by Bryan Halferty

Excerpted and adapted from Terrible Beauty: A Story of Calling, Breaking, and the Unmaking that Made Me. Used with permission.

Our core team of mostly committed members met in the church lobby for trainings before launch. The auditorium was too big and would send our voices echoing off the walls. We needed a living room, a space that could form us into family.

These gatherings developed organically; socializing turned to song; there was sometimes a meal and then the training. I’d reach into my memory and guts to try to turn whatever I found into something practical, bullet points and pithy phrases: “We pass on our passion,” “If you want to heal you must be healed,” and “Become front porch people.” I was experimenting, trying to package values in plastic wrap. I wrestled, on and off, with the need to put all of it on my shoulders. I would have never said it like this, but I was trying to be this core team’s hero. I played the role of confident leader, but the weighty load was wearing me down.

Our core team had embraced a higher level of commitment than the average Sunday church attendee. We weren’t just going to church; we were launching Anchor Church together.

This was our attempt to drink down the vision that I had brewed in my brain, to begin becoming a beautiful community. If we tried to make it happen after we launched, the fragile values would, I worried, be swept away by the tide of new attendees with their own expectations of what church should look like. It was all a crash course in Jesus-centered leadership and community formation.

Anchor Stories

If you asked me on a day when I was confident, I would have told you that Anchor would become a movement that advanced far beyond the address where we gathered. So, I studied groups who had brought something unique into the world, looking for patterns. Impressionists, interested in capturing movement with paint, bucked the Parisian art establishment, offering their own shows. What pushed them forward, resilient, in creative contrast to established norms?

I studied the American Civil Rights Movement, finding wisdom in their two-beat rhythm of praying in the church and marching in the streets. Bonhoeffer, in Nazi Germany, had his underground seminary; how did he train and disciple? I hunted through history. I scoured through books about the Early Church, how it grew in the face of outright hostility, but, like Christ, did not return hostility for hostility but remained open to the poor and civic leaders alike.

It became clear, through my own growing experience as a pastor and leader, and through study, that I couldn’t remain a hero. I couldn’t sustain it. It wasn’t God’s plan. I was seeing, in real time, that Anchor’s growth and depth depended on Jesus’ ministry being poured out into all of us.

At one of our lobby meetings, I rolled out a whiteboard, placing it right in the center of the lobby. Its location made people shift their chairs and crane their necks. I wrote “Anchor Stories” on the top and numbered 1 through 10 along the lefthand side.

What I meant by “Anchor Stories” was a story of core team members expressing the mission of God in their own lives. Loving neighbors. Sharing the gospel. Stepping out in practical love toward the poor or hurting.

“Alright. Next week, come prepared to share a story of life on mission, of how you’ve loved you neighbor and seen a door open through which God might be working. Write a one- or two-word summary here, next to the number,” I said.

It was as silent as a feather falling. You might have thought that love of God and love of neighbor, being two foundational teachings of Jesus, would have been as easy as passing the turkey at Thanksgiving. Easy pickings for storytelling, especially from a group that was helping to plant a church. Nope.

“This week I’ll share a couple of my own stories, but next week I hope that everybody come ready to share one of their own.”

Over the next few weeks, as I wheeled out the whiteboard, a few people walked forward and wrote one- and two-word summaries on the board.

Getting a Glimpse

“Who wrote ‘Just Next Door’?” I asked once.

“I did.” A young mother named Sarah stood up.

Sarah always thought twice before talking, measuring her words carefully as if they were ingredients in a recipe. I was surprised that she was the first person to share an Anchor story.

“I think I have been so trapped in my own world,” she said. “I’ve been exhausted, really. And this stressed me out.” There was, predictably, a bit of nodding. “But I saw another mom down the street when I was on a walk. I just said ‘Hey!’ and waved. Next thing you know, we are talking. She tells me her name, her two kids’ names. It wasn’t very spiritual, but now we walk together. It’s only been one time so far. Already, though, it feels like it wouldn’t be too much to grab a meal together. I am praying for her family regularly. I wrote ‘next door’ because this was waiting for me. Right there.”

I didn’t have to start the clap. It was already happening. All 30 or so of us there had caught a glimpse.

I wondered if I could stop trying to be a hero and just be a pastor, but also, and more importantly, a Jesus follower, right alongside the rest of this community.

There was no simple turn of the faucet. But there was movement. This group began to see their neighborhood differently, through a holy imagination. The space in between their homes, the streets and cul-de-sacs, had become the landscape where God was working out redemption and treating wounds.

Passing on the Kingdom

Compare the story of Jesus to what I had to learn, while subtracting my manic antics, and you’ll actually see a similar pattern. As Jesus begins to heal, the word gets out and the masses swarm: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).

Everyone was waking their sick uncles and picking up their blind daughters and bringing them to Jesus. These crowds promised nothing back to Him. There were no fees or royalties. This was the one-way traffic of love, like a father carrying his kid or a mother nursing her newborn. They were not sold on Jesus; they were—it seems—sold on being healed. Rather than having this group of broken bodies form a long line to take tickets, Jesus gathers the Twelve together and gives them the authority to do the same stuff He’d been doing.

When I wheeled out the whiteboard, I was reading from that script. I wanted to pass on the instincts of the Kingdom of God, distributed throughout the people of God. I imagined hundreds of homes as mini-blast-radiuses shooting out, flashlight beams into darkness. Jesus’ vision of leadership is not one person propped up above others. It is, rather, collaboration and partnership, the growth in gifts that are as different as north and south but still somehow aiming in the same direction.

We would roll out the whiteboard each week. The creaking wheels. The erasing and the writing. How it pushed our inclinations to stay inside ourselves, inviting us to see our front porches and sidewalks, cubicles and bus seats as locations of an unfolding drama of redemption.

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