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Hatch-a-thon Alumni in the News!

November 21, 2019 by Ministry Incubators

It’s so exciting to see Hatch-a-thon alumni doing amazing things throughout the US, and to see their hatchling ventures flying!

Pastor Brent Raska and Burning Bush Brewery

Pastor Brent Raska, former pastor of a Chicago-area Presbyterian congregation, recently made the news with his new venture, Burning Bush Brewery, opening later this winter on Chicago’s North Rockwell Street in Lincoln Square.

The blockclubchicago.org post says, “Though operating a brewery is a career change for the pastor, he said Burning Bush will build community much like a church does. He hopes to partner with local nonprofits and community groups to host coat drives, fundraisers and fellowship.”

Rev. Meredith Mills and Gastrochurch

The Rev. Meredith Mills, pastor at Westminster United Methodist Church in Houston, TX, received coverage by the Houston Chronicle for her work with Gastrochurch.

Rev. Mills conceptualized Gastrochurch—dinner gatherings where the food supports the theological theme for the evening—as an intentionally created “space where a range of guests could come, somewhere outside of church walls, and talk about spirituality,” and to be “’church’ for people who didn’t fit in at a traditional setting.”

Congratulations to both!

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Client Story, entrepreneurship, Hatch-a-thon, Hatch-a-thon alumni, missional enterprise, missional entrepreneurs, missional innovation

WonderSpace: A Journey of “Finding,” Not “Founding”

March 19, 2019 by Stephanie Freemyer

We’re excited to introduce you to Stephanie Freemyer, whose team incubated the idea of an indoor play space called WonderSpace as participants in one of our 2018 Hatch-a-thons! Stephanie hails from Marion, IN and also serves as Children’s Ministry Director at College Wesleyan Church. For more info on WonderSpace, visit its Facebook page or read this Marion Chronicle Tribune article.
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I call myself a finder, and not a founder. Why? Because this whole thing was an idea I sort of stumbled into. In March of 2018, with just a hunch about the importance of indoor play spaces and the dream to see families united, two friends and I brought a very vague idea to the Hatch-a-thon, an event designed to launch new social enterprises. But even after a couple days of innovative design thinking and coaching, we were stuck. We were struggling to answer the questions, and when we did finally work out a response to one of the prompts, the room applauded for us because they knew we were struggling, too. It was a stretching and humbling experience.

We realized that we were stuck, which is why I think we gave up trying to think of good ideas, left the conference, and went to a dumpster to collect cardboard boxes. We had talked and strategized so much about play, we decided that we needed to see it in action. We gathered boxes from dumpsters and attics and brought them home to the real founders of WonderSpace: our kids.

We turned our idea over to the play experts and let them lead us. At first, we stood back and watched them reimagine the boxes. But they wanted to take us with them, so we followed—climbing, crawling, and creating along with them. Sure, we all got lice from the boxes we pulled out of the dumpsters for our experiment… and sure, we had a huge mess to clean up in the living room afterwards (read: pulling scraps of cardboard and tape off the carpet for weeks), but in the end my oldest son declared, “Mom, I want to keep this forever!” I believe it was in this moment that WonderSpace was found. I know my son didn’t mean that he wanted to keep the cardboard forever, and he certainly didn’t mean he wanted to keep the lice… so what was it that he wanted to keep forever? He wanted to keep the same thing I wanted to keep—a sense of wonder and togetherness.

This became my hope for WonderSpace: to provide a place for family formation—that long after the materials are recycled, there remains a long-lasting impact on our children, families, and community from the play we experience together.

Driven by a desire for all children to experience the play, togetherness, and laughter my family experienced that night, I spent the next three months jumping through every hoop and pushing open every door I could find. Honestly, I raced down a lot of paths that kept me super busy and overwhelmed and led nowhere, but they weren’t needless paths. I learned about a lot of things that wouldn’t work in this season. I even revisited doors I had already tried only to have many of them shut all over again. But not all of them slammed shut. I went back to a door that I had tried before to find that this time was different. This time, when I knocked at the doors of a local church in Grant County, it swung wide open. In fact, the door swung open so wide that WonderSpace instantly went from $500 to the potential of $75,000 if we could raise the funds to match their gift. This support is what launched WonderSpace into reality. With money, support, and a church willing to take a risk with us, WonderSpace could begin exploring, researching, and developing play that would unite families and our community.

Fast forward to March of 2019. WonderSpace now has the support not only of one local church, but of other local churches in the area as well. The Community Foundation of Grant County has awarded us a grant along with two other anonymous foundations. Because we don’t have funding yet to buy a permanent building, we have designed 3 mobile play exhibits that can be packed into a 26-foot moving truck and moved around the city for “pop up play events.” We have opened WonderSpace to the community twice (once in a church and second in a school gymnasium) and have already experienced playing with over 400 people from Grant County. I have met so many new people in our city in these past 12 months and have become friends with many. Even in the designing phase, WonderSpace is doing exactly what we had hoped! We’re building friendships, meeting our neighbors, and creating a sense of togetherness.

I call myself a finder because this journey honestly has been one of us finding the next step and taking it. God has orchestrated so much of this journey that I couldn’t even detail to you how to do what we’ve done. Growing up my dad often quoted, “It’s all of Christ and nothing of myself.” That phrase keeps playing over in my mind as we see WonderSpace take shape. This isn’t happening because of what we’ve done, it’s happening because of what God is doing. Recently I was asked, “what about God’s character surprises you?” I know God is just, I know God is creative. I’ve witnessed God as compassionate and loving. However, I’ve never thought of God as playful. But the ways in which God is providing all our needs for WonderSpace causes me to pause and wonder for myself, “what is it about play that God cares so much about? How is God made known through play?”

Through prayer and through the relationships WonderSpace is making, I’m going to keep finding for WonderSpace: finding the next grant, finding the next door, finding the next relationship or friend, finding the next exhibit that unites our community and families in play. Because in finding WonderSpace, I am finding God.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Design Thinking, Hatch-a-thon, indoor play space, innovation, missional entrepreneurs, missional innovation, play, strategy

Ever Wonder What a Hatchathon Actually Is?

December 21, 2017 by Ministry Incubators

If you have heard us talking about “Hatchathon” all over the place but don’t really know what it is, here is a presentation that Kenda made for the upcoming Hatchathon with the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. It explains a little bit what you can expect if you are able to attend one of these events. You can find our upcoming events (including a few Hatchathons), on our events page.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Events, Hatch-a-thon, Missional

Don’t Miss Out – Upcoming Events

November 17, 2017 by Ministry Incubators

Photo by Tim Napier

We have a number of events coming up in the next few months, and we want to make sure you know before they fill up!

On January 20th we have another Taste and See event with the Baltimore Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. If you missed out on the last one, it is a great opportunity to get a “taste” of missional entrepreneurship! It will help you start thinking about innovative ways to engage your community. You can find out more about this event here! Can’t make the one in January? Can’t make the event in January? We are planning another one for February, so stay tuned for more details about that events!

February 8-10, we are holding a Hatchathon with the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. We do not have many Hatchathons that are open to the public, so if you have a missional idea that you are just waiting to “hatch,” this is your chance spend a few days with Mark DeVries, Kenda Creasy Dean and Brenda Bertrand clarifying your vision, goals, and funding. After the Hatchathon, you will have what you need to start turning your big idea into reality. You can find out more information and register for the Hatchathon here!

We have a number of other events in the works, so be sure to sign up for our news and updates to stay on top of what is happening!

 

KEEP ME UP TO DATE!

 

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Events, Hatch-a-thon

Processing Harvey

October 19, 2017 by Meredith Mills

This week’s blog post is from Meredith Mills, a 2015 Hatch-a-thon participant who started a great ministry called gastrochurch based in Houston, Texas. She was kind enough to write a post that talks about her experience with a non-traditional ministry in the midst of Hurricane Harvey.

Gastrochurch is not a normal church. We don’t have a building. We don’t meet on Sundays, or even every week. And we don’t really have “members.” We are a community of church members and church-haters, deeply Christian and nominally Christian, left, right, and everything in between. The only thing committed gastrochurch people have in common with each other is a desire to connect, to talk about their souls on a level deeper than small talk. (That’s actually one of our hashtags…#smalltalksucks.)

So when Harvey struck Houston, I felt more than a little guilty that I wasn’t with one of the traditional churches shouldering the burden of the rescue and recovery efforts. Colleagues of mine were literally rescued from their roofs by helicopter, and then spent weeks on end just trying to get their heads above water as we all to wrap our heads around the extent of this catastrophe. Everyone had a neighbor who needed help; everyone had a homeless friend; everyone knew someone who lost everything. Even now, a couple months later, there are still people living in tents in their backyards. The piles of trash on sidewalks are noticeably smaller, but they are still there. “Normal” is redefined, and still a long way off.

Gastrochurch folks worked their tails off like the rest of the city. Those who are members of local churches worked alongside those congregations to run shelters and distribute supplies. Others spent days mucking and gutting neighbors’ (or their own) houses. When we finally had a gathering two weeks after Harvey, everyone was exhausted.

Gastrochurch gatherings take place in the evening, over a meal. It feels a bit like a pop-up restaurant. We bring tables with real tablecloths and real plates, put candles on the tables, and pray for each person before they arrive. Our core value—the one that outweighs all others—is hospitality.

Every evening has a theme, which guides the menu, the reflections, and—most importantly—the table conversation. When Harvey hit, we scrapped all previous plans and chose a new theme: comfort food. We wanted to allow people a chance to find some spiritual and physical comfort while processing their feelings, experiences, questions, and grief.

The gatherings go like this: people sit in tables of about six. They get three courses of a meal, served family-style. With each course, I give a brief reflection, leading up to a discussion question for the table. The questions are all intentionally probing. (Remember, #smalltalksucks.) The meal and conversation take about an hour and a half, and then we close with an optional time of communion and prayer.

The first discussion question was simply to tell their Harvey story. Some had seen their homes destroyed. Some had the survivor’s guilt of sitting in an air-conditioned apartment for a four days binge-watching Netflix because they couldn’t leave their homes. Some had been out of town and spent the four days glued to the television, drowning in their own feelings of helplessness.

The second question was intended to deepen the conversation. I talked about Job, and the universal human experience of undergoing suffering that is in no way your fault. There are always, it seems, terrible friends offering terrible spiritual advice. (“God won’t give you more than you can handle!”) And there is also the desire—probably universally rooted in the human heart—to demand answers. We want meaning. We want God to explain why this happened. We may even want God to answer for seeming crimes against humanity. And so, the second question was this: “If you could ask God anything you wanted about this crisis or any other, what would it be?”

People began to open up in different ways. Some talked about how guilty and helpless they felt not having any damage themselves. Some talked about how inspired they were by how the community responded, that it was the first time they felt truly proud of Houston. One person said he just wanted to know if there was a reason behind all of it. Did God do this to bring people together? Or does God have a reason for disasters like this? Or is God even directly responsible? Another person said he realized it was the first time in his life he didn’t have a question for God: “This whole experience has been about moving from a place of demanding answers to a place of trust. I’m not questioning anymore.”

One participant told me that everyone at her table had the same question: why me? Either why did my house get flooded? Or why was I fine while my neighbors a block away were devastated? She said, “Everyone’s relationship with God is so personal, and they all bring it to the table. Everyone’s got to figure that relationship out for themselves. Nobody can come and fix it for them.”

The final question moved toward the question of resolution. I remarked that Job never gets answers, he gets experience. He gets an overpowering experience of the presence of God, one that is remarkably reminiscent of a powerful storm. And somehow that experience of the presence of God changes him. Even before he gets everything restored, Job comes to a place where his soul is quieted because he has seen God. Final question: “What would a resolution to your suffering look like?”

I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but the final point summarizes what gastrochurch is all about. People don’t usually get answers, they get an experience. They get to share a part of their souls, and hear a part of someone else’s. Some people stay with the questions, others don’t. We don’t have strict rules, just an invitation to talk about something more meaningful than the weather. Each table takes its own journey, and two tables rarely journey in the same direction. Our theory is that most people are looking for something far deeper than answers anyway.

As the evening drew to a close, I invited all who chose to join me inside for prayer and communion. We usually share communion in silence, but tonight someone had shown up with a guitar. We passed bread and wine around the room while singing—whether truthfully or not—it is well, it is well with my soul. When the time came to leave, I held up my hands for the final blessing:

May you go in 

May you go in 

May you go in love.

May you go with trust that you are not alone.

May you go with the faith that God is good.

May you go with knowing that while it is utterly false that everything on earth is alright,

it is entirely true that one day all things shall be made well.

May you go with the hope of the eternal sunrise ever before you

May you go with the courage of God’s hospitality within you

May you go with irrational peace of Christ around you

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Hatch-a-thon

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