morning or engaging in youth group). I spent hours in a room with the same people repeatedly, and yet no one in that room actually knew me. So I began to fear that if I, a pastor, felt unknown how does everyone else feel?!
In the early days of Bread&Wine, a small decentralized local church based on missional communities the goal was simple: just be the church where you are. Are you in a neighborhood? Get to know your neighbors. How do we gather with other Jesus followers? Share a meal and share the Word (The Bread of Life pairs perfectly with spaghetti and red wine). Want people to know the love of God? Invite them into your home and embody that love through connection, and conversation. We tried our best to keep it simple but we began to grow beyond what we could explain. People desired the model of church we were attempting even when we were still in the "figuring it out” stage. It was messy and raw. We didn’t always like each other. There was conflict, burnout, building up, and tearing down. Perhaps if we were better at planning maybe we could have avoided some of the fallout but for many, we look back over those first years with gratitude. We were being the church. Unplanned, uncharted, but unmistakenly God’s broken people, engaging a broken world.
What if we stopped planning church? What if we stopped putting our energy into a singular event? Would it all fall apart? Yes and no. The structure may fall but would we stop gathering? No. It would simply look different and frankly, the orphaned church is desiring something different. Since Bread&Wine closed its doors after being a community for over a decade, many of us find ourselves untethered, unable to go back to the mainstream, event-driven communities. Even with the messiness of the unplanned, I wouldn’t trade it for the most polished event. I simply cannot go back to hours of planning and strategy. And I really, really love strategy. But it can’t be how we primarily do ministry even though it is necessary at times. Now, this may seem like I am back peddling but hang with me here.
When my husband and I joined a core group to plant a missional community in SE Portland, we spoke of the need for “the trellis and the vine”. The trellis was the structure, the planning per se. The vine was the organic growth. Both were needed and yet, we all had left (more like fled) the trellis which had grossly taken over the vine. The vine, for us, felt caged by the trellis. It was huge and fancy and we spent most of our time trying to make the trellis feel “welcoming”. I’m sorry but trellis’ are not welcoming. It’s the vine that draws people. It’s the life that people notice.
Perhaps the fear of the vine growing out of control is what drives us to build our cage-like trellis’. As ministries get bigger, we need to find ways to organize the masses. After all, no one wants to get stuck with a thousand hungry people with only a few loaves and fishes, right? So we plan and plan, and plan some more to ensure we have enough. But can we put down our strategies for just a moment to consider whether we might be able to do more with less? Our love for control doesn’t allow for this, however. There’s too much risk for error (or brokenness for that matter) to muck up our strategies. Dealing with error takes time after all and brokenness costs us our energy. So we plan and execute our ministries like well-oiled machines, and we praise ourselves for the milestones of growth (aka finances and bodies in the seats). All the while, the growth of the vine could be suffering. People go unseen, brokenness is ignored, and abuse goes unchecked. We can’t be the church in its entirety if we are too busy putting our heads in the strategic sands of a well-managed ministry. God can still choose to move and dwell in the structures we build for him. But we can strategize the Spirit right out of our ministries too and this is terrifying to me.
As leaders in the church, the people in front of us our hungry. Not just for spiritual nourishment but for connection, and sometimes real food. But we get overwhelmed by the need so we build structures and strategies to control our own fear. Then unbeknownst to us, we send people away to other “villages and countrysides to find food and lodging”1 instead of looking to Jesus and offering him our measly lunch. We don’t like to be caught empty-handed and so we problem-solve and strategize our ministries into spaces we can control.
But how do we know we are doing this? We stop seeing each other.
Recently, my husband and I left a community where for nine months we attempted to connect. Mind you, we are extroverts and are easily persuaded to grab dinner or drinks. I was a pastoral intern and invited to the inner circles of leadership in this community. I had an expectation the leadership would be our community, to begin with at least. I was sorely wrong. Instead, when I wasn’t showing up to our regularly scheduled meetings or Sunday church, I was basically invisible. A few emails here and there kept me informed of the happenings but it never went beyond that. When I approached the leadership about five months into the internship to let them know how I was feeling. One leader responded from their wounds and the other appreciated my honesty. Nothing changed, however. I wasn’t entirely hopeful it would but at least I thought I would get invited to dinner or a coffee? Nothing. Just meetings. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Trellis, trellis, and more trellis.
Family of God, there is room for balance!
Trellis’ nor strategy meetings are not bad in themselves. But have we stopped to examine our ministries to see if we are leaning too far one way or the other? I’m sure there are people reading this and feel just the opposite of myself. Some of you may have grown up with more vine than trellis and the chaos that brings when no one is actually leading anything! My experience has been primarily all trellis which is why Bread&Wine was a welcomed relief. Even when we struggled to keep from building an overbearing trellis, people didn’t stop being seen. Even when we crept into that territory, we told one another. I have been confronted and repented of not seeing people myself when I was so caught up in doing ministry.
So how do we stop planning church and start being the church?
I can’t answer this for you. It’s between you and God, and your ministry. When Bread&Wine hit a boiling point of growth, many missional community leaders began to feel burned out by basically leading a small church in their neighborhood. We needed to change and give ourselves permission to be good at just a few things. We needed to simplify the trellis in order for the vine to grow more freely and perhaps, a bit wild. So when the trellis felt overbearing, we would adjust. We would lean on a plurality of leadership and not on an individual or the paid staff to “fix” it. The whole community had ownership of being the church which gave us more eyes to see one another. We kept things simple because being the church in our neighborhoods was hard enough.
When gathering on Sunday became a regular part of the community, we kept it simple. Our whole church fit in a small trailer for most of its lifecycle and you’d think set-up would be a bear but it wasn’t because we did it together. I have fond memories of that first warehouse we’d meet in on Sunday mornings, climbing a treacherous 12-foot later to get to the attic where our stuff was stored. We would form a chain from attic to floor with one person on the ladder as the pass-between. It was dangerous and hilarious and a complete miracle no one got hurt. But we knew we couldn’t do that forever. At the time we were a new community full of energy but eventually, we had to figure out something different. We adjusted the trellis, so the vine could continue to grow unhindered. And yes, this took planning. We took time for examination and readjusting. We took time to ensure our energy was spent primarily on the things that mattered most: being the church. We did our best to ensure our singular event on Sundays was merely an extension of what we did throughout the week.
I have been a part of many different communities with varied trellis’ ranging from small communities to mega-churches. I have spent over two decades serving and leading in those communities from youth to worship ministries. For the first decade of ministry, I loved planning. I loved being in meetings, leading meetings, and even taking meeting notes! Someone has to do it. But now at 42, I find I resist the overly planned ministry. Instead, I want to sit around a table full of food and wine, with kids running around as we talk about life, God, and politics.2 Lamenting and laughing. Sharing tears and salads. That is church to me now. It doesn’t take a ton of planning but it does take a willingness to step outside our regularly scheduled meetings and let real life bleed into the clean blocks of time we’ve sequestered off. It takes more energy to focus on a person than on a plan. Plans don’t need us to listen or be present. We can master a plan but we don’t get to master people.
So what I guess I am saying is: go ahead and plan but start with people first. See the hungry, let yourself be overwhelmed by the need, and then turn to Jesus. The vine doesn’t even attach to the trellis until it’s grown a bit, right? Why not let our ministries grow naturally through connection and conversation, practicing being the church first before we plan to do church. I ran into an old friend the other day who was an elder at Bread & Wine. He mentioned meeting with an eager pastor who wanted to start a church and had visions of a big gathering to launch his ministry. My friend simply encouraged him to get to know the community first. Start with people. Practicing seeing them then turning to Jesus, over and over again. And maybe, just maybe, we’d find there’s plenty of loaves and fishes to feed a thousand people after all.
Mark 6:30-44
Yes, those things can go together. If we can’t talk about them within the family of God, where else can we?! We need to practice hospitality to those who don’t think as we do.
I enjoyed this one and it resonates with me since it is where I am at regarding church leadership and event planning. Is all that I have to look forward too is planning major events for a community and not developing a connection within leadership. I wish we can make more communities and not have to plan for entertainment.