AEC2001
The 2000 Anabaptist Church
Planting Survey:
Reflections and Practical Implications
Part 6
Steve Clapp
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Church planting – life transformation
This past year, I have had the pleasure of discovering the
writing of Anne Lamott. She offers a delightfully non-traditional view of the
spiritual life and wonderful descriptions of the small congregation in
California, which transformed her personal life. She has written eloquently
about that congregation both in her book Traveling Mercies and in Operating
Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.
She had enormous problems with alcohol and cocaine
addiction when she first started coming to that small Presbyterian congregation.
It was located close to a favorite flea market of hers; and she would slip into
the sanctuary on Sunday morning, staying far enough back and leaving quickly
enough to avoid actual contact with people – especially the hugs which people
were fond of giving. Most in the congregation happen to be black; Anne Lamott is
not. Over the course of time, the love and acceptance of the congregation pulled
her in. She describes it this way in Operating Instructions:
When I’d first started coming to the church, I
couldn’t even stand up for half the songs because I’d be so sick from
cocaine and alcohol that my head would be spinning, but these people were so
confused that they thought I was a child of God. Now they’ve seen me sober
for three years, and they saw me through my pregnancy. . . . Toward the end
of my pregnancy, people were stuffing money into my pockets, even though a
lot of them live on welfare and tiny pensions. They’d sidle up to me, slip
a twenty into the pocket of my sweater, and dart away.1
That small congregation transformed her life, and her
writing has transformed the lives of many others. That’s part of what church
planting is about – finding the strategies to reach those who have been missed
by more established churches. Yes, it is partly about numbers. Yes, it is partly
about finding ways to link people to our denominational heritage. But it is
primarily about the power of Jesus Christ to change lives – and the
willingness of our Lord to work through us and the church in that process, to
make us part of the mission of God.
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1.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 28.
