Happy Fifteen Year Anniversary Covenant Fellowship

This past Sunday marked the fifteen year anniversary of Covenant Fellowship Church. We didn't do anything (I don't anybody even thought about it!). But in fact we had held our first Sunday morning worship service on September 19, 1993, fifteen years and two days before.

Starting a church is not unlike starting a business in that you cannot really know, no matter how good your plan, if it will succeed. In our case we decided not to receive outside funding as do most church plants, so we were going forward on an even more sink-or-swim basis. It makes me rather happy to remember that we didn't cost the Presbytery or Synod anything.

When we started I didn't know if there would be enough people or giving for me to receive a full salary, so I was prepared to work part time if needed. Thankfully we had a "free" place to meet in the living room of our "Founding Parents" Dwight and Susan Thomas. Well, it was free to us anyway. Meeting there for 18 months took a toll on the house and probably cost them a lot of money. They live in Chapel Hill now. We miss them.

We knew also that there were so many distinctive aspects to our church model that many might find it just too quirky. For example we had a meal every Sunday (and still do). We had a longer meeting than average with diverse elements, including a longer than average sermon and an open-to-the-floor sharing time.

Perhaps our biggest distinctive was our emphasis on intergenerational corporate life and worship. The Thomas's and I had come out of church situations where people were grouped out according to age, gender, marital status and so forth, and we wanted to have more of an "extended family" atmosphere.

The Thomas's and I had also had come out of frenetic hyper active church environments where people were so encouraged to be committed to church activities that they could not possibly have time or energy for their neighbors or workmates or community ministries and organizations. There was in the Evangelical Church Sub Culture at the time a sort of running assumption that being spiritual meant being really busy at church. We didn't like that. We wanted a more leisurely pace. We wanted folks to have more time to get to know their neighbors and be a part of the greater Greensboro community, and the only way to do that was to make our work very simple. We had a Sunday meeting and weeknight small group gathering. We also have a youth gathering now but that's about it.

I don't know why eating a meal together makes is seem Amish or cultish (!), but to many who would call me in those days, once I mentioned the meal it was like, "OK, thanks. Bye." I mean, personally, I like to eat, and it's nice not going home starving. We still have our every Sunday meal. People naturally get to know each other when eating. That's why we do it.

Oh, and we didn't have or plan to have a building, not that that made us extra cool or spiritual (it has certainly impacted our numbers in a negative manner over time), but we just didn't want to be getting all caught up in all that. I have many colleagues in churches that are mortgaged to the max, and who spend hours and hours a week dealing with facility issues. We don't. It's nice. We have been meeting at Bur-Mil Park Clubhouse for about twelve years now. It seems to work well for us both. They are great folks out there.

We never really had any goal as far as growth. What we do on Sunday wouldn't work if we were very big, and the couple of times we started to get to the point where we had to start thinking about a new meeting place or even spinning off a daughter church, things just sort of took care of themselves.

We are not a small church by the standards of national averages, but we are a small church compared to what a lot of people think are the national averages. If we got bigger that would be cool. We know how to do things better now, even with more people [so come by, any time :-)], but once you see and understand and embrace that you are a small church, it is very freeing. It really impacts your motives. It means that our folks (and our pastor) can be involved in many different things in the community without having to think about how it does or does not grow the church or the church budget. And it impacts how we do what we do on Sunday in a very positive way. No dog and pony show to impress - just trying to be the church.

So, given all these quirky characteristics the odds were stacked against us. Any number of things could have caused us to fail. It wasn't because we were so clever or smart that we didn't, but because God (we believe) simply wanted the work to exist and go on, and go on it did, for fifteen years now. It's really quite amazing to think of all the lives that have intersected with us along the way.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to give thanks publicly. A lot of people have been good to us, such as the folks at Greensboro College when we met there, and the folks at Bur-Mil now, and the folks at the Rhino Times who let us barter advertising for paper delivery, and all you bloggers who put up with me. It's a long list really, and we are grateful for the community in having us, and hope we offer back good things along the way.

So, happy fifteen years to us! And thanks be to God for His goodness.

Joel

Small Church Blessings

I just updated a very out of date home page on our church web site, and wrote this little blurb. Maybe there is some food for thought here....

Greetings in Christ!

Welcome to the home page of Covenant Fellowship Church, an evangelical Presbyterian Church in beautiful Greensboro, North Carolina.

Back in the 1970's E. F. Schumacher wrote an amazing book that was both very popular and very challenging to the status quo of his day. It was entitled "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered." It is one of those books I think everyone should read, and which is perhaps more relevant today than ever.

I'd like to see someone write a book called "Small is Beautiful: Doing Church as if People Mattered."

It's hard to try to convey the virtues of being a smaller church (most churches are in fact "smaller" churches - we're about a hundred people) without it sounding like excuse for failure - such is the state of things today in McMansionland.

At Covenant Fellowship we're not trying to be small just to be small; we're trying to go about being the church in a way that mirrors as closely as possible what we read about in the book of Acts and the New Testament letters, and we're trying to do church in a way that focuses on the most essential things.

In Acts chapter two it says of the new church that "they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers....And all who believed were together and held all things in common."

There are many such glimpses we get into the life of the early church. When asked by folks what are we really trying to do, when all is said and done, the best answer often is simply that we are "just trying to be the church."

Good small churches don't try to be big churches. They don't aspire to be big churches. Big churches offer many services and ministries and programs a small church cannot offer. Small churches offer many qualities a big church cannot offer. The way to be a good small church is to embrace the smallness as a virtue.

For example, in our church we have very little overhead other than support of the pastor and rental of the Sunday worship space. Thus our members are free to throw themselves into the service of one another and of their neighbors in the community and world with no regard whatsoever as to whether it "grows the church" financially or numerically. This is amazingly freeing. It is wonderful.

In a church of our size all the people know each other, or can realistically know each other, including the little children knowing the retirees, and the single people being friends with couples and families. We don't need name tags. We know who is a visitor and who is a regular. We're not all divided up into a million sub groups. We're like an extended family. This is such a blessing. Our teens actually talk to and know and love our adults - amazing!

Children read Scriptures in public service and everyone has a chance to participate and speak their mind. On a recent Sunday we had a season of open prayer and several very young children - and I mean three to five years old - prayed along with the oldest among us. It was beautiful.

Our services are not rushed. There is no hype. There is plenty of time to catch up and reconnect. There is plenty of time to devote to the apostles' teaching, to prayer, to the breaking of bread, and to loving on another.

Despite our being small God has blessed us with an amazing array of gifted and talented and capable people whom he uses to encourage us in our life and worship.

We commend this way of doing church to anyone coming to our web site. Feel free to browse around, and feel free to visit with us on Sunday at any time. We hope that something in our site will be of encouragement and blessing to you,

In Christ,

Joel Gillespie,
Pastor, Covenant Fellowship