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Uprooted: What happens when new church plants pull away from UMC Robin Russell, Apr 24, 2009
UNITED METHODIST REPORTER PHOTO BY ART RUSSELL
When a church plant pulls away from its denominational roots, it can leave some collateral damage. Does the United Methodist Church hinder or help church planters to fulfill their vision?
By Robin Russell Managing Editor
Editor’s note: When the pastor and leadership team of GracePoint United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kan., left the denomination on March 1, it raised the concerns over what can happen when a successful church plant decides to withdraw from the denomination. This is the first in a two-part series. See part twohere.
It may have been Easter Sunday at GracePoint United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kan., but congregational resurrection was not in the cards.
Church leaders announced that day that the worship service would be the congregation’s last—just a month after its former pastor, Bryson Butts, announced that he was leaving the United Methodist Church to start a nondenominational church. The church’s leadership team and most of its 700 members had left with him.
Though Kansas Area Bishop Scott Jones moved quickly to appoint a new pastor and rouse support among area United Methodist clergy, only 17 members remained at GracePoint. That’s not enough to continue the congregation, Bishop Jones said in an April 13 news release. “We are disappointed that things worked out this way.”
The Kansas congregation illustrates what can happen when a United Methodist church plant becomes successful in its own right and decides to pull away from the denomination. At GracePoint, it was not a theological difference but a conflict over church-growth strategy that prompted the departure.
Like Barnabas and Paul parting their ways, such splits can mean expanded ministry for the kingdom-at-large, but there’s still collateral damage. And it raises a larger question: Though church-planting is one of the denomination’s stated goals, does the United Methodist Church hinder or help entrepreneurial pastors to fulfill their vision?
Church plant
GracePoint was launched in northwest Wichita five years ago by the Kansas West Conference of the United Methodist Church, with Mr. Butts as founding pastor. Its first worship service was in January 2004. Meeting at a local middle school, the congregation grew from a few dozen to more than 700.
The church was recognized by the conference for its evangelism success, including using edgy billboard advertising and incorporating secular music in its worship services.
“This was rock ’n’ roll worship style that was attractive to young people who were alienated from the church,” said Bishop Jones. From day one, GracePoint UMC’s goal was to reach the kind of people other churches were not reaching, said Mr. Butts: “the most messed-up, broken, hurting, wounded people.” Most, he said, were drawn to GracePoint because of its “nonreligious” environment, Mr. Butts added, not because it was a United Methodist congregation.
“We had the motto: ‘No perfect people allowed.’ You come as you are. You’re not going to be condemned. We’re going to accept you right where you’re at. Everybody says that, but if you’re really going to do ministry for people who are messed up, it’s not going to be pretty. We’ve got guys covered in tattoos in the band just wailing on guitars. That’s just who we are.”
Part of the church’s vision for outreach was to have a multi-site presence. For Mr. Butts, the northeast part of Sedgwick County (Wichita is the county seat) was a “ripe mission field” because GracePoint had members who lived there but drove cross-town for services because they didn’t find a church they liked in their area.
With the approval of the bishop, the cabinet and conference leaders, GracePoint began to pursue a second worship site on the northeast side of town.
But with 13 already-established United Methodist churches in east Wichita alone, GracePoint soon found out that it’s hard to avoid bumping into what is perceived as another congregation’s space. By all accounts, communication was lacking. At least three times, United Methodist churches that found out about GracePoint’s efforts to expand complained to the bishop.
Expansion attempts
The “pushback” happened before GracePoint even sought to expand, Mr. Butts said. When GracePoint broke out its “Church Doesn’t Suck” campaign, for instance, a retired United Methodist clergy brought up Mr. Butts on charges for using the word “suck.” Another clergy member who visited GracePoint complained to conference leaders that the church was doing both infant baptisms and dedications, depending on what parents requested.
The United Methodist Church, however, officially does not sanction infant dedications because it differs theologically from baptism. According to the General Board of Discipleship’s Web site, “Dedication is a human act—something we pledge or give to God. Baptism is a divine act, a pledge and gift God gives to us. Baptism . . . celebrates what God is doing and will do.”
The complaints intensified as GracePoint pursued a second worship site. And a lack of communication among conference leaders didn’t help.
In 2006, Mr. Butts said he got the go-ahead from his district superintendent and the head of Congregational Growth and Development Committee to pursue a site in Old Town, a thriving cultural district at the heart of Wichita with brick-lined streets and converted brick warehouses that boast more than 100 restaurants, theaters and shops.
He was unaware, he says, that First UMC Wichita had already targeted that downtown location. First Wichita senior pastor Michael Gardner communicated the conflict to the conference’s leaders, including the bishop and superintendent.
“We had already been at work to create an outreach center in the Old Town area,” said Dr. Gardner. “My response was that it was probably not good for two United Methodist churches to be targeting the same area.”
Conference officials agreed.
First Wichita has since opened a coffeehouse house and worship location in Old Town, and has signed a 10-year lease on a historic building and invested $500,000 in it. “We’re really pleased with our launch. It’s pretty highly effective,” Dr. Gardner said. “We’re there seven days a week with people who live in the area and frequent the arts-entertainment district.” Some 150-200 people attend music events every weekend, and some are attending the church’s “NeXt” services on Sunday evenings, which are targeted to young adults.
That’s a different demographic than GracePoint had in mind, Mr. Butts argues, pointing out that his vision goes beyond reaching young adults.
Nevertheless, he dropped his quest to locate downtown and sought next to expand to the east side of town, with the bishop’s support. GracePoint put together in 2007 a team of 35 people and began planning outreach events “all over the east side.”
Part of that included an Easter 2008 egg drop in Andover, just outside of Wichita. The event drew 1,500 people. It also drew the concern of Andover UMC, whose pastor, Craig Hauschild, requested a meeting with the bishop.
“Hindsight’s 20-20,” Mr. Butts said. “Part of me felt like, ‘Do we need to ask permission for that? No matter what we do we’re probably not going to have a real warm invitation.’”
Mr. Butts said he apologized to Andover’s pastor for not communicating ahead of time, but still went ahead with the event.
Bishop Jones said GracePoint acted “without permission that Andover was going to be their site. They sort of got a little enthusiastic and moved too fast.”
The bishop then came out to ease the tension with area clergy. “The explanation I gave to neighboring churches is that GracePoint was going to reach a group of people that they weren’t going to reach; therefore there was no conflict there,” he said. “There was plenty of room for this kind of United Methodist church because it was reaching a different group of people.
“There was pushback, but the voice that counted in this was mine, and I was supportive.”
Mr. Butts agrees that Bishop Jones—who had taught evangelism at Perkins School of Theology and was the director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Evangelism at SMU—and his cabinet have been supportive, but he still experienced continual “pushback” from other Wichita area clergy and churches.
“I have nothing but honor for our bishop,” he said. “If I have anything that I’m saddened about, it’s that I know this has hurt him, and that was not our intention. We did not leave because of our bishop. He’s the best thing that’s happened to this conference.”
The last straw
After bumping up against other churches, Mr. Butts said GracePoint’s third attempt to launch another worship site was purposely kept low-key: GracePoint members who lived in east Wichita would begin to build relationships through small groups.
But in August 2008, he says District Superintendent Cheryl Jefferson Bell told him she didn’t think GracePoint should try to launch anything in East Wichita because her “strongest churches” were there.
“I’d just come to my end of it,” Mr. Butts said. “We had people coming to us from those neighborhoods saying their churches have been in decline for 10 years. Those are her strongest churches?”
The Rev. Bell said she meant that GracePoint should have been communicating with already-established churches in the area. Because of negative feedback from churches and a delay in the timeline for launching a second site, she thinks GracePoint may have felt conference leaders weren’t supportive. But that’s not the case, she adds.
“I was part of that cabinet that voted for that site,” she said. “I have not worked against them coming over. As the D.S., I was obligated to at least listen to concerns of others.
“There were people raising questions about GracePoint coming to the east side. We had worked with congregations, letting them know what was going on. Some of them received that information differently than others. The word was that we were going to do the second campus.”
After she learned the launch of GracePoint’s second campus was delayed, Ms. Bell recalled commenting, “Well, it’s not [going to happen] on my watch”—meaning that since she’d served that area for eight years, she likely was about to be reassigned and someone else would be working on it. Ms. Bell has been appointed to serve as pastor of Newton Trinity Heights UMC, effective July 1.
“GracePoint has a different style than any of our churches out there—that was one of the things we wanted to communicate,” Ms. Bell said. “I think we could have worked something out. This is a new thing for our conference, to do second worship sites. We have to educate our churches that this isn’t about competition.
“I think we were getting there, but we’re just trying to figure out how to do this thing right. It’s hard when you’re working with a variety of people and churches that have been around awhile. We all stay open to learning from mistakes that were made. It’s painful, because I think of all of us as family.”
Bishop Jones says that he was still supportive of a second campus for GracePoint in the summer of 2008, and had asked the church’s leaders for a “sustainable budget.” GracePoint instead withdrew from the second-site process, he said, to focus on building their main campus.
Mr. Butts said frustration played a big part.
“What we knew,” he said, “was that no matter where we go, no matter what our plan is to do more ministry and launch out, we are going to have a fight on our hands every single time.
“There are so many boatloads of people to reach. That’s the thing that just gets me. There’s more than enough people to go around. Take a look at every Methodist congregation in this city. Pack out their auditoriums three times every Sunday, add up that number of people and you’re not even getting close to the unchurched people in this city.”
GracePoint is not the only church in Kansas that has worked to develop multi-site locations, and several others have been successful. Church of the Resurrection outside of Kansas City now has two worship sites. And in the Wichita metro area, Asbury Church has services at four locations. Mr. Butts served as associate pastor at Asbury for five years, before that congregation provided the people and finances needed to help launch GracePoint.
So why couldn’t GracePoint also launch more sites within the system? Mr. Butts says it’s harder to plant churches today, that it’s like trying to put “new wine in old wineskins.” He also acknowledge his own impatience.
“Any entrepreneur in this system has a season of frustrations,” Mr. Butts said. “[Asbury pastor] Dennis Wallace is 56. I’m 40. I can spend the rest of my life fighting against these other churches or we can go out and partner with a group of churches where we’re actually partners instead of fighting against one another.” Pulling out
Mr. Butts said he met with the bishop in October 2008 and laid out his frustrations. “He’s got a very difficult job. On one hand, he wants to reach people for Christ. On the other hand, he’s got a system that in my estimation is broken. It’s an institution, and it’s broken.
“Here’s the bottom line: Wesley started a movement of God. It ought to be easier to start a church in the United Methodist system. At the end of the day, the rules and the regulations trump the calling of God on somebody’s life and their giftings.”
On Jan. 26, Mr. Butts and two other GracePoint UMC leaders, Larry Knott and Mike Snow, initiated plans to break away by incorporating GracePoint Community Church. The conference was unaware of that action, said Bishop Jones.
And on March 1, Mr. Butts announced in a sermon that he was leaving the United Methodist Church to launch the nondenominational church with services at Northwest High School, about three miles from their original meeting site.
Mr. Butts has surrendered his clergy credentials and is no longer a United Methodist minister. In a letter on the conference Web site, Bishop Jones said that Mr. Butts was charged with “disobedience to the order and discipline of the UMC.”
“This is disappointing because it disrupts the momentum of GracePoint United Methodist Church,” Bishop Jones told the Wichita Eagle at the time. “I would like to have seen better communication between GracePoint and my office. We thought we were working things out.” Mr. Butts knows many people are upset with his decision, but emphasizes that he has no hard feelings toward the denomination.
“My only wish is that what the bishop and cabinet had done is to say to these churches, ‘We understand your concerns about what may happen, but we’re coming.’ When we get a green light, we go. And we would begin to raise up people. It just was this continual feeling of being pulled back.”
While it wasn’t hard for GracePoint members with no ties to Methodism to walk out the door, Mr. Butts found that for himself, the decision to leave was “terribly difficult.”
“I was a lifetime United Methodist,” he said. “My parents still are United Methodist. I went through a heck of process to get ordained. When we started this church, our goal was, ‘Let’s do church in a different way and let’s help to renew this denomination.’ What we realized after five years is we had absolutely no influence on the United Methodist Church system. We were not going to change anything.
“They can throw darts at me all day long, but I hope somebody will say. ‘What’s wrong with this system?’ When you start adding up the assets that we walked away from, it’s sizeable. For somebody to walk away from that, there must be something wrong. Or else we’re just idiots. And maybe we are.
“I think everyone just wants to move forward. I wish them nothing but the best.”
GracePoint Community Church has since joined the Willow Creek Association—a network of 12,000 churches affiliated loosely with the nondenominational Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, Ill., that share strategic vision, training and resources—and the Association of Related Churches, which provides help in church-planting through seminars, online courses and internship programs.
On Easter Sunday at GracePoint Community Church, attendance topped 1,200 people. “There’s just such a freedom, that’s all I can tell you—and an excitement,” Mr. Butts said. “When a leader’s willing to step out and take a risk, people are willing to follow that. When you step out and take a faith risk, God meets you right there.”
UNITED METHODIST REPORTER PHOTO BY ART RUSSELL
Church plant 
The last straw 
