Via Media Podcast, Episode 4 Dan Alger January 31, 2019 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2018/how-to-plant-an-anglican-church Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott. McDermott: This is Gerald McDermott. Let me just say before we air this interview with Dan Alger, I should comment on our last two podcasts with Timothy George and Michael McClymond. Both of them were recorded a while ago before we were able to release them. And so Timothy George in his interview with us mentioned an upcoming theology conference, “What Is Anglicanism?” which was already held this past September, and there’s another one coming this September 2019 on the Jewish Roots of Christianity, and we’ll let you know more information about that in podcasts to come. And I should also say that our second episode, our second podcast that you have heard where we interviewed Michael McClymond, we were talking about his book The Devil’s Redemption, which was about to come about but of course has come out now and is available through Amazon and other outlets. McDermott: We recorded this interview with Dan Alger some time ago. In the meantime, he’s received his doctorate. So he’s now the Reverend Canon Doctor Dan Alger. And we should also say that the Always Forward conference that he mentions is in September this year, 2019, preceding the New Wineskins conference for global mission in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. Registration is open at this time. McDermott: We hope you enjoy this episode. McDermott: Now, today we’re going to talk about church planting; and Anglican church planting. And we’re very privileged to have a wonderful guest, the Reverend Canon Dan Alger, who is the Canon for church planting for the Anglican Church in North America. Where he leads the Always Forward church planting initiative. Dan has a long history of church planting. He’s helped church planters and church plants as a friend, as a trainer, and as a coach for more than 17 years. Right now, he’s planting a church in the greater Atlanta area. Before that he planted a church in Fayetteville, North Carolina in the military community surrounding Fort Bragg where he was Pastor for ten years. So, Dan, welcome. Dan: Thank you. I’m so excited about this podcast and the work you guys are doing. It’s an honor to be here. McDermott: Well, it’s an honor to have you. So, let me start, Dan, since we’re asking you to talk about church planting, particularly as an Anglican, let me ask you, “Have you always been an Anglican?” Dan: Well, yes, I was ... We like to use the term “cradle Episcopalian,” right? Those two words sort of flow together. I was baptized in the Episcopal Church, grew up in an Evangelical Orthodox (sometimes charismatic) Episcopal church in eastern North Carolina. So, I grew up in the Episcopal Church and then after ... Then when I was in college at UNC Chapel Hill is when the Anglican Mission in America was formed and ended up joining the AMIA and being ordained through the AMIA. So, my life in ordained ministry has been sort of our new Anglican Reformation milieu that we live in right now. But my growing up years was all in the Episcopal Church and trying to fight the good fight in the Episcopal Church. McDermott: Okay. So, you’ve got lots of Anglican background, it’s sort of in your genes. Now, how did you move from being an Anglican? And then I know you went to Anglican seminary. Did you immediately start church planting? Dan: Well, I resisted the call to church planting for a little while. We knew that we were coming to the end of our time at Trinity School for Ministry and was talking to my bishop about what was next for us and where should we go. Again, this was the days of ... the early days of the AMIA and so jobs and ministry positions were up in the air – to say the least. They just never knew what was going to be open and what was out there. But I had, in my mind, a plan that I was going to graduate seminary and then be an Assistant Rector somewhere and then probably be the Rector of a smaller church, and then a Rector of a larger church after that. That’s just sort of the career path, you know, of an Anglican priest. The Lord blew all of that up. I had been talking with my bishop. He said, “Dan.” I was 21 years old at the time. He said, “Dan, there’s a small group of folks outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina that are wanting to plant a church and I think that you might be the person who needs to go down there and work with this group of folks to plant this church.” Thad Barnum was my bishop at the time, and I said to Thad, I said, “Thad, I appreciate that and thank you for laying that out there, but I’m not a church planter.” Because I had this vision of church planter as this sort of rugged, individualistic, crazy entrepreneur who was going to go start these things without any help anywhere. That’s not who I felt like I was. I was so young. I had never been on a vestry before. I had never been on staff at a church before. I didn’t think I was ready. He said, “Well, I just want you to pray about it.” So, I hung up the phone with him, didn’t think a whole lot about it, but then the rector of the church where I grew up, in eastern North Carolina ... He called me, not ten minutes later, and they hadn’t talked. He said, “Dan, I’ve been praying for you and figuring out what’s next for you after seminary, and I’m working with this small group of folks outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and I think you might be the person to come down and lead this church plant.” I said to him ... His name was King. I said, “King, thank you, but I’ve just told the bishop that I’m not a church planter,” and I kind of went through the spiel with him as well. So, he said the same thing. I’ll never forget it. He said, “I just want you to pray about it.” So, my wife gets home from work a couple of hours later. I say to Karen, “Karen, the funniest thing happened today.” So, I tell her the story and she’s quiet for a minute. She says, “Dan, I don’t think you should dismiss that so quickly.” McDermott: Hmm. Dan: It’s one thing when your childhood mentor and hero challenges you, you can kind of waive him off. Then your bishop – you can wave him off, too. But then when your wife says- McDermott: (laughs) Dan: “You really need to think about this.” McDermott: That’s serious business. Dan: This might be the Lord. So, long-short of it is I listened to her and we went and visited this group of folks and ended up going down there. I was 22 years old- McDermott: Whoa. Dan: And stepped into the work of church planting with a group of about eight folks down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. McDermott: Whoa. And was that plant a success? Dan: It was. Yes, it was. I mean, by the Lord’s grace. I look back at it now and I don’t know how, but it was. The Lord brought us folks and the Lord had mercy and grace with me when I made a lot of mistakes. We were, again, in the early days of the Anglican Mission. There weren’t a lot of other Anglican Churches around. The closest one was about an hour and a half away. Everything was a church plant at that time in the AMIA. There weren’t the support structures around. So, it was a difficult time of learning the process of church planting and doing it alone. Part of that is what really ... has really formed me to have a desire to help church planters never have to go through it the same way that I went through it. To not let church planters be alone. To make sure that they are well cared for, a lot of discernment before they go, well-assessed, trained, equipped, cared for, funded, and to make sure they always have someone to call and be with them as they’re a part of this. So, yes, the church is still there and it’s doing great. I was there for ten years. We ended up building a facility, things like that, but it’s doing great. [crosstalk 00:06:59] McDermott: Now, Dan, you were convinced that you were not a church planter type. Dan: I was. McDermott: And I bet there’s a lot of people listening today who also are thinking they’re not church planter types, or at least are wondering. In the Anglican world its ... there aren’t a huge number of full-time jobs for new seminary graduates, Anglican seminary graduates, but there’s always an opportunity to plant a church. So, how do I know that I’m a church planting type? How do I know? Because I don’t think everyone is a church planting type. Dan: I agree. McDermott: God doesn’t make every priest to be a church planter, or every deacon to be a church planter. Dan: Right. McDermott: So, for all those folks out there who are wondering. How can they know if God has given them that gene, so-to-speak? Dan: Yeah, well, I would say first thing is this: I’d say that a lot of people get bad advice. It’s like when you are first discerning whether you are called to be a priest or not and somebody tells you, “Go try to do everything else in the world, and if you can do anything else then do that, but if you can’t, come back and be a priest.” I hate that advice. [crosstalk 00:08:08] I mean, because honestly there are many things that we can be doing that have much more worldly gain than what we’re doing in this calling that could be very attractive, but we’re called to give that up to do what we do. I think that a lot of people give bad advice with regard to church planting, too. When someone is coming out of seminary and they don’t know where they’re going to go, then oftentimes bishops ... and I’ve tried to work with our bishops as much as we can, or rectors, or anyone. We’ll look at them and say, “Well, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there, so you’re probably going to have to plant a church.” I think it’s horrible advice, just in the same way of saying, “There aren’t a lot of jobs out there, you need to go be a plumber.” Well, if you’re not trained for that, and if you’re not handy, you’re going to cause a lot of damage in people’s houses. You shouldn’t go be a plumber either. So, church planting ... there is a giftedness for it. There is ... we want to make sure what we say in the assessment of church planters is we want the right person in the right place at the right time. There’s a process for discerning that. So, depending on what diocese they’re in; if they’re in the Anglican Church what diocese they’re in, they might have a different process for assessment. But going through online assessments and assessment centers where they go away for a few days as a couple, if they’re married, to go through the process of being asked questions about who they are, how they’re wired, what their experience in gathering folks is in the past, why are they drawn to this? Those sort of things. A good assessment is a gift to a potential church planter. McDermott: Could someone listening today, who’s asking this question, and maybe they’re in seminary, maybe they’re not in seminary, thinking of going to seminary- Dan: Right. McDermott: With this intention and wondering, could ... So, you’re saying they should contact whom in order to get this assessment? Could they contact you? Dan: They can contact me, and then I’ll try to plug them in ... connect them with the right person to get connected to. If that’s me and I need to help carry that with them then I will. But if they’re in other dioceses part of my job is knowing who’s out there and what they’re doing, and so I can help- McDermott: Right. Dan: Get them connected. So, they can surely contact me and I’ll either help them myself or get them connected with the right people. McDermott: Now, you have a podcast. Dan: I do. McDermott: And maybe they can go online to your podcast and contact you that way? Dan: Yes. They can. On our website www.Always-Forward.com. Always Forward is the ACNA’s provincial church planting initiative and our podcast is the Always Forward podcast. But then my email ... They can email me directly. It’s Dan.Alger@AnglicanChurch.net. They can get me there. McDermott: Great. Okay. So, let’s get down to theology and nuts and bolts. Dan: Okay. McDermott: Anglican Church planting. What is different about the Anglican kind of church planting? Dan: Yeah. I think a lot of people immediately when they ask that question of what’s different about Anglican church planting they immediately go to the externals of ... and oftentimes to Sunday morning worship: vestments, candles, liturgy, sacraments. That’s a huge part of the methodology, but I think that the main distinctive comes before we get to those external sort of symptoms of the disease that we have as Anglicans, I think a good disease, but a disease that we share together. And that is a lot of folks, when they approach church planting ... We approach it in such a way that their missiology determines their ecclesiology. So, what I mean by that is this is a discussion that Stuart Murray had in his book, “Laying Foundations” ... “Church Planting: Laying Foundations.” That church planting takes place at the intersection of ecclesiology and missiology. A lot of what is written and discussed in current church planting books, and a lot of current missiology, is that your missiology determines your ecclesiology. So, you have a mission, and we know God’s mission is to redeem the world and to reach the lost, and so then they would ask the question: “So what does the church need to look like in order for us to do that?” Whereas, I think Anglicans come at it from the opposite perspective. The opposite perspective is we need to ask, “What is the church, and who is the church?” And what are some of the aspects of the church that the Lord has given us that are gifts? Like, the great tradition that we’re apart of, and the liturgy, and the sacraments, and our polity system, and our aesthetic that we’ve been given that is part of who we are as Anglicans. Let’s talk about these things that we think the Lord has given to us, and then say, “How are these things ...” “How do these things affect our missiology?” “How do we, in our tribe that we are called to be a part of, and our tradition that we’re called to be a part of – how are we called to go about doing mission with these things that we value?” I don’t think we have to throw them out. I think that they were created and given as gifts to the church for the work of mission. They’ve just been forgotten or abused. So, as Anglicans, we approach it just a little differently. Not, “What do we have to do in order to get this planting work done?” But what’s our end result? What is the church? Then what does the church look like on mission in the work of church planting? So, I think it’s that fundamental thought change, a paradigm shift if you want to say it that way, that gets us thinking in a different way that then affects our missional choices and our methodology, and how we do worship on Sundays and how we do evangelism – it all begins with that discussion of recognizing ecclesiology before missiology. McDermott: I was a Baptist preacher once. Dan: Hmm. McDermott: And- Dan: Just one time? McDermott: (laughs) Dan: It was just this one day. (laughs) McDermott: No, actually, it was for five years. Dan: (laughs) McDermott: I preached over 200 sermons in five years. A little country church out in the cornfields of Iowa. You know? I’ve been an Anglican priest for a bunch of years. And when I think of being a priest, either celebrating or preaching or doing both on a Sunday morning, or on a week day. And the great thing about the Anglican tradition is we can have a Eucharist every day of the week. There’s a lot less pressure on me as an Anglican priest leading worship than there is on a ... Then there was when I was a Baptist. I had to be ... Even though it was a little church in the cornfields, I had to be sort of ... to use your phrase from our discussion at lunch, “a rock star.” I mean, I had to, not do it all but preside ... But think it all up every Sunday. Dan: Mm hmm (Affirmative). McDermott: And sort of entertain and inform and inspire. It was a heavy load on my shoulders. Dan: Mm hmm (Affirmative). McDermott: But as an Anglican priest, I’ve got this glorious thing called “the liturgy.” Dan: Mm hmm (Affirmative). McDermott: That comes down from the early church. I’ve got these ... You know, “glorious” is too weak a word ... These monumental things called “sacraments” that I get to preside over and administer. Dan: Mm hmm (Affirmative). McDermott: And people are not focused anywhere near as much on me. They’re focused on Christ in the liturgy and Christ in the sacrament. And maybe ... And also, Christ speaking through the sermon, even if my sermon is bad, which often it is. Dan: I’m sure they’re not, they were all good. Hypothetically, if somebody’s sermon was bad, right? (laughs) McDermott: So, does this make a difference, too, when it comes to church planting? Dan: Yeah. McDermott: As an Anglican? Dan: Absolutely. Because we don’t go into it trying to be the hero entrepreneur. That’s not who we are. And I would say our polity system plays into this as well, because we take great pride in the fact, actually. Hopefully godly pride that we’re not autonomous local congregations. That we’re doing this together, and that we as dioceses should be doing this together. We’re not in competition with the other Anglican plants and trying to be the next coolest thing. We’re a part of the Church. So, our goal is not to be the most well-known entrepreneurial pastor in town and then we write our cool edgy book. That’s not how we enter into this. I don’t mean to ... I don’t mean to come across as pejorative, because many folks from other traditions, they’re doing such great work, and they’ve brought so many people to Christ. They’re making disciples. So, I don’t mean to ... if I sound dismissive, forgive me, and I repent from that. But I think every tradition has its pitfalls, and the church planting world has the pitfall of folks who sometimes get into the work for ambition. As an Anglican planter that’s not how we enter the work. We enter, honestly, in a place of submission – submission to the great tradition, submission to our bishop, submission to the liturgy and the sacrament, submission, of course, to Jesus and the Word. So, when we enter in with a posture of submission that’s very different than entering with a posture of ambition. McDermott: That’s great. Now, Dan, let’s turn a corner a little bit. Dan: Yeah. McDermott: And let me, you know, you’ve done a lot of church planting, and you have counseled a lot of church planters, and taught, and what’s the word? Nurtured and shepherded a lot of church planters in their- I’m sure ... In their good times and their bad times. What ... As you look back on your years of church planting, what’s the best thing you ever did? Then, also, what’s the worst mistake you ever made? Dan: Ooh, the best thing that I ever did? Well ... McDermott: As a church planter. Dan: Right. That’s a hard question to answer. You know, I hate to sort of Sunday school out and say, “Well, we preached the Gospel. That was the best thing we ever did.” I mean, of course, it was, and it is. If we don’t have that, then we don’t have anything. But I think maybe I’ll narrow it down to say “keeping the sacrament central to who we are in church planting is so significant” for the reasons we’ve already talked about. But it shapes the way you do everything. And it’s just a remind of something ancient and something that has been around a lot longer than me and my church plant and is going to be around a lot longer afterwards as well. So, just keeping the sacraments central constantly pulls you out of your own local anxieties and pulls you into the greater story. So, I think that’s preaching the Gospel … the Gospel proclaimed and the Word visible in the sacraments as well – is so vitally important. The biggest mistake … I think, I would say this for me and I would say this for most. The biggest problem that I see … Mistake that I see in Anglican church planting is premature launch. We are a worship-centric tradition. So, we want to get to a Sunday morning worship as fast as we can. That is oftentimes … it’s deadly for the church. We have to remember that we’re not planting a worship service, we’re planting a church. There’s much more to church than just a Sunday morning. So, we have to have … there’s a lot that needs to be in place before we go to a regular Sunday morning worship. And there needs to be a critical mass of people as well. We all have faced the temptation, and every church planter that has started a launch team or core group, or whatever their language they want to use is – they get the pressure from the people in that group. “I’ve talked to people about coming and they’re not comfortable coming here, but as soon as we start services they’ll come.” Don’t believe it. They never come. That’s not … That is akin to being able to say, “I can’t go out with you because I’m washing my hair.” Right? They’re going to be washing their hair next time, too. (laughs) McDermott: (Laughs) Dan: Don’t believe them. You’re not going to start attracting people just because you’re doing a Eucharistic service on Sunday. Now, you’ll gain some people that way, yes, but they’re not going to be the droves of people that you’re imagining in your head. You’ve got to do the hard work of preparing the soil. Sometimes for a long time before you ever go to a Sunday morning worship. McDermott: So, how do you know when, then? Dan: I think … And situations are all different. You know, people kid me because so oftentimes when people ask me a specific question I say, “Well, it depends.” Oftentimes it does depend on the situation and the context and the planter, and there’s so many things. But I think that for a healthy church it really needs to be somewhere in the realm of 60 to 75 people that you have together before you launch a regular Sunday morning worship. That’s probably low-end. Because, one, just from a liturgical standpoint, when you are saying the liturgy it becomes more of one voice the more people that you have. But you can get over the aesthetic aspect of it, but what it takes to run a service between greeters and readers and music and who’s going to make the communion bread and who’s going to set up chairs? If you’re in a set-up/tear-down kind of situation. Who’s going to do nursery? Who’s going to take care of the kids? Who’s going to clean-up afterwards? Who’s going to do … I mean, the list is forever long. So, you not only have to be able to have enough people to do that on a Sunday, but then to sustain that for a year or two years, three years. So, a lot of people get enough volunteers to be able to do it at the beginning, but 18 months in its- Even if you have new people that have come, and hopefully you have, they haven’t gotten involved enough that they’re willing to come set up chairs yet. Your people start to get really tired and you start to lose families because they’re just worn out and they start to get discouraged. Having a larger critical mass at the beginning leads to a healthier foundation for a church plant. McDermott: So, what do you do if you only have 20 or 30? How do you keep them together? Dan: Yeah. McDermott: When you haven’t launched the Sunday morning service? Dan: My recommendation is what you do is you have something at your house or wherever it is that you need to be able to gather, and you do teaching on “What is church?” When we planted the church where we are right now we spent a year in my living room going through Acts 2:42-47. We went through every word. They devoted themselves. “What does ‘devoted’ mean?” And we walked through that. To the apostles teaching. Well, when you have the apostles teaching that opens up multiple weeks on, “What do we believe?” And the creeds and the 39 articles, and all of those sort of things. It opens up those kinds of teachings. The fellowship. “What is church community?” The breaking of the bread; we’re talking about sacraments. To the prayers; we’re talking about liturgy. So, there’s a lot of … there’s a lot packed into just those … that description of the early church. So, we did that for a year, and then in the end of … I did the teaching, we gathered people that way, sometimes we would do a song or two with a guitar, you know, that … to worship with. But we would close with either Compline or Evening Prayer and a more informal, a little bit modified, version of the Eucharist. So, we would share the Eucharist together weekly in a more informal Evening Prayer kind of setting. McDermott: Mm hmm (Affirmative). So, what if you just can’t break that barrier of, say, 30 or 40, or even 50? Do you just conclude after a year or so that God does not want you to start this church? Dan: Again, it all depends on the situation. I mean, like the church plant where we are now is slow growing, but part of the complications of that is because of the other responsibilities I have within the province and such I’m not there throughout most of the week. So, if you’re just trying to do a Sunday morning worship, that’s not how you plant a church. So, this has been a very unique sort of situation, but we’ve been keeping things together and doing discipleship and doing outreach, and we’ve been saving up our money as well. We’ve just been able to hire a new associate rector, assistant rector, to come and be a part of it. She’s able to be there full time even when I’m traveling and doing other things. So, we’ve been at this for almost five years now, but it’s been … it’s sort of been a very different way of raising up a launch team in a lot of ways. So, that’s a unique situation. There’s not a broad “after a year, if you have this many people, do you stop?” It depends on the situation, but I think you have to ask some honest questions. If people aren’t coming, and they’re not … What’s going to change if you add the added responsibility of a Sunday morning worship? If it’s just, “Well, they wouldn’t come to my house, but they’ll start coming to sit on a Sunday morning worship.” So, what? I mean, that’s not the people you need to be able to really invest in growing this church either, because the purpose is not just butts and seats. That’s not our end goal. McDermott: Mm hmm (Affirmative). Dan: So, we have to ask some really good questions, I think, at that point. McDermott: I think we’re getting some very realistic advice a seasoned church planter that I think is going to do a whole lot of good for people listening. Let me ask two closing questions. Dan: Sure. McDermott: The first is for seminarians out there listening. Anglican seminarians who are thinking about church planting after they graduate. What’s the best thing they could do now to prepare? Dan: Yeah, so I would encourage them … the best education that they could get is to be involved in a church plant. Even if it’s a really bad church plant. But to be a part of it and to learn what to do or what not to do. That if they can do their field work in a church plant setting, even if it’s not Anglican. I mean, preferably, if they wanted to plant and Anglican Church they would go to an Anglican Church plant, but if not, be in a church planting environment and learn from it. There’re also things that if they’re going to plant within the Anglican Church or we have our Always Forward conference every year in the fall. It’s in Denver in August. And would love for people to come out to that, just to be a part of that community and learn Anglican specific ways of talking Anglican Church planting. The Always Forward podcast is a good way to start to even be introduced to some of the issues that surround specifically Anglican Church planting. But they can also start to work through the process of assessment now, the assessment that we referred to earlier, by contacting their church planting leader of their diocese, or if they don’t have one yet, or don’t know who it is, contacting me and I’ll connect them with somebody. But they can begin that process of discernment and assessment now as well. I think, finally, if they are thinking about church planting at the end of seminary, they’ll go through seminary with sort of subconsciously taking everything they’re learning and going, “Alright, what would this look like in a church planting setting?” “Okay, what would this look like if we were doing this with 30 people?” “What would this …” And so, it changes their seminary experience just because they’re running everything through that lens right from the beginning. McDermott: Mm hmm (Affirmative). Good. Dan, you mentioned your podcast. Just tell us a little bit more about your podcast. Dan: Yeah, I host it along with Shawn McCain, who is an Anglican Church planter in Austin, Texas, and a good friend. We talk about all types of things regarding Anglican Church planting; from the discussion we had earlier about ecclesiology and missiology to sacraments and church planting, to the role of the liturgy in church planting, to vestments. We interview lots of different folks and so we have about a season and a half right now already up on the website. Then we are going to be back in March with sort of the conclusion of this season. So, we’ll be back again soon doing that, but it’s a great place for people just to be able to join in this discussion. For Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike. So, they can go on iTunes or Stitcher, or wherever it is that you get your podcast and look for Always Forward and Shawn and I will be there. McDermott: Well, Dan, we will listen, and we want to thank you so much for being on today. Dan: Thank you very much for having me. Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.