FOUNDATIONS AND SCAFFOLDS

Today I found the contract I signed to rent the function room of the Inn At Medford for our opening service nine years ago. I smiled to look at what had been booked - 60 chairs theater style and a podium. I think we had blown by that number half an hour before our scheduled 10.00am start on that sunny October morning.

It's tough to recall who all those folks were - 154 of them in total, but without checking the details my guess would be that less than half are still with us now.

Of course, if you're a young couple starting out or seniors retiring, you get off Long Island as quick as you can. With the average house selling for something like $400,000, I95 South becomes very inviting. So we have seen a lot of good people move out of state.The others seem to have fallen into one of two camps -

SCAFFOLD MEMBERS
I first read this phrase in one of Steve Sjogren's books on church planting (not sure which one, but anything by him is worth getting hold of) and it has stuck with me. These are people who are with you from the start, are a great help in getting things under way, but are never going to be part of the long-term future. You don't know that and they don't know it, but that's how it works out.

Christians who join new churches generally have their own preconceived ideas of how things will or should take shape and they get disenchanted and downright upset at times if things don't fall the way they expect them to.

Some get very upset indeed like the woman who cursed me out as she and her husband made their exit several years ago. Good people - scaffold members. (Foul mouths too!)

A lot of scaffold members want the new church to resemble the one they just left. That's weird. If it was so good there, why were they with us in the first place?

Leadership guru John Maxwell reckons that three years into every church plant, none of the core group that started things moving is generally together.Wish I'd known that six years ago when a number of scaffold members made an exit.

FOUNDATION MEMBERS
These are the folks who have come to be rock solid partners in the mission and we have quite a number of them. I entertained the idea of listing some of them here, but realized that time and space don't permit, besides which I am bound to forget someone and don't want to tick them off on this anniversary weekend.

So let me give you just one example.

Dan Ricci was there with us on October 4th of '98. I was surprised, but very happy to see him on day one. Dan's a smart cookie. He's 397 years old (80 something actually, but I don't remember his exact age - maybe 86?).

Because of the respect I have for him, seing him there that first morning was huge for me and I honestly think it added a lot of credibility to our venture for those who know Dan. If he was there, this must be okay.

He has not missed a single Sunday morning service since then and has won a place in everyone's heart as he serves every week as the person who greets everyone arriving at the theater with a smile and hands them a copy of our weekly news sheet.

He wasn't a scaffold member, Dan's part of the foundation.

Both are necessary, but their function is different.

You generally don't see the foundation, but you'd soon know if it wasn't there!

This wseekend I'm especially appreciative of our foundation members.