My Church Planting Journey, Part 1: God doesn’t do “cheap.”

(Or, How I Arrived at this Moment)

Three weeks ago, I received the news that my whole Church Planting & Redevelopment team was being laid off from The Episcopal Church Center, in service to a greater “realignment process” initiated by our new Presiding Bishop. At the end of the email detailing my severance package was the chirpy assurance, “I know your future is bright!”

After the initial surprise and panic of losing a job I’ve rather enjoyed for the last five years, I’ve found myself reminiscing: How did I Arrive at This Moment?

To tell the story, I have to go back at least twelve years. And it’s going to take a lot of posts (which may or may not end up being sequential!). But, if you walk with me on this journey, I hope you might read something that speaks to your experience and offers hope along your way.

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An Invitation

“I’d like you to consider something,” the Bishop said. It was 2013, and my husband Josiah (also an Episcopal priest) and I had been summoned to his office for our annual check-in with the boss. We figured we would spend the time assuring him that we were doing a good job as new priests in our small rural Alabama churches. But instead, the Bishop dropped a bombshell. “I’d like the two of you to consider planting a new church.”

My ears pricked up, and I leaned forward. I knew nothing about church planting - had never even heard of it, in fact - but I have always had an entrepreneurial itch. As a kid, I was always the one trying to start little businesses: lemonade stands, pet sitting services and babysitters’ clubs.

“Tell me more, Bishop,” I pleaded. “Where, when, what? Whatever it is, I’m in!”

“I don’t know what it will look like. I do have a neighborhood in mind. I’d like to see something… different. I love the Episcopal Church. I was born in it, baptized in it. As I know you were too. But I’m becoming increasingly afraid that, if we do nothing new, we are in danger of becoming a museum.”

Like most Mainline churches in the U.S., the Episcopal denomination had been in steady decline since the early 90’s. In fact, it was calculated by statisticians that, if we didn’t do something about the membership crisis, our centuries-old denomination could be all but gone in just forty years. Across the country, growing secularization and shifting cultures and demographics were leading to record numbers of “unchurched” and “dechurched” people.

The Bishop continued to muse, “I am afraid that these traditions I love are beautiful but increasingly irrelevant to young people today. I would like this to be a church that is allowed to try something different and experimental. I keep hearing about the concept of ‘church without walls.’ That has a ring to it, to me.”

“Wow Bishop, when can I start? Where will the money for this come from?”

He looked at me and said, honestly, “I don’t know.”

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A complicated neighborhood

It turned out that the neighborhood our Bishop had in mind for the new church plant was the one in which I was born. It was a complicated neighborhood, and still is. My family lived in a house just down from the city park, where I remember spending hours learning to ride my bicycle without training wheels. The neighborhood felt perfectly peaceful to me, as a loved and sheltered little kid, but my parents say that every now and then a dead body would turn up in that park.

When I was three or four years old, I slammed my finger in the car door, as we were returning from the grocery store. My mother was too afraid to pull it out, so instead she stood on the sidewalk, screaming for help. A neighbor from across the street leapt off his porch, pulled my finger out of the car door and drove us to the pediatrician’s office. Years later, my mother reminisced about the incident. “When we got home, he (the neighbor) said to me, ‘I’ve gotta come clean with you. I am stoned out of my mind right now. Probably the only reason I had the courage to pull your little girl’s finger out of that door.’” That incident represents the essence of what I remember about that neighborhood in the late 80s and early 90s. A mix of liberal young families and stoned hippies.

There was more to it, of course, because this was Birmingham. I don’t recall ever driving down 41st Street South, the street on which my new church, The Abbey, would one day be located. In the decades after Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birmingham Campaign, White residents began moving out of the city in droves, making their way toward suburbs on the south side of Red Mountain. They took their businesses, tax dollars and churches with them. When I was a kid, many of the former business and retail areas were ghost towns.

That started to change in the mid 2000s, when people my age decided they wanted to move back into urban centers. The city was cool again. A brewery opened up in an old fire station on 41st Street South, followed quickly by a trendy pizza place in the old post office and a gourmet grilled cheese spot. Hundred year old houses with dilapidated front porches were purchased and renovated. A row of rental scooters appeared. All this happened in quick succession on the south side of the street. The less chic north side was kept at bay by the railroad tracks, across which still sat a public housing project, seedy gas stations and a drug and alcohol rehab center.

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Church without walls

At first, our Bishop’s proposition was that my husband and I start the new church together. However, Josiah insisted that, while he would be as supportive of me as he possibly could, his own call to ministry was as a pastor, not a planter. So I became the lead visionary and executor of the project. In 2014, I gathered our team to dream together about what might be possible.

“I don’t know what this will look like, but I want it to be a church without walls,” our Bishop repeated.

It was a vision I believed he and I shared. By this time, I had heard enough stories about churches that put up barriers - often unintentionally - to love and belonging. I had friends my age who were all kinds of messed up from the purity culture, sinner’s prayers and apocalyptic preaching of the 90’s.

“I want to be able to come into this church and not be looked at weird because I’m a young, single adult,” someone said.

“I want this church to be diverse,” someone else said. “So many of our churches are just full of rich white people.”

“I want it to be at a time other than Sunday morning,” another groaned. “I wake up early every day to go to work. I need a day to sleep in.”

“Okay, so would you come if it was on Saturday evening?” I asked. “Or Wednesday night, maybe?”

She thought for a moment before answering honestly: “No. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I want to go to church at all. I just want to hang out with people and talk about God.”

I had come prepared with a suggestion, one I’d heard about at a church planting conference in Minneapolis.

“Guys, I have an idea. What if we opened a church coffee shop? Like, it’s a church but it’s also a coffee shop - and the coffee shop IS church, and church IS sharing coffee? It’s open all day, six days a week. You can come whenever you want. It will be diverse because this neighborhood is pretty diverse. It’ll have literal walls, obviously, but it won’t have barriers to love and belonging.”

To my surprise, they were nodding. “That’s what Jesus said, right?” Bill said. “Eat this bread, drink this coffee, in remembrance of me?” And all of a sudden, we were headed in a direction.

Our diocese had not started a new church in almost a decade and, it turns out, church planting is like a muscle - if you don’t use it, you forget how. We all knew how to maintain an existing, sixty year old church, but no one seemed to know how to start a new one.

There was one more than one character who was less than pleased with our idealistic plan.

“We have flushed far too much money down the toilet on ideas like this,” said one senior priest. “We need to find cheaper ways to fail!” This was enough to make me wonder if the older, more experienced leaders in our diocese were thinking of us more as cannon fodder than as missionaries - but not enough to squash my enthusiasm.

We began having conversations with neighbors, local business owners, property developers and nonprofit consultants. We put together budgets, business plans and ministry plans and applied for grants. A couple of us drove to Atlanta for a week-long espresso training.

I applied for a $100,000 grant from the Episcopal Church Center to help us with build-out of the coffee shop ministry space. When Tom Brackett, the Manager for Church Planting and Mission Development (who would later become my mentor, colleague and friend) called to let me know we’d gotten the grant, I sat in shock for ten whole minutes. Then I texted the Bishop:

Now we have to do it!!

He replied back: Yay, we have to do it!

We began to talk about what to call our new church and finally settled on The Abbey. The name hearkened back to the era of convents and monasteries - where monks and nuns lived and dedicated themselves to lives of prayer and service. Many had some kind of income-generating social enterprise, like, say, brewing beer and wine, or making and selling cheese. That’s what we wanted - a place devoted to spiritual questions, loving our neighbors, and brewing and selling coffee. We decided that the shop would close on Sundays at four o’clock so we could pray and worship there.

The more enthusiastic our team got, the less happy that particular senior priest became. “This is becoming more and more worrisome,” he declared. “Money does not grow on trees! You have got to rein in the overhead!”

So, for better or worse, “cheap” became our mantra and our constant companion.

There were several available storefronts on 41st Street, but only one was cheap enough that the diocese agreed to sign a monthly lease on it. It was the cheapest because it was the closest storefront to the railroad tracks, which separates the lively new business area from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham. As realtors say, “location, location, location.” If you wanted to start a profitable coffee shop this building was a huge mistake. If you wanted to start a neighborhood ministry, it was a ringer.

On Valentine's Day 2015 we opened the coffee shop and launched our spiritual community, as planned. I think almost four hundred people came by that day. Opening Day was, you might say, the only thing that went as planned. God is mischievous, after all, and has a propensity to turn all suppositions, definitions, requirements and longings inside out and upside down. In the end, we failed just about every test and expectation levied on us, ended up closing down the coffee shop, bumbled our way through the Covid pandemic, moved into the basement of a Baptist Church, and ran into God many times along the way.

Above all we discovered, God doesn’t do “cheap.”

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tries many times to explain the unimaginable value of the Kingdom of God. In one parable he compares it to a pearl so valuable that a merchant sells everything he has to buy it. To the chagrin of our diocesan supervisors, few of The Abbey’s failures came cheaply. In fact, a few were very expensive - with high financial, emotional and spiritual cost. But even some of The Abbey’s failures were Pearls of Great Price, and the sightings of God we experienced through them might have been worth just about any price.

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