drive by assessing

so I've been assessed. Which is a word that has many amusing possibilities for misspelling. We were CPACed (Church planting assessment center) this week and it was actually pretty cool. It's a confidential process, but I'm going assume the same rules that applied to chaplaincy will apply to this: I can talk about how it affected me without divulging details of other people who were at the center too.

I've been trying to come up with a way to describe it to friends and family not all that familiar with church planting and the best I've come up with is it's a big fat job interview at gunpoint. Just kidding. Mostly. They put you in stressful situations to see how you react. Everyone keeps asking if you're OK, how are you feeling etc. After a while I kind of felt guilty for being fine, really not bothered. They wore us out, though. The idea of getting school work done in the evenings went out the window real fast.

the things I liked about it:
-A fairly objective analysis of personality and skill sets
-An appreciation for openness and transparency over "right answers"
-The time for self reflection
-The opportunity to see how Seth and I function together and separately in team dynamics, which is quite well actually. (I was kind of afraid my loathing for group projects at school meant I was bad at working on a team, it turns out it's just because group assignments are usually retarded)
- the cool people I met who are totally excited about church planting
- learning about church planting. after all, we're pretty new to the scene

things I didn't like about it:
- Analysis tools are helpful, but I'm more than what a model or test can tell you
- I wish we would have spent as much time on spiritual gifts as we did on the DiSC
- Again, I'm new to the scene, but the push for big numbers fast = good church was a little concerning. But the context was American churches, I don't know enough to judge on anything but gut feeling at the moment
- they ran us to freaking death. I understand the life of a church planter can be stressful, but don't tell me about the importance of downtime and then keep me up all night.

But anyway, they liked us. We'll get the big fat packet o' analysis in about two weeks, but their conclusion was that we would have a lot to offer as team members, but that they wouldn't recommend we be team leaders for at least the next several years. Which is fine with us, we want to be on a team where we can be mentored before going out and being the team leader. Notice I didn't say going out on our own, I can't ever really see myself doing my best in a non-team environment. They gave us some good pointers about how to move forward, which leads to one of the coolest results of the week:

(background) In an interview portion, they asked us where we go to church and I was honest, we don't go anywhere right now. Now, I was a little nervous about putting this out on the table, because there was a possibility I would be chased from room with flaming torches "What?! You want to plant churches and don't even GO?!". But it wasn't like that. We explained the rough haul that it has been in JC trying to find a church, never really feeling we could plug in anywhere, and just the heart-breakingness of knowing what real church looks like and being disappointed over and over again. Honestly, we were just burnt out and exhausted with the search.

Now, they said that we had been taking an overly reactionary (as opposed to pro-active) stance, which I agree with. But most of all, they just wanted to help us find a church. The assessors that are local came to us and offered to help us find a place that wasn't necessarily perfect, but had a vision we could get behind, at least for the rest of the time we're in school. I was really impressed by that, how much they cared about us as people and not just candidates. So we have a game plan to visit different churches, both local and not so local, just to get a feel for where we would fit and what things we like in a church and then debrief with someone here who has more experience with churches than we do.

It's occurred to me that even though I am a seminary student, just as a person, there is no reason I should expect myself to be an expert at finding a church. The church I grew up in is... well, you've heard the stories, let's say not perfect and I stumbled across a good church in college. But those are the only experience's I've had, I don't have much to compare with.

Anyway, Seth and I are really excited to start looking for a home church. I hadn't realized how much I had missed being excited about going to church.

And it's exciting to know more about church planting and how we would fit into it, I think it could be a really great fit. It's funny how an option fells more like a possibility when the skeleton idea is fleshed out a little bit.