A Church Replant in an Urban Setting

By Cody Moore

It was a brisk March morning in Colorado when five elders and three staff members gathered on couches and chairs around the low-slung coffee table drinking their caffeine-imbued warmth with a general feeling of trepidation. “What are we going to do?” was the question racing through each one”s mind.

After a brief but intense round of prayer, one of the staff members described the situation. “As we all acknowledge, our church is literally dying,” he stated. “The number of funerals easily outpaces the number of new members, so we must do something.”

Three options lay before the leaders. This meeting was dedicated to discerning which of these to follow.

The church building could be sold. The monies could be used to fund a move outside of the neighborhood or the planting of two or three new urban churches.

An equity loan could be taken out against the building, and the monies could be used to re-envision and replant the existing church.

The church could continue what it had been doing for two decades, and soon cease to exist.

After a long period of anxious discussion, followed by more prayer, the elders unanimously decided to go with the second option. Some could not imagine selling the building, but none could imagine doing nothing. The second option appeared to be the most viable.

“It will cost this church a lot more than money to do this,” one staff member pointed out, “Are you ready for it?”

“Go for it,” was the final decision by the elders.

This is the story of that church, West Side Christian Church, and the church it became, The Pearl. It is a story of two churches born of the same root, born with the same purpose in mind: to proclaim and live out the gospel on the west side of Denver. It is also a tale of time and times.

One was a church of the modern period, a 20th-century stalwart of loyal membership, deep missions-supporting pockets, and doctrinal purity.

The other is a church of that which comes after the modern period (often referred to as “post”), a 21st-century attempt to contextualize within the urban setting, to focus on relationships, and to speak with both an audible and a visual vocabulary. Each church is a member of the body and has/had its own role to play. But the first church could no longer ignore the change surrounding it. A bank account of zero forced a decision. The urban neighborhood around the church had been changing for several years while the methodology of the church had not. Things had been headed this way for a long time, and the time for action could be delayed no longer.

A Six-Month Window

West Side Christian Church, established in 1913 and the oldest Christian church in the Denver metro area, chose option two, which meant replanting ourselves as a new church. The extent of this replant grew after the work began, and no one could foresee exactly what the new church, eventually The Pearl, would look like.

The first hurdle to jump was procuring an equity loan. Four lending institutions said no before the Church Development Fund said yes. The local CDF representatives were enthusiastic about the new vision of the church. Our leaders breathed big sighs of relief.

We also renamed ourselves as a part of the new envisioning process. We needed to capture who we were and what we were about. After much deliberation, prayer, and research, we landed upon The Pearl. This name was based upon the parable found in Matthew 13 concerning the merchant who sells all for a pearl of great value.

We wanted to find ourselves within God”s kingdom more than anything, so we sold, in the form of a mortgage, the one thing we owned””our building. Our name was now our founding principle. It was a symbol of our primary value””anything and everything for the kingdom.

The second hurdle was that none of the staff had been trained in church planting. We decided to find a consultant, and we were advised to ask Rick Grover. Rick planted Journey Christian Church in New Orleans and was familiar with both urban context and holistic theology (i.e. meeting both the spiritual and the physical needs of the local community). It was a perfect fit.

A six-month window was framed””not a long period of time, but it was long enough. The workload was enormous and urgent, but it was a team effort, including the gracious exit by the youth and family life minister to allow us to hire the worship and arts minister we needed.

In an open vision meeting we communicated the new vision to the congregation. Every effort was made to induce ownership of this fresh direction. Yet many could not accept the new vision. Some departed in a quiet shuffle and some in a thunderclap, and unfortunately, close to half the saints eventually left the church.

But the hand had been put to the plow; there was no going back. During the six-month period, a core team was formed from those members who had fervently jumped on board with the new plan. This group covenanted together, in a solemn ceremony at which Grover was present, to be positive, loyal, and to do the work of the replant. Throughout the replant period, we emphasized prayer and fasting as a community of faith. The team was dedicated to reaching their urban neighbors no matter what it might cost.

The launch day””October 3, 2004″”was meticulously planned. When it finally came, it was a welcomed day filled with both anxiety and relief. The people came, and the results were unbelievable””not the attendance numbers (these met our expectations) but the people themselves who were there.

One tradition we continued from West Side was to take up prayer requests during the service and to pray for these during a pastoral prayer. The intensity of the requests during that first worship gathering was strong. Substance abuse, halfway house residency, prostitution, and single-parent families suddenly became our norm. We became an urban church almost overnight, divinely forced to deal with the issues in our own backyard.

The Results and the Future

What are the results of our replant experiment? (By the way, we term it an experiment because so few churches have chosen this path.) In a one-year period we have experienced a visitor increase of approximately 700 percent compared to the previous year of West Side. We have had a baptism rate increase of more then 1000 percent, with nearly all the baptisms coming from the local community. Our average attendance is also 30 percent greater than a year ago despite the fact we lost nearly half of our congregation during the transition. And we have come to understand that every neighborhood is a mission field and every church a mission.

Something also worthy of note that we did not expect was the attention paid to us by other Christians. The people of God outside our church took notice. The religion editor of The Denver Post wrote an article about us that appeared on the front page a month before our launch date. Phone calls began to pour in: “Congratulations on the stand you are taking!” and “Way to go!”

By the time all was said and done, we had appeared on the 5 o”clock news of Univision, K-LOVE radio had run a national news spot about us, churchcentral.com wrote an article for its Web site, and even Christianity Today published an article. Saints around the nation were applauding. Others want to hear our story not because we are so great, but because they are in similar situations.

What does the future hold? Who knows but the Lord? We do know that we are a new church, with many new people, and a new set of values (not doctrines). We therefore have established two important goals: One, we are developing a separate nonprofit entity (Pearl Community Development) to work alongside our congregation that will focus on community development initiatives and be an outreach arm of our own church. Two, we are firmly committed to planting other urban churches.

This is not to say that every community is not important in the Lord”s eyes, but it is to say that the urban context can easily be neglected when determining where to plant a new church. We dream of the day when there will be a String of Pearls draped around Denver, adorning all of the urban neighborhoods. We will give whatever it takes, including our possessions, to make this happen.

 

 

Cody Moore is minister with The Pearl.