Church Planting - The Assessment Center That Wasn't

So I was reminded by two separate people in the past 24 hours that I have not moved our church planting story any further along on the blog. There are some things that I blog about that completely overwhelm me when I think of trying to put them into words. This is one of them. So although I would like to, I can't completely blame the delay on the fact that our lives have entered a season of insane craziness.

So here goes the story . . .

When we last left off are heroes Ben and Erica, oops wrong kind of story. You're not three years old, are you? I tell a lot of these kind of stories at this stage in my life.

Let's try again.

When we last left off I said that our wheels were spinning a little bit in the church planting arena. As Ben was networking with some church leaders in the Twin Cities who are big into church planting, it became apparent that one of the next steps we needed to take was to attend the Converge (this is what the Baptist General Conference is now called) Church Planting Assessment Center.

It could take an entire blog post to define exactly what the assessment center is, but here is my attempt to do it briefly. Prior to attending you complete an application that asks very personal questions about many areas of your life. You also complete three personality tests online and the results are sent to the assessors. At the assessment center, you join other couples who are being assessed for four intense days of being assessed. Man, I don't know how else to put it. Ben had to give a presentation on his philosophy of ministry and a mini-sermon. We both had to show that we can effectively share the gospel. There are team exercises where you are split up as a couple and put with other candidates and ask to do a church planting case study. There is a psychological interview. There is a huge team project at the end where you are with your spouse and the other couples on your team and you have to create a viable plan to plant a church in an area of the country which is assigned to you, and then show how that church will plant 10 more churches in 10 years. You have about 16 hours to finish that project, some of which are the hours that you are supposed to be sleeping. Also once you get together as a team, they start pulling you for your couple interviews so your team is never fully together again until you do your presentation. Oh and while all these things are going on there are assessors ringing the room assessing away.

See? That was a super long paragraph and I just hit the high points. So following the direction of those around us we registered for the assessment center happening in Brooklyn Park (yes, so close to home) at the end of August. We took all our pre-tests, arranged for my parents to take time off to come and stay with Micah and Savannah, and just waited to start this next step. Then the beginning of August happened and we had the fateful conversation with Savannah's cardiologist telling us that she needed surgery. Oh yeah, and she needed that surgery just a few days before we were supposed to go to the assessment center. Everything came to a screeching halt. My parents still came up, but this time it was to support us, be with Savannah, and help care for Micah.

The next few months were spent 100% focused on providing for Savannah's and Micah's needs, and taking the time for us to recover from almost losing Savannah as well. We all had a lot of recovering to do.

Next time how we ended up getting to spend a week in sunny San Diego in January.

PS - I don't have time to read this through so there are probably errors. I guess you can chose a flawed chapter in the story, or no story at all. Sorry those are your choices. (I say that last statement a lot during the day too.)