The Ooze has started a web conversation called Seed Stories – Adventures in Church Planting. It’s an opportunity for people involved in starting churches with an ’emerging’ flavour to share their stories.
First off the rank is Dwight Friesen in a frank interview on planting small. He talks about starting off with a vision of becoming a ‘mega’ church but coming to embrace a vision of growing a community of 30 to 40 people.
Dwight has a web site with connections to ‘Christ-commons’, connecting, orthoparadoxy, relationality, and some very use44/241/200/dwight-friesen.jpgful writings. He and his wife Lynette founded quest – a Christ-commons in metro Seattle in 1996. He’s recently taken on the role of Assistant Professor in Theology at Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. He’s currently teaching “Introduction to the Hermeneutical Task – Art of Reading Beyond the Page” & “Life Together I – Ancient-Future Focus for Church & Worship”. I appreciate his wisdom and humility.
Here’s a sample of the interview from Seed Stories.
Seed Stories: What has been the most challenging aspect of this for you? (Feel free to go wherever with this: psychologically, emotionally, occupationally, theologically, philosophically, physically, etc.)
Dwight: On a personal level one of the great challenges continues to be to die to my dreams of a successful ministry. I have had to embrace church planting failure as my m.o. I always wanted to be respected and have people be interested in what I do – for God’s glory of course – but choosing to be in relationship with the people God brings my way and intentionally limiting the size and scope of one’s ministry doesn’t earn the respect of the modern church. One of the things I haven’t been able to get used to yet is watching as a friend in our community begins cutting themselves off from community and put up increasing blocks to the attempts of others to get close. When I see that it is often just a matter of time before I lose them from my life. When I know that a person is unconnected and is making choices which isolate them from community I grieve, for pain they are experiencing for the loss of their presence in my/our life and for loss to our community where every participant shapes us. I love seeing someone fall in love with Christ through his church, especially when a person’s prior experience of the church has been very negative. I love to see a person marvel at the grace of God in a church community.
SS: What have you found to be the most freeing aspect of what you are doing?
DF: I have a life that I like for the most part. I like who I am becoming and who my family is becoming. I have friends and we love each other and we love God together. We enjoy the freedom to create a schedule that works for us. We have a sense of openness, no topic is off limits, no person can’t be related with. Allocation of time is big – we spend almost no time planning and organizing events. We don’t spend a lot of time looking for needs or trying to fill the gaps in our programming. We don’t market ourselves. We try to just be.