By Dave ShieldsHello friends, I have moved forward more in my quest for God’s guidance. No matter what I do, I cannot shake the idea of planting a church. It feels like each night that I pray about where God wants me to go, the thought of planting continues to roll around in my mind. Today, I finally felt the pressure was too much and asked my current church, Grace Church, for feedback.
Grace made it their mission to plant over 100 churches by 2036 and have a solid program. I have witnessed a few of my friends in the ministry go out and plant. They seem to be a good place to start, so I did that. I have not yet applied to be a planting resident because I am still considering what this might mean for my future. However, the thing that God keeps bringing to me is that I should at least gather information about it – this is because He created my mind and knows how it operates.
Fear
Okay, so you are a spiritual guy, why wouldn’t you want to go off and plant a church? The single biggest reason is fear. I won’t try to sugar coat it. I am very afraid of what that might mean. I have spent over 25 years of my life building a career in IT, and it has led me to a well-paying job and a lifestyle I could not dream of having when I was younger. Depending on how the church plant happens, I would have to come to grips with the fact that I will leave that behind. However, after completing my doctorate, it is clear that I have much more passion for the ministry’s work than for IT.
But it’s deeper than that! Despite being blessed with considerable financial resources in the most recent decade, I made many stupid financial decisions as a young adult that my wife and I are paying for now. Thanks to a series of debt restructuring (no bankruptcy, thankfully) and influxes of cash from various endeavors, we still run our account into the red sometimes. After spending so many years of boom and bust IT, it has only been in the past 4-6 years that we haven’t been scraping by from paycheck to paycheck. To convince myself and my wife (and our remaining four kids) to give all that up will not be an easy sell.
My family has been blessed with a beautiful house, a popular hangout spot for our kids’ friends in the neighborhood and beyond. They have built longstanding relationships with their friends via school and sports teams, which was difficult for them when I moved them up north from Oklahoma in 2018. They are entrenched in school programs, football teams, etc. What will happen if I make them give that up? Can I make them give that up? It’s much harder to decide this when more is at stake than before.
Relationships
We have also spent many years developing relationships in this area. I have built a dedicated group of men for my small group over the past 8 years. We have befriended the parents of our children’s friends and even stood in the gap as their backup family when they needed it. I have built a network of relationships with Christian musicians in KC who call on me when they need DJ Services or spiritual support.
Although my wife has not made as many friends as I have, she still has a few, and one of them considers her the only remaining friend she has. Even more, my wife loves her job, the first job she’s had after stepping out of the workforce in 2010 to be a mom for all our adopted and biological kids. It’s a small company, but the people she works with have grown to love her and depend on her to keep the office running. If we were forced to plant a church elsewhere, I would ask her to give up all that without much warning.
Let’s not forget the non-friend relationships! We have a great group of doctors and therapists who help us and our kids. Given that we have special needs kids in our family, finding doctors who understand them is challenging. After a few years of issues, our care team understands our needs. My wife is finally seeing a few doctors who are actively helping her with her myriad health problems, and she would have to give that up.
Why Not Plant in KC?
I feel like KC is saturated with churches, which float in and out of existence almost nightly. I don’t know what value I could bring by planting here in Kansas City. In fact, just down the street from my house, literally one block away, is a church. When we first moved to our house in 2020, a church had been there for a bit but could not afford to get its name changed on the sign, so they draped a plastic banner over it with the new name. Then, about 2 years ago, the church again renamed itself and replaced the old plastic banner with a different one. Now, that banner has been joined with a yard sign advertising a second church that meets there on certain days.
Then, let’s look at the church plants from Grace. The first one I can recall, Silo Church, launched only a few short months after my family started to attend grace. The church no longer exists (at least its website does not). Another one, Northlake Church’s site, does not exist anymore. I have seen Freedom Chruch downtown, started by my friend J.T. Batey, baptize two new believers. I have heard that Vine Hill Church, started by my friend Alex Howell, had over 200 people attend its opening service. Granted, a few others have been sent out from the church, including a friend starting a church in the Middle East. They are out there, but are not growing yet.
I walk out the door of my house and can point to at least four churches within walking distance of my home, one of which my oldest son attends with his girlfriend. When I go to my office, I see the remnants of at least five churches in the downtown KC core, and I know many more have fallen into ruin. I also can’t exactly start a church near my house because even Grace has its North campus only about a mile away from my home.
With this many churches, Kansas City and its suburbs are generally covered. What on earth could a church I could build even do that would make it different than these others? I dislike this because we have grown to love KC and its people and are in no hurry to leave. If God wants me to build a church here, I will need a lot of help figuring out where a church would fit into this area.
Where Else, Then?
That is the golden question! As any of you following my blog have seen, I have opened my eyes to where else I might go. Although I have traveled around the US, I have generally been in the Midwest and Southern states. I have seen every state in the South, and well over 50% of the Midwest. I have been to each state along the West Coast. However, the East Coast and New England have been mostly beyond my grasp. I visited NoVa (Northern Virginia) twice when I went to D.C. I visited Maryland when I graduated from the University of Maryland for my Master’s. And of course, at the beginning of the month, I drove out to Southwest Virginia for my doctoral graduation, which allowed me to visit the beautiful state of West Virginia.
There is a possibility that a church in Virginia would be interested in me, given my credentials from Liberty, and as beautiful as the area was, I wouldn’t complain. I was enthralled with the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia and could see myself enjoying the Charleston area. But much like KC, they have a saturation problem. The city only boasts around 50,000 people; with at least 264 churches in that area, that’s almost 189 people per church. I don’t know how I could do much good there.
The place that keeps coming back to my mind is Maine. I have never been there, but it is beautiful based on the pictures I have seen. It, and many other New England states, especially those further away from New York, have a lot of potential. Maine has about 5 or 6 major cities, almost all of them along the coast. Still, the state’s population is over 1 million, and some options might exist. But Maine is known for having a gruesome winter, often buried in snow for large parts of the winter. If my wife can’t handle the cold winters here in KC, convincing her to move there will be a challenge.
Beyond that, many of the most unchurched states in the USA are in the New England/Northeast, including Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. At least if I were to be sent to one of these areas, I wouldn’t feel like the church plant was superfluous.
What Then?
I guess the answer is that I still don’t know. I plan on talking to the leaders at Grace and a few of my trusted spiritual advisors to see if this works. Who knows, maybe there will be a place in KC where God wants me to build a church. Whatever the case, I have moved further along the path than before. Prayers would be appreciated!