Church Planter Interviews – Jason Malec
Bob Hyatt
Oct 27, 2010

So your church, New Denver , is obviously in Denver, CO. Tell us a little bit about where you guys are planting in the city.

Well Denver has 2.5 million people, but it still has the feel of a small city. It’s pretty young, very transient. People don’t come here to commit, they come here to play. It’s like an adult playground. The people are highly-relational, distrusting of institutions and highly secular.

Our church is located in a semi-urban place, about 3 miles outside the urban core. We’re in the first ring of suburbs that were built when the city first expanded. It’s actually kind of funny, the place where my family live is about 2 miles away from the city and originally it was where people in the city would build country homes to escape the city…2 miles away!

Anyways, we are located where people are fairly wealthy, want the amenities of the urban setting without the messiness, grunge or “riff-raff” of the city.

People tend to be fickle, have a hard time committing and are always looking for something better to do at the last minute. They really like to keep their options open.

Tell us about the process you used for planting your church. What did that time look like? What did you do?

Well my family came with 2 other families, we were all on staff at a church in Atlanta. The 3 of us are co-pastoring the church together (which we know is a little unique. I like to say, “Co-pastoring isn’t the way to do it, it’s just that it’s the way for us.” For whatever reason, it works really well for us). Before we moved here we probably visited the city once a month for about 6 months. During that time we just worked at building relationships. Psychographics. Figuring out where we wanted to live and plant.

I was actually the last of the families to get there; we arrived 6 months after the other two families. When I got there we already had a core of about 20-25 people and we started small groups.

How did you build that core team? I’m always interested how people gather core teams when they are “parachuting” into another city they haven’t lived in for very long.

I’d say about 25% simply came from networking. We were constantly meeting with people and “pressing the flesh.” Another 50% came because they were familiar with North Point or were transplants from Atlanta and had attended North Point in the past. And the other 25% came from Facebook microtargeting. We’ve actually had a lot of success with that.
But getting back to the question about how we started…we took this core group of people and developed weekly small groups, and in March of 2009, we started bringing these small groups together once a month for some very light worship and then on October 4 of 2009 we began our semi-weekly worship service.

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?

Honestly, it’s very much like your average evangelical church. This Fall we will have 4 weekly Sunday gatherings and have a few small groups distributed around the city and we’re looking at starting a Huddle and seeing how that goes. Maybe start a Missional Community? I guess we’ll see. We also have informal gatherings. I’ve tried to really tap those who are strong people-gatherers and have asked them to be proactive in getting people together to do fun things. Just trying to make it organic.

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

That’s actually kind of a hard question to answer. I still feel like we’re caught in between our megachurch roots and the more missional, organic style.

We have certainly dug into our toolkit and can “put on” a good worship service. What we’re doing is pretty stripped down, though, but we feel good about it. One of our core group recently commented that she feels like she “can bring all of me” to our gatherings. And that was a big compliment. She meant that her doubts, questions, and earnest pursuit of God – whatever that looks like – was welcome. Again, that was very encouraging to hear.

But the best things have probably been the organic, relational connections. I think there’s been a lot of life in that. It really seems to tap into the reality that people in Denver are often anti-church, yet hyper-relational. So the relational connections tap into the vibe that you find around here.

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

You know, I think we were pretty idealistic at the beginning. I guess that’s normal for church planters, right?

Before we were here we had people tell us to expect 80% of the Core Team to vanish within a year or two. And of course we thought, “No, that won’t happen to us.” Yeah, it definitely did.

We also tried something for 6 months where we didn’t have a worship service once a month and encouraged everyone to get involved with a mission project we were all doing together. It seemed good on paper, but never quite got off the ground. We might have had 20% of the people come out on those Sundays. I’m glad we tried it and I know there’s actually another church in Denver that has had unbelievable success with that; it just didn’t work great for us.

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

Some people might guess it’s been in the leadership aspect with three of us co-pastoring together, but that’s actually been great.

I think finding the right teaching rhythm has been hard with three of us. We tried to team teach the same message on one Sunday, that didn’t work. We alternated weeks, I taught for a week, then Stephen taught the next week, then Norton preached. Yeah, that didn’t work either.

Now we’re teaching for blocks of time, so I’m teaching for something like 4-5 weeks straight on one series. That seems to be working much better.

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

The key for me would be discipleship. We’ve got to disciple people. I just don’t know of many people who are doing this well. We’re looking to explore Huddles and that could really help, excited about that prospect.

We also really need to be sustainable. We’re top down right now and need to employ people who are evangelists and multiplying influence so we aren’t the only people carrying the banner. People are following right now and we need people who will lead with us.

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

I think it would be easy for me to get caught up in creating a spiritual place for others. I think God is constantly reminding me that it starts with me. It’s the only way I can replicate anything, it has to start with me. One of the axioms we had in our last church that really stuck with us and gets to the heart of this: “Is what is happening here on staff worth exporting?”

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

Man, 5 months from now would be awesome!

Well there are 3 of us on staff right now. I would think in 5 years we could have at least three networked churches, but maybe 6 or 8 that have spread and multiplied out of this (we can already see some of that starting to happen). Even now on a map of the city, it’s so interesting: There are three clusters of people with each cluster around where each one of us lives. And it’s not like we planned it like that, it’s just happened.

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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