[May-Lynn shares the vision, principles and
unique challenges of Mosaic Boston including a very transparent conversation
about her personal transformation, the importance of creativity, community,
and relationships within a church-planting team.]
Listen to May-Lynn’s
talk (MP3 file, 24 minutes)
RK: The newest church on the block is Mosaic Boston.
May-Lynn is working with Joseph Kim and a team that is starting Mosaic Boston.
It meets over at the Huntington Ave YMCA. And, again, I think that their
vision is a little bit different than what we have heard already. [It’s] a
church plant out of High Rock in Somerville. So thank you so much,
May-Lynn.
MC: It’s an honor to be here. I am
especially thankful to be among those who I would consider to be modern-day
heroes of the faith.
Cookie cutters and contextualization
When we first
started, everybody wanted a cookie cutter form. How do I do this? How do I
start a church? How do I reach the community? We want a recipe, a how-to list
on what to do. But as you can tell from Matt’s church and Ismail’s church,
it’s all dependent on who you are trying to reach. Mosaic LA (Los Angeles) has taught us that
every city has its own stronghold. Every suburb or town has its own strengths
and weaknesses. And to be incarnate is to be Jesus in that group. And
so, there is no one set way to set up a church. But, I guess, I liken it unto
parenthood, where you just have to pray that by the grace of God he will give
you the wisdom in time to do it.
A vision statement
With that, we have a vision
statement. We are called to be a movement of expanding communities that serve
Boston and the world as gospel renewal-agents in personal spirituality,
relationships, the arts, and urban healing. Like Ismail, we don’t have any
desire to be a megachurch or “giga-church.” But, we want to be a continually
expanding community in the city of Boston and to the world.
Membership and the danger of a consumer mentality
Like
I said earlier, Rachel and I are on staff. We are unpaid. Unlike Rachel, I do
not have a seminary degree. I also have a fulltime job. So I am here as part
of the laity. We use the term “staff,” because we want to redefine what church
membership is. The term “member,” as you know from American Express, has its
privileges. There is a sense of entitlement. So we want to redefine people’s
understanding of membership so that when you come to church, you realize it’s
not about you. It’s not about whether or not a church can meet your needs or
about how you can be satisfied. We are changing their mentality of membership
to service; turning from becoming a consumer to a servant. So when you say
“staff” it is immediately outward looking. So that is something that we want
to do intentionally and how we want to redefine.
The stigma of religion and the power of the gospel
Our
target area is the Fenway community of Boston. And there’s a huge stigma to
church. There’s a huge stigma to religion. And we want to change that. And so
we want to help them understand that its about Christ and community. Because,
again, I want to reiterate our belief that, as Ismail said, “It is the power
of the gospel.” There is power and transformation in relationships. The
reflection of Christ in people is what is going to win people.
Believing and caring
We can’t change what people
believe until we change what people care about. And so what we are trying to
set up is, instead of going out as lone rangers into a community like some
missionaries do, we are saying, let’s go out and bring the people into the
community. And seeing the way we know Jesus, how we interact in love, reflects
the gospel to change and transformation. And in time, as they hang out with
us, having coffee, doing something together, they say, “These are my friends
and they call themselves Christians and they happen to go to church. Well, I
guess as long as all of them are my friends, I might as well go.” It’s
seamless in terms of how we are trying to win them. We want to emphasize with
them that church is not programmatic, but it is the power of relationships.
Developing a vocabulary
So particularly, how we name
things, like with our small groups, we call them “community groups.” We don’t
call them Bible classes. Once again, because it is outward focused. We try to
move away from the Christianese. We try not to use terms like “non-Christian”
and “non-believer.” That already says you are not and I am.
We try to say “unchurched” and encourage people to be who they are. We invite
them to events in terms of their likes. It’s outside church life. We are
trying to invite them into our community—to our daily living—to be real with
the struggles we have and to live authentic lives. That it’s not always all
that great, but what keeps us going is the gospel and the life of Jesus
Christ.
A place of convergence
So we encourage
people to move into that area [Boston’s Fenway]. You know, Boston is very
transient. The whole world comes to Boston. People from different parts of the
world come to do research, to study and live. This is a missionary field. We
particularly chose the YMCA because it is a neutral place. It is the
Huntington Ave Y, right across the street from a hospital. It’s a convergence
of many different types of people. You have the hospitals, which are
infiltrated with “post docs,” “brainiacs,” people that are doing amazing
research. Then you have Berklee (College of Music) and New England
Conservatory, so you got the music and the artsy people in that area. And then
right behind it you have Mission Hill. So we wanted to bring all these people
together and we planted it right there. We wanted it to be a neutral place
’cause we didn’t want it to be about a church building or institution. But
it’s about a community. And the YMCA is a neutral place where people would
feel comfortable. Eventually we would like to spread out and go into different
places. Our community groups are in homes where the people are living.
Spirituality, creativity, and creating community
One of
the events, which have really been successful, are our “house concerts.” One
of our core values is natural creativity. Creativity is the natural result of
spirituality that God does as a creator God and a beautiful God, that when
artists create, they are tapping into the divine. So we have a bunch of
churches that emphasize the arts but are weak in theology, and yet churches
that are strong in theology and weak in the arts. But we [are saying], “Why
can’t these two things be married?” So in our house concerts, we try and do
that. Similar to what Matthew was doing with their music night, we invite
visual artists to display their work and performers to actually come and
perform, just to celebrate what they do. We particularly invite those that
don’t have a church or know Jesus Christ because we want to celebrate what
they do, to invest in people who are willing to stake their life on a passion.
And amazingly, if they were to become Christians, would just transform the
world. But we don’t want to do a bait and switch, so we don’t preach the
gospel there. We don’t say we are a church. We want to build relationships
with these people and tap into what they do and what they love to do. Because
if we are excited about what they do, then they feel like, “Wow! I am
special.” And that’s why we want to go out and say, “God loves you a lot!” So
our house concerts are usually every quarter. Rachel is heading that up
because she is very artistic. And we do it in a house because we want to
celebrate the actual art. If we were to do it in a performance setting,
there’s like this “American Idol” competition, where we are afraid something
bad will happen, where we want to upstage the next in competition. But once
again, we want to focus on a Christ-centered community [setting] the culture
of what a great party is.
Party
One church planter said. “To grow community you
have to be known to throw great parties.” So we want to start throwing great
parties, but not about alcohol, not about a particular person or star, but
about the community. As a result of that, the performers actually became
friends. A few weeks later, during July 4th, [we had] a little barbeque and
watched the fireworks on the Esplanade. But two of the musicians just sat down
and started playing music together and they had a little group and a little
audience gathered together. And so that was exciting, because we were starting
to network and build community. So that is something that we are doing in
terms of outreach. We don’t necessarily have a program, because we want set
that tone of not being a cookie-cutter type of church.
Inside
community: gifts, one another, and warfare
In terms of the
community inward, let me share just a little of how we started. Originally,
there were those who broke off with us from our mother church of High Rock. So
that became our core leadership team, and that was about eight people. So
after a while, we were [thinking], eight people is too many. So in terms of
how you start a church plant, on how you streamline, probably having four or
five would be nice. And that’s kind of what evolved, in terms of being on the
same page, in terms of gathering our leadership team. And how we did that was
through our strength-based endeavor. So what our pastors did was, we took
strength-based tests. I’m not sure if you are familiar with it. It’s available
online, called “StrengthsQuest”
and it’s somewhat similar to Myers-Briggs, but it was created by Christians
for people in ministry. The benefit is twofold. It helped build awareness
among ourselves about strengths and weaknesses, but specifically what their
gift was in terms of ministry. Because, you don’t want to [say], “Ok, an
evangelism group, let’s have that,” and plug people in, [and] “Ok, we need a
discipleship group. So let’s plug people in there.” We want a ministry where
it is about that person. What are you passionate about? What brings
you to life? What would you love to do? Because, when you are naturally
passionate about [what you are doing], that’s what will bring people. Anyway,
so we wanted to tap into everybody’s strengths. Well, that’s one aspect of how
that helped encourage the formation of this ministry.
[www.StrengthsQuest.com: StrengthsQuest
is a program from The Gallup Organization that focuses students on strengths
rather than weaknesses.]
The second was how to relate to one another, because in the process of
church planting, you learn a lot about yourself and other people in community.
[In our team we have] a way of crashing through relationships and you see your
worst and your best when they come out, and we realize that we judge one
another by our strengths and our weaknesses. So if [there is] something I can
do naturally, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. But for someone who
doesn’t do that, I think, what is wrong with them? So there’s natural friction
there. But if I were to realize that this is someone’s strength; that she is
compassionate and that she can feel and talk deeply with someone for long
hours of conversation, that is her strength. And the fact that she doesn’t
like big gatherings is not a weakness. But I’m like, it seems to be a
weakness, because I like big crowds—just give me a microphone! So in terms of
learning, the strength-based test is really helpful to really learn to love
one another and enculturating community as we enter into relationship with one
another.
Warfare
One of the aspects of church planting is
warfare. Before we started meeting at the YMCA, a few of us went
prayer-walking up and down Huntington, because you know the Christian Science
Center is there, you know that huge monument there. There is a lot of warfare
here in Boston. [There are] some strongholds that we know of and others that
we still don’t know of. And we are still very naïve in terms of what we do out
there. But in terms of how the Lord is working, he just continues to give us
grace. We just started in April [2005]. For many of us, the honeymoon stage is
over. And we are finding it to be a difficult time. We are finding that our
fuses are shorter with one another. We are less gracious. There are a lot of
difficult things going on in people’s individual lives. Our associate pastor
is stricken with some type of rheumatoid arthritis. And he is disabled from
being able to sit and stand and rest for long periods of time. He’s only been
able to find out that it is rheumatoid arthritis just a couple of months ago.
Our lead pastor is Canadian and his visa was due up in October. We didn’t have
our 501(c)3 until [the] last week in September. We were able to sponsor him
literally hours before they were to go to the border and get his visa and come
back. 
I could just go on and on. I think the hunter is most successful when the
prey doesn’t know he is there. So we are mindful that he is at work, but we
don’t know where he will strike, but we are mindful. A lot of times we realize
that he is trying to divide along relationships. They are subtle ways, sowing
seeds of discontentment. We all have our ideas as to what we want church to
be. And we come to the table and say, “This is how it is,” and we just clash
all the time. So that is interesting.
Community affirmation
Two more points about the
strength-based test. We actually had the whole staff do that. And we had a
feedback time. Everyone had to take the test and then we had a meeting where
we would actually use [the results] as a community to affirm. Because it’s one
thing to say, “I have the gift of ___,” but then someone else would say, “No,
you don’t.” It’s important for the community to affirm what you are
good at, not only what you believe. So we used that time to take the
feedback and actually have each person write a little paragraph of what they
thought was their strength. So I would, for example, have thirteen paragraphs
about myself, saying what they thought I would be best to be publicly serving
as. And that was a really great time.
Three buckets of ministry
And from that, we divided
three buckets in ministry: the building out, the building on, and the building
up. Building up is more of the spiritual edification group that deals
with the counseling [and] discipleship. The building on are the
logistical, or administrative stuff of worship—using sound equipment, and the
building. Building out, which is our going out. They aren’t to be all
inclusive. They obviously all overlap. And you only have thirteen people on
staff, so you all do a little bit of everything. But that helps in learning.
And we are tapping into people’s strengths. And that’s what we want to do.
There are a lot of churches that are focusing on eliminating the negative, in
a remediation type of thing, but we want to focus on what works, what
interests you, what unleashes you to do what is great. And that’s what we want
to do.
Personal transformation: He’s starting a church in us
first
Personally—I want to end with this again—I’m just a nobody
and I want to tell anybody about somebody that can save your life.
The Lord, in terms of using us as a group, I think what he is teaching us
is that he wants to change us personally. He wants to start a church and he
wants to start it in us. That it’s not so much about working through us—he
wants to work in us. I think, for me personally, this is very difficult. I
have never been more rebuked than I have been in the last few months. And I
welcome that. And it has been great. But I never thought that I could have
stepped on so many toes, to such a degree, with so many people. And for them
to come back and say, “You know, May-Lynn, I don’t think so!” or so
many [? times/people] in my face. It has been humbling, but I think that all
of our weaknesses are surfacing. But the thing is, through that, the gospel is
[working]. And that is how we are trying to send that message out, of
transformational change.
So why, at Mosaic Boston, are we called? Because we are a broken,
fragmented people. We operate under the belief that Jesus Christ wants to
bring healing into our lives. And [our lives] as broken pieces of glass are
only beautiful when they are placed together in a way to reflect the light and
glory of an awesome God.
[“X” refers to members of the audience]
X: I missed the distinction between members and
staff.
MC: Members are the staff.
X:
When do you meet?
MC: We meet in the morning 10:45. We
researched and discovered that people are most on time at quarter hours as
opposed to just on the hour.
X: [A question regarding the
size of the group]
MC: So about 20-25 people are involved.
The success of growing a group is food-free food and parking. So we are
working to negotiate free parking across the street and we have food on
Sundays after church. Everybody wants food and just a time to chat.
X: What percent of your group is
Asian?
MC: Right now, it’s a little bit high, because
we’re all friends. It’s about 90%. But we are specifically trying to invite
non-Asian leadership up front so it becomes truly a
mosaic.
SE: Do you worship in
English?
MC: English? Yes, it’s all in
English.
X: [a similar question regarding language
directed to Ismail]
IP: All in Portuguese, but we also
have simultaneous translation because we have six or seven
Americans.
X: [a question regarding the church schedule of
Mosaic Boston]
MC: Yes we do have community groups on
Wednesday nights. We have one that just broke off. We have one in Somerville
and we have prayer meeting on Tuesday mornings.
Our leadership meeting is
at 6 [a.m.] on Fridays. As young adults, we don’t want to sacrifice sleep,
[but] if our target is the night time, then we want to leave those times
available. Plus, we find that our meetings are less emotion and more
efficient.
Thank you.
Home > Emmanuel Research Review > Issue No. 13 > > May-Lynn
Chang