I heard about a roller coaster that opened this spring in the UK (that’s the country, not the NCAA Champs) called “The Swarm.”  Boasting of speeds up to 62 mph, it is designed to take up to 28 screaming riders – with hands and legs dangling – on a “flight through apocalyptic devastation on Europe’s tallest winged roller coaster.”  Throw in the 127-foot inverted drop and near-misses with walls and stuff and you’ve got the makings of a pretty good thrill ride.

Only one problem.  2 weeks before it was set to open, crash dummies came back with limbs missing.  Ooops.

2 lessons can be learned from this that apply to The Gathering (or your church plant):

One: no matter how excited you might be about the great things you’re doing, a little patience can go a long way.  Look, nobody likes to wait when it feels like you’re on the verge of something great, and none of us would be on the church planting ride if we didn’t sense that there was something great in store for our churches.  But the worst thing we can do is move so quickly that we harm the body.  None of us want the people who have jumped on this ride with us to come back without crucial parts of who they are because we were impatient and wanted what we want NOW.  Back off, pray, and let time work for you, not against you.

Two: planning is a must.  Inherent in planning are to things that we don’t get a thrill from: time and testing.  We’ve already talked about the time, but let’s brush against it one more time with an eye to the Boston Marathon that just took place this past Monday.  Having run 2 of those beasts (marathons, not the one in Boston – yet) I can tell you with absolute certainty that you cannot wake up on a Friday morning and decide to go run 26.2 miles the next day without having spent the necessary time working through a training plan.  Most of them last 18-20 weeks.  You can see how time and planning go hand in hand.  The church you’re planting is worth the time it takes.

But what about testing?  What if the engineers had decided to just “give it a go” and opened the ride without sending out anybody (dummy or real) on a test run?  A lot of blood, a lot of legal headaches, a lot of pain.  In short, one big mess.  So work your plan, and then test the work to make sure it’s the best ride it can be.  The people that get on board will be glad you did, and you’ll find that they enjoy the ride a lot more, too.  In fact, they’ll probably bring friends back to ride with them.

What does it all mean for us at The Gathering?  It means that there is a timing in this whole process that is 100% perfectly in line with God’s.  It means that no matter how full our space gets, the last thing we should do is rush to find a solution without patience and planning.  And best of all, it means that when we’ve done just that, the end result will be a ride worth taking again, and again, and again.

I LOVE MY CHURCH!!!

I saw a lot of things on Easter Sunday that thrilled me, motivated me, and left me speechless.  Now, a few days removed from it all, I’m beginning to put some words to what I saw.

First, you guys at The Gathering took a special day and kicked it up a notch or two!  As people kept pouring in the doors, I kept thinking about how hungry people are for truth, for something real, and I was humbled that the Lord would trust us with those people.  The team from Park Ridge Christian School opened the morning with an awesome creative dance and then I got to listen to a coffee shop turn into a worship-fest!!

One of the things that I love is the freedom at The Gathering to share with passion and without fear what we sense the Spirit is doing each and every moment, and it was off the charts to experience with each of you how very near God is to all of us, but especially on Sunday to those who are fighting off addictions.  The word of the Lord was clear and true.  YOU ARE FREE and He is with you in EVERY WAY AND EVERY MOMENT!

The teaching was a relief, not because I dreaded it but because I was so full of what God had shown me in Scripture specifically for that day and I was so glad to finally get to share it.  The resurrection of Jesus is, without a doubt, the greatest sign that JESUS IS LORD.  Believing that He is alive is good, but Romans 10:9 says that we’ve got to combine that with yielding our lives to Him as our LORD AND KING.

Angels threw a huge party when one person did just that, followed by a couple dozen who stood to publicly say that they wanted Jesus to rule their lives in every moment as Lord.

It can’t get better, I thought.  I was wrong.

As the afternoon went on, I watched 2 things unfold simultaneously: my Twitter feed showing church numbers from around the region and Bubba Watson marching toward an improbable Masters victory.  As I watched them both, everything came together and I realized something: ordinary Bubbas get to have their day.

Let me explain.  Bubba Watson may be the most unlikely and at the same time the most likable Masters champion ever.  He’s raw, he cries (a lot!), and he seems a bit uncomfortable, appearing unsure how to handle himself in the Butler’s Cabin during the jacket ceremony.  Asked if he ever dreamed of winning what may be the most prestigious tournament in professional golf, he humbly said, “I’m not sure.  I’ve never dreamed this far.”

He was so honest, so real, so unpolished, so vulnerable, so much like how I feel about The Gathering.

Watching Twitter cemented that feeling for me.  I saw unreal numbers of people in attendance at other churches and encouraging reports of how many new brothers and sisters we all have as a result of their services and I started to feel a bit like Bubba in comparison to Tiger.  Smaller, less polished, less prepared for the victory that had come almost unexpectedly because the dream had seemed almost unattainable.  And yet, ordinary Bubbas get to have their day.

You may feel ordinary, unpolished, raw.  Maybe you lead a church of a few and cringe when you read about the victories of the churches of the many.  Maybe you find yourself wishing you could feel more “with it.”  Wishing that your numbers from Easter 2012 were measured in hundreds instead of tens.  Maybe you’re lost in the woods searching for a shot that went way right when you needed it to stay in play.  The lesson we learn from Bubba isn’t what we’ll do in the good times, but in the hard times.  Those are the times that will define us.

And so, we keep our heads down. We play with courage from wherever we find ourselves; sometimes in the fairway, sometimes – often, in the worst possible times – in the woods needing a miracle to emerge victorious.  And in those moments, we swing with confidence that we are not alone and there is One Who loves to breathe His breath into the moments that take away ours.  And when we find ourselves on the green putting for a jacket of the same color, we weep, not because we don’t belong, but exactly because of the opposite: we belong there with everyone else who has stood there before and everyone who will stand there on sunny spring days still to come.

We weep because we realize that victory isn’t so much about standing alone on top of a mountain as much as it is about standing in a circle with others who have won before, too.

Everyone wins, from the polished Tiger to the weeping Bubba.

That, for me, is good news.

That may be the longest title for a post on my blog ever, and it probably needs a bit of explaining.  Every week on Tuesday (plus or minus a day most weeks) I write a little blog post called “From Me to The G” and it’s basically my thoughts about the weekend worship experience that we just had at the church we’re planting in Albemarle, North Carolina, called The Gathering.  If you get bored with this post, feel free to check out the church site to get a feel for what we’re all about.

Anyway, the point of the title is that I ran a little experiment over the week-end here that made me a bit of a blogging rock star for a couple of days and it reminded me of how important it is that we never over-promise and under-deliver as a church.  On Friday, as I was scrolling through my wall on Facebook, I noticed a couple of my friends liked a link entitled “Look what this girl is wearing at the beach in front of thousands of people” that was accompanied with a picture of – you guessed it – a girl on the beach in a bikini.  “Busted!” was the first thing that went through my mind (since I knew my friends had followed a link just to see more), and then I thought that a quick Google search might reveal the truth behind this obvious scam.

I clicked the first result and found a page saying it probably wasn’t a harmful scam or virus, but that it wasn’t wise to click the link on Facebook.  The author made a comment about how his blog had blown up lately with people searching for answers about the lady on the beach, and suddenly I had an idea.

I would write a blog post basically saying nothing and title it “Look what this girl is wearing at the beach in front of thousands of people” and see what my blog stats would do.  I posted it halfway through Friday and ended that day with 584 visitors (up from the 200/day I typically see).

Saturday was 1,250, Sunday was 1,143, Monday was 555 and today is trending back down to the 350 range.

The point?  It’s not that hard to draw a crowd, but you better have something to give them or they won’t stay around.

What does this mean for The Gathering and any other church plant (or existing churches for that matter)?  It means we need to have more invested in this thing than just great marketing and events to get people in the doors.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that (thanks, Seinfeld!), but growth is better if it’s more than just a high water mark on a couple of Sundays in the calendar year.

Like “We Want Justin Shirtless Tour” on Twitter, the goal is for our attendance to trend upwards over time, not bounce up and down like a bobber in the water as fish nibble and leave.

At The Gathering, I’m thrilled to say that while we aren’t ashamed to count the numbers, we’re more than just about the numbers.  We are committed to being good stewards of the people those number s represent.