Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit and Monthly Income

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter Two

“You seem like an…average person,” the stranger’s voice faltered through the phone. “Uh, a good person? You should come study with me and learn. I’ve taken classes and can show you that there’s only one catholic church.” 

In advance of CityChurch’s first public weekly services in Iowa City, I designed a mailer that was sent out to five thousand households. The man on the phone received the flier’s invitation to services at our “welcoming new community of faith.” So naturally, he called the church number, found out I was the pastor, and attempted to dissuade me from my mission. By “catholic,” he meant there was only one universal Christian church, one body of Christ; there was no need to define myself or my congregation as a boundaried entity. On one hand, he was right, of course. But that hadn’t stopped any clergy anywhere, in the last two thousand years, from gathering and pastoring unique, localized communities of believers.

Another man discouraged me from starting the church for a different reason: “Church planting is just a hobby for you. There’s no risk involved.” This person felt I should be moving, like a missionary heading to another country; staying in my own county to start a church apparently classed with the backyard gardening I poorly attempted each year. Faltering in my surprise, I stumbled toward a response. Of course there was risk, I told him. I was asking people to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a start-up I would manage. I was leaving a job with an undermarket but stable salary. If I appeared to squander the church’s seed money, who would ever invest in me again? If the church didn’t get off the ground, I couldn’t snap my fingers and get my old job back.

I’d grown up in life and ministry in evangelical-adjacent spaces. They aren’t very hospitable to women leaders. Only five years ago, a Barna snapshot showed that 61% of people holding to evangelical tenants of faith were uncomfortable with a female pastor. Some of those uncomfortable people left my previous church when I came on staff as an associate; they left with their tithe checks and their volunteering hands. Other churchgoing men in the area found ways to villainize me, speculating to others about who I’d voted for in the most recent presidential election; a local pastor spread false rumors that I supported a controversial local non-profit. 

Starting my own church was a relief in many ways. People who were uncomfortable with the female embodiment of pastor wouldn’t show up in the first place. And I would never again be cast aside as a nuisance barring the way to the (male) lead pastor’s door.

However, white middle-aged male churchgoers, while actors in the conversations described above, also supported me financially and tangibly more than any other demographic. If they attended CityChurch, they donated or volunteered or both. They advocated. They encouraged. When they invited me to lunch, they paid. One wintry Sunday morning, a congregant moving out of town stopped by the house and handed me a $500 check-–a thank-you gift for welcoming him into our church community during his short tenure in Iowa City. “This is for you to do something fun,” he said. “Maybe take your girls to see Hamilton.” (I did, gladly.)

But while this group seemed to be the most resourced and able to support our church community, they were at times an endangered species. In his late 70s, my father surveyed our attendees one Sunday morning and exclaimed, “We just need more men here!” Now, I will always bristle at any implication of lesser value ascribed to women and children, but I agreed with my dad: Together, men and women image God. In unity through Christ, men and women are healing, restorative, and strengthening to an entire community of adults and the children it shelters.

However, when people in our city and surrounding area intentionally looked for a church to attend, they generally looked for a male pastor not because they necessarily held an explicit theological position about this (although sometimes that was the case), but because a male pastor was who they expected to see on the website and on the platform on Sundays. Their mental image was poised to map itself onto a real-life scenario. And when they visited CityChurch, I was not a match.

I don’t think you will be surprised, Reader, to know that since 2011 only about 2% of venture capital has gone to all-female teams or female entrepreneurs. And–I daresay it’s common knowledge–poverty rates are higher among women than men, particularly women of color.  I’m taking pages from the worlds of business and economics, true. But, they help me understand–and I think I did understand early on in my church planting journey–why (short of a miracle) white, upper-middle-class evangelical-adjacent men with resources to give away were not going to flock to CityChurch. I understood, therefore, that we would not have the same resources as the male-led church down the road (for several reasons, but this being significant among them) because women do not inspire the same level of confidence in investors, customers, or potential parishioners as men do.

We would not have the financial margin to send out another five-thousand dollar mass mailer when we came back to in-person church in 2021 after sixty weeks online. We could not responsibly invest our bank balance in significant online marketing to spread the word about the church again or offer store-bought breakfast and multiple beverage options every Sunday, or (most significant of all) rent a space the church could occupy seven days a week and thus do away with setup and tear down. In our last 14 months as a church, we were limited to a Sunday morning rental space, Donut Shop ground coffee from Target, a commercialized creamer with a distant expiration date, and a sometimes empty sign-up sheet for snacks.

Despite this, I was often encouraged by the clergy in the city and around the country who ministered to congregations like my own with meager resources. Their faith and solidarity with me was one of the blessings that came of being poor in spirit and monthly income. Resurrection Assembly of God (pastored by your substack host Joseph Lear) was one such church; under his leadership, the congregation prayed regularly for me and the church, took up offerings and/or donated a portion of their monthly income in surprising frequency. It is magnificent and humbling to be on the receiving end of a gift so costly to the givers.

What CityChurch lacked in supplies I hoped we made up for with love, gentleness, genuine welcome, thoughtful teaching, theologically rich prayers, and sincere songs of worship. Most beautiful to me was the way the adults in the community tended to the children, often my own; intentional poses before a camera at baptisms and school concerts, the handcrafting of a scarf, or a quiet request to pray over a twelve-year-old’s fractured ankle conveyed value and inclusion. Then, the pandemic brought a wave of door drop-offs: A pastry chef in her former trade, Noel baked one of my teenaged daughters an entire cheesecake from scratch in hopes to alleviate her pandemic-induced despair. My former associate pastor Tony bought family-pack-sized boxes of Walmart-brand fruit snacks for the same daughter (and still does when he’s in town), a way of conveying that even though he sometimes saw her only once a week on Zoom, she was a solid and significant mark on his mental map. 

Along the journey of pastoring CityChurch, I learned to rejoice and content myself with the gift of our relationships with one another, as well as whatever financial resources God provided through the congregation or through outside (surprise) donations. The knowledge that there were brothers and sisters around the world who ministered with fewer resources (and sometimes greater joy!) tamed my despair by and by.

I hope I am not misunderstood. Given the choice, I would have asked for more abundant material resources for the church in a heartbeat. It would have allowed us to bless more people, leaving a larger spiritual footprint and practical good in the lives of those who traversed downtown. However, that was not a choice given to me, nor to many laborers travailing in the harvest fields. 

We hang our hope on the promise that those who have no such choices will inherit the Kingdom of God.