The Road of the Revolutionary

  • Matt Payne
  • Jan 6, 2008
  • Series: Revolutionaries
The Road To A Revolution
 
Happy New Year everyone!  My name is Matt Payne and I’m the Lead Pastor here at Church! at Bethany.  Today I am continuing the tradition of using the first Sunday of the year to give a State of the Church message.  If this is your first time with us I want to let you know up front that this is a different kind of message than normal.  The Bible refers to the church in many ways and one of the ways it describes it is as a Family.  And today we’re going to have a little family meeting.  
I want us to spend a little bit and look back on 2007 and I want to spend more time looking ahead to 2008.  I think it is healthy to look back and try to learn from our success as well as our mistakes.
 
Today is our 72nd Sunday as a church.  Last January we had just 17 Sunday’s under our belt.  A year ago we were still riding the high of our launch in October 2006.  The first quarter of 2007 was a great time.  We were meeting at PCC: Rock Creek.  Lots of new people were coming.  Our attendance was running around 145.  On Easter Sunday we had almost 300 people!
 
Easter was a high point of the year.  Over the next three months things began to change.  For 9 months when people asked me how it was going I said things like, “Great!  Amazing!”  While other church planters were down and sharing their struggles I said that we must be doing something wrong because things were going great.  I gave a message at the first of May talking about us in the Fall going to two services and launching a new campus.  It took me longer than most but by the first of June I realized that things felt different.  The one constant thing in a new church is change.  
 
During that time several core people from the church decided to leave.  Some going back to our Mom church.  Some left because they never got connected in a Community group.  Others—a group from Scappoose—decided to help start a new church there.  
In June I decided to get out my old basketball shoes and join guys from the church to play in the YMCA league but during the first game I broke both bones in my arm.  In July we lost our full-time Children’s Director.  Throughout the summer our attendance dropped—and our offerings dropped with it.  We also found out that PCC was not going to renew our lease and we had until September to find another place. By August many were looking around at empty seats at PCC seriously considering abandoning the ship.  It was a dark time for me—and I had nowhere to turn—except God.  
 
I have a prayer team of over 130 people that represents over 70 churches--some from around Portland—most from the Midwest.  Prayer emails were flying and I believe God did a miracle when Stoller agreed to a one year lease.
 
We decided to re-launch at the end of October—it would have been better to do it at the beginning of the month but because we didn’t know where we were going to meet we had to push it back.  During October and November we had a lot of new people coming to check us out.  Several of you started coming since we have moved to this location.  New people brought excitement and energy.  
Then I was in a car accident.  I have been going to the Chiropractor 3x a week and a medical massage therapist 2x.  I am doing better but still feel pretty sore at times. It consumes a lot of my time.  The Thanksgiving to New Year Holiday season found us dropping back down in attendance and offerings.
 
We use the 3Cs – Celebrate, Connect and Contribute to help us determine how we are doing as a church.  They are our dashboard.  Currently we have 128 people who are coming regularly to Celebrate—which is defined by at least once a month.  79 adults and 49 kids.  We have 46 adults currently Connected by going to a small group which is 58%.  In the Contribute category we have 32 adults serving in Kids City, or the Front Porch which is 40%.  We also have 20 family units who give regularly.  During the month of December the offerings were an average of $1200 per week while our budget is $2500 per week.  For the year we averaged a little under $1700.
 
The past couple weeks I was able to take some time off and I had a chance to refocus on God and His vision for Church! at Bethany.  Last year we did a message series entitled Expectations.  Our happiness is really based on our expectations.  When we see the Blockbuster movie preview we expect that its going to be awesome—but many times it disappoints!  Then we watch a movie that we went in with no expectations—and it blows us away.  
 
One of things God reminded me of was a study that came out last year on new churches that were
started between the year 2000 and 2005.  They studied almost 2,300 churches and found that the average new church plant had 41 people (adults and kids) after one year.  After four years the average church plant had 83 total people attending. The average size church in America is 75 and in one year we have surpassed that.  I don’t know what your expectations are but as a new church we are doing above average.
 
Portland author Don Miller tells the story of how he and some friends went to Peru to walk the Inca trail.   It’s a 26 mile trail through the Andes.  It climbs up over a pass at 14,000 ft.  There are 21,000 ft mountains all around.  He said you spend 4 days on the trail and you get up really early the last day so that you can arrive at the city of Machu Picchu to watch the sunrise.
At the beginning of the 4 day hike the guide told the group as they stood on a plateau that below them was a river that ran through the sacred valley and the sacred valley trail would get them to Machu Picchu in 6 hours.  It was just a few miles.  The other trail will get them there in 4 days—26 miles.  About 9 miles of it is steps—straight up. Don said he thought why don’t we take the short trip!
 
The guide said that in Incan times the short route was the commercial route.  If you were taking goods and services to Machu Picchu you would take the short route-6 hours.  But everyone else would have to take the 4 day journey.  They would have to take the 26 mile journey through the high mountain passes.  Here is why he said they did this:  they made them take the long route so that when they arrived in the city they would appreciate it.  If they took the easy route they wouldn’t appreciate it.  
 
I wonder if we are willing to accept the fact that the hard things in our life, the difficult nature of it is ok.  James 1 tells us why the hard road is ok, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
When times are difficult we tend to say:  I must be doing something wrong.  I must be a bad person.  And you may be.  Maybe it is the reason why you are in conflict in your life.  If so, you need to fix it.  But maybe the mission God has given you is just difficult. 
&nb