It's Been Awhile

Hey friends, it's been awhile. I had an email from a friend in Dublin last week: Hey, we need an update...

He's right. It really has been a while.

But where to start? And what to say?

I have another friend who lives in Salt Lake City. Like me, Thomas is a pastor. Like me (again), Thomas also happens to be bivocational – Monday through Friday he is busy running 3 cafes and a coffee roastery; on Sundays he leads a house church that meets in his living room. Somewhere in the midst of that he's raising 3 small kids. (And you thought our lives were busy!)

A few weeks ago, Thomas made an observation. As Presbyterians, we attend presbytery meetings (regional gatherings of pastors) several times a year. As church planters, we are expected to report on our "progress".

Whenever this happens, Thomas observed, it's tempting to look back over the previous months and just focus on all the good parts – the places where God really seemed to show up. Maybe it was a gospel conversation with a non-Christian neighbor; maybe it was a chance encounter with someone looking for a church; maybe it even involved them coming to faith in Jesus.

Those things happen. (And Presbyteries love this stuff.)

But then Thomas' noted that if you were just listening to Presbytery Reports, you might get the impression from that church planting is all shock and awe, signs and wonders; that God is doing big stuff in all these other people and places, and if you just had a little more faith maybe you could get in on it too...

(I sometimes wonder if we read Acts this way, as well?)

But what if your Report actually focused on all the other days, too: the ones where God seemed distant or absent; the week(s) your kids were sick, and everything went wrong at work, and nobody showed up on Sunday, and all the non-Christians you know seem like they're doing just fine without Jesus (thank you very much!).

As a church planter, there are the times you wonder if God is doing anything at all in this world (or perhaps you are the problem?). And then there are the nights when you're wide awake at 3 AM, wracked with anxiety, wondering if your business is going to make it, or maybe the church, or even your marriage. Some nights you wonder about all three...

Ironically, these less-than-glorious days happen much more frequently than the ones we like to talk about in church planter reports (and emails to friends). I'd guess 90% of the time. Maybe even higher? (Presbyteries get nervous if you talk about this stuff; they wonder if maybe you're doing something wrong – but I wonder if maybe we're conditioning people to measure success wrongly...)

Thomas' point isn't that God isn't working. On the contrary, he is.

It's just that we only see it clearly, get a glimpse of the glory, on a handful of occasions. Most days, it's just rough seas with low visibility.

And our job as Christians is to keep sailing, regardless of the weather.

The author of Hebrews 11 – that famous chapter about faith – seems to suggest this is a fairly normal state of affairs for Christians. (Go read verses 13-16, 39-40: "All these people died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on this earth. And people who speak thus make it clear they are seeking a homeland... Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called there God, for he has prepared for them a city.")

I feel like most days, most of what I do as a church planters is get up, read and pray, then go to work and try to be faithful in the tasks at hand – to be a decent boss, to do honest work with my own two hands, to be a faithful spouse / parent, to answer any questions that people ask. I try to point people in the direction of Jesus, and I pray like crazy that he shows up and does something, because if it depends on me we're in trouble.

Eugen Peterson calls this A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.

So that's what most of the last year has been like. (Heck, that's what most of the last ten years has been like.)

As some of you probably know, Lazarus is a struggle right now. When you take everything that's happened over the past 4 years – COVID, inflation, the economy, increased cost of goods, increased cost of labor, foot traffic down, craft beer cooling off, etc. – it's been a slog. Both locations are breaking even (barely), but no one's getting rich. The last time I had two+ days off was last July. We are tired. But hey, we are alive and kicking and God has been faithful. So Lazarus is doing fine.

I think All Souls is doing well, too. Over the past year, we have seen God bring a cast of unlikely characters into our lives and our living room:

• there's a young woman named "Mariah", why texted us late last week: "Today was one of the roughest days of my career and everyone at work hates me. I don't know where to go from here, but I just feel very alone. Could you and Marilyn pray for me?" (Mariah's coming over for dinner tonight, so I'd invite you to pray for her as well – she is journeying back into faith after a period of trying to walk away from it; she has lots of questions and hurts and fears... but Jesus seems to be doing something. So pray that we'd know how to point her in his direction.)
• there's a refugee family from Honduras who's been showing up at our church. (If you remember my previous email about "Sylvia", she's the one who brought them when their young son showed up in her classroom wearing the same set of clothes every single day, because that's all he had.) So we've been helping them as a church, first with food and clothes, then getting them into an apartment, and now they're focusing working on work while we try and help with transportation. It's been daunting. They speak no English. Yet for some reason, they've attached themselves to us as their church, and we feel like Jesus is inviting us to help them.
• speaking of Sylvia, she's struggling. She was very regular all through the fall and winter, but over the past few months she's virtually vanished. There's a lot going on in her life as she weighs the cost of following Jesus. (She is living with her non-Christian boyfriend and has confessed that she's struggling to trust Jesus with giving up that relationship.) Sylvia's hold on faith feels precarious right now – so if you are someone who prays, please pray for her!
• we had a guy from India worshipping with us – let's call him "Adhrit" (I'm intentionally going to refrain from going into too many details here). In case you aren't aware, this is a difficult time to be a Christian in India; persecution is real and significant. Adhrit was a devout Buddhist up until 4 or 5 years ago, when Jesus appeared in a dream and called him to follow him (I kid you not). Now Adhrit and his family all identify as Christians (it has been costly); they belong to a small presbyterian church (go figure); he reached out to us when he came to Austin for a business conference 4 weeks ago. And guess what? Our tiny little house church just happens to have another Indian couple (who found us last November).

There a half dozen more new faces that I could tell you about, but this should be sufficient to give you the gist.

Where are all these relationships going?

I have no idea. But I believe God has brought them into our living room, and we get to love on them and point them to Jesus for as long as they are here. Much of that loving will be long and slow and mundane. But I believe God is doing real, significant things in the lives of many in our congregation.

As I mentioned in a previous email, it's getting hard for everyone to fit into our living room. Over the past 5 months, we have talked and prayed and gradually arrived at a plan – I feel very encouraged at both the process, and the conclusions – over the next few months, we will start to split our church into 3 unique clusters, and each week, one of those clusters will start to be remote (gathering together in another house, dialing in via Zoom, then discussing over lunch after).

This will allow us to continue worshipping in houses, while expanding beyond just one living room. Hopefully it will create space so new folks can continue to enter. More importantly, we have now 3 couples who have volunteered to lead these clusters (and be coached by me in how to shepherd their people). This is an important step forward in the life of a house church. But none of this will work if Jesus isn't in it. So please pray for us in this regard.

Just in case you're curious, we've spent the last year working through the Gospel of Mark, and then most of Acts. (Many of our people have never really read the Bible; a big part of what we do is help them learn how to read it for themselves.)

Now we're working through Paul's first letter to Timothy. If you're curious what we're talking about, you can listen to the first 3 weeks here:

1. Learning to Wrestle with Paul (1 Tim 1:18-20) - 4/
2. How to Avoid Shipwrecking your Faith (1 Tim 1:1-11, 18-20)
3. How Jesus Saves Sinners (1 Tim 1:8-17)
4. Jesus & The Peace of God (1 Tim 2:1-7) - [I'll update this link on the web once it's posted)

There's always more that could be said, but my emails have a tendency to be long enough already. Much of what we're doing here in Austin looks mundane, monotonous, small. At the same time, I feel incredibly grateful for this call – it really feels big, in the sense that I get to pursue 2 great tasks: first, learning how to build and run a solid business that creates jobs and serves our community well; second, learning how to help a tiny little living room full of seekers start to read and pray and hear God's voice for themselves, so that they can respond in faith to whatever he is calling them to.

I have no idea where God is going to take all this. But I sure am glad to be laboring where he has planted us.

I will try to write again, sooner rather than later. In the meantime, pray!

Christian & Marilyn