February 12, 2008
To Plant or Reshape
When I’ve talked to folks who’ve planted new churches the underlying thought seems to be that it’s a lot more work than they imagined. Most say they’d resist any future opportunity to do it again. I visited with pastor and author Bob Hostetler about the church he helped plant. His church purchased property close to the school where they’ve been meeting, and now after seven years, a new auditorium is taking shape. “It’s been a lot of work, but I’d rather plant a new church any day than try to reshape or change an existing church.” After 10 years my own congregation continues to undergo changes. Our character is looking more and more like a building that’s been repeatedly added on to; the roof line doesn’t match, the windows are a different style, and the front door seems out of place. In hindsight I wonder if the re-modelers wished they’d planted a new church rather than undertaking an extreme make-over on the existing church.
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3 comments:
Thanks for pointing out the trade of correspondence after your Feb 6th blog. I went back & read most of them ( I wore out on Steve's second one & gave up). There was really a lot of info there & was very thought provoking. We have a Sat. night service, which I think is contemporary, & then we have four Sunday morning services with one of the 9:30 services being contemporary. Our Sr. pastor preaches all five of those services plus most Sunday eve services. They are close to being the same sermon. When our new sanctuary is finished & we move into it in Oct., the goal is to at least cut out one of the Sunday AM services. We have two mtgs. this next Sunday afternoon & part of it is to give input on the order of services, etc. when we do move into the new sanctuary. Probably there will be a printed questionnaire for everyone to have a chance to vote on their preference. The best guess right now is 8:00 traditional, 9:30 contemporary, 11:00 traditional, but who knows.
Ken,
I’m really glad to hear that your church leadership is soliciting input from the congregation and that they are making room for both traditional and contemporary services.
Gail
Ken;
-----Thank you for your thoughts. I too am glad to hear about church leaders seeking the interests of the flock. Providing His people the choice of a traditional service is certainly a big step forward, and a lot of churches do this. It is all a part of taking care of one another and taking interest in each other’s interests.
-----I am sorry I write so long winded. I have such limited time to write that sometimes I run out of time before making that last preparation of evaluating each thought for relevancy. I know that giving the reader a few relevant thoughts mixed in with a few irrelevant ones is disrespectful. But I find it more respectful than my giving them no thoughts at all.
-----Then again, many people consider what I did at that church as being totally out of bounds, or worse. Sister Anonymous was confused, and I needed to give her a full accounting of what I did and for what I hoped. I chose to spare few details.
-----Thank you for reading. And thank you even more for writing.
Love in the Lord,
Steve Corey
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