Semimonthly ACNA planting advice

The ACNA’s Always Forward effort has inaugurated a new podcast to replace the five years of podcasts it (until last year) had posted on the Anglican 1000 website.

So far Always Forward has posted four podcasts. The first one introduces the podcast and the two hosts, both members of the Always Forward leadership team. A familiar name is Canon Dan Alger, the ACNA (and Diocese of the South) canon for church planting and a church planter in Georgia. Less familiar may be Rev. Shawn McCain, a church planter in Texas who is part of the C4SO diocese.

The second podcast, entitled “Casting The Question - Can Anyone Plant A Church?” is an example of the shorter (15 minute) format of answering a question (other questions can be emailed or submitted using the podcast web page). In this case the focus is on assessment, which Alger notes has both evaluative (how ready are you) and formative (how can you get better) elements.

The 3rd and 4th podcasts relate to a theme that Alger considers a mantra of Anglican church planting: "Church Planting lies at the intersection of ecclesiology and missiology." He attributes this to Baptist church planter Stuart Murray, author of Church Planting: Laying Foundations.

The 3rd podcast is thus a discussion of ecclesiology with Bishop Stewart Ruch, bishop of the ACNA Diocese of the Upper Midwest, while the 4th podcast is on missiology with Bishop Todd Hunter, bishop of C4SO. Each interview is about an hour, although the former has an extra 15 minutes of introduction to the podcast series. These longer interviews are promised to be posted twice a month.

For those that spend a lot of time driving (or jogging), the podcast offers a way to keep up on ACNA best practices for church planting. For those that are more visual, Always Forward is running a blog with a Cliff’s Notes summary of each podcast.

Thursday's Always Forward church planting panel

From Thursday-Saturday, the ACNA church planting effort Always Forward is hosting their 2016 conference near Denver. It has four tracks: church planters, potential church planters, churches that sponsor church plants, and others (such as dioceses) that help church plants. As with the earlier Anglican 1000, it promises to be a major event for those ACNA members involved in church planting.

One session will be broadcast live on Thursday morning, courtesy of C4SO, ACNA’s non-geographical evangelical diocese. According to a blog posting by Rev. David Roseberry (a church planting consultant who until recently was rector of Christ Church Plano), C4SO is conducting a weekly webinar on church planting every Thursday, and this week’s conference session will be part of that series.

The panel discussion is called “What I Wish I’d Known Before I Planted” and will feature various church planters from the conference. As with the other C4SO webinars, it starts at Thursday 8:30am PT, 9:30 MT, 10:30 CT, and 11:30 ET. (Joining the webinar may require installing Adobe software so participants should plan to join early).

The heart of an Anglican church planter

Fr. Chris Culpepper gave his personal testimony last month of how and why church planting is doing God’s work in 21st century America. He spoke at the 28th annual assembly of Forward in Faith North America; his 42-minute talk on July 21 was recorded by Anglican TV and is now available to watch on their Facebook page.

Fr. Culpepper is the head of the FiFNA church planting task force, and the most experienced planter in the Diocese of Ft. Worth. He first quoted Proverbs 29:18: “where there is no vision, the people perish,” and then summarized his thesis: “I think church planting … is at its core bringing the Kingdom of God to a place where it does not now exist.”

“A Desk and a Phone”

He highlighted two phases of his journey towards planting churches. The first phase came in a series of jobs that he described as “a desk and a phone.” The latter story began as a young adult (as a lapsed Episcopalian) leading a UT Austin fraternity, and then a job in real estate sales. He returned to the Church at his home church — St. Andrew’s (Ft. Worth) — as youth minister for five years.

From this, he concluded “It became pretty obvious to me that church planting was where my heart really was,” attending church planting conferences and workshops before attending Nashotah House from 2002-2005.

From meeting other church planters, he drew two conclusions. His first was that “They possess one innate quality about them and it’s a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to do something about it.”

The second is that church planters are driven by the Great Commission: “we want to see that taken to every pocket and every nook and every cranny and every territory where the kingdom of God is not — because we have a burning passion for the salvation of souls.”

“Giving Birth”

Fr. Chris Culpepper at the FiFNA Assembly
Photo from Anglican.TV

The second phase of his journey he termed “giving birth”, because it’s one thing to have a vision to plant churches, but another thing to put it on the ground.

Upon his ordination, Fr. Culpepper started as the curate at a TEC parish, until that congregation decided to stay in TEC while almost all of the Diocese of Ft. Worth left to join ACNA. He decided to leave that church and turn his attention to church planting, and was fortunate to find financial support from his bishop (and some former parishioners).

In 2008 he began to assemble a group in Ft. Worth, and by early 2009 they were meeting monthly; in the fall of 2009 Christ the Redeemer Ft Worth began meeting weekly. Fr. Culpepper credited both coaching and other resources for his successful efforts to transition from an assistant priest to head of a new church plant.

Before CTR was fully launched, a group from Waco asked Bp. Iker to plant a church there. So Fr. Culpepper made the three hour round-trip monthly (later biweekly) to meet with the Anglican faithful. As part of the effort, some trips to Waco became a family road trip with his wife and their two pre-teen children.

Today the Diocese of Ft. Worth has two healthy church plants. Christ the Redeemer has an average Sunday attendance of 120 and a budget of half a million dollars. In Waco, he grew the mission to 75 people meeting biweekly; in 2014, Christ Church Waco called Fr. Lee Nelson to be their first full-time vicar, and they began weekly Sunday worship in the Fall of 2015.

As Fr. Culpepper said, “this is what God has managed to accomplish by his grace. … when we continue to make people the priority, through prayer God makes the provision possible.”

Planting for the 21st Century

He called church planters and other clergy and laity to recognize the new reality of reaching the unchurched. Even in Texas, “long gone [are the times] that we can paint our doors red and hope people will fall into them.” He noted that none of the youth that he ministered at St. Andrews were attending Christ the Redeemer (7 miles away).

Nor can Anglo-Catholics assume that faithful Christians from other congregations will “find their way to Canterbury Trail.” Instead, it’s up to the Anglican churches to fight to be noticed by those who need to learn about the historic catholic faith. And when they get noticed, to have a message about the substance of that faith that will win in the marketplace of churches.”

At the same time, limited resources can help with spiritual formation. Even the most Anglo-Catholic of church plants has to gradually phase in key liturgical elements (such as acolyte robes) as funds permit. At the same time, the introduction of new elements provides an opportunity for teaching the congregation. ”It’s like picking up these incredible things that had been hidden in the dirt, and dusting them off and making them new again. People have this incredible fresh perspective on things that happen when you plant churches,” he said.

Going Forward

The goal of the FiFNA task force is to augment the resources that are out there. Anglo-Catholic church planters can’t afford to re-invent the wheel, but instead must learn from what has been done before. That notably includes the ACNA’s Always Forward, and its own efforts to compile and disseminate best practice.

He noted that his own efforts were supported by a non-denominational church planting coach who had planted five churches of his own, and coached more than 100 others. While “every church has its context, [there] are abiding principles that are the same.”

Conclusion of first Task Force meeting

The Task Force this afternoon concluded its first-ever meeting, held in the Ft. Worth offices of Christ the Redeemer (the ACNA parish headed by TF chair Fr. Chris Culpepper). We had six (of the nine) task force members present (one virtually), as well as three visitors.

Left to right: Fr. Bill Wilson, Bp. Win Mott, Fr. Michael Brooks,
Cn. Dan Alger, Fr. Lee Nelson, Fr. Chris Culpepper.
Not shown: Bp. Keith Ackerman, Mr. J. West

Anchored in the context of today’s America, the two-day meeting focused on the intersection of vibrant Anglo-Catholic churchmanship with best practice in Anglican (or other Christian) church planting.

Our special guest was Cn. Dan Alger, who is the church planting canon for both the Anglican Diocese of the South and the ACNA. He discussed their new website (Always Forward) and new framework for church planting. From the AF website:

Canon Dan Alger

A healthy church planting network has four primary components for the support of church planting:

• Conviction. … A church planting diocese holds the conviction that church planting is a normative function of the diocese and pursues it with intentionality and passion.
• Culture. A diocese with a church planting culture values healthy risk and celebrates the work of entrepreneurial ministry; it celebrates its church planters and naturally raises up new planters from its ranks. …
• Collaboration. A church planting network does not see the work of planting as solely an individual endeavor, but rather the shared work of the diocese. …
• Constructs: … Always Forward will help to educate on the importance of the proper core systems … We define these core constructs as: A Leadership Pipeline, Planter Assessment, Planter Training, Coaching, Ongoing Support, Funding, Mission Oversight

We look forward to sharing the AF resources with our church planters, and also helping the AF explain Anglo-Catholic church planting to the broader ACNA audience.

On the second day, we focused on planning our session for Forward in Faith’s 2016 National Assembly in July. As with AF, we see our goal as both helping individual church planters, and also helping sponsoring diocese and parishes build infrastructure (and culture) that empowers these planters.

Bp. Stephen Scarlett from his California study

Learning from evangelical campus ministry

By J. West

Everyone knows the importance of reaching the next generation of Christian believers. Often the focus is on educating and engaging children at home. But the Church also needs to engage students in college, when even the most devout young believers face threats and temptations (particularly if they were not fully formed at home).

On Saturday, the Diocese of Western Anglicans (ACNA) hosted a half-day workshop on campus ministry. An audience of 22 —  including Bishop Keith Andrews and clergy or laity from all four deaneries — heard a presentation by Rev. William Beasley, founder of the Greenhouse Movement near Northwestern University — along with two other rectors active in the Greenhouse Movement.

Greenhouse started in AMiA and is now part of ACNA, but it is not an ecclesial jurisdiction of its own. (I know the story of Greenhouse from an Anglican 1000 podcast by Beasley and Mike Neibauer, his first lay church planter).

Beasley and Greenhouse would be considered controversial (if not radical) in some quarters. Derived from his observation of African congregations where ordained clergy are in short supply, the Greenhouse model is to quickly plant lay-led congregations under the supervision of a regional priest. These lay leaders are more readily available and (others have noted) are younger and more rapidly deployed.

The model relaxes the need to have a big enough congregation to support a full-time priest (and a building). As Beasley (a cradle Episcopalian from Virginia) put it: “Where I grew up, you had to have $1 million to start a new congregation [to cover property and salaries]. We didn’t start any parishes because we didn’t have $1 million.  That was strong paradigm that affected how everybody thought about our mission.” While not all of us agreed with his solution, I believe everyone shared his diagnosis: no matter how the Church wants to improve the odds of church planting success, it can’t wait until the perfect time.

Still, many of the issues discussed at the workshop regarding campus ministry would be faced by Anglo-Catholic (or any other) campus ministers. These structural issues include:

• The linkage of the sponsoring parish to campus ministry, whether as a mother-daughter or the Greenhouse-style network.
• Working cooperatively with parachurch organizations (e.g. InterVarsity) and other Christian clubs and denominations. The two groups can publicize each other, and the parachurch may have programs to train or develop student leaders (e.g. to lead small groups).
• Overcoming potential hurdles or hostility from secular universities, including (at an appropriate time) jumping through hoops to be officially recognized on campus.

Like other church plants, a campus ministry faces a tension between hoping to grow rapidly and beginning regular worship prematurely. At the same time, Bp. Andrews noted that a congregation is more than just worship: it needs to be equipped to make disciples out of its members and evangelize new members.

The workshop discussed other topics related to working with potential members:

• Selecting ministry leaders. Beasley recommends finding someone already on campus rather than sending an outsider to campus; he has had particularly success calling recent alumni who have strong ties back to a specific campus.
• Differing approaches for evangelizing and discipling depending on whether the (prospective) member is Anglican, other Christian and non-Christian.
• The particular opportunities and challenges of international students, particularly those from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Beasley summarized the process they used to learn the Northwestern campus by using an unfamiliar term: “prayer walk.” Later Fr. David Montzingo (who is preparing laity to form numerous spinouts from his current parish) explained how he once used the same approach at nearby San Diego State to discern (and pray for) potential sites on campus.

It is not clear which parts of the overall Greenhouse strategy would work in the context of an Anglo-Catholic church ministry. From my own experience, a young church planter is unlikely to understand how today’s Anglican congregation relates to both to the historic undivided Church and the differences between Anglicanism and those traditions (notably Roman Catholic and Eastern) that also emphasize such continuity.

Some aspects seem a non-starter, particularly those that reduce the sacramental nature of the parish experience. It assumes that laity will be allowed to distribute reserved sacrament (controversial) or that the congregation will accept only occasional Holy Communion service (which has disadvantages and advantages).

To me, the riskiest element of this plan is that it reduces (if not eliminates) the ability of trained clergy to disciple and mentor both individual parishioners and congregation leaders. Rural parishes in the UK and US sometimes share a priest, as do some Catholic parishes in Europe. However, it seems as though both Schism I and II parishes have been successful this century in identifying and training (bi)vocational deacons who have the training and discipline necessary to lead a parish in the absence of a full-time rector.

At the same time, Anglo-Catholics (who have not planted a lot of campus ministries recently) can learn from the issues, opportunities and challenges faced by the evangelical and charismatic streams of Anglicanism. In that regard, there is an opportunity to learn by studying such approaches (just as one can gain insight from reading Joel Osteen), as long as the leader has the maturity and judgment to recognize which ideas are appropriate and which ones are not. In particular, if a campus ministry does not have its own ordained clergy, then the making key decisions about which ideas to follow and which to ignore would seem to be the crucial responsibility of the sponsoring parish and its pastor.

ACNA's Emergent Planting Process

By J. West

Anglican 1000: Then and Now

When he was installed as ACNA's first primate in June 2009, Abp. Bob Duncan kicked off what was labelled “Anglican 1000” to plant 1000 new Anglican churches in North America. He appointed David Roseberry as provincial canon for church planting, who was succeeded in 2012 by Alan Hawkins. When he was installed as ACNA’s second primate in 2014, Abp. Foley Beach appointed Dan Alger as the ACNA church planting canon while retaining Hawkins as a canon for development, i.e. provincial fundraising. (Alger is leading church plants in Foley’s Anglican Diocese of the South while Hawkins is in PEAR USA that is joining ACNA).

Anglican 1000 hosted a series of conferences from 2010 onward. In fact, the podcast section of the website has audio from dating back to 2010, and more recent content from conferences in March 2013 and May 2014.

While the Anglican 1000 blog and podcasts have not been recently updated, Canon Alger is still leading ACNA church planting efforts. Both Canon Alger and Hawkins have been on the road for church planting training for several years, including a September 21, 2013 joint presentation to the Anglican Diocese of New England in Amesbury, Mass. (captured in an 82-minute YouTube video).

Their most recent visit was to the Diocese of Western Anglicans Sept 25-28, delivering two church planting workshops in Southern California and then Arizona. About 30 of us attended the first two-day session at Bethel Seminary in San Diego, which emphasized what dioceses, deaneries and sponsoring parishes can do to support church plants and church planters.

Anglican Church Planting Resources

There are many resources for church planting on Amazon, websites, paid consultants and elsewhere. Most of these resources are for launching evangelical non-denominational churches — hence the interest of FiFNA in providing materials for Anglo-Catholic church planters.

The ACNA has also noticed this gap. Attendees at the DWA workshops received a 44-page training manual, entitled Building a Church Planting Diocese.

The last six pages were a 3,000-word excerpt of Alger’s January op-ed from the ACNA website, entitled “Sacramental Church Planting.” After an ACNA process that has often seemed very AMiA (if not non-denom) influenced, he wrote:

As an Anglican church planter, and because the sacraments and church planting are two of my greatest passions in life, I am excited both about the liturgical church regaining its missional side and many mission-filled churches coming home to their roots. My giddiness is tempered, however, by the great variance in the quality of this meeting of mission and sacrament; it is sometimes a beautiful, life-giving symbiosis and sometimes, as previously described, a gory, carnage-filled train wreck.

In my opinion, this recognition (by ACNA’s church-planting spokesman) that some Anglican church planting is not all that Anglican is already a relief if not encouragement for Anglo-Catholic minded members of the ACNA.

A Seven-step Process Model

To anchor their workshop on supporting church planters, the canons presented a model of a support process. It has seven steps:

1. Strategic Oversight: the deanery/diocesan oversight of planters needs to balance too much vs. not enough structure, to encourage initiative while restraining chaos.
2. Leadership Pipeline: training church leaders builds on a foundation created earlier in life, so we must begin our pipeline training in nursery, Sunday School and youth group. Catechesis is needed for any potential leader.
3. Assessment: not every one is suited to church planting, so we can dramatically improve the odds of success by using proven (decades-old) research to assess potential planters before they go into the field.
4. Training: training of a week or more (for both clergy and lay planters) dramatically improves the odds of success. Clergy need to understand Anglican distinctives while at the same time evangelizing and making church accessible.
5. Coaching: church planters need a range of spiritual advisors — including mentors and a paid coach — to help them deal with unexpected challenges and be accountable for following through; there is a shortage of experienced coaches.
6. Funding: building a new community is harder, longer and more expensive than you think. Church planters should be developing financial support a year in advance. There are major challenges in years 3-7 as the initial excitement fades. How much support for how long will diocese, deanery or sponsoring church provide?
7. Ongoing Support: church planters need ongoing support, including relational support, mentoring, advice from church planting peers, continuing educational, and support structures for their spouses.

Below is my diagram attempting to illustrate this process.

The remainder of the workshop was organized as a series of 7 lectures followed by breakout group discussions of assigned questions for each step.

Assessment

The needs of assessment differ whether the planter who is one who is familiar with the local context, part of a team of planters, or a “parachute planter” who builds a network from scratch. Still, there are common requirements for assessment:

• Assessment instrument: a personality test evaluate the strengths and weaknesses as potential planter; only about 30% are ready to “solo” as a church planter.
• Holistic assessment: In addition to the paper test, the local evaluation includes observing existing behavior and interviews.
• Relational: assess existing relationships, including the (essential) spousal support

The canons showed a draft of the (50+ page) ACNA Church Planter Assessment Manual, which is scheduled to be released in early 2016.

Guiding and Mentoring the Planter

Canon Hawkins presented his own typology of 7 types of advisors for spiritual formation:

1. Counselor: probing emotional and behavioral patterns
2. Mentor: imparting wisdom
3. Confessor: tells us the truth
4. Pastor: disciples us, practices “soul care”
5. Spiritual director: helps us recognize the grace of God in our midst.
6. Spiritual companions: friendships with peers who spur us on.
7. Coach: holds us accountable to our plans and promises, specifically for church planters; often combined with a mentor.

In our breakout group, each of us were asked to identify which roles we had covered and which ones were vacant — illustrating the gaps in our own support and guidance.

Going Forward

Over the next few months, “Always Forward” (née Anglican 1000) will be releasing its new website and its assessment manual. While there is a goal of developing a full church planting manual, it seems like that is several years off (2018? 2019?).

Meanwhile, the training suggested three key questions for our deanery church planting committee:

1. Until the ACNA materials are available, what resources do we use? Popular (nondenom) church planting books — and if so, which ones? Or do we (temporarily) develop our own custom materials? 
2. For coaching and training church planters, do we use experts like Titus Institute, CMM and Lifeway, which have proven expertise (but are expensive). Or do we develop our own capabilities — if so, how?
3. The deanery has limited funds to support new church plants. Should we spend it on improving the odds (assessment, training, coaching), or on directly supporting the planter/mission? Or is planting attractive enough to attract new or expanded donors?

The latest ACNA efforts bring us closer to understanding the process, but planting a new church still requires a lot of patience, persistence — and prayer.