How to Flourish in Exile

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter Three

This is Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.

Heather Weber is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, coach, and the founding pastor of CityChurch, Iowa City. She planted CityChurch about the same time that I came to Resurrection Assembly (formerly First Assembly), Iowa City to lead a revitalization. Because both church planting and church revitalization require miracles, our stories intertwined as we supported each other in prayer and fellowship. I prayed with her through the conception, gestation, and delivery of a church. She prayed with me for the healing and resurrection of a dying church.

CityChurch was planted in 2016, and it closed in August of this year.

I have asked Heather to write a series of posts under the title “Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.” The title is intended to poke at, deconstruct, and contradict prevailing, unreflective (and indeed unChristian) narratives of church success. We invite readers to catch up on Chapter One and Chapter Two.

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This is what the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord on its behalf, for when it has prosperity, you will prosper.” Jeremiah 29:4-7

Like everyone else, I didn’t know what hit us in March of 2020. I just knew that our church’s rental space in downtown Iowa City was indefinitely closed to us. 

The church—composed of students, professors and professionals of various stripes—had nowhere to gather but for Zoom, the online platform I have no memory of using before the COVID-19 pandemic.  Zoom, supposed to be our online gathering space for a few weeks, became our church community’s oasis for the next sixty. That’s right: Sixty. 

Around week twenty of pandemic life, my newly appointed associate pastor and I began to take solace in the words of Jeremiah. There we were, exiled from our downtown worship space, long after many churches had gone back to in-person services. There we were, not banished to Babylon, but to Zoom. And God’s instructions to Israel gave us comfort. If they could embrace the exile, build houses and stop living in tents, plant gardens and live–really live!--off the land, if they could get on with the business of flourishing and establishing themselves through homes and weddings and babies and gardens in this foreign place, well then, couldn’t we?  Couldn't we, too, hope and work for the flourishing of our own families, our church community, and the community around us? 

Tony or I preached on Zoom every week for those sixty services; our online community gained new members from around town, the country, and from across the pond. On Sundays, the church worshiped and took communion with whatever bread-and-wine-like substances were in our homes. We did door drop-offs of candy and Subway for the local kids and teens, fresh bread and pizzas for the adults, and sewing supplies for the construction of homemade masks for the police department. We gathered outside by fire in the fall (always wondering how close to stand, how necessary the masks). We mentored younger leaders in designing our services and our Zoom “extracurriculars” (Couples’ Night on Zoom? Yes!), and we walked through the valley of the shadow of death, engineering a careful, socially distanced memorial service for one of our dearest members.

Both Tony and I had big prayers stemming from Jeremiah 29, not just for the church and community but for the flourishing of our own families and marriages as well. We were bold enough to believe that those, too, could bloom and blossom in the midst of uncertainty and exile. Miraculously, they did. 

Displaced from coffee shops and workplaces, the forced extra time together meant my husband and I had an opportunity to work more diligently on dynamics we had shadow-boxed around for many years. We cut boards, built new rooms, and patched holes in the roof of our relationship. We tilled soil and planted seeds that turned into fruit that sustains us now as we parent our daughters in our ever-changing cultural landscape.

The church community, too, bloomed and blossomed. We experienced God’s presence because of what was happening through our computer monitors, door drop-offs, and socially distanced s’mores roastings. We laughed and grieved. We comforted one another. We made the strangest kind of home in the strangest year of our lives. 

At the end of those sixty weeks, it was time for the exiles to go back home, to worship in our various local communities. In Iowa City, we were required to wear masks for another eight months. Some members were nervous and others ready for life to be “normal” again. Complicated conversations ensued: Should we eat together? Take communion? Sing more than one song?

Sometimes, even home is not the same after we’ve been away for a while; returns may be like a new exile, reminding us that the deepest longing of our hearts is for the “city that is to come.” The experience of exile and returning to a temporary (and temporal) home was a lesson in the nature of faith-governed lives: there will be many more strange years ahead of us, years where we won’t be where we are supposed to be—pushed out, cast aside, or slowed to a screeching halt in a place that is not our home.

Yet, the word of the Lord rings true through Jeremiah. Here’s a spade: will you turn up dirt? Here are the seeds. Let them fall from your hands. Pray for your neighbors as you pray for yourself. Host a wedding. Hold a baby. Sing. Take the timber: Build a shelter in a country that is not your own.