People need a Plan B
WINNIPEG, MB—Do a Google search for "Plan B" and you'll come up with pages of information about the morning after pill. It isn't exactly what Nashville pastor Pete Wilson had in mind when he wrote his first book. But he figures that people looking for him can find him, and maybe a few "morning after" seekers will discover something unexpected.
Plan B is about shattered dreams. Now in his mid-30s, Wilson long ago learned that life is full of inexplicable circumstances and that bad stuff happens to good people. He knows that dark times come to everyone and sorrows abound. And yet, Wilson insists, "there is an undeniable relationship between personal crisis and spiritual transformation."
Speaking to ChristianWeek during a Winnipeg stop on a promotional tour, Wilson explains that "God gets our full attention" during times of adversity. "That's when our illusions of control in our life are obliterated. Shattered dreams bring us to a point of personal surrender. And that's when God can mold us and shape us," he says.
The lessons of failure seem a strange message for Wilson to be trumpeting. This is, after all, a man who started a church in small town Kentucky as a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old. Five years later more than 600 worshipers called the congregation home, and Wilson returned to his boyhood home of Nashville, Tennessee to start another church.
In just seven years, Cross Point Church has grown to reach more than 2,500 each weekend through its four campuses located around the metro Nashville area. "God gave me the gift of leadership," he acknowledges. "And I've been uncommonly blessed."
So what is the strong appeal of yet another church in what is already a church saturated culture? "A lot of non-church people live there too," he replies. "We wanted to create a place for them." And what does that look like? "Involvement in our local community is a high value," says Wilson. "A key question for us is: 'If our church disappeared, would our neighbourhood notice?' Having an impact on our city is a key part of our mission."
Overcoming the separation between church and neighbourhood can be a challenge. Cross Point's main campus is situated in a transitional area between deep poverty and high affluence. Initially it attracted only the affluent. But as leaders realized that "no relationship equals zero impact," Cross Point established a "lunch buddy program" linking people from the church with children from the poorer neighbourhood.
Now many members are connecting with children. "The church is not the four walls," declares Wilson. "That school would feel an impact if we left."
Uncommon opportunities also arise. Last spring Nashville was washed under a deluge of severe flooding. "But a one-in-a-thousand-year flood for Nashville is a one-in-a-thousand-year opportunity for the church," says Wilson. Thousands of people affiliated with the church rolled up their sleeves and went to work cleaning up, gutting homes and carting garbage—an estimated $4-million worth of volunteer work in two weeks.
The city took note. "Loving and serving attract attention," says Wilson. "Acting like Jesus is the best marketing you can do."
Strangely, the message of the book is aimed primarily at Christians who seem to expect the life of faith to suit the American dream. "Christianity kind of got turned into a way to satisfy our self-centred, ego-driven, materialistic world," says Wilson. So when things go wrong, the weak foundations of this faith are shattered. People are looking for a Plan B.
"It's not always easy to see God in these situations," he says. "But we need to believe that God is most powerfully present even when He is most apparently absent. We are called to look for Him, even in the midst of darkness."
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