At First, Failure
I inherited my first church plant from its exiting pastor. In six months we grew the church from about 100 … all the way to 30. After that, Jan and I went to Bible college, and from 1980 on, we’ve had a lot of great stories of God’s favor on us. But I still love tempering my own stories with my first church experience, which was a total failure.
I was a young man, 20 or 21 years old. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t answer questions — it was that I didn’t even know what the questions were. The church went downhill from there.
Later, we started a missional church in Brazil and were quite excited. It took us a while to get registered with the government, and we had a couple of other families helping who had gone through Bible college with us. But six or seven months in, the government changed hands, and we were actually forced to leave the country. Officials said we could come back, but we would have to get our visas another way.
One of the guys that had worked with me to start the missional work in Brazil actually moved back there a year later. He stayed there I think close to 20 years, carrying on that work. But my family moved to Chile after Brazil.
The Church in Chile
Even ending up in Santiago was kind of a mistake. With a friend from school, I had made a trip around Latin America — mostly to several capital cities. So we were in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on our way to Buenos Aires, Argentina. When we got to the airport, they wouldn’t let us fly to Argentina because we didn’t have the right visas.
I said, “Okay, where else does this plane go?” They said Santiago, Chile.
I said, “Okay, I’ll get off the plane in Chile, and I’ll work the visa thing out with their Argentinian embassy there.”
And that’s how I got to Chile. When people would ask me what called me there, I tell them, “They wouldn’t let me into Argentina that day, so we ended up in Chile!” We stayed for a week or two and had some great meetings and great stories there.
My family ended up moving there a few months later and stayed for six years. Our children were little at the time.
So in Santiago, Chile, in 1985, we had our first church that, in my eyes, actually had an impact. It was a great adventure. We only had a couple of helpers, a few other families. We were doing language acquisition, cultural adaptation, church planting gatherings, evangelism. We didn’t take a vow of poverty, but we just lived that way.
It was the craziest, most wonderful thing we ever did. When I think back on that church in Chile, I have great memories. I knew it was an assignment. We were just trying our hardest to follow the Lord. Our non-denominational church was growing. We started a Bible institute. I don’t think we could foresee everything that happened after that — certainly not running into the Vineyard!
About a year or two into it, maybe 1986 or ’87, we met the Vineyard. As soon as we did, it definitely influenced how we operated as a church. We started praying for the sick. Worship changed from song services to worship services. There were major changes in our approach.
Thinking back, I honestly believe that one of the adventures in planting that church in Chile was the God factor. There were things we didn’t know he had to do through us. It wasn’t a perfect strategy. It certainly wasn’t because we were the brightest and best. There were just certain factors that worked out the way they did.
For example, there was a woman who came to the church at a pretty desperate time in her life. She had a small business and was a very entrepreneurial woman. She had her issues, including substance abuse — but God did a miraculous healing in her, and she became this crazy evangelist. She brought so many people into that church. We went from 50 to 200 or 300, and this woman was the main catalyst in that growth.
[bctt tweet=”No matter how good or strategic you are, you need to watch out for the God factors that you didn’t plan for. ” quote=”I always say that in church planting, there’s a God factor. No matter how good or strategic you are, you need to watch out for the God factors that you didn’t plan for. But once you see them, you need to nurture and facilitate them.”]
I haven’t heard it lately, but there is an illustration that when you’re mining for gold, you dig and you dig and you dig and you dig. Then when you’re done digging, you continue to dig. You wear out a shovel. You go get a new shovel. And who knows? Someone could be within about a foot of striking gold, and they quit. They say, “I’m done.” They sell their shovel and land rights. Somebody else takes over and hits the ground three times and pow — there’s the mother lode. I don’t know if that’s a true story, but it’s a great illustration for not quitting.
It always pops in my mind to this day — this woman in Chile signifying the hand of God. Think of the magicians in Pharaoh’s court. They could not continue to duplicate the miracles of Moses. They basically had to say, “This is the finger of God.” That’s used in various places in Scripture. And that’s also a big part of church planting: to be able to look back and say, “Wow, this has the hand of God all over it.”
Coming To The Vineyard
By 1991 or so, Jan and I had moved back to the States with our kids, and we were pretty Vineyard-ized. Many pastors in Chile had taken on a lot of the Vineyard values too. I’d been in touch with Lance Pittluck, the regional overseer on the East Coast. He was talking to me about a year- or two-year-long transition into official Vineyard. It wasn’t completely appealing.
Somehow I got us invited to Denver ’91, the Vineyard national conference, through Lance and Bob Fulton. A handful of us from Chile came, and through a couple of phone conversations with Fulton, we got ourselves invited to a lunch the second day. John and Carol Wimber were there, Bob and Penny Fulton, Jan and myself, and the other Chilean pastors.
Something I loved about the whole thing was that the Chileans were so authentically themselves. They played. They teased each other. I half expected them to break out into a food fight — they were just loving and playful people. Nobody felt on the spot just because John Wimber was there. I don’t think any of them even realized the moment fully — that we were in a sense being interviewed.
John started asking the guys questions, and they answered in their way. For the most part, I translated for them. The Chileans weren’t intimidated and weren’t trying to impress John. My own demeanor was probably worse. I was aware that it was a crazy thing to be at lunch there.
As we walked out, Fulton said to me, “How’d you like to share some of your thoughts this afternoon on how this works?” I said, “Bob, you don’t even know us!”
He said, “Yeah, but sometimes we do this.” Later I figured out that was code language for, “We do whatever we want, when we want.”
So I shared some of my missiology ideas and thoughts that afternoon, along with Luke Huber from the Paz group in Brazil, who had these incredible stories. Someone else from Europe shared too. Listening to the other stories, I felt for the first time like God definitely played favorites!
About two hours later, Fulton called me at the hotel and said, “Okay, we decided. You’re in. We’re going to lay hands on the Chileans tonight and receive them into the Vineyard.” I said, “What about the year or two and the get-to-know-each-other stuff?”
He said, “Sometimes we do this.”
That night, hands were laid on us, and we were received as well as some others. And I tell you, that was a crazy, wonderful night. There were manifestations of the Spirit that I didn’t have a category for. It was the presence of God.
One of the Chileans nudged me and said, “What is happening?” I said, “I don’t know, but I think it’s the Lord.”
All that is part of the story. It’s stuff you can’t make up, that I didn’t have a category for. I certainly didn’t have a plan to be in Denver and to be invited to a lunch and to short-circuit the system. So this is the encouragement I always try to give to church planters: Just keep saying yes!
I look at church planting as a divine assignment. We’re not the origins of this. Church planting is not an idea of the Vineyard. Church multiplication didn’t come from the Vineyard, and it certainly didn’t come from the group I was working with, and it certainly didn’t come from Phil Strout.
I think when people get involved in the whole idea of church multiplication, they can rest in knowing that God is much further into the story than we are, and he releases divine resources that we may not have planned on. He gives supernatural strength when we have basically fatigued ourselves with what we can do on our own. He has the finger on this. Maybe you weren’t exactly planning on something — yet something just breaks loose, and you know in your conscience, in the mirror, that you can take no credit for it. If God had not brought in that factor, this church plant would not have gone the way it did.
Hard Stories Need To Be Shared
That’s a very positive story, the Chilean church plant. But sometimes other stories need to be shared. Sometimes the Lord leads people to do things, but the direction he’s taking them, the purposes and reasons for his leading, might be way beyond what we think they are. Especially when we have the dark cloud of “Western success” and judgmental perceptions always looming over us.
I have a dear, dear friend who was a church planter. He spent ten years planting his church. We tried everything to help him and his wife. They were faithful, salt-of-the-earth people. And they were bivocational for most of the time they were planting.
The short story is, after ten years, they had to shut it down. I refused to call it a failure. I called him the morning I knew they were in the process of shutting down. He was relocating back to the church that sent him.
Over the phone, I said, “How are you doing, buddy? What are you feeling?” He said, “Well, I’m driving away from the school right now. Everything is done. We had our last service. We hugged, we cried, we rejoiced.” He didn’t seem all that emotional about it, but I was emotional for him.
I asked, “What are you thinking right now?” I figured I’d be there for him, give him the old “atta-boy” type of thing.
He said, “As I was driving away, this is what I prayed: ‘Dear God, I don’t know how you interpret the last ten years of my life, but I give them to you as an offering.’”
It was a schooling on our understanding of obedience — the glory of God, the mystery, the dark cloud of Western success. So after I stumbled a bit and gathered myself together, I hung up the phone. I looked at my wife with snot running down from my nose, and I realized I had just been talking to one of the greats of the faith.
That couple’s adjustment back into church life had no resentment; they had no blame to give; they didn’t say the Vineyard didn’t do enough to help them or that the people didn’t do enough. He was convinced he had given it his best shot.
Today’s he’s a theological consultant for Vineyards around Maine. He’s a beloved elder and brother and a real statesman, but his church planting turned out very differently than mine. I can’t even measure the admiration I have for him, despite the outcome of his plant.
[bctt tweet=”We get into this for the glory of God and the well-being of people, not for the successes…” quote=”We get into this for the glory of God and the well-being of people, not for the successes and the times when everything goes the way we think it’s going to go.”]
Back In The States
After we moved back to Maine from Chile, we helped out a small church in Lewiston for about a year and a half. Then, in 1993, we moved to Portland, Maine to start a church from scratch with 20 or 25 adults and children. The church’s 21st anniversary was just this last May.
That church was eight or nine years of hard work and a lot of fun. There were clear places where we saw the finger of God, things we didn’t plan on. There was great teamwork, deep conviction, and a sense of it being an assignment from the Lord. We bought our property from the owner, who actually financed it for us. We had very little money. But we got that building, and the congregation has planted out and is going well today.
Toward the end those several years, I got sick. In 1999 I had a couple of heart attacks, went through quadruple bypass surgery, and was very sick for about a year.
We came to a place where I decided I wanted to stay in missions doing cross-cultural things. I was working with Mark Fields and wanted to continue to influence conversation on multicultural awareness and cross-cultural church planting. But physically, the church life was becoming too demanding. We were at 300-400 people, and I felt I couldn’t do both sides of my ministry well anymore.
So we decided to give up the church to the associate pastor, a very steady guy from England.
I left a secure job, medical insurance and housing, not sure what we were going to do. We ended up in Spain for a few months, where Mark Fields had invited us to work with him. So I worked on mission mobilization. That was around 2001.
The church in Portland was my second impacting church. When I’d left Chile, I’d had this fear that I would never again experience the glory of the deepest of friendships. But in Portland, we experienced it again.
That assignment was wonderful. I made so many deep friendships. Some of my dearest friends from way back have been at those same churches for 30, 40, 50 years. I really thought I would be the 40-year guy too. It was always my intention. But that’s just not how it worked out for me.
A Pathway In Maine
Around August 2003, Jan and I were on vacation, and I prayed a secret prayer. Then I asked Jan, “Do you have another church plant in you? Would you like to plant again?”
She looked at me and said, “Really?”
I said, “How about we ask the Lord for a church of 300 or 400 people that already has an established staff?” And she said she’d be willing to pray that secret prayer with me.
So we did. And we didn’t tell anybody. If I’m being honest, I was hoping that it would be in the south! I’ve never been a real fan of cold. I don’t like snow. But I didn’t ask the Lord that. I just said, “If there’s a church of 400 or so that has an established and solid staff, and you could use me and Janet as senior leaders, so be it.”
A couple weeks later, the church in Lewiston asked if I would come and be their senior leader. And of course, the average attendance that year had been 392 people! Not only did they have a staff team, but I knew and adored them — including Allen Austin, who had been a dear friend for many years.
At first I asked Allen if he wanted to lead instead, and he said he wasn’t ready. He had been a sergeant for many years in the army and was used to charging hills — but in this situation, he needed others to tell him what hill to charge. So Jan and I came on board.
I don’t think it was an emphatic, low-voiced “Phil, let’s do this.” It was more pragmatic: We had prayed that secret prayer, this came up, and we thought, “Okay. Let’s do this.” It wasn’t anything charismatic. It was just a simple acknowledgement of the situation.
Three months later, the Lord began to speak to me. He began to ask me to ask him for a large church in the Maine context. He said, “This is what I want you to do, and you have to be able to break out of some molds.” At that time, the only large church Lewiston really had was the Catholic parish.
I hedged, because I was a church planter. I wasn’t about large. I was a pioneer. I only knew that kind of do-this-from-scratch stuff.
So I sat on that impression for another few months. Finally I got together a group of leaders. I shared with them that I had a slight fear I was beginning to enter into a disobedient zone, where the Lord had asked me to pray this prayer, and I’d basically been in a negotiating mode for a number of months.
As I shared that, one of the guys in the room broke out in an ecstatic tongue and spoke for 15 seconds. It was driven. 10 seconds later, another woman interpreted it. And this had never happened before. These people were the unlikely vessels that the Lord used — maybe the least likely people in the room.
I don’t care what people’s theology is about that — it happened. All 20 of us gathered in my living room got on our hands and knees and prayed and asked for what God wanted us to ask. “Do with us in Maine as you will,” we said. And that’s where God impressed on us that Pathway Vineyard Church would contribute to the redemptive history of the state of Maine. I no longer feared saying it! I no longer feared believing that God would use our church to change even the concept of church in the state of Maine.
That was the beginning of a several-year growth. Today Pathway is a church that most evangelical churches know about. We’re known for the trajectory it’s been on and the innovations we’ve done. And it goes on without me. I’ve been gone now for a year and a half, and it just continues on with great leadership.
[bctt tweet=”God gave us a divine assignment and a grand adventure.” quote=”And, of course, it continues on with the hand of God. God gave us a divine assignment and a grand adventure.”]
Now, here’s the thing about church planting. Everyone wants to see miracles, but nobody wants to be in the place where they need one. I think part of our positioning in church multiplication is to always point to Jesus and the in-breakings of the Holy Spirit rather than to our own hard work. Jim Collins states something like this: “If something goes wrong, look in the mirror. If something goes right, look out the window and see who you can give the credit to.”
We must be delivered from the Western mind of success. We must always acknowledge the finger of God.
