Last month we decided to shut our church plant down. Very disappointing news and I am still confused, saddened, and learning from the failure.

I hesitated to even write about it, but in the end I am about honesty, and helping planters grow. Therefore, we need to share the wins and the losses.

I know that my identity is not the success or failure of my ventures, so I feel I can talk about it in an objective way. I also know that if you are apostolic and entrepreneurial then you are going to fail sometimes. It’s part of starting things and part of taking risks.

So here I share with you my biggest ministry failing since becoming Christian.

Why Did We Stop? 

In the end the leaders of our plant decided they were called away from the plant. And because we didn’t have the infrastructure and resources (leaders) to keep going without them, we had to close down. I wrestled with the decision strongly, but I felt it was more responsible to scatter us than try to keep it going with out proper leadership.

Our church plant was a fully volunteered plant. From day one we were a team of people with other jobs and/or ministry focuses and we gave our extra time to getting a neighborhood church going. No one was paid.

We all felt super compelled to find a way to reach our neighbors that weren’t going to church or following Jesus. We wanted to do a low key house church that would really focus us, ground us, and free our time up to be among our neighbors and experiment with how to reach them well with the gospel.

Our model was not decided on (multiply house churches, or grow into a bigger church that needed a building) and we felt that we needed to let that develop as we grew.

But in the end, we weren’t reaching our neighbors very well – sure we had more relationships and were spending time with them, but none were coming to our gatherings. We had more and more people coming from around the greater LA area and shortly we realized we were running a church of people from all over the place when we started with the hope of reaching OUR place.

In the end our two leaders, who served faithfully and as volunteers, decided that they didn’t have time to raise their family, work their other jobs, reach their neighbors, and run a community of people from all over LA – some coming from 45min away.

I totally understand, I even blessed them and decided with them that we needed to stop since that was their heart. But it still stinks, I don’t like it, and I didn’t want to stop.

Side note: I can be disappointed and not fully agree and still love these people and be friends with them. It’s a complicated thing that has happened but relationships come first and I don’t harbor judgment. I get frustrated some days and of course have emotion about this decision. But I understand why they did what they did and can see both sides. It’s complicated.

How I Feel

I feel like we failed. I feel disappointed. I feel that we stopped too soon.

I know some of you squirm at the word “failure”.

To be clear about what I mean here: What we set out to do didn’t work.

My family moved specifically to Torrance and put many extra hours a week into this dream. It was a costly dream on our time and community development and it failed.

For that reason I am disappointed – we put a lot into this with heart, time, and home and it didn’t work. We ended sooner than I ever would have wanted and it feels like we are giving up on our area of geography.

I know that is not the case, God is on the move and at work, but it does feel as though our community just lost something really important.

We had some difficulties in our church and I understand why the leaders wanted to stop. I get it on a cognitive level and even a part of me is relieved on an emotional level. We had developed into a very different kind of church than we intended and it was taking more and more energy. I remember the night when the main leader broke the news to me and while I was bummed I was also partly relieved. I knew we were lacking momentum and there was desire to get into a community that had more.

But that was a smaller part of me. The bigger part wanted to keep fighting to figure out how we could crack this code and become a blessing to our specific area as a church community.

I was and still am a mixed bag about this venture.

I also feel a competitive and convicted surge that shoots up from my gut to try this again at the right time. I have learned a lot from this (about teams, about timing, about process, about covering). I don’t feel devastated. I feel dejected. I don’t feel gun-shy to plant again or like I want to run away from any kind of upstart. I actually feel the contrary. I am eager to see who my next partners will be and how we can go about planting a new work with God to reach the area we live in.

What I learned 

There are so many details we could get into, but at the end of the day those don’t really matter. Let me instead share with you a few things I have learned and will carry with me into a next plant – if God calls me to lead one.

Be More Patient

We started in the totally wrong way. We gathered a core team and started meeting weekly with them almost from the beginning. It wasn’t the weekly gathering that was wrong, but that we made it open. We weren’t totally clear on our vision and soon (within months) we had an expectation on our shoulders of weekly services and Sunday gathering to live up to. This made us put the cart way before the horse and we took bad form, had the wrong people for what we wanted to do, and then grew in a cockeyed way. If we were to do this over again, we would have started with a small group of people, kept it closed, and really worked out our vision and people before ever opening it up to the public and allowing expectation to fall down on us.

Within three months we had twenty people and more than ten kids under the age of eight and lots of expectation of being a weekly gathering that was many things to many kinds of people. Yikes.

Have Clear Strategy

We never had clear strategy about where we were trying to go with the church. We had clear values, and ideas – even a cool visions statement – but those aren’t immediately actionable. Because our strategy wasn’t crystal clear we spun around a lot, got impatient when things didn’t go right and even changed course multiple times. This goes against everything I know as a leader and it even frustrates me as I write it. Of course we want to be nimble and flexible and adjusting as we go – strategy doesn’t have to be in concrete. But you have to have a clear course that is charted so you can follow and lead others to do so too. We just really didn’t have much and when we did get clearer, we changed too quickly when it didn’t immediately take. Strategies take time to develop and come to fruition so staying the course and patiently and slowly working at it is key. We were too shifty and ever changing. I believe we just got confused and ultimately that led to the breaking up of the team. When you have clear vision and strategy it’s taxing leading people. But when you don’t have it, it’s fatiguing and eventually fatalistic.

Have a Better Covering

Not everyone on our team may agree with this, but I think this is the number one way we went wrong. We had a poor covering and developmental relationships. Its not that we didn’t have any – we joined a denomination, had an overseer, and even a coach helped our main leader through phone conversations.

But what I wish we would have done was joined a local congregation that had church planting DNA and energy, learned from them for a while, and then were sent out with a core team and by a leader that was in our area. We are in LA for crying out loud and Long Beach, which is just South of us, has incredible planting efforts going on there specifically. There were plenty of people to learn from, and be sent out from, if we wanted that.

But we were too cocky. I put this as much on me as anyone so don’t hear this as me crapping on our main leader. We thought we could do this; we had friends in the ministry that we could consult with, and we had even been in church plants ourselves before.

But leading one is different – especially the way we were trying to do so – and I really regret our decision to no get under local leadership and have more accountability and face time with people that knew what they were doing. I think it was our worst decision and I kick my self now for not having the foresight and the maturity to fight for that. Especially now that the lead couple feels called away. If we would have had that covering, I think we could have sustained even with our lead couple exiting.

If you are going to plant, get into an environment TOGETHER with your team and learn and get sent out by a church or planter TOGETHER. That was the mistake in the most acute way – we all had been part of church plants separately, but never together. So we believed the lie that we knew what we were doing. But every team is different. Now I know that the biggest mistake was that we as a TEAM didn’t spend time together in a church planting church catching vision, getting better training, and being sent out by local authority.

We needed more humility and patience.

Final Thoughts For Now

I would have thought the only way we would fail is if someone had a major moral failure or that we had some massive conflict that broke the team up. That didn’t happen. We just didn’t start right, we got confused in the middle, and in the end our main leaders felt it was time to move away from what was growing. I do wish we were still at this, but I do understand and do respect them for stepping down. Sometimes it is harder to say, “I don’t feel called to lead this” than to keep going out of obligation. I can respect that. But it still hurts.

Kristina and I moved to this exact area to start this community with them. We had great dreams of a neighborhood church with these people and it never occurred that we would just stop. Maybe move away someday, but not stop.

For now the dream is on pause…and I hate pause.

God will continue to lead us forward, he is on mission, and Kristina and I have already found a great community to be part of. Thanks be to God.

But all this has done is grown my heart for planting. Shutting down our church hasn’t discouraged me or made me think, “I am never doing this again” – quite the opposite really. I feel more energized to learn from our failure, and to get back out there with God and do it again.

Last I checked there are still many unchurched and curious people on our streets, in our workplaces, and at our schools. More planting must happen.

I believe in creatively reaching our neighbors and unchurched friends more than ever.

I am disappointed, but I am not devastated and I hope our failure can help you learn.

What verse in the Bible encourages you when you fail? Please share in the comments.