They say that over 80% of church plants fail. This is the statistic that is shared at church planting labs and church planting conferences and just about anytime church planters gather to talk about church planting. It is the statistic that weighed heavily on my mind when my wife and I moved to Austin, just over 6 years ago, to begin a church plant.
It was a year after we moved that we finally had a core team of folks ready to think and do church in a different way. Our impulses weren't born from a desire to finally do church "right," but to approach it differently, to go for something more real and raw, simple and small.
What we did was to plant a house church that eventually became a collection of house churches that gathered separately to focus more intently on discipleship and then gathered together for a time of worship. We were all new to this, my wife and I included, and there was a lot of stumbling and mistakes and correcting and moving forward. A lot of times it felt like one step forward and two steps back, but even that is a kind of moving forward; the kind that teaches patience and perseverance, the kind that forms individuals into a community.
That is certainly what happened with the Immanuel Austin community. Our house church gatherings came to look like AA meetings, with the goal to become more like Jesus and the understanding being that this is a difficult thing to do. We would often say when sharing our story that there were "no promises of an easy road, just people to walk it with you." We understood that we weren't going anywhere without the promise of "God with us."
As the years progressed we adopted, as a community, what we dubbed the Immanuel "way of life." It was a list of commitments that we would hold each other to, our version of the 12 steps; things like praying daily and meditating on scripture, having our neighbors into our homes, and serving in our communities. This "way of life" served to draw us even closer together than we had ever been, and closer to God as well.
And then, just a few months ago, as my wife and I were feeling as good about Immanuel as we had ever felt, we came to realize that our 6 year old son was missing out on an essential element of community; that of having peers. Of the folks who had gathered with Immanuel, there was no one, other than ourselves, with children over the age of 3. It was a problem we brought to our community in the hopes of discovering a solution. After months of praying and thinking and talking and listening, we discerned that the solution was to disband Immanuel and to find our way into other Austin churches. It was one of the roughest nights in the short history of Immanuel and, for all the crying I did over it, it will certainly not be the last crying that I do.
They say that over 80% of church plants fail, but the question they don't ask is; fail to do what? In our 5 years serving as pastors of the Immanuel Austin community we have witnessed relationships healed, tragic mistakes atoned for, sins confessed, and forgiveness offered. We have seen love shared with those most in need and given to those who seemed least deserving of love. We've helped people to grow in faith and experience church less as a series of events and more as a way of life. We have watched as folks on the fringes of faithfulness have changed into true followers of Christ, committed to the kind of life that calls for risk and sacrifice and ultimately brings hope and joy. We can testify to the sorts of slow everyday transformations that are nothing short of miraculous.
A high percentage of churches fail; fail to challenge believers to become disciples, fail to offer hospitality to those that are different, fail to offer grace to those on the outside, fail to offer love to those most in need. The Immanuel Austin community is not a church that failed to do these things. We didn't do them perfectly, but we learned to do them well. I am proud of our church and proud to have served as its pastor. The people of Immanuel have helped to restore my faith in what church can be and I thank God for that. My prayer is that we will each take with us this vision of church that seeks simply to walk in the way of Jesus and to support one another in the effort. My hope is that we, "being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."
