Ok, no, this is not a blog article about a new David Bowie knock off of “Ground Control to Major Tom”. It is about the process of putting the rubber to the road of starting our new faith community. We’re, all of you along for the ride, in the process of starting our community. This is called Launch in church planting circles. That is the launching of our worship service.
In these church planting circles, the analogy of launching a rocket is the way this process is explained. As a lifelong space exploration nut, I have to tell you could not have been happier to hear this analogy being used. I was born 17 months before Apollo 11, and swear I can remember it. I grew up watching Apollo, Skylab, and the Shuttle as closely as many follow baseball. I could, before law school and parenthood took away the memory space, tell you the names of each of the Apollo ships (Apollo 11's Command Module was Columbia, and Lunar Module was Eagle), etc. And it is not just the space geek in me that loves this analogy. The analogy works.
In launching a rocket, you have to design the rocket, get the funding from Congress, build the parts, assemble it, prep the launch pad, transport it to the launch pad, fuel it with enough fuel (too little = boom), and launch the ship. That’s what we need to do with our new faith community.
The good ship Village was dreamed of and designed by our chief dreamer, Cheri with the Holy Spirit very much there beside her. Mind you, the Spirit and I need to have a few words about the middle of the nigh wake up calls for design meetings over the last few years. And, yes, the Village design process has been a lengthy process. I can tell you that indirectly this project (a church for progressives who have given up on traditional church, and want to change the world because of their faith) has been on the design table for a decade plus now.
The next step was getting Congress to fund this little ship. The Village is a little bit more like the International Space Station, in that it is not just the project of one nation. We are a plant of the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ. So, you may ask why? Because together, the two offer resources that one single denomination could not offer.
The parts assembly process has been over the last several years. People and skills needed for this project have been coming together for years. The assembly process for NASA happens in a really large building, one of the largest in the world, called creatively the Vehicle Assembly Building. It’s the large white one in the picture above. Well, there’s no building that size in Toledo, so we’ve had to use a bunch of smaller ones - Kurt & Cheri’s house, The Parklane Hotel, every coffee house in greater Toledo, The Church of St. Andrew UMC , Park Congregational Church, Panera on Glendale, the Main Branch Library, the Northwest Ohio Food Bank, etc.
Now we are ready to prep the pad, move the ship there, fuel it properly and launch. With NASA, that is handled by the launch team in Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center. They handle the assembly process, the roll out to the launch pad, the fueling, and the launch. When the rocket clears the tower at the launch pad , their responsibility ends and Mission Control in Houston takes over. That’s why you hear them say on every lift off, “3, 2, 1 Lift Off, Lift Off and the Shuttle has cleared the tower”. It’s the end of the launch team’s job and the beginning of Mission Control’s job.
To pull of our launch , we need our own Launch team. We need people who are willing to give their time and talents to help us do this. To add to our paid servants (the staff of Cheri, Jessica and Joe) we need to add a group of unpaid servants (aka Volunteers). We need people to help us get our new facility (more about that when it is officially selected) prepped. We need to come up with a marketing plan and execute it. We need to get our children’s ministries fully staffed and running; our connection groups (small groups for study, etc), our service projects continuing and expanding, financial and administrative processes started, a plan to make new members feel welcome and brought into our church family and then WE LAUNCH WORSHIP, first for us in September and for the public in October.
If we do this right, well then an amazing adventure beings. If we do this wrong, well follow this link and watch some launches go wrong and see what happens http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8&feature=fvw. Want to help launch the Village? You don’t need to commit to forever. When the Village has cleared the tower (begun weekly worship in October), some of us will go on to other projects. Others, like myself, will transfer over to Mission Control and keep this ship on it’s path.
Want to join in on the fun? Contact Cheri or I and we’ll be happy to talk to you some more and get you placed as a member of this team.
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