I’m HYPED About 4 Changes at Tampa Underground in 2019
and why you should be too…
It has been a remarkable year for the Underground, full of microchurch innovation and creativity as our community continues to follow Jesus in mission all over Tampa. We have empowered 41 new microchurches this year, now saturating the city with 220 creative expressions of the church proclaiming and demonstrating the good news of the Kingdom. In 2018 we provided office space for nearly 30 microchurches, event space for 410 unique ministry events, 100 custom media designs, financial services for 43 microchurches, missional coaching for 95% of our microchurch leaders, over 40 leaders of color developed through the Roots Project, 50 unique platforms for training, and over 200 patients received access to free health care services through the Free Clinic.
Through it all, 2018 has been a year of listening to Jesus about the future of our collective work. The Underground started with a dream of 100 microchurches in Tampa, which we quietly surpassed in 2014, and then 200 microchurches, which we quietly surpassed in 2017. This year was a year without a dream, as we waited for the voice of the Lord to guide us. Our staff team and elders have been listening, learning, surveying, and discerning the voice of God for the future of the Underground. By God’s grace we hope to empower 600 microchurch dreams and journey with 150 leaders toward ordination by 2025. This vision communicates our hope to become a deep and wide city network. We still want to multiply creative microchurches all over the city (wide), but we want to journey with every leader in community toward mature and persevering leadership (deep). We aren’t just a startup service, we’re a missionary family.
We are making a few shifts in 2019 to run with God toward that future:
- Free Clinic Expanding Counseling and Care services for leaders
Many of our leaders are eclipsing seven to ten years of sacrificial microchurch life and incarnational ministry. For the first few years of any missionary’s journey, services like media, finance, and facilities can be critical to helping a dream get off the ground, but coaching, training, pastoral care and counseling are essential to the perseverance of missionary life over the long haul. The Free Clinic is significantly expanding a new counseling and care arm of their services, which will offer preventative care, prayer ministry, and specialized counseling for leaders and those we serve.
2. From Crucible to Catalyst
Through a listening survey of our leaders, we discovered a growing experience of loneliness and weariness in our community of microchurch missionaries. This caused us to wonder how to provide more spaces for relational connection between leaders, and spaces for public celebration of what God is doing in the city. We already gather as a community of leaders on Sunday morning, but that event is not regularly designed to be relational or celebratory. So we are rolling out a new Sunday morning gathering called Catalyst, which will create room for mutual encouragement, missionary peers, and celebrating all that God is doing.
3. Minority Leadership Fund
Our ambitions always outrun the giving capacity of our local community, so we continue to innovate our economic model. One piece of that innovation is leaning more on network staff engaging in personal fundraising. The downside of leaning on a traditional western personal fundraising strategy is that strategy contains built in disadvantages for leaders of color (here’s a good starting resource to learn why). Any organization choosing to lean on that strategy must simultaneously design infrastructure to counterbalance those built in racial inequities in order to preserve multiethnic shared power and shared voice at the table of the organization. We are starting a minority leadership fund in our budget, allocating nearly $50k to subsidize the personal support of our staff of color, and hoping to grow that fund to $200k by 2025 to be a city wide fund for microchurch leaders of color.
4. New Staff Joining the #squad
You would think that tiny salaries, fundraising, and no benefits would make it difficult to find and hire strong and talented leaders, but I’m learning more and more that the Underground compensates staff on an entirely different set of metrics. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a priority for me to figure out how to pay each of them closer to what they deserve, but they don’t seem to mind. Empowering and serving hundreds of missionaries, receiving their stories, helping them flourish, it all fills our cups in a way that life insurance can’t. So we keep adding new servants to the service platform every year. George Wood is coming on to direct the counseling and care expansion of the Free Clinic. Marcus Ramsay, a musical mad scientist, is joining the team part time to coordinate corporate worship at any of our events. Tomy Wilkerson is joining the team to apply his love and passion for theology to cultivate and review some of our written and public content. Finally, Brianna Wilkerson is joining the team as Managing Director, providing supervision, development, and care for the executive team while optimizing and professionalizing some of our systems.
Among all of the exciting shifts at the Underground in 2019, perhaps the only downside is seeing off the Sanders family, along with Stacy Gaskins and Alisa Rehn, to Ireland in January. Brian went house to house, meeting to meeting back in 2006 asking dozens of local missionaries “what if?”, sharing a dream, and he’s spent the last 12 years giving everything to see our network grow and flourish. Once upon a time, Brian was the media team, and the finance team, and the coaching team. He has negotiated every contract, project managed every Hub, designed every budget, all while faithfully leading a microchurch. He is a servant to the core. It’s given me an entirely new respect for the early church in Antioch, now that we too are being asked by Jesus to give away some of our best people to His bigger plans in the world. But as we always do, we will say yes to Jesus, full of trust in the midst of hard departures, full of gratitude for the ways God has used Brian in our movement, and full of faith for the future of our movement and for what God has in store for Ireland through this team.
