Christian Piatt Blog

Here’s an article that was recently featured on the WorshipConnection website about nontraditional church governance.

When is a church not a church?

My wife, Amy, and I started Milagro Christian Church four and a half years ago in Pueblo. We began in our living room, gathering around our coffee table or huddling by the fire with a handful of friends, trying to imagine what this thing called “church” might look like some day. I remember one week when no one came other than us. After feeling sufficiently sorry for ourselves, I informed Amy that she was not allowed to preach only to me, so we prayed, took communion and went out to dinner.

Just recently, Milagro, which is Spanish for “miracle,” was recognized by our region as an official congregation in good standing. That our church is still around in itself is a miracle, though I still don’t quite know what it means to be an official congregation.

The region agreed that, since we were worshipping 60 to 80 people a week and showed many typical signs of viability, we should charter. This chartering thing is something I guess all churches have to go through to graduate from being little-baby-make-believe churches to big-kid churches. It was nice to be recognized by the region, though, and it was a good cause for celebration within the region, so why not? Let’s charter – even though we don’t really know what it means.

It turns out that, in order to charter in our denomination, you are supposed to have 100 members on your roles. The thing is that we don’t have members in our church, and thus, we have no roles. I don’t really even know what a role is, although it evokes images of some very dauntingly official-looking scroll or something. It sounds like something people should sign with a big, fancy feather.

Not us: no members, no roles.

The good thing is that the region was so happy about our success that they overlooked their old policies and chartered us anyway. So now we’re official, which is nice, but we pretty much went back to doing things the same way we were doing them before.

That’s not entirely true, actually. To date, we’ve prided ourselves in doing things a little bit differently. Our Board is entirely volunteer, open to all who choose to participate at any given meeting. We have no committees or chairs (we actually do have chairs to sit on, but not the type that run meetings), and we have operated thus far without bylaws, budgets and the like. We’ve survived on passion and faith, and so far it’s worked, more or less.

Granted, Amy has foregone a significant chunk of her salary package for the last couple of years, and there have been a few things that have slipped through the cracks. So after almost five years of blissful anarchy, we’ve actually begun to get organized. We still don’t have members or elected Board folks, but we do have a Board Chair, and she is gradually nudging us toward having a financial plan – dare I say (gag), a budget.

I understand the need for all of this, and one thing I have come to realize is our post-institutional, plenary rejection of the old models of governance and congregational structure have left us somewhat adrift, once we reached a certain size. Believe it or not, there’s actually a reason for all that structure!

Problem is, too often, the people in charge have no idea what that reason is any more.

Church growth expert and author George Bullard speaks often about the model of the van, with the four passengers – Programs (P), Vision (V), Management (M) and Relationships (R) – each competing for the driver’s seat. We started as a big “V” church, driven by little more than a dream of what we might be. From there, as we gained a little bit of momentum and people actually came, we added a healthy dose of “R” to the recipe. As we had more and more kids, and as people wanted to do more to reach out to the community, study scripture and spend time together socially, “P” asked to cut in.

Now, though we’ve held it at arm’s-length as long as we could, “M” is knocking at the door, asking – if not demanding – to be let in.

Too often, established churches allow “M” to stay in the driver’s seat, focusing on sustainability, budgets and keeping the lights on more than feeding on prayerful vision. However, vision, relationships and even programs lack some real teeth without strong management. In reacting against something we wanted to avoid, we actually were holding ourselves back.

So how do we let “M” into the circle of trust without it taking over? After all, “M” has a time-tested reputation for doing just that. Do I really want a worship committee (just typing the “C” word makes me a little nauseated) telling me how church should look and feel? Our “y’all come” approach to letting anyone who is willing to help out has served us well, at least up to now. But is it time for a change?

Bullard’s contention is not that progressive, post-institutional, emergent churches have to reject “M” outright; in fact, he stresses that good management is a critical part of a successful organization. It may not look exactly the same as it’s been done before, but ideally, it serves a necessary purpose.

At Milagro, we’ve agreed to let “M” play ball, but we’re clear on keeping him out of the driver’s seat. A couple of times, when we started to get big enough that Amy and I couldn’t talk to everyone after worship on Sunday, “R” reared its head and suggested that perhaps we were growing too fast. So far, “P” is too young to drive in our faith community, but I’m sure the day will come when she’ll try to grab the keys when we’re not looking.

The key to our long-term sustainability, effectiveness and congregational health is keeping Vision at the helm. Though the region may struggle to redefine what it means to be a congregation as churches continue to reinvent community, I’m confident that the logistics of what you call attendees, worshippers, members, committees or what have you is not what make a church a church.

A church can take on many wonderful forms, but when Vision takes a back seat, that’s when it really begins to look like something other than what it was created to be.    

I finally set up my own podcast. You can get to it at the site: http://christianpiatt.podbean.com/

or you can subscribe through iTunes, or check out the player below:

I posted the first audio chapter of my new book project, titled “Pulling the Goalie: My Lesson in How Babies Are Made…Again” a few days ago, and I just finished producing chapter two today.  You can check it out on my main MySpace Page in the audio player by going to www.myspace.com/damienstribe.

Check it out, share the link with others who might enjoy it, and let me know what you think.

Christian

For those who may not yet be aware, I’ve been working for the last nine months on a new book about my wife’s recent pregnancy called  PULLING THE GOALIE: MY LESSON IN HOW BABIES ARE MADE…AGAIN.

I’ve decided to create some audio files of the first few chapters, and I recently recorded and mixed chapter one. To download the first audio chapter of PULLING THE GOALIE for free, CLICK HERE. Unfortunately, the file is too big to fit on my current web hosting site, so you’ll have to check it out on MySpace until my new site (coming soon) is built.

WARNING: The book contains some coarse language some may find objectionable.

I’ll post more chapters as I record and mix them down. In the meantime, enjoy, pass the word along to others, and please let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Christian Piatt

I’m not the kind of guy who experiences God in any mysterious way on a regular basis. I tend to play my faith a little closer to the vest. But once in a while something happens that’s simply hard to explain.

I have a close friend, who I’ll call Randall, who I’ve known since college. Randall is smart, funny, much more outgoing than I, and he was well-connected enough back then to get me into the local bars when I was nineteen.

Those were some of the best times of my young life: playing packed-to-the-walls house parties in Randall’s house with my band; traveling up and down Interstate 35 on the weekend, stopping at the Czech bakery along the way; talking in the wee hours of the night about the nature of God, love, fate and how to hook up with girls.

It’s hard sometimes to notice when someone is doing more than just having fun: when they’re really dealing with a beast they cannot tame, and with pain they cannot drink away.

I’ve worried for years since about Randall’s drinking. He’s built his whole life around it. He had dreams of owning his own business, moving to the country, and raising a family, but none of that has happened. Instead, I got a desperate email from his sister a few weeks ago, begging for help.

Randall was about to lose his job because of his drinking, and it was affecting everything from his health to his relationships. He had stopped eating, and his skin had turned sallow and waxy.

A couple of years ago, I sent him a letter telling him, in as loving a way as I could, that he either had to stop drinking, or he would die. He acknowledged that he did drink too much. But he was felt he had things under control, and that he could quit any time.

What I didn’t know was that he had shared my letter with his younger sister. His dad died when we were in college, and his mom and other sister are generally unavailable, but his younger sister has struggled with addiction too, and thankfully has come out on the other side.

It was time for an intervention and she needed help. My father-in-law has been in recovery for more than two decades, and he has performed more interventions than I can count. So the next thing I know, he and I are on a flight to Texas try and help get Randall into treatment.

It’s an emotional thing, being a part of just a life-or-death decision like that for someone you care about, but for me, it was about more than Randall. I was mourning the relationship with my dad, particularly given that the break several years ago between us revolved around alcohol. And the conspicuous absence of Randall’s older sister and mom, who opted not to participate in the intervention, touched a nerve in me too.

How do families that were bound by blood drift – or break – apart? How can love turn so bitter? All of this came welling up for me during the intervention.

I joked with Amy’s dad that we were on a mission from God. But the deeper we got, the more we actually started to believe it.

On the plane to Dallas, there was a spirited African-American flight attendant who actually smacked me in the back of the head, mid-flight. She mouthed off back and forth with us the whole trip, and finally offered us a couple of free drinks. I passed.

Mark explained that he didn’t drink, which sparked a conversation about where we were going. By the time we touched down, she offered us her blessing.

Then we got to the car rental office, and another black woman behind the counter greeted us with some bottled water and a beautiful smile, and started asking about our trip. So we told her.

“Praise God!” she shouted. “I’ve been in ministry for five years. You’re doing God’s work here today.” On our way out, she also offered a blessing, and said she would be praying for us.

The next morning, while we were having breakfast, our waitress – also African-American – leaned over to my father-in-law out of the blue and, under her breath, said that he reminded her of her first sponsor.

In twelve-step-speak, a sponsor is the person who has been in the program a while and now helps new folks navigate sobriety. So, of all the things she could have said, she mentions her sponsor, less than an hour before we head into an intervention.

When we told her what we were going to do, her eyes widened. “My goodness, I got goosebumps,” she said. “This is God’s work happening today. I’ll pray for you.”

One black woman blessing you is nice. Two is uncanny. Three begins to seem beyond all coincidence.

Amy had just finished reading a book called The Shack the day before I left town, and God is portrayed in the novel as – you guessed it – a black woman.

A life with God is no guarantee of picket fences, healthy families and two-point-five kids with perfect teeth. The lives we inherit are messy, sometimes painful and maddeningly inscrutable. The good news is our lives also are woven together like a tightly-knit tapestry. Thank God.

Our parents may screw us up six ways from Sunday, or we may do plenty of screwing up on our own. But God can still use us. Randall, broken and suffering as he is, bears God’s light. Sometimes we are like a beacon on a hill, and other times, it’s all we can do to keep the lamp lit at all. But Randall’s barely glowing ember was enough to bring us together.

And somewhere, in the middle it all, God showed her face, not once, but three times. Then Randall let light into the middle of all of that darkness with two simple words: “I’m ready.”

God’s call is not always to safety, comfort or convenience, but it is to joy, hope and healing. What is required of us is to respond with the words: “I’m ready.”

In case you are interested, I wanted to let you know that my book, LOST: A Search for Meaning, is now available as a Kindle edition on Amazon. For those who may be unfamiliar, Kindle is an e-book system, where you can download the entire book to a portable reader, not unlike MP3s for music, but you still can read it just like a book.

This is often a less expensive way to get books, and it also saves trees, so I’m excited to have a book available this way.

Currently, LOST is #13 on one of the “bestseller” e-book lists on Amazon, and it would be great to see it jump up closer to the top. If you know anyone who is into Kindle or similar e-book formats and they dig LOST, please send this their way.

For a direct link to the e-book, click here.

Thanks, and happy holidays.

Christian Piatt, Author 

MySpace to Sacred Space and

Lost: A Search for Meaning