How it All Started
Thirty five years ago we went to Ireland to help a group of friends create a new gospel community—a demonstration that God is living and active in his people, and would use them to build an authentic Irish expression of biblical community. We learned so much from our Irish friends. It was a turning point in our lives.
We quickly discovered our most critical role was to offer the gifts of encouragement, coaching, and the recognition that God had given them the gifts they needed to establish an Irish-led congregation. Others had come alongside them before. But this pattern of championing localized church leadership deepend and has continued since we departed, as has the initial congregation in which this was practiced. I trust that our Irish colleagues would agree.
Through a willingness to put reputation and ambition aside, American leaders in mission contexts increasingly follow this pattern of equipping—of coming alongside leaders in their contexts to cultivate fruitfulness in their ministries.
We returned to the U.S. from what was a season of epiphany having acquired a taste for that fruit. We had started a journey towards fostering this way of serving within the lives of pastors and their spouses, praying God might open those doors. And he has.
It always refreshes me to remember the Lord’s faithfulness and brings the picture into greater focus.
Our season of church planting in Colorado offered an opportunity to immerse ourselves in a community once again. We saw many people come to know him through the ministry of the church. It also presented systemic challenges to the model we had tasted in Ireland—much of the paradigm of the church planter was molded by the myth of the hero leader. [[ Read more about giving up the hero leader model here ]]
The next ten years were a tremendous season of learning for us. God was weaving together the convergence of a third church plant in North Carolina, the Genesis Project, the Pastors Summit, our first sabbatical, and completing my Doctor of Ministry degree at Covenant Seminary.
The church we were then planting in Concord had chosen to have a team-pastor model from the start. Co-pastor and partner Mark Weathers and I can attest to the wisdom of this church planting model. At the same time, we were exploring how we could come alongside pastors in the US with our colleagues in the Genesis Project. With the Pastors Summit, we became part of the research as well as facilitators of subsequent cohorts.
We’ve been saying for years that pastors need a pastor. They often don’t have one. As they care for the souls of their flock, too often they have no one who cares for their souls. That is what started us down the road and began an increasingly intentional path with our colleagues in the Genesis Project. In 2004 we began asking, “how would we care for the hearts of church planters in the lonely often dangerous calling of establishing a new church?”
This is how it all started. Now what we do by God’s grace is to offer pastoral care, and spiritual direction to pastors. We include their spouses. We avail ourselves of the best tools we can find to support this process.
Our aim is to strengthen the church to carry out Christ’s mission by creating a place where pastors can be renewed and refreshed in his grace.
