Discerning Phoenix

Picking up where we left off last article, the assignment is clear:

Work to establish an interdependent understanding of the gospel, and work to build a corresponding interdependent church.

With that clarified, what is next? There are a whole series of questions that pop up:

• Where do we do this?
• How & what are we doing?
• Who do we this all with?
  

…and probably dozens of others as well. Over many posts to come, we’ll attempt to tackle at least these questions in this general order.

The first question that we choose to dive into is the where question. This may seem to be a surprising place to start, but I want to propose it matters deeply because it is critically important and it is the question that offers the least flexibility for change. If we come to new understandings of how or what we’re doing, we can adjust our course. If God calls new people to be involved or calls people to begin a new chapter, we can figure out how that works. If we aren’t in a place that an interdependent expression of church can flourish, there isn’t much we can do about that, and this kind of soil doesn’t change much over time. Choosing the right place to try and give this a shot is an important decision to try and do well.

Said another way, I believe the assignment that we’re being given is a different kind of assignment. This isn’t first a church planting (or succession) assignment - although to be sure it requires involvement and probably leadership in a local church - it is a church pioneering assignment. We are called to birth something new, and the calling is more to specific wineskin than it is to a specific location. That being said, the wineskin frames the location question: where is there a high likelihood this new wineskin can flourish? Not every place is equally ready for an interdependent expression of the Church: where then can such a thing take root? This is an important question to take the time to weigh very intentionally.

Pushed into the Next Chapter

One of the most concrete steps towards the next season happened for me when COVID shut the world down. Shortly after that, the Lord began to make it clear that he was moving my family out of the local church that we had served and thrived in for over a decade (The Vineyard Church of Central Illinois, or TVC for short). Over a year-long process he made it clear it was time to lay down the ministry school I had founded, and that the next steps would become clear as we started walking towards what he was asking us to do.

From the very beginning I had the sense that we wouldn’t know where we were to go next until we were leaving Champaign-Urbana and putting ourselves in the place of trusting God to lead us. During the entire exiting process I asked God to make it clear over and over, but we never had any clarity. Each time we would consider a city we would begin to feel some enthusiasm about it, and then it would peter out and become clear that it wasn’t what God was doing.

Just about as soon as I had finished up my assignment and concluded my time on staff at TVC, I almost immediately had the impression that I needed to seriously look at Phoenix and consider it as a place to go. I found this very surprising: I didn’t know hardly anything about Phoenix and wasn’t seriously considering it in any regard. It had come up as an option as I had surveyed various hub-airport cities, but that was about it. All of a sudden Phoenix felt like a flashing red light that I had to give my attention to - this was pretty surprising to me.

Over the last months of research, prayer, and even a trip there, Brittany and I believe there is a serious chance that this is where the Lord is calling us to go and do our church pioneering experiment. After a few months of looking into it and exploring from a distance, we took a family trip there in August, which seemed incredibly blessed of the Lord. We came back asking God, “Lord, we need you to make it clear if this is not what you’re doing.”, and we plan to take through about November this year to finalize that decision.

The decision making process that we are using is based upon three major categories. This first is what fits us as a family: we want wherever we land to be a place that we and our family can thrive. I don’t believe sacrificing ourselves to the mission is a healthy perspective, outside of the concrete ways God would ask (in which case there is always grace that sustains you). The second is what fits the mission: as we said, we need wherever we go to be good soil for interdependent expression and experimentation. The third is what we hear God saying. We are presently weighing whether Phoenix is the convergence of all of these factors. Breaking each of these categories down into more concrete areas, here is what we are turning over:

As we’ve dived in thus far, there seems to be pretty exciting discoveries ahead in each of these areas. Read on to continue to get more specific!!