From a Failed Church Planter

There are statistics about church planters, how many succeed and how many fail, and who is more likely to experience each.

We have plugged our ears to those numbers and plodded along, seeking faithfulness despite the smallness and obscurity of the ministry to which we belong. 

This isn't an essay about our hardship in tending to a dying church; there's a handful of other blog posts and a forthcoming book for that. This is an essay about how we failed and why I’m choosing to speak honestly, perhaps even brazenly, about it. 

I am uninterested in hearing well-meaning sayings about how we haven’t actually failed or how success and failure aren’t really about numbers. Our church has remained small. It hasn’t grown much, and when it has grown it is usually offset with loss. Last Sunday, our service was ten people, and we've given up any semblance of shame that number could hold because each of those ten people mean more to us than any number of words in this essay could hold. At times, it felt like we hemorrhaged people like a deep wound that wouldn’t heal, sliced open by the Lord and bleeding out at the loss of arterial pressure. But the few people we have, we hold closely to our hearts. They strengthen us, spurring us onward. 

Their presence is a blessing because we know, palpably, what it is like to be alone. Did you know there is a texture to loneliness? You probably do, in one measure or another. It’s the itchiness of a wool sweater a size too small: too-warm and prickly. It is baked and dry like overdone brownies. We know the thickness of it because we’ve sunk our teeth into it. It feels like clay and doesn’t taste much better. 

We failed, and I’d rather call it by its proper name than pretend it doesn’t exist. Five years in, without the financial support of close friends and family and fellow churches (who have really taken a bet on us, might I add), the church as it stands today would not exist. The church would be (at best) under the care and stewardship of someone else, and (at worse) dead.

This essay exists because I no longer wish to give caveats to our experience here:

            “But God has been faithful."

            “But God is fulfilling our needs.”

            “But we know that God will sustain us.”

There have been real and apparent times in which I haven’t felt that God has been faithful, I haven’t felt him helping us, and I haven’t felt sustained by him. I’ve been at the end of my proverbial rope for so long now, that I don’t remember what it means to have more of myself to spare, to give, to grow. I can barely remember what it feels like to be more than a shell of myself, filled with bone and blood and sinew and nerve and muscle.

We couldn’t grow a dying church within the means that God has given us over the last five years. We have operated within the gifts he has entrusted to us, within the circumstances he has given us to, and I bear no shame in saying we have been unable to succeed. There is a confidence I have in knowing that we have given ourselves fully to this ministry, fully to the Lord in our endeavors. Failing in this way is no skin off of my back because it is undeniable to me that our failure could be anything other than the purpose of God.

In the new year, we will merge with another church in the area. Paul will finally have help leading the church pastorally. There will be more people than have ever filled the building in the last five years, probably even a decade. It’s saccharine, even lavish, to think about. But there's a bite to the sweetness, a bitterness that lingers, which reminds us all that we were unable to do on our own, and all the pain we endured so consistently for five years.

Now, we merge. Each church recognizes that we are better together. Each of us recognizes that we need the other. Each of us sees that the God we both wholeheartedly serve is calling this good. 

I have never experienced an impoverished spirit like I have over the past few years, and I have hung on with white knuckles to “blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom.” I have fought beyond measure to believe that that is true, that this verse is for me, and that I have not been cast out of God’s Kingdom, instead being welcomed into her gates and sturdy walls.

I am grateful that I haven't been cast out, and I am thankful that I am given sight to what had been previously unseen by my own small eyes, of the millions of ways in which God is building his kingdom on earth brick by brick. He has been preparing two congregations to come together as one, our stories forming parallel lines until this year where they have now taken sharp turns toward one another.

Admitting our failures has been an exercise in spiritual maturity while also being a practicum in knowing God more deeply and loving him more fully. I have had to be honest with God. I haven’t been able to offer anything other than honesty. The poverty of my spirit couldn’t afford to buy big-ticket ideals and half-hearted tropes. Being honest with God has allowed me to see God’s own honesty with me. I can only afford to say what I see, say what I feel, and live in that vacant space of lack that is loud with silence and loneliness. I could only afford to say, “God, you sure feel absent, and I’m not certain why I am admitting that because it feels like you can’t hear me. Or worse—you won’t.” 

But by that honesty, God was honest right back to me. A real, true I-am-rubber-you-are-glue situation. I settled-in to the identity marker of being a "failed church planter," and God has continued to instill in me a sense of belonging and belovedness. I have named the location in which I have found myself, a wasteland, a desert, and wilderness—and God has not told me I’ve experienced otherwise. Instead, he has met me in barren places, offering a promise of hope on the other side, a promise that there is an “other side.”

In his measures of bigness and greatness, God did not invoke Romans 8:28 to corner me into a placated and manufactured joy. I have yet to feel invalidated by God in the reasons for my sorrows and sufferings. No—he simply, consistently, and kindly reminded me of my belonging within his kingdom and my belovedness.

I can only testify that I have not found satisfaction in blinding myself to what is around me, but God’s kindness to me has been shown through a sort-of conversation, a push and a pull. I point to the things that bother me, and he answers by pointing back at me, at his kingdom, and my position therein. It is a strange thing to point out to an omnipotent and all-knowing God that things aren't as I think they ought to be. But he meets my groaning with an honesty all his own that tells a story of my blessedness within his family. 

As a new year opens wide her mouth, will you choose to step into her yawn with a tenacity to be honest with God?