But… here I am. I changed my mind for various reasons. One is a little conceited. Last June we had a baby, and I’m convinced that everyone wants to know what he is doing and looks like ALL the time. Yes, sadly, I’ve become that deranged mother (grandparents rejoice!). The other big reason is that my husband and I are trying to start a new church in our town. We aren’t doing it alone of course. We had our first core group meeting a few months ago, and there are about 20 people committed or seriously considering a commitment. But I think I, as Sam’s wife, am going to have a unique view on how this whole thing goes down. I hope that this can someday be an encouragement to other families as they start down similar roads, or for anyone who wants to keep tabs on this crazy family.

New resources- It’s a fundraising truth that you will get more people to give to a new project than an old one, sure there are non profits who, over a number of years, have built up a steady stream of donors, but thats not a norm. For the most part people invest more in helping dreams take shape, than they do in keeping a struggling project afloat. When you start a new church it will stir up new resources than might not have been utilized before. (This includes peoples talents, their money, and even venues.)

reNewed energy – This is kind of connected to new resources, but often new churches create a pioneering spirit which causes people to be more energized about what they are doing. There might be people who are content with helping in existing ministry, but often a new project is the spark that helps reinvigorate them.

New perspective on neighborhoods challenges – Often older churches have come to understand their surrounds from a certain vantage point. Sometimes what this means is that they can be biased toward certain ideas or methods. New churches will accept new ways of dealing with the challenges of a neighborhoods because they have different biases. For example while many older churches gave away clothes and other goods, which in the long run kept people in a state of dependance. New churches began to consider the idea of subsidized sales which gave people a different sense of value associated with their goods, and allowed them to develop healthier values about money. Of course we have to realize that sometimes there are very good reasons for sticking with a certain way of doing things.

These are just a few of the many reasons why starting new churches is a good thing.
(For the record I understand that this list could probably be applied to most volunteer organization)

The first week of January Jo, Gus and I traveled to visit my family in upstate New York. This gave us a nice break from alot of the busyness.

As many people know we have been planning and praying for the opportunity to plant a new church for the Lawrenceville Bloomfield sections of Pittsburgh.

Last weekend I presented my plans to our denomination’s regional leadership and they decided to endorse it.

This means a number of things for the DeSocios and thedesocios.com

1. Joanna, and I will begin working toward starting a new church for Lawrenceville and Bloomfield.
2. We will be connecting with many people who might want to join us in this new church.
3. This means that we will be pretty busy preparing for our transition, including spending alot of time finding the needed resources to realize our hopes for this new church plant.
4. Starting in July 1st I will move from my position as Assistant Pastor at City Reformed, to being a fulltime church planter. The leaders at City Reformed hope to have a potential replacement in the works by June so that there might be some overlap.
5. I will not be posting as much as I had been on our site, as I will be spending alot more time networking and updating people about our progress. Im not sure that we will be using this site for those updates.
6. When I post they are going to be shorter.
7. We are gonna spend more time putting up pictures and videos of Gus (thats why most people come to this site anyway.)
8. We need help from lots of people to see our dreams of a new church community become a reality. Please consider how you might partner with us, in support prayer or participation. Contact hopeforpittsburgh@gmail.com

Frequently, established church have pressure placed on them to care for the needs of the people already present, this means that often the older a church is the more time it ends up spending on programs and services intended to care for and retain its existing members. This doesn’t mean that older churches don’t care for new Christians, it just means that often they are better equipped at training more mature Christians.

Monday morning Jo, Gus and I flew to Atlanta, for our denominations Church Planter Assessment. The main goal of the Assessment was to interact with Jo and I to see how well we might do at starting a new church (often called church planting). Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America does this kind of thing several times a year. We were with 8 other couples and one guy.
The actual assessment was an intense process. It was broken up into projects, teaching, interviews, and personality testing. The men and women evaluating us had all participated in church planting or were in leadership in similar areas. All our assessors were great–they really cared about getting to know us, and while I assumed the whole thing would be just one big job interview, I’m glad I was wrong. I made some great connections with the other potential-planters as well as the assessors.

What Assessment wasn’t

• A cake walk — It wasn’t an easy process. We probably spent 15 hours just with the application alone, and that was before the intense 3 days spent in Atlanta.
• A vacation — I’ve never been on a vacation with that kind of breakneck pace.
• Final approval — The assessment offered us a recommendation. The final approval comes from our local network of churches(presbytery).
• That scene from Armageddon — The counseling wasn’t crazy and no one went near my cooli.

Why was it important?

• It was one of the best things that Jo and I have done for our marriage.
• The process also helped shape my thoughts on my limitations as a potential church planter.
• We went away from the week with a fresh perspective on our hopes for Lawrenceville, some of which changed over the week and other which were affirmed.
• It let me see that I hadn’t been relating to Christ the way I need to. I had been offering people the church, it was Jesus’s church, but I hadn’t been offering people Jesus. This blew me away, and I so glad that it did.

Does this change anything?

• Yup, it sure does, but I’m not exactly sure of everything yet, so I’m gonna keep my mouth shut.

1. We had a counseling session with Phil Drake. It was really good. We looked at where our blind spots are, and it confirmed to us that Jo and I are working well together. It also revealed some potential challenges for church planting and pastoral ministry in general.

2. I preached a 10 minute sermon and then Jo and I talked about our call to church planting. The format was such that there was no dialogue as much as they ask and we answer. It was a bit wearing, but an important step.

3. We’ve already got to talk to some great couples about ministry they are excited about. Its interesting to find that alot of the people here are looking for affirmation and they didn’t necessarily wait till after assessment to start talking praying and planning for church planting opportunities.

On a side note I need to thank my Mom who is staying with us all week, and all those other folks who contributed to let us get here.

At RPTS I was told that the purpose of the New Testament Church, was to worship. Even in seminary, I saw some flaws in this understanding. Over the last year I have become more convince that worship is not the purpose of the church. Here is why I do not see the worship as the purpose of the church, it presupposes that the culmination of Chris’t kingdom has already happened. While, I do think it is appropriate to say that we were created with the purpose of worshipping God, making this the purpose of the church does not take into account the impact of sin, and the plan of redemption. Please don’t think that I trying to remove the importance of worship in the life of the church.

Some theologians have spoken about the importance of recognizing the already and the not yet. Christ’s kingdom has already come, though it is not yet fulfilled. We have already been redeemed by Christ’s work, but we have not yet been made perfect. To suppose that the current purpose of the church is worship, wrongly assumes that the not yet has already come, when it has not.

I think it would be more appropriate to see that the primary purpose of the church is mission, while remembering that a major component of mission is coming together to worship God and celebrate how he has been at work.

As it is a somewhat nebulous term, some might wonder how I would define mission. I would define mission as the commanded response to bring the redemption that Christ accomplished to a broken world.
It is important to see the connection between Christ’s work of Redemption, and the mission on which he as sent his Church. While Christ has completed plan of redemption, the application of that redemptions has not yet fully been realized. God has decide that he will use the church to help bring about that application, and this is what sets the church on mission.
Some verses that have shaped my thinking:
2 Corinthians 4:15, 1 Peter 2:11, Matthew 28:18-20, Ephesians 2:19-22

Second, people need to start asking themselves how can God change this region and what part does he want me to play? At this point far too many christians might be avid fans, but they haven’t gotten off the bench.

Third, Remember the motivation for church planting isn’t personal notoriety, or denominational pride, but as Paul says, a desire to see grace extend to more and more people for the glory of God.

Fourth, churches need to move beyond a church-vs-church standard. When I say church-vs-church, I mean that many churches today evaluate themselves not based on what they are called to be, or what God has made them, but by how they match up to other churches. They have a program we have a program, they get 170 we get 190, etc. When churches are content competing with each other for the self-awarded title of best church the Kingdom with suffer. It doesn’t matter what the best is, it might be most engaging, most missional, most evangelistic or most reformed, all these man-made crowns are a barrier to church cooperation and Kingdom expansion

Fifth, churches need to begin to strategically recruit planters to Pittsburgh. Local churches need to begin to get the word out that they are looking for qualified church planters. I think the PCA would have more church plants if we simply communicated our need for gospel-centered churches, with more potential candidates. This also means that churches need to speak with their bank accounts, and start putting money aside for planting. This needs to be done proactively rather than reactively. I know that many churches do not have extra money lying around, but church planting shouldn’t be one of those extra things we do, it should be as core to our church as Sunday worship.

Finally, churches need to make plans, and at the same time welcome unexpected opportunities. This was a lesson that I learned from Bruce Finn, a PCA church planting coordinator in the Philadelphia area. Sometimes we will make plans and God will have different ones, which will present us with opportunities that we never could have imagined.