Labor and Delivery: The Birthing of a Church

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter One

The Holy Spirit was the midwife, standing above me as I lay on the operating table. It was time for the baby to be born, but I was terrified. “I can’t do this,” I implored the midwife. Unfazed, she returned my gaze and said, “You know exactly how to do this.” Somehow her confidence rang true enough that I believed her, and in a wildly courageous move I swiveled my body around on the table and dropped my feet to the floor, assuming a position for childbirth. The midwife at my side, I bore down, knowing she was right. I’d already given birth to three babies. I just had to surrender to the violent trajectory of this living being inside me and not fight against it. Birth, then, was inevitable.  

The Lord spoke to me almost exclusively through pregnancy dreams up until I planted a church in 2016. He had a painful sense of irony, because it was only on the day when a fertility expert told me my chances of conceiving a fourth child were practically zero that I gave into what had by then been a six-months-long invitation to name what I thought God was asking me to do. There’s no reason to wait, the Midwife whispered after the appointment as I, wordless and stunned, walked the halls of the hospital toward the parking ramp. 

Each miscarriage in the previous few years had only stoked my longing for another flesh-and-blood baby. But with grim acknowledgement, I understood it was a different kind of fourth child God wanted me to birth. This was confirmed over the next twelve months of gestation. In another dream, a friend whispered to my pregnant belly, Your new ministry will begin in September in the east. It was oddly specific and prophetically accurate, as we launched weekly services on September 11 in a college town east of my former ministry context. We then became a downtown church, ministering to the transient of the transient in our community: the homeless; undergrad, grad and exchange students; visiting professors, nurses and writers; and professionals of various other stripes. The group was so transient that everyone, except a few people adjacent to my immediate family, left the city between six weeks and three years (the average closer to six weeks than three years!) from the time they became meaningfully involved in church life.

I used to think the labor in my dreams referred to the start of the church, the initial stages of fundraising, word-spreading, team building, advertising and vision casting. But when the church ended its public services six years later, I saw that the labor lasted as long as the church did. Only at the end of the labor could I behold the church, like a newly birthed child, for what it was.

It was a church shaped by the gospel of Jesus Christ, yes, and also by the way the gospel message intersected with the goings-on of our nation during my labor: the election of Donald Trump, the swearing-in of Justice Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court, the murder of George Floyd, two years of pandemic life, the election of Joe Biden, the attack on the U.S. capitol, and the ongoing flow of people in and out of our city. I and my associate pastor preached about the evils of racism; preached against the idolatry of government officials and policies; and preached that the love of Christ could overcome the fractures in our public squares and churches. I consoled, comforted and admonished our congregants. I married them and buried one of them. 

In the last ten years, church planting rhetoric has affirmed planters with exploding attendance, high-dollar outreaches, and the acquiring of property. I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “failed church plant,” but I’ve heard it plenty across restaurant tables, on podcasts, in seminars and books. Of course someone usually counters that indicting phrase with the likes of, “But obedience is the true measure of success!” Even so, the rhetoric of failure hangs heavy in the air. 

We do not say, when a baby is born after thirty-six hours of labor, that it had a failed birth because the mother’s labor didn’t progress at a desirable pace. We do not say, when the baby struggles to breathe, or the mother loses too much blood or needs help delivering (via cesarean section or forceps), or if, God forbid, the infant dies in the process, that the labor failed. Failure is the language of term papers and gym class assessments, but an unfit description for the work of human beings delivering human beings into the world. 

Instead of grades and benchmarks, there is a story to tell about a baby and how it’s delivered. For instance: a nub of nose, delicate fingers, translucent eyelids, twelve hours, the tired and joyful mother who nurtured embryonic life into a kicking, hiccuping infant. And, of course, there is a name.

My church, CityChurch, has a name and a story that includes many more names and faces, weddings, graduations, baptisms, communion, music, prayer, pre-pandemic parties, breakfast casseroles, Spanish rice, salvations, the coming together of many nations, and heart-wrenching goodbyes. Part of its story includes a Chinese woman (and stranger to the gospel) who stumbled into our building on a Sunday morning just before service, seeking shelter from the rain. Now she is a devoted friend and follower of Jesus. Back home in China, she’s shared the story of her faith in Christ with her aging parents. CityChurch’s story also includes people from around the county, state, country and world who have renewed their hope in Jesus and/or his Church and are living incarnationally—leading Bible studies for children, practicing generosity, and loving their neighbors well.

In the second quarter of 2022, I could see that the landscape of church attendance in our city had changed. The larger churches around us were experiencing decreases in involvement and giving. CityChurch’s irregular attendance became more irregular. In our city, many former churchgoers I knew had decided they were simply done because of the Church’s response to the pandemic, the race riots, the 2020 election, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Or, former church members now simply attended church online, tuning in to a service in another state or city. My own pre-pandemic lay leaders had mostly moved away, which left me carrying an unsustainable load. I wondered if God might be shuffling and re-organizing the believers in our community for maximum benefit and impact—for the sake of the Church and for the sake of the world—and so, after the most sobering kind of soul searching and prayer, I resigned and recommended to our board that we cease our weekly services so that my congregants might transplant themselves into the soil of other local church communities.

Six weeks out from that decision, I sometimes got caught in an overwhelming riptide of shame at what some might deem failure. Other days, I was perfectly content to believe I followed the wind of the Spirit as it blew in a new direction. And on yet others, I thought about God’s recruitment of both male and female birthers—laborers who deliver and nurture churches and their stories. I was part of CityChurch’s story from start to finish; today I dare believe it reads like a winsome vignette in the epic tale of God’s relentless pursuit of all humankind.

If this post has stirred your interest, please stay tuned for upcoming posts in this series, “Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.” 

Heather Weber is an ordained minister, coach, and founding pastor of CityChurch in Iowa City, IA. She’s the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir. You can subscribe to her Substack newsletter, Dear Exile, here.