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| 157 7 Church Planting I A New Work From the audience of about fifty people, a young man who looked to be in his late twenties asked, “When you have a team ready to plant, how do you find a church willing to mentor you?” Three of the four panelists answered him. Dustin, “lead pastor” for a 2005 church plant in the eastern suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, assured the questioner that if he had the flexibility to move anywhere he and his team would be “snapped up in a second.” Following some advice from others in the audience, Rick, lead pastor for a 2006 church plant joked that Lexington, the city of his church, might be nice. As proof, he proudly announced that Lexington was recently named by Forbes magazine as “one of the most influential cities in America.” This evoked an appreciative but modest round of laughter. Before the laughs had fully subsided, Kevin, lead pastor for The Oaks whom we met earlier, suggested in the calmest of tones that they consider Middletown: “We were in Forbes too. They named us one of America’s ten fastest dying cities.” The amused uproar jolted the room. Kevin’s tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to Rick’s class-infused quip was a lighter moment in an otherwise serious day. The panel was the featured event of a seminar, “Church Planting for the Rest of Us,” held at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. I spent nearly three hours there on a cold morning in late January 2010. Founded in 2000, Sojourn was an early member of Acts 29, an Evangelical church planting network with two hundred and ten churches in forty-two states (as of October 2010). Everyone at the seminar was a current or hopeful Acts 29 church pastor. Because of its tenure with the network, Sojourn regularly hosts training events like this seminar and is well-known among Acts 29 leaders. Kevin described Sojourn as “the intellectuals” of the network, particularly influential for “innovation and the arts.” The seminar was held in Sojourn’s main building near downtown Louisville : a late nineteenth century, 57,000-square foot converted elementary 158 | Church Planting I school. The dominating element inside the building is an engulfing presentation of art. Most of the walls are lined with professionally displayed pieces of various media: black/white and color photography, paintings, drawings, etchings, collages. The seminar room is on the ground floor and adjoins an art gallery that is open to the public. The Sojourn staff change the exhibits in this gallery every four to six weeks, and accept bids from local and national artists. That morning, a University of Missouri art professor’s work was on display: a photographic tour of American megachurches. “Church Planting for the Rest of Us” had two halves. In the first half the four panelists listed “three or five things every church planter should know,” followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. A cumulative list from the four men ranged from the practical to the spiritual: read widely in the church planting literature; build a launch team unlike yourself; be mentored by a successful church planter for six months; be yourself; count on more spiritual attack than you expect; remember that you cannot please everyone; concentrate on doing a few things well as a church; do not ground your identity in what you are against; be humble; emphasize service to your city. The second half, followed by another round of questions, addressed “three or five mistakes to avoid when planting a church”: do not launch too early; do not try to mediate every problem; pray; create specific blocks of time for rest; try not to over- or underestimate problems; pastor your family first. The panelists and audience were all in their twenties and thirties; all (save one exception) were white, and all were men. These demographics are nationally representative for Acts 29 pastors. Age and race are sociological, structural reflections of the network’s history and the New Calvinist movement more generally (Hansen 2008). The absence of women is theological. Acts 29 pastors describe themselves as “complementarians”: they interpret certain biblical texts (for example, 1Timothy 2:11–13, Titus 1:5–9) to mean that males and females have been designed and assigned by God to serve different, complementary functions within the local congregation. Only men can be “elders.” This theological conviction does prompt some social conventions. For example, a sense of hyper-masculinity pervaded the Louisville...

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