In that CRC-Voices thread on CRC/RCA church planting plans David Snapper, church planter and pastor from the Washington State reminded us of the thorough research he did that showed that the greatest determiner of CRC church plants getting above 200 within the first 5 years was their proximity to an established community of 2000 member of the CRC in general. Almost no CRCs planted outside one of these established CRC communities made it above 200 (Granite Springs in Lincoln in our cluster is one of the exceptions). Clustering is a key strategy both of Christian Reformed Home Missions and of this new CRC/RCA effort. He challenged me on why we are pursuing this effort in this way. This was my response.

Clustering:

Do you know (according to the physicists) how planets and objects in space form? Gravity. I’ll add a new metaphor to the mix. (See David Brooks http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12brooks.html) Bodies of mass pull together.

The seeker movement sought to use a big bang to create critical mass. Call people. Get 200 in a room. Catalyze the operation by getting the right preacher, the right music, the right promotional campaign (Here at Happy Suburb church sermons aren’t boring, the kids love our play structure and we have clowns teaching them about how to be moral and that God is love, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, we serve Starbuck’s coffee, plenty of parking and friendly service, giving is optional, come and go as you please, see if we can’t help you feel better about yourself and be the best self you can be…)

Our clusters are made up of little churches and we cling to life like little mammals surviving the asteroid strike that brought the extinction of Christendom in the west.

The CRC/RCA thing hopefully helps get a bit more gravity. Our immigrant clusters were geographical leveraging of clusters and gravity. Economics, family ties, language, etc. created these clusters. They had vision and ideas too. We’ve got less of what they had to leverage but we are struggling to put specks of dust together and the more little specks that accumulate the more gravity we get.

Is it a desperate mission as Rod noted? Yep, but it’s also a loving and joyful one, and I don’t know of any other way.

Along the way we’re finding (just like immigrants did) that there are others we can bond with and that working together is better than working alone.

One of the four Kingdom Enterprise Zones is Wyoming Michigan. When someone told me this he almost apologized for it, but I told him it was a terrific choice. Not only are the new, non-immigrant based clusters tough, but the immigrant based ones continue to lose gravity. The vision that drew them together continues to dissipate. We see that in the conflicts in GR.

I know full well that if I took a church in a traditional CRC cluster I could have more faces looking at me every Sunday AM to hear my sermons. That would feed my ego. On most days I do like the challenge of taking bits and specks that are floating through space, trying to knit them together in a strange land, and see what God might want to do through it. Foolish, maybe. But I don’t know of a better way for the CRC and the RCA and the DeVos foundation to spend its money. 🙂 pvk