Progress Toward Church Plant
We have made progress toward our goal to plant a church in rural Iowa this year. Dan Andrews, our Upper Mississippi Regional Minister and I are being coached by Jay Nickless, who has planted several churches in rural Kansas. Jay developed a Target Analysis Process to prayerfully discern where God is at work preparing the way for a church to be planted.
One of the first steps was to recruit a team for this process. I am excited about the team that has come together to join Dan and me: Natalie Cooley, Pam Lippert, Vince Lindaman, Joe Simon, Noel Williams, Dean and Michele Messerly, and Bryan and Megan Dewhurst. This team represents people of different ages who live in different parts of our ministry area, but who are all excited to see how God will work.
We met first on Feb. 5 to pray and give an overview of the process. We met again on Feb. 12 to pray again and develop a list of possible towns to research. Our initial filter criteria were towns between 30 minutes and an hour of Steamboat Rock who have an elementary school. These were not hard and fast criteria, but ones that made sense to us. After having everyone select their top towns we narrowed the list of 13 towns down to 11 and assigned them to people to research and return a one page summary of the Geography, Demographics, Spiritual Climate, and Culture of each town.
We met on February 19 and after praying together each person had just under five minutes to share the results of their research on each town. During each presentation we put the summary sheet face up in front of us. After the fourth presenter everyone had to choose one of the four sheets to discard and we kept doing that after the rest of the reports until everyone had determined their top three. Then each person turned in a ballot ranking those three in order. A town received 15 points for every #1 ranking, 10 points for every #2 and, 5 points for a #3 ranking. Here is a table of the top 4 vote winners, which shows a strong consensus among the group.
Our next step is to visit these four towns for Prayer Walks and to observe the people and places and try to discern how God is at work in each town. We will also try to engage with key members of each community in strategic conversations that might help reveal what issues each town is facing, how the churches are doing, and the openness and need for a new church. These visits will take place over the next 4-6 weeks.
At the same time, I have been working with Jay Nickless and Stu Streeter to develop a compelling Call Statement to help us find a church planter. Robbyn Diamond did some amazing design work to make this document more engaging. You can see the Call Statement on our nab-umr.org website. We are excited about two prospects from Iowa who we feel might be good candidates for church planting and Dan and I are pursuing those possibilities. Please keep praying for God to work and lead.
