Southwestern Seminary’s academic requirements in the 1980s were not for the faint of heart. In addition to a full regimen of theological preparation, the seminary insisted we also choose some electives, one of which turned out to be life-altering for this former Air Force pilot.
I was a bit unusual in that I was already working full time in ministry as the pilot and travel arranger for a Baptist group that was taking hundreds of people overseas each year. I had been to several countries and met a good number of missionaries. Also, unlike most students who longed to serve as pastors, I was all about missions and evangelism. My mantra was, “I would never join any church that would have ME as the lead pastor. Just give me a plane and a passport, and I’m heading into missions.”
But thanks to just one class, I eventually found myself acting as not only a pastor, but as a missionary without a passport.
The Elective That Started It All
My first dip into the elective course pool was a basic piano course–surely a useful skill for pastors. However, I quickly learned that the hands that could handle the “stick and rudder” of any kind of airplane had no touch for piano keys.
Next, I stepped into Daniel Sanchez’s class, Strategies for Starting Churches. The course title was intriguing, and totally new to me. There are actual reasons and strategies to start a church from scratch—who knew? Oh, Dr. Sanchez did, and he knew how to impart that knowledge. As it turns out, planting new churches is the number one method to reach new people for Christ! More than door-to-door, more than stadium meetings, even more than mass media (which in those days meant only radio or late-night TV).
The strategy involved studying a geographical area, learning what kind of people were there, what kind of churches were there (or not there), and what might be logistically and financially possible. Demographics from school districts were a treasure trove. Surveys of local people would put a face on the data, humanizing the numbers with real stories and real people.
One strategy from the early 1900s was (and remains!) influential: Flake’s Formula. Developed by businessman Arthur Flake for the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now Lifeway), this five-part strategy provided a concrete plan of action for growing not only Sunday School programs, but any new discipleship entity, such as a church plant.
First, Flake advises that church leaders begin by examining the needs of the community. What demographics are underserved? What groups are lacking easy on-ramps to church life? Then, leaders should take time to dream up new structures and programs that will serve those demographics. After this, workers need to be enlisted and trained, and the necessary space must be provided. Finally, after the ministry structure, programming, teams, and locations are all prepared, your ministry is ready to begin intentionally drawing in your target demographic with public announcements and personal invitations.
All of these sociological elements of how people choose a church to attend gave me new insight, and frameworks like Flake’s Formula gave me tools to turn that insight into action. I passed that class and loved it, but wasn’t sure how any of this would apply to my future. Until the week I graduated…
Act Like a Pastor (And an Evangelist. And a Missionary).
My own church offered me a position as their Minister of Missions. I didn’t even have to relocate to a new country in order to be a missionary–just shift my thinking from global to local and find myself some church planters. In those pre-Internet days, our local Baptist associations were the hubs on a massive network (the SBC) and when our Dallas area director of missions learned that Casa View Baptist Church wanted to sponsor church plants, the planters were knocking on my door.
It was time to take Flake’s Formula and put it to work.
We surveyed the communities and neighborhoods in question, designed the ministry structures, recruited the personnel, reserved the space, and started inviting folks. Soon, two Spanish language churches, one Portuguese, one blue-collar group, a country-flavored church (this was before “country gospel” was cool), one contemporary church, and a “Willow Creek” clone were soon all holding court on Sunday mornings. It was glorious. Our “mother” church had 1,100 people on a good day, and after five years of planting, the attendance at all our plants had almost that many. It’s true that some failed, some merged, and some relocated. At times,it did feel like we were throwing mud on the wall to see what might stick. But a bunch of people were reached for Christ!
Multi-family housing ministry was all the rage then, so we had people taking the gospel into apartments and condos and nursing homes. In much of our Flake-inspired surveying work, we discovered that many individuals and families simply weren’t able or willing to make it to a church building for worship. So, if the local people weren’t coming to church, then we’ll take church to the people. Most of this work was done by our lay leaders and church members, and it worked! For a season, I would attend our 8:00 a.m. worship, teach a young married class at 9:30 a.m., and then teach it again inside a gated community near my house.
I’ll never forget the meetings at Bristol Square Apartments. Never more than ten people, but always with the assistant manager. She had to let us into the clubhouse, so she just joined our group. Within a year, she had come to Christ, was baptized (the only time she ever set foot in the mother church), and was promoted to manager at another apartment complex. She joined a nearby church, and they hired her as their minister of multihousing.
Then God moved my family and I to Denver, Colorado–hardly a Bible-belt town. For five more years I was doing outreach and planting churches, but it was way harder than Dallas. We strategized, experimented, failed, learned from failure, and experimented again. Two church plants survived to merge into churches, one failed, but one grew larger than its sponsor and planted other churches.
Meanwhile, our senior pastor had to take an early medical retirement. The head deacon said to me, “Jim, you are now the acting pastor” (a term I have never heard before nor since that day). I said, “Okay, what would you like me to do?”, and “Act like the pastor” was the answer!
Sure enough, they lateralled the football to me and I ran with it for 15 more years. We did multihousing ministry at Bear Valley, until it formed its own 501c3 entity, called Mission98.org. Today, it is the national platform for multihousing ministry anywhere in the USA.
And all this happened as a result of my inability to play piano, and Daniel Sanchez’s gift for inspiring church planting.
