Bryan is the Lead Pastor of Anchor Church (Tacoma, WA), a community imperfect Jesus-followers with a growing number of congregations around Washington’s south sound.
He’s currently working on a memoir-forward, spiritual formation rich book for church-planters and other “starters.” It’s called Terrible Beauty.
Anchor Church
A community of imperfect Jesus-followers living for the good of Tacoma and the greater south sound.
Bryan’s family and a small cadre planted it in 2018 with the hope that it might be both a safe harbor and a sending base for those on their way to Jesus and others already following him.
Terrible Beauty
(how to plant a church without self-destructing)
Terrible Beauty: How to Plant a Church Without Self-Destructing unearths the common but often not shared experiences of church planting. With equal parts candor and humor, it charts the journey of church planting from conception to launch with prose that is both story-centric and consistently practical.
Every church planter wrestles with the same questions:
Am I talented enough?
Good enough?
Cool enough?
Is God really in this?
What if I’m wrong?
What if we can’t raise the money we need?
How do I avoid selling out?
Am I turning into a jerk?
When am I going to get to rest?
How do I avoid killing my marriage while trying to bring life to a church?
Through a memoir-forward approach, Halferty shares a balance of hard-earned wisdom and practical ideas from the journey of planting Anchor Church in Tacoma, Washington. Halferty’s story is rife with self-doubt and marital challenges that emerge from the uncertainty of the early stages of church planting. He probes into the psyche and spiritual life of a church planter at all of the vital intervals along the path to launching the church.
Halferty’s discovery is that church planting is a laboratory for spiritual formation. Church planting uniquely reveals the need for the nearness of God in the process of fundraising, loving neighbors, and community formation.
While offering eye-blinking honesty about personal weaknesses and missteps, Halferty is buoyant with hope. Terrible Beauty invites readers to honest self-reflection and a journey toward wisdom and spiritual growth and away from bravado and self- reliance. Halferty, in the end, offers the reader a practical guide for church planting, but even more, a refreshing reminder of the humiliating hilarity of human limits and the power and generosity of God.
