Main Session 2

Description: The high-achieving, highly mobile, de-churched neighborhoods of Washington, DC, aren’t ideal environments for small group ministry. Yet, National Community Church is making it work. Learn about their “organic approach” to community and how you can see group life flourish despite harsh surroundings.

Speakers’ Bios:

Mark Batterson serves as lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, DC. In 2007 Outreach Magazine recognized NCC as one of the 25 Most Innovative Churches in America. One church with eight services in four locations, NCC is focused on reaching emerging generations. 73% of NCCers are single twenty-somethings and 70% come from an unchurched or dechurched background. The vision of NCC is to meet in movie theaters at metro stops throughout the metro DC area. NCC also owns and operates the largest coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. In 2007, Ebenezers was recognized as the #2 coffeehouse in the metro DC area by AOL CityGuide.

Mark is the author of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day and Wild Goose Chase: Reclaiming the Adventure of Pursuing God.

A native Alabamian, Heather Zempel invested her parent’s money and six years of her life at Louisiana State University earning bachelors and masters degrees in biological engineering. She finally left Cajun country to apply her newly acquired skills as a consultant at an environmental engineering firm and later as a policy advisor in the United States Senate. She now engineers environments that foster community and spiritual growth as the discipleship pastor at National Community Church in Washington, DC. Heather and her amazing husband Ryan can be found on Capitol Hill enjoying theater (from the audience or the stage) and settling arguments with Webster’s Dictionary. Check out her daily ramblings at www.discipleshipgroups.blogspot.com.

Notes:

Okay, starting off, I’m excited for this session. Mark and Heather are my bosses at NCC.

MB: We needs lots of different kinds of churches because there are lots of different kinds of people.

It was the first weekend of January 1996. It was our first Sunday as pastors of National Community Church. It was also the weekend of the blizzard of ’96: two feet of snow. We had three people, my wife, myself, and our baby Parker. The good news is that with 19 people the next Sunday, we had 633% growth in the first week.

I had never pastored a church, and it was baptism by immersion. It was tough. I used to lead worship and would close my eyes because it was too depressing. We’d start with 6-8 people.

The school we were meeting in got closed down for fire code violations, and if the church had died, only two dozen people would have known or cared. But sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is hang in there.

But somewhere in the back of my head I remembered that Willow Creek had started in a movie theater, so I went in to meet the manager at the Union Station theaters. They had just started a campaign to rent out their facilities during off hours. It was like God was in the middle of this thing!

I started with the traditional idea of renting a building until you can buy one, but in our neck of the woods, Capitol Hill, land goes for about $10 million an acre. I began to realize that our location was perfect. We were in the most visited destination in Washington DC with our own subway system, food court, etc.

We also own and operate the largest coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. Coffeehouses aren’t just a place to get coffee, they are postmodern wells. They’re the places that people just hang out.

Every day we have hundreds of people come through our coffeehouse. On Saturdays we have two services there. On Monday we have Alpha groups that meet there.

We are in a unique place. We are 73% single twentysomethings. We have 40-50% turnover every year(?).

Without the favor of God I don’t want to be in ministry, do you?

As our staff has grown through the years, I realized how much you enjoy doing ministry has a lot to do with who you are doing ministry with. The quality of your ministry will also begin to depend less on your competence and more on that of the people you work with.

God will not grow our churches beyond our capacity to disciple people. In other words, all of the pressure is on Heather.

HZ: Before coming on staff I was a biological engineer, so that happens to be the lens through which I view ministry.

I know some of you are groaning because you were the kids who hated science in school.

One of the most profound stories I heard in the science world is from a cereal company that wanted to replace it’s old equipment because it took equipment from a 5 story building to produce irregularly shaped cereal. The engineers figured out how to reduce the process to a machine that produced perfect cereal and was the size of a tabletop. However, no one wanted to buy the cereal.

I have a bad habit of going to conferences like this, finding the perfect model or system, and trying to implement it without regard to the specific culture where I am. You can have a perfect small group model that will produce perfect disciples, but if the people in your congregation won’t get involved with it, then it ceases to be the perfect system.

We’re going to talk about some of the catalysts that push forward the growth of community in the context in which we do ministry.

Don’t confuse the outcome with the methods. The outcome for us is people who are living and growing in community. There might be a number of processes that will get you to the outcome.

MB: 1. Everything is an experiment

Neurologists sub-divide the brain into regions responsible for a variety of functions.

THe visual cortex responsible for the optical nerve

The pre-frontal lobe (?) is responsible for spacial operations.

The medial ventral pre-frontal cortex is the east of humor.

Your left brain is the locus of logic, and your right brain is the locus of creativity or imagination.

Those hemispheres are connected for about 300 million nerve fibers called the corpus collosum. Female brains have about 40% more connections between the hemispheres. Men have 20% more bone density.

Over the course of time there is a cognitive shift from right brain to left brain. At some point we stop doing ministry out of right brain imagination and start doing it out of left brain memory. We stop dreaming and start remembering. I think God has called us to creativity. It’s not optional. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.”

We believe that there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet.

What we try to do at National Community Church is approach everything we do in an experimental fashion.

Here’s what’s beautiful about this. How many of you as leaders have found that no matter how God-ordained your vision is, there are some people who will oppose it. So, if someone says, “I don’t think we should be doing that.” You know what our comeback is? “It’s just an experiment.” If it doesn’t work we’ll stop doing it. If it does, we’ll try to do it better.

This gives you the freedom to fail, the freedom to try new things, and to create what you want the future to look like.

HZ: One of the experiments we started about 4 years ago was running our small groups on the semester system. And this is one of those times when your context is important. We have a ton of college students and Hill staffers.

We’ve found that people are a lot more willing to try out a group if they’re only going to make an 8 to 12 week committment. How many of you really want to sign up for a 5 AM prayer group that meets in perpetuity? The fear is that people won’t stick with it, but we’re finding that isn’t true. People will join as long as they can see the exit sign.

We’ve had situations where people have been in the middle of year-long inductive Bible studies of Romans. That’s great, except that in the middle of it people may realize they’re struggling with relational and sexual purity and need out to address the issues they’re dealing with.

MB: We had quite a bit of resistance when we started.

So first, we said, let’s just try this. It’s an experiment.

Second, we allowed long-standing groups to keep meeting.

We take a break in August. And there was some concern that we’re taking a break from God, but we are supposed to be teaching people to feed themselves. Also, it allows our leaders, who invest so much time and energy in their groups.

HZ: We’ve tried some digital discipling as well. We’ve started zonegathering.com, a blog for our leaders, and a lot of our groups have started their own blogs, places where they can have discussion throughout the week.

MB: I love technology, but I am inept. I have our kids help me through the DVD. I walk through our media department and ask them if they need any non-tech support.

I started blogging because I felt like I lost connection with people as our church got larger, and it allowed me a way to connect with them.

There was some thing where people felt like technology would stifle community, but exactly the opposite has happened.

I follow our church staff on Twitter. It allows me to know when someone had a rough night because their kid was sick.

We need to redeem technology for Christ.

HZ: You promised a bad experience, and I don’t have any, so you want to share one?

MB: We decided to do a Rock Band tournament as a fundraiser for a missions trip. It worked well. We raised about $1000. Note to self: you might want to check the lyrics before you do that. But here’s the thing. It’s that dimension of leadership where you take God very seriously, but you don’t take yourself very seriously. You know how you laugh at yourself. You try stuff, you experiment with stuff.

HZ: 2. Maturity does not equal conformity

Modulus of Elasticity: How much force can you apply to an object to deform it without which it will not be changed.

Each object has a yield point at which it can no longer go back to its original self.

The modulus of elasticity is important when thinking about spiritual growth. We’ll take people to a retreat or get them in a small group but not push them beyond their yield point, so they come back and return to their old self. We need to push them beyond their yield point.

We decided to allow small groups to emerge from the creativity of our leaders. We told people that we want to build community and make disciples; how you do that is up to you. We’ve got groups doing inductive Bible studies, reading books, serving the homeless. A few years ago one of my leaders wanted to start a group around fantasy baseball. I trust Nathan. I told him we wanted to make disciples of Christ, not disciples of the Phillies. The guys got together to pick their teams. Then they adopted a little league field. Every so often they go out and take care of the field. People began to ask questions. There’s now an NCC banner hanging in the outfield. Our staff had nothing to do that.

MB: We call this our free-market system of small groups. We’re speaking descriptively, not prescriptively, but this has worked well for us.

We take our leaders though a 3 hour leadership course and have them sign a leadership covenant. We want people to be part of a small group before they lead a small group. We expect our leaders to get a vision from God and go with it. Are there groups we’ve said no to? Yes. Are there groups that ended up being very marginal? Yes. How many of you have a committee in your church that should have died 20 years ago? That’s the great thing about the free-market system. If no one shows up to your group, you don’t have a group.

Oswald Chambers: Let God be as original with others as he was with you.

HZ: 3. Expect the Unexpected

MB: Spiritual growth is a conundrum. The key to spiritual growth is establishing routines. We call them spiritual disciplines, but when a routine becomes a routine, we have to change our routine. When I’m in a spiritual slump, it’s because I need to get out of our routine. Change of pace plus change of place equals change of perspective.

In physical exercises routine eventually becomes counterproductive. Your muscles adapt and stop growing.

The disciples didn’t know what Jesus would do next. He overthrew money-changers in the temple, walked on water, and then healed someone on the Sabbath. Jesus could have healed someone on any other day, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun with the Pharisees. A good leader’s got to have a good curveball.

You cannot overappreciate your small group leaders.

HZ: We wanted to bless our leaders beyond anything they could imagine, so we went to Five Guys burgers and went into the Senate and House office buildings and took burgers not only to our leaders but also to their offices.

MB: 4. Love People When They Least Expect it and Least Deserve It

We want a culture of experimenting, originality, etc., but when you get right down to it, where does community grow best? In an environment that is graceful and respectful. John 1:14 – Jesus was full of grace and truth.

We need both of those things. Let me speak bluntly. We live in a culture where it’s wrong to say that something is wrong, and that’s wrong. I live in a city where it’s all about being politically correct. I’m going to be biblically correct. This generation wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the hard truth. Let’s stop answering questions that no one is asking.

If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it. When a woman is caught in adultery and brought to Jesus, she expects to be stoned. Jesus stepped in and loved her when she least expected it and least deserved it.

If you can try to love people when they least expect it and least deserve it, you can create a culture where amazing things happen.

Related posts:

1. Group Life 2008 – Community and Social Media
2. Group Life 2008 – John Burke – Why Community is Essential
3. Willow Creek Group Life 2008