Great NW Banquet and Central California Workshop

Wow! Our first Kairos Northwest Fundraising banquet was a wonderful evening. 115 beautiful guests dressed up for the enjoyable evening. Here's what we did:

• The praise team from the Sherwood Community Church of Christ was awesome taking us to worship. 
• I shared how Kairos began, called by God in the Northwest
• Scott Lambert introduced the Kairos video by reminding us what God has accomplished through Kairos with twenty-five planting projects in eight states and four countries.
• Gena Granberg shared Arlene's story of pursuing faith and Julie Hilty shared her personal journey of transformation.
• Ron Clark challenged us to set aside fear to let God lead us into the future.

Today, Saturday, May 19, Kairos is conducting a church planting workshop at the Tri-Valley Church of Christ (TVCC) in Livermore, CA.  TVCC is partnering with Jason and Mary Darden to plant a church in Berkley, CA.

Kairos is partnering with several churches here in central California to see a new wave of churches planted and growing in this thriving, dynamic region.

The chart here shows how the first wave of church planting peaked in 1950. Many of those churches are now in the declining years of their lifespan. It's time for a new generation of 21st century churches to be planted who introduce Jesus to 21st century people. That's what the TVCC workshop is about.

We've got a dynamic plant team presenting today:

• Jason and Mary Darden will begin their planting work in Berkley this fall in partnership with TVCC.
• Aaron and Amy Redelsperger from the Cordova Church of Christ who are preparing to plant in the Bay area.
• Wilson Parrish who planted the Sherwood Community Church of Christ in Sherwood, Oregon. The Cordova and Davis Parks churches share in supporting Wilson and Kristen.
• Tim Blair from Port Orchard, Washington is here in central California where he has been in ministry in years past. Tim and Lisa are preparing to launch Ekklesia on the Kitsap peninsula partnered with the Renovo church.

Northwest Banquet

Come join us!

If you live in the Northwest we invite you to join  Kairos staff and planters for an evening of celebration at our first annual Northwest fundraising banquet.

Date: Tuesday, May 15

Time: 5:30 for enjoying the museum, 6:15 for dinner

Place: Pearson Air Museum, 1115 East 5th St., Vancouver, WA 98661

Did you know that the Northwest US is designated the "none" zone? Sixty-three percent of people claim no religious affiliation, compared to forty percent nationwide. Yet the Northwest has an amazing spiritual vitality in the context of this spiritual gap.

Kairos is part of this spiritual vitality. Conceived in this Northwest context of need and starting the first churches in the Portland metro area Kairos truly rises out of the context of the spiritual needs, reactions, and challenges of America's non-Christian people.

Please join us for an inspiring evening of celebration.

Kairos Executive Director

Exponential 2012

Kairos has ten people at Exponential, the largest church planting training/gathering event in the States. Here's some of the big teaching points I'm gaining.

Day 1 - Exponential: Reproducing at all Levels to Create a Missional Church Movement (Dave and Jon Ferguson, Community Christian Church)
1.  Know your leadership development system so your people know how to grow.
2.  Multiply your small groups. Every leader has an apprentice. Multiply when your apprentice is ready to lead, has their apprentice, and has a host.
3.  Multiply everything: leaders, groups, celebration services, churches.

Resource: The Apprentice Field Guide at newthing.org

Day 2 - Church Plant Killers (Matt Keller, Next Level Church & Shawn Lovejoy, )
1.  Work Your Vision. Vision is a hard-data preferred future of accomplishment. When it happens you can measure it and know it.
2.  Doing it Alone. Your success hinges upon your dream team. Create your farm system:
  - Pick up ducks
  - Give them responsibility--not a title
  - Debrief/train them regularly
  - Spend time with your $5 ducks, invest in them
  - Stretch them, it's how people grow
3.  Don't Lead Yourself. The hardest person to lead is yourself.

Quotes
"We're church planters, we don't take no for an answer, we figure it out."
"Leaders have to grow at a pace faster than their numeric growth or one day your leadership gap will become unmanageable."
"Don't plant at the neglect of your very lives."

Resource: The Up The Middle Church by Matt Keller. The Measure of Our Success by Shawn Lovejoy

Decline in Churches of Christ: Good News and Bad News

Did you read the front page article in the March 2012 issue of the Christian Chronicle?

The article starts with this summation:
 21st Century Christian identifies 12,629 a cappella Churches of Christ with 1,578,281 adherents nationwide.  The number of men, women and children in the pews has dipped to the lowest level since a comprehensive effort to count members began in 1980, according to the 2009 edition of Churches of Christ in the United States. This is a drop of over 12,000 people and 708 churches since 2009. 

There's both good news and bad news here. Let's start with the good news first.

Heritage Strength
There is a movement of new churches that are reaching new people with the gospel and they have found strength in our restoration heritage. Kairos is working with fantastic younger men and women who are exploring our heritage anew and finding in it vitality for the future. This is what our heritage is built to do: to use the Word of God to create anew in the world of God. These church planters are engaging both sides of this equation. They are using the tools of our heritage's approach to scripture and digging into it deeply. They are also engaging the world as missionaries. The result, they are learning how to engage God's lost people in Gospel conversations.

There is reason to hope and to persevere into the future.
But there is also bad news:

The Decline Will Continue
I came to the "decline" conclusion the Chronicle is reporting over ten years ago as I saw what was happening in Churches of Christ on the west coast and the Northwest. As our Kairos leadership team looks at California, Oregon and Washington we see a decline that will continue--and will continue at an ever faster rate over the next years. This is the cold, hard fact.

What Do We Do?
There are always choices and other certainties. Let me list a few:
1.  God's kingdom will always endure. There's no doubt here. The resurrection of Jesus is God's victory act in the world. He rules.
 
2.  We can choose to live faithfully and engage God's mission. There are more churches making this choice. Someone asked me a few weeks ago if I am seeing a geographic change in Churches of Christ. No, I don't. What I do see is that churches that have preachers who have a good kingdom theology and a love for our fellowship are taking their churches into healthy, dynamic places.
 
3.  We can join together to plant a new generation of churches across America whose leaders and people know how to successfully navigate culture and reach new people. This is happening, albeit slowly to this point. 
 
4.  We can ignore the need and let our fears or our own small, local concerns overwhelm us and turn our eyes away from what God can do.

I pray you will choose to be a difference maker. Call me. Let know: 360-609-6700.  

Special People

Every now and then you get to meet special people. This past week I met two such people.

Tom Paterson is one of the world's remarkable men. Here's a short list of his life accomplishments:

• Creator/designer of Disney's Space Mountain
• Filed the first patent for the ATM machine
• Lead inventor of DVD technology with RCA in 1969
• Author of Living the Life You Were Meant To Live
• A Nobel laureate and recipient of the Presidential Seal of Honor
• Creator of the Paterson StratOp process

Meeting Tom at the Paterson Center was a great experience and deep blessing.

I also met Suzette this week. Suzette doesn't have the life bio Tom has. She waitresses at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Collins. Yet she served thirteen of us well in the midst of deep trauma in her life. Her husband is divorcing her and the custody battle over their two children is bitter. Suzette shared this bit of her life story with me when I asked if there was a way we could bless her through prayer. Her response was so amazing in being open with the tender portion of her life when I had so "broadsided her" (her words) by asking to pray for her. She said no one had ever done that for her before.

Tom is a man of faith and accomplishment. Suzette is a woman of courage struggling to find faith. Both are remarkable people.

Father of all, thank you for populating our lives with remarkable people. Amen

National Urban Ministry Conference

I led a church planting track this past weekend at the National Urban Ministry Conference in Memphis, Tennessee. Jim Harbin, coordinating director for NUMA lists church planting as one of the eight critical strategies for urban ministries.

Over one hundred and twenty urban ministry workers and volunteers gathered for renewal, worship celebration and discussion on how to serve the cities of America as kingdom people.

Here are three strategic learning points I took away from the conference:

 1.  The "inner city" of the 1960s and 1970s no longer exists. The government tenement blocks are being torn down. The poor are now finding housing in dispersed apartment complexes, often on the outside edges of the central city. This should impact our strategy for model of churches.

2.  Indigenous urban leaders need to be trained in context for effective kingdom leadership. Victory Outreach, for example, seldom sends its church leaders away for training saying it pacifies them for the streets. This should impact our strategy on how to train leaders.

3.  Dan Rodriguez (A Future for the Latino Church) reported on his five year research that most successful Hispanic churches are English language based with a strong salsa (Latino) flavor. This should impact our strategy for Hispanic outreach and ministry.

The National Urban Ministry Association is "an association of incarnational urban ministries and individuals networked together to fulfill the Great Commission through the church."

Fund Raising Training: A Must for New Church Planters

 

Tim and Lisa went through Discovery Lab (planter assessment) and Strategy Lab (ministry plan formation) last year and hit the path of support raising and developing their seed team. 

Recently Kairos sent Tim to a fundraising training event offered by Bill Dillon of People Raising, hosted by our friends of the Christian Evangelistic Association.

Tim Blair is a newly activated church planter. He and his wife Lisa we called from a nine-year youth ministry role to a missional role to reach God's lost people in their home area of Kitsap County, Washington.

Tim came out fired up and ready to ask churches and missional Christians to partner with him. Here's why Tim says every new planter needs to attend fundraising training:

 "One of the greatest obstacles in the mind of most potential church. The People Raising seminar presented by William Dillon is a two-day practical guide on how to raise support for Christian ministries or church plants. The details provided in this two-day workshop provided very practical ideas on how to pin-point the greatest potential donors and secure their financial support. 

"Fundraising  seems a very difficult barrier to most new church planters but this seminar made it seem very doable if the proper approach is made. The do's and don’ts were clearly spelled out and the principles supporting each were explained. Bill Dillon is a wealth of experience having literally raised millions of dollars for his Inner City Mission Fund in Chicago. You ask a question and he will have an answer. 

"This seminar is a “must do” first step for all new church planters as they begin their fund raising work. It will build confidence in you and provide you a clear step by step process that guides you through the interview process, making the right kind of “ask,” doing follow up and keeping a clear record of prospects and active donors. It would be most helpful just after Strategy Lab as you begin to cast your vision for potential partner churches and individuals.   

"If you're a potential planter and feeling hesitant about church planting, People Raising would certainly build your confidence. People Raising is not just about raising money but about how to connect with people for a Kingdom cause. 

Here's my last word: If you aren't able or willing to ask committed Christians for money how will you ever ask committed unbelievers to give their lives to Jesus? Go for it!

Note: Kairos now pays the registration fee for planters to attend People Raising or The Body Builders training seminars following Discovery Lab.