When church plants leave: UMC responds Robin Russell, May 1, 2009
PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN L. BROWN
Bryson Butts, pastor of the nondenominational GracePoint Community Church in Wichita, Kan., withdrew from the United Methodist Church in March due to frustrations over launching a multi-site congregation.
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 concerns over what can happen when a successful church plant decides to withdraw from the denomination.
This is the second in a two-part series. See archived story here.
The Kansas West Conference of the United Methodist Church had invested heavily in the growth of its church plant, GracePoint United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kan. In the last five-plus years, the conference had made available land for the church’s first building and invested more than $300,000 to grow the congregation.
Last summer, GracePoint UMC purchased additional land, borrowing $100,000 from the Kansas West Conference and investing more than $100,000 of its own money. GracePoint even had plans to build a $6.5-million building within the next few years. The church’s leaders had paid an architectural firm more than $230,000 for plans and construction documents for a new ministry center.
The land and all assets—including office equipment and worship equipment paid for before March 1—remain with the United Methodist Church.
That’s the day GracePoint’s founding pastor Bryson Butts announced to his congregation that he was leaving the United Methodist Church to start a new nondenominational church. His entire leadership team and most of the church’s 700 members left with him.
In an e-mail sent to Kansas clergy, United Methodist Bishop Scott Jones said Mr. Butts’ decision to leave United Methodism was “very disappointing.”
“We were surprised,” he wrote. “We would have liked to have some opportunity to discuss this in advance to see if the issue could have been resolved in a different way. While we knew there was some disagreement about the church’s desire to expand faster than we were able to support, we were unaware of Bryson Butts’ decision to leave the United Methodist Church.”
Bishop Jones moved quickly to appoint a new pastor. The conference also purchased a half-page ad in the Wichita Eagle for about $4,200, paid for by conference clergy, and Bishop Jones encouraged area United Methodists to visit GracePoint as a show of support.
More than 150 people attended the United Methodist church’s service the first weekend after the split, but most were visitors who came to encourage the church. By Easter Sunday, just 17 members remained.
That’s not enough to maintain the congregation, Bishop Jones announced April 13. The church has begun the process of officially closing its doors while the conference works on a plan to regroup.
Systemic problem?
Some observers, like United Methodist blogger Shane Raynor in his online Wesley Report, question whether elements of the United Methodist Church’s system—including double-digit apportionments, giving up property ownership to the denomination, having the pastor subject to reassignment and turf wars with established United Methodist churches—discourages successful new churches from staying in the denomination.
“I’m not saying we should completely change our Methodist system,” he wrote on a recent post, “but if we don’t make some changes, similar headlines are going to begin to show up in newspapers around the country.”
It’s certainly not the first time United Methodist pastors have pulled away and gone on to lead successful nondenominational churches.
Craig Groeschel was an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City who left in 1996 with a handful of people to start a nontraditional church that met in a rented dance studio in Edmond, Okla. Within a few weeks, attendance grew to over 130 people and they began meeting in a middle school. By January 2008, his LifeChurch.tv was meeting at 13 locations in six states—and globally online—reaching over 21,000 people weekly through 50 worship experiences.
Nationally known evangelical pastor Joel Hunter spent 15 years as a United Methodist pastor in Indiana but left the denomination over theological differences, according to a June 2008 article in The New Yorker. He accepted an offer in 1985 to lead Northland church in Orlando, Fla., an evangelical congregation of about 200 that had just lost its pastor. Today his church of 12,000 worships at four sites in Metro Orlando and around the world through an interactive Webcast. Dr. Hunter is among an inner-circle of pastoral advisers to President Barack Obama.
But these pastors left on their own, without taking a whole church leadership team and most of the congregation with them. No surprise
Dan Dick, former research coordinator for the General Board of Discipleship and author of 13 books on spirituality and congregational development, says it’s no surprise that these successful pastors left the denomination.
“We’ve created this for ourselves and we shouldn’t be surprised this is happening,” said Dr. Dick, who will be the director of connectional ministries for the Wisconsin Conference beginning July 1.
He feels the denomination got off track in the 1990s “when we veered off and started pursuing the church-growth movement” so popular among nondenominational churches. He likens that model to a new business start: Select a location in a growth area, get a dynamic CEO-type leader and find “two or three very deep pockets to draw from, to be able to launch a really nice facility, good parking, good equipment and technology.”
While that formula may work in a congregational setting, he said, it’s not especially beneficial to a connectional system like the United Methodist Church, which seeks to create communities of faith that are accountable within a denominational structure.
Focusing on numerical growth and expansion isn’t really central to the Methodist identity, Dr. Dick argues. And while United Methodist churches want to reach as many people as possible, the Wesleyan focus is instead on building communities that equip people to live as Christian disciples.
“That’s a very different thing,” Dr. Dick said. “It’s one of the reasons why we are traditionally and still are fundamentally a small-membership denomination.”
Most successful United Methodist church starts, he said, tend to have three things in common: They are a satellite of an existing congregation, they have a committed core group of leaders and they are designed to meet a specific need, such as a different racial or ethnic demographic.
GracePoint was a fairly good model, but its expansion was “poorly executed,” Dr. Dick said. Though the church plant sought to launch satellite campuses to reach different audiences, he said “they operated congregationally in a vacuum” and weren’t as concerned about where other United Methodist congregations were present. “They were going into a head-to-head competition rather than seeking ways to be collaborative and connectional.”
The challenge for the denomination, he added, is in meeting a numeric goal to launch new faith communities during this quadriennium. “Many of the strategies right now are nothing more than to look at maps and say, ‘Where is there not a strong United Methodist presence?’ There’s a basic assumption that a church is a good thing in and of itself.”
Instead, he said, the denomination should have a more “holistic view about who’s already out there.”
“It’s wonderful to believe that the United Methodist Church has something of value to offer. But too often there’s an attitude, and maybe even an arrogance, that the United Methodist Church is superior to all these others, and so there has got to be a United Methodist presence. And we don’t have to be concerned about the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Lutherans, the Catholics . . . that we can just go in and settle in.
“I feel like GracePoint had a vision to do God’s work in the area, and they were just going to go in wherever they could without really having that open conversation with other Methodist churches, with other faith communities in the area. I think that really hurt them down the line.”
Path 1
The United Methodist Church has indeed set a goal of training 1,000 pastors and to plant 650 new churches by 2012. That strategy is part of the aggressive vision of Path 1, a strategy team on new congregational development coordinated by the United Methodist General Board of Discipleship (GBOD).
Thomas Butcher, who heads New Congregational Development and Path 1 for the GBOD, said, “It’s very painful when what happens at GracePoint happens, but that’s not going to deter us from planting new churches.”
A new United Methodist congregation is not just a notch in reaching the denomination’s goals, according to the Path 1 team. Faith communities are marked by certain distinctives: regular community worship, Wesleyan in theology, an effective discipling system, community outreach and willingness to plant another new congregation in its first decade.
The Path 1 team—which includes church leaders from the Council of Bishops, the denomination’s Connectional Table, several denominational boards and racial ethnic national plans, and church planters—offers training and mentoring to new church pastors and also helps conferences be supportive of such new church starts.
Mr. Butcher says Path 1’s “new-church process” will result in an 80 percent success rate among new church starts, from finding the best pastors to helping the church plants multiply for growth.
Providing church plants with trained coaches can help, he says. Some conferences use coaches to work with the district superintendent, the church planter and conference leaders in establishing goals. “I think that would have been helpful, to have someone to listen when someone’s not getting a lot of support from the churches around them,” Mr. Butcher said.
Coaches also understand that church planters need to move at their own pace, yet will hold new churches accountable, he added. “They tend to push the envelopes with the annual conference rules and regulations, but I think the district superintendents understand that these are the kind of people they are.”
At GracePoint, there were a “couple of red flags,” Mr. Butcher said, that showed its leadership was thinking independently rather than as part of a connectional system. For one thing, he says the church didn’t pay their apportionments, even though they’d been around for over five years. (Mr. Butts says the church paid some apportionments in the last couple of years and gave to the conference capital campaign.)
“They had time enough to get established—those are things to pay attention to,” Mr. Butcher said. “We’re on a high learning curve here. And places like GracePoint, as painful as they are, teach us some things about what we can do better in the future.” Coaching strategies
Church-planting pastors tend to share common characteristics, says the Rev. Gary Shockley, a new church strategist for Path 1. He helps develop assessment tools to determine whether someone is called as a church planter. “A lot of those folks are going to be catalytic innovators,” he said. “They’re going to be very entrepreneurial-type folks, self-starters, self-motivated, charging-forward kinds of people.”
New church planters also face tremendous pressure to succeed, added Mr. Shockley, who has planted churches himself in the Western Pennsylvania and Central Florida conferences.
“Oftentimes we start with very little, and we know that the eyes of the church are on us to succeed and be fruitful. So there’s a drivenness in getting this thing off the ground so it reaches critical mass, it’s able to quickly get to the point of viability and sustainability so it can stand on its own.”
That kind of drive, combined with resistance from existing churches, can make church planting “an isolating and insulating experience,” Mr. Shockley said. “We don’t always get the kind of support we’re looking for from other churches and other pastors in the connection.”
He learned the hard way that it was up to him as a church planter to take initiative in building partnerships with existing churches—not the other way around. By articulating his vision, he helped other churches understand they were on the same team, he said.
“There’s always kind of a push and pull type of tension that exists in church planting. When a new church comes along, there is an immediate concern about ‘market share,’ for lack of a better word. ‘Why is this church coming when we’re trying to reach these people? They’re trying to reach the same folks.’ So there’s a partnership that needs to be formed very early on.”
A lot of a church plant’s success depends on conference leaders: how they relate to a church planter, what their understanding of church planting is and their commitment to it, he said. Still, there’s no guarantee it will be a lasting success.
“No matter how much we try to support and encourage and resource pastors and new church starts, we cannot prevent someone from deciding to leave,” Mr. Shockley said. “That not only happens in new church starts—it happens in existing churches as well. I think we just feel it more in a younger church that’s got a sense of vibrancy and is maybe more on radar screen of the denomination than an existing church would be.”
Picking up pieces
Even breakaway pastor Mr. Butts said he believes it’s possible for the denomination to accommodate such church growth, as long as existing, traditional congregations begin to recognize that it takes all kinds of churches to reach everybody—and that there’s plenty of unchurched people to go around.
Unfortunately, that was not GracePoint’s experience, he added. “I would say most people misunderstood what we did and did not embrace it,” Mr. Butts said.
Bishop Jones agreed that the denomination needs to find a way to balance “innovative, entrepreneurial efforts with long-term structurally sound actions. There’s a tension between the two.”
Communication with United Methodist churches in the district certainly was lacking, Bishop Jones said. But GracePoint’s leadership team, he added, also seemed frustrated at having to be accountable to conference leaders.
“They felt God was leading them elsewhere, and didn’t really want the guidance of a bishop and cabinet and relationships with other United Methodists,” Bishop Jones said.
Mr. Butts says the failure of GracePoint UMC was due to a competitive attitude among other United Methodist congregations.
“I just never felt a collegial environment,” he said. “Quite frankly, it always felt like more of a competitive situation. Even when we left, that’s what was said, that we were leaving to start a ‘competing congregation.’
“We’re not competing against anybody. We’re all on the same team. We’re still on the same team, even though we’re no longer United Methodist. We are still all trying to reach people for the kingdom. The day a church sees other churches as competition is the beginning of the end.”
At GracePoint UMC, the Rev. Steven Spencer, who was appointed March 5, will continue as pastor of the church until it is formally closed. The church will help remaining members find other church homes.
The conference is still committed to a United Methodist church in northwest Sedgwick County, Bishop Jones said, possibly within three years. “We remain committed to reaching unchurched people in northwest Sedgwick County. We will be back.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN L. BROWN
Systemic problem? 
Path 1 
Picking up pieces 
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