I've Been Thinking About This…

Pete Wilson

Pete’s job – teaching, vision & discipling the other pastors. Pages of notes here about Crosspoint’s experiences (‘MS’ stands for Multisite; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.):

Regarding the campus plant:

• A launch team is essential
• Launch takes a massive amount of work
• Missions are a great way to bring multiple campuses together to help cement connections in the whole church
• Crosspoint has 4 ‘Serving Saturdays’ each year
• MS makes any DNA problems more evident
• MS appears to demand matrixed management, but it doesn’t work very well (something that’s become very obvious in the business world).
• MS has the advantage of making a congregation become less building-centric (cool insight).
• Launched new campuses with mailers, but word of mouth has always proven most effective. Not too much with Twitter/FB. Social media good for communication and assimilation; not so much for growth.
• Target is to have campuses self-supporting within 1 year
• Also give an offering to churches that are planted nearby

Regarding the CP, he must be exactly the right fit:

• same as the lead pastor except for the preaching – Crosspoint’s CPs report to Pete and Jenni Catron (the executive pastor) and meet twice each week.
• Qualifications: heart, commitment to the DNA, be a strong leader, strong communicator.
• Top passions: leadership and spiritual development.
• Every campus sees the CP as their pastor rather than Pete.

Regarding video teaching:

• Video teaching is working well – used to be a 1-week delay, now down to same day (actually about 10 minutes, and could be pulled down to a 2-minute delay if they chose).
• There are 2 backup messages ready if needed.
• Regarding the switch to video teaching –
  • it was hard to stop looking at the people locally and focus on the camera, and
  • gets feedback from the CPs about the video teaching.

Regarding the week’s schedule:

• Mondays: every visitor gets a handwritten card; volunteers get a card as well.
• Tuesdays: meeting day
• Wed/Thu CPs do counseling, visitation, meet with volunteers & staff

My takeaways here:

1. The way Pete talks about it sometimes, you might think that Crosspoint is a well-oiled machine that everyone else is running, and he’s just a figurehead wandering around. But it’s clear that he does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. Until recently, for instance, every new person coming to the church got a handwritten note of welcome from him – as the church growth rocketed upward, that alone was a huge amount of work.
2. Choosing the right people and investing them with the right vision is evidently an essential constituent of the growth – almost as vital as consistently great teaching and an environment of fellowship.

A wonderful talk to listen to – hard to miss the excitement he feels for the church and it’s people.

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What follows is the summary of the 15 pages of notes I took at the conference, speaker by speaker. Each of these men were encouragers; some were better atuned to the listeners than others, but I certainly got some tremendous help from each of them.

(‘MS’ stands for MULTISITE; ‘CP’ for campus pastor.)

Terry Broadwater

Director of the Chi Alpha Network

• Go where the people are.
• Lead the elders through a study of Acts – what should we be doing? Where should we be going?
• We must raise up and release a generation of church planters
• We should be people like Philip, who left the Jerusalem church and traveled to the desert, overtaking the lost eunuch in his search for Life.
• David’s attitude and praise in 2 Sam 6 – an example of NT worship in the OT
• Accountability is relational now, not legislated.

The question coming out of Terry’s talk for me is – are your elders or deacons so connected to the pastor that they want to spend time with him? … are they personal friends? … have they bought into the vision he has been given? Or are they ignoring or resisting what he’s trying to do? The founding pastor of a church plant gets to choose the elders, and they generally follow his vision and lead. When the founder leaves for whatever reason, the elders look for the replacement – and from that point on there’s always the concern that he’s bringing in change that they don’t agree with and that wasn’t part of the original pastor’s vision. After all, if they’re hiring him, then he reports to them, right? So there’s often an expectation that he should do the things they want the way they want.

But people and culture inevitably change, and so God’s desire and path for the church will change; can the elders grasp that if they haven’t had formal training? In general I think they can, but a real spirit of unity and humility must be present. Further, there must be a joy in the yoke. I think the proof of that is – do the elders enjoy doing things with the pastor (cookouts and hang times just for the lead team), or do they only get together at official meetings? If the latter, I’m pretty sure the church is in trouble.

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Just back from a great 2 1/2 days in DC at the Church Multiplication Network. Got Josh to drop by a couple of times each day to keep Biff company (thanks, Josh), and we conned a couple of folks in the small group to get us to the train station and pick us up on the return (thanks, Mike & Frank!). Naturally we had a heat-wave for traveling – over 100F in DC Monday through Wednesday – so that made lugging bags extra fun. Waiting in the sun on the platform for the Amtrak Vermonter that was 50 minutes late was a treat too.

Apart from the heat, though, this was an incredible trip. The Assemblies of God (http://AG.org) had laid the church planting conference on for free. I caught wind of it from Twitter, since I follow some of the presenters, and Pastor Ryan & I managed to sign up relatively early. (Some good responsiveness and follow-up from the AG staff during the leadup to the conference – thanks to Debbie Armstrong & Nicolle Rockenbaugh)

As it happens, there are a number of interesting events intersecting for us on this topic – first is the conference itself, of course; secondly the fact that we have just started a series called GOING – something very missional to encourage a more personal level of ministry and outreach. I’ll be taking the sermon “Mission (to the Promised Land)” based on Joshua’s invasion on 7/18 and then doing the follow-up to VBS on 8/1 (“Tidy to messy”) – pastor Ryan is covering the other 5 weeks. The third of these events is an elder meeting next week where Pastor Ryan is sharing God’s vision for Praise Christian Fellowship’s church growth.

So the timing of this was great for us. We’re also thinking of going to the Sticks conference (Nov 9-10) and considering a Grand Tour of a number of the churches whose blogs and pastors’ blogs we’re tracking – Mark Batterson at NCC, Pete Wilson at Crosspoint, Greg & Geoff Surratt at Seacoast, Dave & Jon Ferguson at CCC, Shaun King at Courageous Church and Andy Stanley at North Point and one or two others. It’ll be interesting to see how many we could fit into a weekend. Sadly we’ll not make it to Zak White at Revolution Church.

The other vital accomplishment during this trip was to get Ryan hooked on Doctor Who. All right-thinking men should be, so we watched the episodes written by Steven Moffett – one of the two best writers of current production TV (the other is Bob Larby, but you knew that).

More notes to come…

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• Pastor Ryan was away today in Minnesota for our denomination’s biennial convention. He’s on the technology panel there, and he’s visiting a multi-site church as well.
• The new coffee continues to be a hit. There is a dedicated crew that comes in around 8am to get it ready by 9am – a real gift!
• Worship music was great as always – Chris added in a new song, “Every Move I Make” – at the request of a couple of children. It has a chorus with NA NA NA repeated about 20 times, but we lived.
• I preached on Fatherhood (see my previous blog, ” Message: A Father’s Heart”), as the last of our series on “Love in New England”. I think it would be a breeze to build outlines for preaching on Fatherhood every week for a couple of months! There was so much I had to cut out.
• The Elders have joined the service during May & June, taking turns to pray – this is the last week of that, but I hope they continue. Phil’s prayer today spoke to children (and me!) powerfully.
• Attendance was lighter, as usual during the summer, but at the beginning it looked non-existent. Folks trickled in during the first 15 minutes and we wound up with a goodly crowd by the time we got to the sermon.

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Here are the supporting Scriptures from the message on ‘A Father’s Heart’, June 20, 2010. The audio message will be posted here: A Father’s Heart

… and the slides are here:

Download (PPT, 255.5KB)

Further readings on ‘A Father’s Heart’:

Want to know what your teenage kids are up against? This is an eye-opener:

… and here’s another …

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Wrapping up thoughts:

1. An excellent conference and opportunity – worth a lot more than the price of admission. You sometimes do get more than you pay for.
2. There wasn’t a whole lot of new information for me – its value to me was in what was repeated and confirmed. Sometimes you need to hear something over and again for it to sink in (well, I do anyway).
3. The single most frequent repetition was – “Spend less time ministering to your congregation and more time ministering to your family.” (Perhaps a third of the speakers said this, either in the form of regretting they hadn’t or glad that they had.)
4. I was deeply impressed by the honesty of the speakers. Many of these people had made mistakes that they were sharing – that was gold they were mining and handing out.
5. I was also struck by how many speakers there are out there – people I’ve never heard of – who are excellent teachers.
6. One note hit a chord in me: the speaker (and I’m afraid I don’t remember which) said that people – including pastors – think that the most important job a pastor has is to lead the congregation. Not true. With every pastor, the thing God is building is the pastor, not the congregation. (That is: The most important relationship is the one a person has with God, not with the people God has called us to work with – and this applies as much to pastors as to anyone else.) This was a heavy thought, since we have always heard that the shepherd must be willing to sacrifice everything for the sheep.
7. Sound quality has been improved a little over the original “The Nines” conference, where the level was not balanced across the videos. This time it was – for the most part. However, the sound control for the live portions was very poor, and between that and the 4 or 5 videos that were not recorded at the same level as the rest we were running back to the sound board more than a dozen times during the session.
8. There were also some transmission issues that surfaced, which – considering the complexity of the project, and that it was pretty much a one-off – were understandable; they also gave us a chance to catch up, so they weren’t as frustrating as the sound issues.

My one wish for future conferences: Youse guys run all the videos through level-balancing software to limit the sound levels to one range (an easy step to improve the quality of the presentation). I’ll set up closer to the sound board. Next time will be even sweeter!

All in all, an experience that I (and others at Praise Christian Fellowship) really appreciated. Thanks, Leadership Network.

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