My Worship Revolution

Alright, after lunch.

Small Group Exercise

Now we went back into our small groups for another exercise.
Same small groups, different set of assessors watching us.
For this one there were two sites (areas/cities) that were described.  We had to pick one and had about 40 minutes to create an idea of what our church plant would look like there.
One of the sites was a suburban midwest city, and the other was a large city on the California coast with a large college in the town with an east side and west side, with college students mostly living on the west side and a high homosexual community and lot of artists and professionals, and not a lot of families on the east side.  Hmmmm.  Sound familiar.
In a way I was hoping we’d choose the midwest town cause I knew I’d be way too opinionated on the California context.
We chose California.

After our last group experience and seeing how different people led, I was a little concerned to tell ya the truth.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well it went and how we worked together as we created this fictional ministry.
We all then presented our church.  We had 45 seconds to do so.

Evangelism Exercise

This was the nice contrived situation to see if we knew how to articulate the Gospel to someone.
Role playing situation.  You meet with someone at Starbucks who has been coming to your church and they let you know that they are ready to be a Christian and want to know how.
To be honest, this scenario was actually not nearly as awkward as I thought it could be.
I was with a great assessor who I liked, so that helped.  I was able to just articulate to her in my own way that I felt comfortable what it looks like to cross that line of faith and follow Christ daily.
Good times.

Golden Personality Presentation

This was the third and final personality profile that we took before coming.
Many of you may have taken the four letter Meyer-Briggs test before.
This one is Meyer-Briggs on steroids.

It’s actually really cool.  Rather than just give you your 4 letters, it also breaks each letter into 4 contrasting options and tells you how your subsets came out, and you can even see where those subsets may have 1 that is out of pattern with the overall.  Also, this one gives more of a degree to just how much you really are each thing.
As usual I am an ENFA – Extrovert, Intuitive, Feeling, Adapting (updated language from perceiving)
My extrovert level is to the max with absolutely no introvert.
And of course, in true form, Rachel is the polar opposite ISTZ – Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Organizing.

One final note on the personality test.
They have been given and explained by two guys who do this and run their own team building company in MN.  Jerry and Steve Dahl.
These guys are really good.

Church Planting Project

That took us up til dinner.
Now, after dinner is when things really get interesting.
We were broken into 2 groups.  So 10 candidates in the group.
We were given the Elk Grove, Sac town area in our group.  Had a folder and demographics and everything.
We were told that a donor called one of us and wants to give us money.  He wants us to plant in that area and wants a presentation on how we will plant 10 churches in ten years.  We were given 2 hours yesterday and will get like 4 today.
The presentation has to be 20 minutes, and all 19 people have to share at some point.

Oh yeah, and during this planning process, multiple candidates are being pulled out to do ministry and counseling interviews.  So be ready to adapt when one of your leaders disappears.  Or more than one.

I was real interested to see how this was gonna go.
10 alpha males in a room asked to lead together.  Woohoo!!
We started with prayer and started to discuss how we would go about this.
Pretty quickly Rachel and I as well as one other couple were the first ones pulled out for an interview.

Ministry Interview

This was an interview with 2 of the assessors that lasted about an hour.
We actually loved this part.  They asked questions about our marriage, about how we do ministry, where we are in the process, how we connect with God, how we rest, and how we anticipate dealing with the stresses of church planting.
Both assessors were great peeps and it really was fun to have conversation with them, and seriously, the questions weren’t nearly as difficult as I thought they might be.

It actually worked out pretty awesome in my opinion that they pulled us out at the beginning when they did.
Basically we missed all the chaos of trying to figure out how to get the ball rolling with everything.
So as we walked back in, they had picked a lead pastor and working through the values and vision of the planting movement.
We definitely felt disconnected and it took some listening to figure out where we were at and get cought up, but once we did we dropped right in and gave our contributions.
We created some teams for the next day, myself being on the team to develop the strategy for planting the first church, and we finally wrapped up around 9:30.

Definitely were pretty wiped by the end of that day.
So we head back to the hotel and blogged, and didn’t last much longer beyond that!
Thus the end of day two in the life of an assessment center.