Going Public

I just sent out the latest version of The Fulcrum Community Newsletter. Below is a snippet that I’ve adapted for the blog.

We moved to Austin one year ago. As years go, this last one passed in a hurry. Looking back on it, it is easy to break it down into two clearly defined stages.

June to September was the networking stage. I tried to meet and gather as many people as possible who might be interested in helping us launch The Fulcrum Community. I was sitting down with anyone who had a pulse and was even remotely interested in Fulcrum. I remembers lots of meals, cups of coffee, and conversations in this stage. Many of those conversations didn’t go anywhere, but a few a did.

October to May was the community building stage. While still expanding our network, we also began to focus on helping the people we were gathering become a community of faith. We launched Cafe Fulcrum in November as a mixer event. Several months later it morphed into a full-blown worship gathering with singing and preaching. We made throwing parties a priority. We looked for ways to serve each other and our surrounding community. We multiplied groups. We welcomed newcomers who had very little experience with “church” and were thrilled to see them show signs of spiritual growth.

This summer marks the beginning of a new stage for Fulcrum, which I’m calling “Going Public.” While continuing to expand our network and build community, we find ourselves with an opportunity to make our presence known in a more public way. Later this month, we’ll be moving to a larger venue for our Sunday morning gatherings. The coffee house where we’ve been meeting has been a great venue for Cafe Fulcrum, but its limited capacity meant that it felt very full if we had more than 65 people show up, which is exactly what started to happen.

On June 20th, we’re going to start meeting at the Clay Madsen Recreation Center in Round Rock. It’s a well-known gathering spot in Round Rock and will keep us in the center of the action. If all goes according to plan, we’re going to meet there several times this summer and then launch weekly gatherings on September 12th. While we believe our bi-monthly Cafes were perfect for the community building stage, a weekly worship gathering in a public place like Clay Madsen will increase our exposure in the community and give us a more visible “front door” at which to meet and greet those who are curious about Fulcrum.

Our greatest temptation will be to make the Sunday morning gathering the “main event” for our community. From the very beginning, I’ve said that we didn’t just want to start a worship service. Instead, our goal has been to form a community of faith. Hopefully, we’ve established in our community’s DNA the conviction that what happens in our smaller group settings is just as important, if not more so, than what will happen on Sunday mornings. I know it is hard for many churches to find a healthy balance between having an attractive worship gathering while at the same time fostering incarnational community when the church is scattered, but that’s what we’re hoping to do.

We’ll see what happens.