When we initially began exploring the idea of a church plant, we circulated this letter to a few friends that we thought might also be interested.  The letter turned out to be a great launching pad for discussion, so we wanted to include it here for others who want a little more background on why the church was started and where we envision it heading.

April 27, 2010

Dear Friends,

In the last few weeks, we’ve talked with several of you about our desire and struggle to find a church a little closer to home. We’ve explored a lot of options and gone around and around and finally decided that it might be most helpful to share our story with you and get your thoughts! This is a very long-winded email, but I wanted to give you the full thought process and hope you’ll share yours with us as well. So here goes:

Even before Bobo and I moved to San Antonio, we felt strongly called to attend a church in our immediate neighborhood and envisioned inviting neighbors to join us in worship and study together. When we arrived, we started visiting church close to home without success. We continued widening our circle until we found ourselves driving forty minutes each Sunday to New Braunfels (NB). More than a few folks asked us, “Can’t you find something closer to home?” And we shook our heads with cheerful resignation, as we prepared for a lovely daytrip through the country. For a while we really enjoyed visiting NB and discovering new friends, restaurants, and activities. Each week felt like we were on vacation in a place far from home!

But after a year, this feeling became a problem--we still felt like tourists. When our NB friends told us that they were moving across town closer towards us, that meant they were moving across NB, which was still 30 minutes away from us. We never bumped into our NB friends in the grocery store; we didn’t participate in mid-week activities; Bobo couldn’t make it to worship practice because I was not ready to handle two children on my own. At best, our friends generously came to us or met us in the middle, because they realized that having young children was a logistical challenge. After baby Ella was born, we spent several weeks at home, waiting to socialize until she had received her two-month vaccinations. During those few weeks, I thought we had gone on spiritual vacation while trying to adjust to life as a family of four. I even felt a bit guilty that I hardly gave God a passing thought. We dragged our feet on resurrecting our small group, and talked a lot about having folks over for dinner, but never took any action.

Looking back, I think I was actually in spiritual hibernation. As spring arrived, I began to stretch and look around and realized that my priorities had changed. I didn’t want to be gone all day every Sunday because the kids needed naps or time just to play at home. I wanted a local support network. I wanted to engage with folks on a deeper, ongoing level about stuff going on in my life. And it wasn’t just me. In a two-week period, several members of our former small group expressed a desire to find a new church. We started meeting new neighbors who had never been to church but were curious. My brother made plans to move here, right down the street. We became energized that a natural community was forming around us—but what to make of this?

At first, I got depressed as I realized that we might need to leave our New Braunfels church that we loved to meet the needs of our family and friends. I knew it needed to happen, but I was resisting. We started visiting churches again to see if there might be anything that would work in our neighborhood, and that was a miserable failure. Every single church had something that struck a wrong chord. Maybe we were being too picky? Maybe we just needed to create a hybrid church—Sunday morning here, small group there, social group over there. Why not? The thing that really nagged at me though was that something was missing, and clearly we were not the only ones in the area struggling to find a place to fit in. ˆSeveral members of our small group were in the same boat. What was going on?

Pastor Scott Tjernagel from our church in NB recommended a book to me called Not the Religious Type, written by our former pastor in Cambridge. In the book, he describes a recent shift in communities of faith where church-goers started to un-identify with the “Church” as a religious institution. They started to rebel and ask some fundamental questions about why people attend church, what it should look like, and what that means for our spiritual journey. Aha! Yes, something that I could very much identify with. Having attended traditional Southern Baptist and Methodist churches when I grew up, embracing an agnostic period for most of college, and finally reconnecting with God on a deeper level at the end of college, I found it hard to go back to sitting in a pew as a silent bystander. I wanted more! And I can genuinely say I found this when we lived in New Haven and Virginia.

I was so excited to move back to the Bible Belt in Texas, convinced that I would find an amazing church, or maybe twenty, right in my neighborhood. Suffice it to say that I have been shocked to find the Church community I’m craving sorely lacking. San Antonio seems to be made up of mega churches, with leaders that have church down to a science—from parking attendants to greeters to fun gift bags to hip messages to sophisticated music teams to video production crews—all working together beautifully to make sure that church last no longer than 1 hour and 15 minutes, a sure-fire recipe for making your congregation happy. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that in the rush, even the Greeters at the church get lost in making sure that I get to room 7B as opposed to even asking my name or why I came. Sunday morning began to feel like a tidal wave of activities, while my heart was still stuck in the undertow.

I spent a little while reflecting on what kind of church I am looking for, and here’s what I came up with:

• - a church close to home (10 min or less)
• - a church where I can engage in community with those in my neighborhood
• - a church that embraces diversity and actively tries to foster it
• - a church that is genuinely friendly and welcoming
• - a church that I would feel comfortable bringing non-Christian friends to
• - a church that does not preach politics or judgmentalism, but welcomes conversation about ideas
• - a church where people participate actively and that feels alive
• - a church where I can feel and see God moving in people’s lives
• - a church where my children will grow up loving Jesus and ideally have activities to help them learn in a fun, engaging way

Anyone else resonate with this? It’s how I envision the early church being: small groups of people meeting in homes and sharing their lives and faith together (read Acts chapters 2:42-47 for a really cool vision of this). How did we go from that vision to a viral epidemic of mega churches with sophisticated formulas for maximizing growth and tithing? Now churches rely on weekly small groups to fill in the gaps, which leads me to wonder about the purpose of a weekly Sunday service at all. Is it just a pep rally? Shouldn’t I already be pepped from my vibrant small group discussions?

The only thing worse to me than getting lost in this mechanical, cultural Christianity is sinking into the abyss of doing nothing at all. From time to time I delude myself into thinking, “Well, I can’t find what I’m looking for, so I’ll just stay at home and have my own quiet time.” This is a euphemism for going out to eat a nice breakfast instead. Seriously, right? I have great intentions, but frankly the follow through just isn’t there. Even if I do miraculously crack open my Bible to ponder the mysteries of the universe, have I done anything to build or support community?? Now, certainly I risk sounding a little legalistic here that going to church on Sunday morning is the answer to deepening faith. I actually don’t believe that at all, but I do believe that every week, if not every day, I want to be moving in the direction of growing closer to God…and this requires effort on my part, not just good intentions. So doing something is better than doing nothing at all.

But the purpose of this letter is not just to settle, it’s to explore how I find what I’m deeply longing for. So Bobo and I find ourselves coming full circle, wondering: why not create community right here with our friends and neighbors and wrestle through these questions together? So many of you have shared your journey with us and find yourself in similar places of spiritual limbo. Why not dig down roots together as a little church plant and really be intentional about being the kind of community that we want to be, the community that we see in Acts (sharing meals, helping each other, asking the hard questions, volunteering together, being part of each others lives on a deeper level)? We’ve hesitated for so long on going this route because several of you have brought up some really important hesitations about just creating our own community. But I’ve been giving them some more thought, and here’s some new thoughts to ponder:

Hesitation #1: We don’t want to become insular community. Joining another church gives us an outlet to meet new people and try new things. We love meeting new people as well, so what if we were really intentional about reaching out to others like us that also find themselves in spiritual limbo? What better way to make new friends than through a network of each other’s friends, all meeting together in the interest of growing deeper together?

Hesitation #2: We’re all looking for different things—kids programming, social outlets, singles groups, support networks. A church plant just doesn’t have that stuff that I’m looking for. This was one of my big recent realizations: we certainly all are looking for different things, but why does that mean need to sacrifice real community just to get plugged into peripherals of church? One of my favorite authors (Beth Moore) calls these spine and rib issues. The peripherals of church are the ribs, but your spine has to be strong to support all the ribs. Why not invest in building up the spine and then piecing together the ribs as necessary. There’s nothing saying that we have to meet on a Sunday morning, so we could pick a time to meet that still allows everyone to participate in the other activities that they want to. Ideally, one church would have it all, but if we had found it by now, we wouldn’t be on the search, right?

Hesitation #3: How would this work? I’m always on the go—how would we possibly pull this off? Here’s what I envision... I see us getting together on a weekly basis at someone’s home or at the Amenity Center to sing songs, have a message, pray and talk together, and maybe even have a potluck together from time to time. Our pastor in NB volunteered to come down from time to time (even weekly if need be) to share a message. I see us pooling our various talents to get organized—someone making snacks, someone sending out emails, someone teaching/speaking from time to time, others volunteering to watch or work with the kiddos every few weeks. The idea here is to strike a balance between being organized enough as a group that we can maximize time together and feel comfortable bringing along friends (Christian or non-Christian), but not to create a Sunday morning production.

Hesitation #4: We all come from very different religious backgrounds, some very conservative and some more liberal. How could we blend all these different perspectives? Bobo and I have loved attending Vineyard churches over the past few years, specifically because they do not see themselves as a denomination but more of a movement. The model is pretty unique: the idea behind the Vineyard is not to ascribe to a certain set of practices (Catholic church does X, the Baptist does Y, and the Methodist church Z) but rather to move towards a set of values (like relationship with Christ and building community). You can read more about it at http://www.vineyardusa.org/site/about/article/core-values. If you’re really curious, I’m also attaching a pdf written by our former pastor in Boston that summarizes this concept. It’s a lot to digest, but will certainly get your wheels turning!

Hesitation #5: This sounds like a lot of work. What’s the point? When I think about going this route versus continuing the church shopping process or just settling for one we’ve already found, I stop and ask myself, “Which route will help me grow closer to God?” I have no doubt that putting myself out there like this will undoubtedly make me more intentional, thoughtful, conscious, and faithful. No doubt. My only lingering concern was, will my children also get as much out of this? I grew up having Sunday schools teachers making me memorize Bible verses and participate in plays and sing songs, all of which were foundational for me. Will my children miss out on all this? Well, seeing as they are not getting that now while I’m in spiritual limbo, it can only go up from here! But I also heard a very compelling argument from our pastor Scott in New Braunfels, whose kids grew up in a church plant. He said that his kids did not participate in a lot of those peripherals, but what they did do was see a picture of his parents living out their values in Christian community. They were actually a part of the community and participated in everything. And when I stopped to think, he hit the nail on the head. What more could I want for my kiddos?

So after weeks of thinking about this, I wanted to share my thoughts with you and see if anyone else was interested in going on an adventure? I know this is a very long letter, but I wanted to be honest and give you the full scope of my thoughts. By no means do I mean this to be a line in the sand…I see it more as a forum for discussion. What is it that you are looking for? Is it possible that we can find it together? What next? Feel free to email to call or we can even grab a cup of coffee!

Love, Amy and Bobo