Chicago Church-Planting Conference
Disregarding the Mafia
Chicago is the city of Al Capone and Mafia politics, but it will be swamped this week by hundreds of Christian leaders, and four of them are NeoXenos ministry leaders: Joel Hughes, Keith McCallum, Mark Michalek and Greg Morscher. In a packed Gladiator van they drove without air-conditioning through a deluge of rain and floods that shut down I-94, but they arrived in the big city, starry-eyed and wondering what changes lay in store for the week ahead.1
Christian leaders are gathering from around the country to learn about radical, new church-planting strategies that break the dusty, old molds of the traditional church.
Multi-Site Exposed 2008 is a conference about "multiplying your church’s impact in your community," their Web site claims. It is sponsored by Leadership Network, which has been bringing together "innovative Christian leaders" since 1984.
"Leadership Network’s ‘DNA’ is to work directly with pioneer churches who are testing and implementing the new ideas that will drive the Church in the future." – Leadership Network
Cutting-edge Christian thinkers do meet each other at Leadership Network conferences. The leaders of Emergent Village and the Emergent Church Movement first met a through Leadership Network conference.
"If you incubate a weed, you’ll get a lot more weeds," Joel said, "but if you incubate something spiritual and spread that, it’s a good thing." He was stressing the need for real discernment while learning from these other church movements.
The Timely Topics
We came to this conference to figure out, ‘how can we plant churches in other locationsFor years NeoXenos elders were budgeting and watching for an opportunity for advanced ministry training. Greg first spotted this conference as a timely opportunity to examine new church-planting trends in Christianity. For months Keith was writing about these new trends in the NeoZine (see The ‘Real’ Xenos Model, for example), and then at the 2008 July Body Meeting at Hudson park he taught about the trends and the church plants that were coming as a result.
"This ‘Multi-Site’ conference is where we got all those cool teachings from Mars Hill," Greg said, referring to the teachings from Mark Driscoll, the Resurgence, Dave Browning, Matt Chandler and other innovative, young church-planters.
"We came to this conference to figure out, ‘how can we plant churches in other locations, universities and cities, given our meager resources?’" Greg said. The new multi-site pattern of growth was the focus of our July Body Meeting.
"We’re planting new churches this fall, and we need to see what other churches are experiencing" Keith said.
"I want to see one model of how this ‘Viral church’ idea might look," Joel said. "This is one of our options: to have a central hub with multiple churches stemming from that one. You can be in Pittsburgh or Youngstown and still take advantage of resources, teachings and support available back here at KSU," Joel said. "That’s one model — it’s exploratory."
Titles like "Reproducing Leaders: the most important task" and "Campus Pastors: what do they look like?" caught Mark’s attention, especially ‘Campus Pastors’: "That would be interesting to hear," he said.
But the sphere leaders agreed the most promising of all was "Rapid Reproduction: we need to dream big, but start small," by keynote speaker Dave Ferguson, who leads Community Christian Church on Chicago’s West side.
The South Street ministry will benefit from the teaching, "How does a church renew a city?" by Mark Job, pastor of New Life Church, the host site for the conference. This ministry grew in the renewal housing projects of Chicago’s inner city. It is a multi-cultural church, "making changes across economic, racial and community barriers in many sections of the city," they say.
Mark thought New Life would help South Street learn how to "create well-defined roles and ways to direct volunteers into the most effective ministry positions in inner-city work."
Next up: Sphere leaders attend a worship service at Willow Creek.
Additional Information:- Mark immediately turned the television on and began aimless channel-surfing, while Keith immediately thought of the many brothers and sisters back home who could benefit from a brief NeoZine article about this conference. [↩]
