Evanston Vineyard Church Planting Blog

Reason number 5 for planting new churches: It’s the very nature of the church to grow and expand and multiply.  Remember the story Jesus tells about what the kingdom of God is like? He takes a very common image to people in his neck of the woods, the mustard seed. You plant a mustard seed, which is much tinier than a cucumber seed or a tomato seed or a grain of wheat, and you think, “How big could the plant that comes out of something this size ever grow?” But a healthy mustard seed can produce a tree tall enough and luxuriant enough with foliage that a grown man or woman can rest against its trunk and be shaded by its leaves.

A healthy church produces leaders who are healthy, and some of those leaders who are gifted to be catalytic pastors begin to look at what the senior pastor is doing and think, “I’d like to try my hand at doing that!” But of course, the only way to do that is to get trained and then get sent out. If a mother church does this over and over, they can look back several decades later and see an exponential effect, as one church becomes two, and those two churches plant again and become four, and so on and so on.

When we planted one of our churches, we took a whole boatload of young leaders with us. Out of those, one in particular always had strong ideas of how this or that could be done. Since he lived with us, it made for some lively dinner conversations! When the time came, we sent him to become pastor with his wife of a fresh start to an existing church plant that was merging with another small church. That church grew strong and healthy, passionate about the poor, adventurous in encouraging art and artists, reflective of its multi-racial, highly-educated, opinionated community. In 2007 or 2008, that church will launch a Spanish-speaking plant at about the same time that our church will launch a new church plant in one of the Mid-Atlantic States; exponential expansion happens again.  The gifting that we saw in him and in his wife would have shriveled on the vine if we had insisted on keeping them. He would have turned bitter from never being able to give full rein to the vision he had. Instead, there are now two strong churches where before there was only one.

Next up: How do I know if I have the right mix of gifts to think about planting a church?

- Cindy Nicholson 

Sorry for the big space between blogs here. Ironically, it was mostly because of church planting! The national church planting task force for the Vineyard USA met here March 15 and 16, followed by a conference here staffed by our Midwest region church planting task force, Cause to Live For, Cause to Die For, for risk takers of all ages looking for a vision worth risking one’s life for. Due to the fact that most participants were also sleeping on our nice rug-covered concrete floor, it was also a Cause worth Wracking Up Your Back For, which eliminated a few of us older risk-takers.

At our church planting task force meetings, we tallied it up and figured out that we will have roughly 56 new churches being planted in 2007. Here are some of the places these plants are heading; think you might be interested in going and giving your all so that a new church might be deeply planted?

West Coast:
Solvang, CA
Apple Valley, CA
Pasadena, CA
Santa Barbara, CA
Fresno, CA
San Diego, CA
Yorba Linda, CA
Tumwater, WA
Everett, WA
Redman, WA
Medford, OR

Southwest & Rockies:
Bayville, TX
Sherman, TX
Boerne, TX
Steamboat Springs, CO
Johnstown, CO

Plains States, Midwest and Great Lakes:
Oak Park, IL
Moline, IL
Chicago (west side), IL
Peoria, IL
Waterloo, IA
Indianola, IA
Sioux Falls, SD
Harper County, KS
Milwaukee, WI
Almont, MI (released already)
Breckville, OH
Circleville, OH
Columbus, OH
Monroe, OH

Eastern and Mid-Atlantic:
Wilmington, DE
Ashland, VA
Virginia Beach, VA
Lawrenceburg, VA
Wayne NJ
Jersey City, NJ
Bergen County, NJ
South Paris, ME
Riverhead, NY
Wellesley, MA
Providence, RI
State College, PA

South:
Crystal River, FL
Grant County, KY (released)
Berea, KY (released)
Decatur, GA (released)
Dallas, GA
Lenoir City, TN (released)
Columbia, SC
Chapel Hill, NC

Reason #4 for planting new churches: We need new churches in new ground. We’ve got to keep breaking new ground, particularly if we want to plant churches that plant churches, creating an exponential kind of growth. If Christians with a missional focus bring new people into a relationship with Jesus, but there is no church community for those folks to plug into, it becomes just an experience they had once, a “been there, done that” kind of thing and their hearts become hard. If we are going to bring the Kingdom to the world, we have to come along behind with new church communities, especially if we are going to new groups of people who have never been impacted by the amazing story of what God did through Jesus. They aren’t just going to go settle into the church down the road they may have been driving past for years. They need us to think fresh, on their behalf!

- Cindy Nicholson

There are many people who are not yet being reached, people who are interested in spirituality, maybe even interested in Jesus, but the church is a barrier.

You hear it all the time these days expressed this way, “I’m very spiritual, but I’m not religious.” What they are trying to say there is that they are interested in spiritual things, but there is an obstacle in their minds about how they perceive church or religion being played out. What is needed, of course, is new churches that answer some of their objections.

It’s funny, but even in areas that we perceive to be “saturated” with churches, or that are in close proximity to a mega-church that seems to scoop up everybody in its path, there are pockets of unreached people, and some of them would respond to Jesus if there were a church that could speak their language. When we began Evanston Vineyard, there was, almost literally, a church on every corner in Evanston, but there were many, many young people like us who could not find a way to be anything but Sunday attenders in them. So we started a church with a few dozen twenty-somethings and one grandmother! It was a 4:00 pm church service, homemade soup and bread-eating, community of the young, the foreigner and the widow.

We send out new plants so that new people-groups in towns and cities all around us and around the world will have something brand new in their neighborhood, something that maybe is tailored a bit to reach them.. Our latest plant, Charlottesville Vineyard in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in central Virginia (www.cvillevineyard.org), is a new church in a very old town. There is nothing else like a Vineyard there, nothing that is a little on the young side, nothing that has that mix of strong bible teaching, passionate worship, informal community and regular hands-on prayer for the sick and hurting woven right into the everyday life of the church. There are a number of good, godly, wonderful churches in Charlottesville, but the Vineyard will reach a whole new set of people who would never set foot in those other churches except for weddings and funerals. Here’s a story from Jim and Megan Bleakley, the planters:

Jim had the opportunity to pray for a guy in our church who is at the “seeker” stage. He has been looking for a job recently and has not had too much luck with landing decent jobs in the past. Jim, knowing of his job interview the next day, asked if he could pray for him. He agreed and Jim began to pray. Jim prayed for favor, that he would be able to be relaxed during the interview and that the company would offer him a job on the spot before he left.

That night and the next day he felt calm and not as worried as he was the day before. He was wondering if it was because of the prayer and when, during the interview, they offered him a job on the spot he later relayed to Jim that he KNEW it was because of the prayer. It seems that God has made an impression on this guy and we are praying for more encounters like that one where he would not be able to deny God’s mercy and his love for him.

- Cindy Nicholson

Reason #2 why Evanston Vineyard plants new churches: Because we want to see more people be introduced to the life-changing power of God’s mercy and truth, and new churches do that more efficiently.

It’s not that a church our age doesn’t introduce new people to Jesus; we do so in many different ways, all the time. But a new church plant’s whole focus is on building something new out of a community of people who never really knew Jesus before the planters and their team showed up. Sure, they’ll get some folks who are already committed Christians who couldn’t find a church home or are transferred into town. But the foundation of the church, the thing that makes it exciting, is establishing a community of brand-new wholehearted followers of Jesus.

Here’s a very recent story from one of our church planters, Jim Pool, up in Royal Oak, Michigan, that beautifully illustrates this:

When we first started looking for a new building, we put a call into a realtor on one of the signs of the buildings that we were interested. (Plus, he had a pretty cool sounding name!) When we met him, he swore like a sailor - though he insists he doesn’t really remember this! That building didn’t work out, but we really seemed to click, and so we told him we wanted him to rep us. A week or two later he invited us over to his house to talk over things and to look over some more possibilities - as soon as we walked in he offered us a beer; and we ended up talking way more about the Bible and science and all kinds of other questions than about properties. This evolved into regular Friday morning breakfasts at my favorite hang-out to talk about “realty”, when in fact 95% of what we talked about what God, Jesus, the Bible, etc. He would come up with whatever questions were on his mind and then we would talk; at our first meeting he told me his wife had just made him give up smoking pot! After a month or so of this I invited him to church - he and his new wife came and they loved it. They’ve come regularly since then, sitting right behind me and tapping along on the chair to the drum. He helped us find space in a building to rent and he was honored by the church - who gave him a big ovation. He’s been coming much closer to God - wondering why he doesn’t seem to feel anything in worship like most everyone else is, etc. - and coming to believe that the gospel makes sense, etc. Well, two Fridays ago at our breakfast, I asked him if he was ready to commit to Jesus, but he said he just wasn’t quite there, but was close. Then, this past Sunday, after articulating the gospel and asking if anyone wanted to give their life to Jesus, he stood up. I’ve been doing this for months with no response, and praying hard for someone to commit their life to Jesus, and when he stood up, I started to cry. Then two other women stood up to recommit their lives to Jesus, too. It was powerful! Praise God! As Matt Redman quotes C.H. Spurgeon, “Never lose faith in the power of the gospel.”

If you have been around our church for awhile, one of the things you have probably noticed is that people are always coming and going. Steve Nicholson and Bill and Cheryll Hanawalt leave to go visit our church plant and missions folks across the country and around the world. We pray over people as they leave to go on short term missions trips or to move for years to another place to help plant the seeds for new churches to grow. Why do we do that? Why not just work on making our church ever larger? Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about the main reasons we have always wanted to be part of planting new churches.

First, we would not plant new churches out of our church if we didn’t see that pattern in the bible. The book of Acts is full of stories about Paul going to a place, establishing a church, and from there the whole surrounding area being evangelized and new churches springing up throughout that province: Jerusalem, Judea (same area), Samaria (next area north), Antioch (farther away), then Philippi, Ephesus, Rome (further, further, further).

In a similar way, from this church came the Urban Vineyard in Humboldt Park/Bucktown area, and from there churches are being planted in Puerto Rico. We helped launch the Vineyard in Oak Park, and they in turn are planting a La Viña on the other side of Oak Park. We planted the Libertyville Vineyard which planted La Viña Mundelein which has planted Crystal Lake Vineyard in 2006. Directly or indirectly we have been the parent or grandparent church for a dozen or more Vineyards throughout Chicagoland, and there is certainly room for more! In 2007, folks from our church, Urban Vineyard and Hyde Park Vineyard are working together to get a new Vineyard started on the Westside near UIC. There is a dream for another plant in ’07 or ‘08 either out in the rapidly expanding new subdivisions beyond Plainfield or in the Arlington Heights area.

We also send planters far afield; our two most recent planters sent out have been the Tompkins to Boulder, Colorado and the Bleakleys to Charlottesville, Virginia. More on them in coming weeks! Again, why do we do this? Why do we give strong leaders away like that? We do it because there is ample evidence in the bible that the way new people get exposed to the story of Jesus in ways that meet them in their own language and culture is through new churches. We want to be part of establishing new outposts of the Kingdom of God in many, many places, plants which become effective church homes for a whole new generation of people who love Jesus.

- Cindy Nicholson