Church Planter Interviews – Ben Sternke
Bob Hyatt
Sep 10, 2010

So your church Christ Church , is in Ft Wayne, IN. Tell us a little about Fort Wayne.

Well Ft. Wayne is a pretty blue collar place. It’s fairly traditional and politically conservative. It’s pretty common to see Fox News on the television when you’re going from place to place. It’s very family oriented. I’d say 98% of people I talk to are there because they are living close to family or have moved there because it’s a great place to raise kids. A lot of people went off to college and moved back. It actually has a really strong history of innovation. The television tube was invented here as well as the first pocket calculator. It’s also the birthplace of the NBA. So despite having a somewhat conservative base, it also has this intermingled history of innovation.

Talk to us about when your started planting and your process for starting.

We started with an alternative service or satellite campus in December of 2007. It started in our living room. Slowly, over time, it morphed into an official church plant, having its own entity apart from another church, which really came to fruition between September of 2009 and January of 2010.

Obviously the focus of this blog is more towards the missional church and looking at different church structures. What is the structure of your church? What would the average month look like?

Well, we’ve taken what was a weekly worship service and turned it into a  Missional Community (group of 20-50 people on mission together). So now, we have 2 worship services each month, which are pretty “standard” services. We then have a community meal once a month with some worship elements in it. Then one of the weekends we have a day “out” where we engage in practical ways of serving the community. So currently, that’s how we structure our weekends. We also have Huddles going, which are our vehicle for discipling people every-other week. What we’ve done for the summer is have a kind of “Taster” Huddle, a chance for people to experience what it is and we’ll start our first “official” Huddles in the Fall. We really see these Huddles as being our main engine for discipleship and leadership development.

I think 8 family units will form our first official Huddle that we’d like to see develop leaders to begin several MCs through that development and investment. Before Christmas I’m hoping and praying we’ll be able to multiply into 2-3 MCs that are networked together and gather for two worship services a month. But we’ll see. Sometimes it takes longer than I’m thinking. But we are really trying to structure ourselves for multiplication.

So as you think about the last 12 months of planting, what do you think worked really well?

  • Huddles have really worked for us. I think that was our biggest breakthrough and win for us. We’re starting to see people become like Jesus. I’m not sure we knew how to make disciples before and we are really seeing it happen now.
  • I think another thing was not being shy about asking people for commitment. When we look at the people who have grown the most, the people who committed the most also grew the most. I was naturally sheepish about it at first, but it really seems to have worked. We have 8 very specific things we asked people to commit to, it was a really high bar.
  • We educated people on the regular practices that will help shape and form us for God’s mission. We did it on an individual level, but specifically in our worship services by developing a pretty powerful liturgy. I’d also add that this liturgy has worked even better when it’s been in conjunction with discipleship process and engaging in mission.

In the last 12 months, what hasn’t worked?

  1. In the beginning the leadership was really weighted too much towards consensus. I think we overreacted to authoritarian forms of leadership we saw. We weighted it so far in that direction that we often waited to see vision come from the “community” as a whole and it never really did. I’m not ready to say that it never can…but I may be close. We just kept waiting for everyone to be on board and on the same page and I think we got to a place where someone with vision had to lead and move forward and take people on that journey and then let people see it and get on board.
  2. At first we socially engineered our MCs. We looked at a map and said, “Hey, you know what? You guys all live really close together. Why don’t you start an MC?!” It never quite worked.

What is one failure you experienced and what did you learn from it?

Again, it relates to socially engineering our MCs. Our first iteration of Missional Communities were me more or less saying, “Hey guys, I heard about these things called MCs. They sound pretty awesome. Why don’t we split into two groups, each being an MC, and this could be your mission. Now go lead them!” But they had never seen one or had led or experienced it. When we decided to come back together and have a time where we modeled MC life together for the late spring and summer, one MC breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the other had developed some neat relationships and we asked them to pause so we could really build a foundation of discipleship through Huddle. Then, out of that, we’d launch MCs when leaders had a vision they felt God was giving them.

Ok. Let’s imagine it’s 365 days from now. What needs to be different in your community?

Better developed and equipped leaders. We’re starting to see the first of that in our Huddles, but we need more of it. I’d also like to see the ownership of the vision more widely distributed through the community.

What is the biggest thing God has been teaching you in the past year?

If I had to break it down, it would be this: “Faithfulness to what God is telling me to do is more important than everyone being happy or having everyone like me.”

So let’s think 5 years into the future. What does Christ Church look like? What’s happened?

Well, we want to keep making disciples who make disciples, multiplying MCs into all kinds of neighborhoods and relational networks in Fort Wayne… and see where God takes us. I think it will be a lot like the book of Acts where the Apostles are hearing about things happening in Samaria or Antioch, not because they’ve sent people there specifically, but because people have gone and started something because they are missional disciples. I really believe that can happen for us here in Fort Wayne.

These interviews were originally published on Doug Paul’s blog: http://3dchurchplanter.wordpress.com/

How It Is Now Is Not How It Will Always Be

By Bob Hyatt • 20 Mar, 2024
One of the main tricks in life, I believe, is not to extrapolate current conditions and circumstances off into the future. However, that’s exactly the tendency we have as humans, and especially, I’ve discovered, as ministry leaders. We look at things now and think they will always be that way. We long to see landmarks in the road, mileposts that tell us either we have now reached the pinnacle, the place we always dreamed of being (even if that place is only “stability”), or conversely, the bottom has fallen out and now is the time to bail out. But the mileposts are merely markers on the journey, telling us where we are now, promising nothing of the journey ahead. And so, when things are good, we see nothing but success and good times stretching out in front of us. In the depths of despair, during the most challenging times of life and ministry we feel as though the darkness has become the new normal. The reality is much more complex: there are always better times ahead, and worse ones as well. During those dark times, when ministry becomes more of a weight than a joy, I tell myself, “whatever is happening now will not keep happening forever.” Those words have kept me through relational breaks in our staff that seemed unfixable, through budget woes when we didn’t think we were going to meet payroll, even a time when our community lost a third of its members because we had let a beloved pastor go. In this way I have found hope. In the same way, during the successful times when we were growing, budget was bigger than ever, and when new people were engaging with the church seemingly every week I continued to tell myself, “what is happening now will not keep happening forever.” In this way I have found a measure of humility. There’s another way to read this mantra as well, one that encourages us not to miss what is happening right now as we overly focus on where we’d like to be or what we’d like to see happen. The challenge of ministry, like the challenge of life in general, is to be present to what’s happening now . Too many single people miss the joys of singleness longing to be married. Too many young married couples miss the joys of the early years without children because they long to be parents. Too many parents of young children miss the joys of the infant years, longing for the days when their children are more independent, less dependent on them for everything. And on it goes. In the same way we in ministry can miss the joys of a small, close community by looking at larger communities and wishing we had their resources and influence. We can miss the inherent learning and even joy of being shoulder to shoulder in community with others through challenging times because the difficulties and pain we are experiencing mask the ways in which we are being brought together, the ways in which we are being formed and the invaluable things we are learning. In life, and in ministry, remember: How it is now is not how it will always be. Learn to appreciate how things are now, but also take comfort in the fact that if things are difficult, there are better days ahead. Stay humble because no success is forever. Stay hopeful because, in Christ, no failure is permanent.

Exciting Announcement- Ecclesia is Joining Ascent!

By Chris Backert • 19 Feb, 2024
I’m writing to share some exciting and important news with you that we believe will be significant for Ecclesia in the days ahead! For the last few years, I have been engaged with other church and network leaders across the US and Canada about forming a new “connection” for the church in North America. The heart of the effort is around unifying, amplifying, and multiplying the kind of Christian witness that Ecclesia represents, for the sake of the gospel, over the next few decades. This new effort is called The Ascent Movement, and within the last 12 months, its momentum has picked up increasing speed. A few months ago, I was asked by the council of Ascent if I would help spearhead the development of the network in its next phase. I agreed to accept that task. One of the core goals of Ascent is to connect, coordinate, and collaborate with groups like Ecclesia so that we can do more together than we could in isolation. In many ways, it will function as a “network of networks” like Ecclesia functions as a “network of churches”. In addition to ministries like Ecclesia, there are also seminaries, mission agencies, and other ministry support organizations that are joining Ascent in these early days. For the last several months the Ecclesia board has been discerning whether or not Ecclesia would officially enter into a partnership affiliation with Ascent. We unanimously affirmed that decision at our recent board meeting. Since Ascent is in its early phases of formation, more information on the benefits and opportunities of this new partnership will be ongoing. However, we are happy to share some of the aspects of this new affiliation that we find compelling and will not only bless Ecclesia, but also all of the churches within Ecclesia. First, given the size of Ecclesia, there have always been areas of ministry that we believe are important, but toward which we have not had the scale to accomplish or contribute. Among these are concrete efforts around - increasing the witness of the Hispanic church in North America - supporting mission expansion to less-resourced parts of North America - increasing opportunities for disaster relief and response - and mobilizing prayer networks. Further, there are also specific and tangible benefits that are made possible through this partnership for any Ecclesia Churches. Some of these include things like - discounted tuition costs to Truett Seminary for any Ecclesia leader or member serving an Ecclesia Church. - discounted rate in utilizing the services of Chemistry Staffing for future hiring - access to a church-based missionary sending ministry for those Ecclesia Churches engaged globally, and more! Lastly, there is a specific aspect to this partnership affiliation that is particularly helpful to Ecclesia. Ascent has agreed to partner with Ecclesia over the next year to expand our church planting and multiplication reach in a way that benefits both Ecclesia and Ascent. Practically, this looks like Ascent investing a little over $1,000/month into Ecclesia over this next year and together working toward a set of mutually beneficial goals. As I think about this opportunity within the current moment of our network, it seems right for multiple reasons beyond the purely practical. At our Ecclesia board meeting in late 2022, we established a path for individual affiliation within Ecclesia to make concrete space for leaders who are outside ministry contexts that allow for our core congregational affiliation. The heart of this decision was a desire to increase the kinds of relationships that Ecclesia has within our scope of ministry. The decision to affiliate with Ascent is similar. Also, as I shared at our Ecclesia Gathering in January, this decision fits within the Core DNA of Ecclesia. When I look back at the founding of our network, three aspects were central then and have carried forward. First, our desire to extend the gospel to increasingly post-Christian, or more challenging, settings and groups of people. Second, a desire to exemplify a Christian witness aligned with the theological and missiological direction of affirmations like the Capetown Commitment. Third, our desire to provide a relationally rich journey of friendship for the churches and leaders who are part of our family. When I consider the affiliation with Ascent, we share in common those first two Core DNA. As for the 3rd foundational aspect of our network, I believe the time has come where Ecclesia itself needs “friends for the journey” in the same way that Ecclesia has provided a context of friendship for those within our community. On the other side of COVID, it’s clear that ministry in the days ahead is more exciting, while also more challenging and complex. We believe we need a greater community to be the most faithful to the gospel that we can. You can go to www.ascentmovement.org to get a quick glimpse of its vision. The current website is a placeholder for a more thorough site coming later this Spring. Ecclesia, of course, will have a seat at the table in its formation. We have also provided a one-page overview of Ascent on the attached document. We will keep you updated on this exciting development. Please feel free to reach out with any questions. - Chris
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