Oct
26
2011

Ministry Systems: Strategy Implementation

An article by Matt

Last week I asked the question “what will be different in the life of someone attending your church five years from now?”

As a youth pastor, as a church planter, and in each of the ministries that I have served in, this is the question that I have asked as I have started to develop our ministry strategy. In the case of the students and children of the church that I served in north Jersey, we aimed to develop a healthy understanding of authentic Christ-centered community, and instill a life-long desire for that community in their lives. Our strategy, both for children and students, relied on small groups to do the majority of the discipling of our students. As I hear back from former students through the years I am excited to learn how many of them are continuing to grow in their faith, and leading, or taking part in, a Christ-centered small group.

While in Baltimore, we were highly intentional about serving the neighborhoods that surrounded us. We pursued this through a neighborhood based small group strategy (noticing a pattern?) and through focusing our service efforts on a local elementary school. Through our work we were able to repaint the elementary school (at no cost to the city), reclaim play areas that had been too dangerous to be used, were invited in to administer and staff the school’s food bank, and were invited to develop relationships with the school’s families. We were also able to establish a presence in a recreation center that shared the school building. Through our small groups, and our work in the school, we were able to see a number of people come to know Jesus, and begin to pursue him more fully.

In each of these cases, we started off by asking ourselves about what the outcome of our ministry would look like:

In New Jersey, where a vast majority of our students would be leaving the area for college, we wanted our students to embrace faith for themselves, and understand how to pursue their faith in Christ outside of their parent’s home. The small group model helped them learn of their need for community, allowed them the opportunity to wrestle with their faith in a safe environment, and helped them to realize the value of mentors in their lives.
In Baltimore, we wanted to see two very different communities reconciled with God and one another. To do this we tapped into the strengths and needs of both communities, and brought them together to serve the local children. It is amazing what happens when people realize that you want to see their children succeed, and are willing to invest your time and energy into that. Our work with the schools gave us an incredible amount of access into the lives of the area’s families, and cool things resulted.

So, how did we make this work? I am convinced that three things need to happen, to fully make a strategy work:

Communication. Communication is a big deal. Know what to, and what not to communicate is key to your ability to cast vision, and lead people well as you work towards implementing your vision. Develop an intentional communication strategy that will allow you to properly focus people’s attention on your most important ministries. One of the biggest mistakes I see churches making in this area is to use the Sunday service as their opportunity to present a laundry list of programs to their people. I would highly suggest communicating one, at most two, key ministry opportunities each week and then referring people to their bulletins. Communicating the needs of your most important strategic ministry focus at the same time you are inviting people to bingo night will cause things to get lost in the noise.
Team Development. Building the team to implement your ministry is key. Go slow on this, make sure that you have the right people on the bus, in the right seats (I know, I know, but I love Jim Collins). Ensuring that the people that you are relying on to make your vision a reality is something worth taking your time on… and investing your resources into. I tend to believe that most churches should be spending more on volunteer development and appreciation, equip your team well and you will be amazed by what they can do.
Being Flexibly Focused. Dwight Eisenhower said “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” He might as well have been talking about ministry. Unexpected crisis will pop up, things will go differently than expected, and people will come down with the flu. Keep your focus on what is important to your ministry, and allow for a little flex if you need to shift methods. This flexibility, combined with your earlier preparation will not only prevent you from ripping your hair out, but it may lead to finding better ways to pursue your vision.

When developing and implementing strategies in YOUR ministry, what has made YOU successful?

http://www.facebook.com/RobertFBarnes Robert Barnes

For our church (Dayspring Church, PCA, Spring Hill FL), four years ago, we were a church that needed a renewing work of God, generally speaking. There was a need for God to strip away programs and staff and all non-essentials, and for him to strip away my unbiblical expectations and immature strategies I’d brought to the ministry. That hurt. A lot.

We now have a very simple church, modeling mercy ministry to the community, and a growing reliance on God’s promises toward us. We discover those in the “means of grace”–preaching, praise, public prayer, public reading of Scripture, humble repentance, the sacraments. We focus not on religious church-directed action during the week, but on family units, faith strengthened, loving those in and around their homes. Bringing beauty, goodness, truth to their home and their neighborhood, that regularly brings new people into our church, where they meet the Jesus they’ve seen reflected in the lives and conversations of their new friends. And we support missionaries who are doing the same.

The main thing that brings people to the church is, in our experience, verse-by-verse expository preaching. They can’t find it anywhere else. But then they find more. Weekly communion grows on them. Family-integrated worship (no distinct children’s ministries, children’s needs and children service opportunities intentionally put in every aspect of the church life) grows on them.

It’s inexpensive, simple, God-centered, biblical, liturgical, historical, reformed, yet relevant because while it’s God-centered but communicated by flesh on flesh, knee to knee relationships.

Would this work in a large church? We are sub-100.

Would this work in an urban setting, where there is need for collaboration (and therefore administration) due to the gushing blood out the wounds of the culture?

Would this work with Hispanics/other cultural settings?

Would this work in a church plant?

Would this work with limited leadership, or with a pastor who was a specialist who can only preach/pray/counsel?

Would it work with a distinctly contemporary flair, with music and a soul patch and a cool web site?

I don’t know. But God is using this simple model to change us, change me.

http://www.churchthought.com Matt Steen

Robert, thanks for sharing this! I think your questions remind us of the importance of context in all of this, and while I personally think that a soul patch makes everything work far better (just wish I could grow one) what I appreciate about what you write is that you know what is working in your context, with your crowd, and with your particular skill set and you are chasing after it… without declaring it to be The Model.

Seriously, thank you for sharing this, and thank you for serving the Kingdom in sunny Florida.

http://www.facebook.com/RobertFBarnes Robert Barnes

I can grow a soul patch, and I can lead a hip set of worship songs. From electric guitar, even! But in my situation, that’s not what we need.

On one hand, you are right and I was trying to say that what we are doing is not The Model. I don’t believe The Model is found distinctly set forth in Scripture. I believe The Model-thinking is the product of post-WW2 thinking, where the common man in America became aware of world-wide-paradigms and ideas that could either kill you or help you. They decided, by and large, to try and be helpful, while getting rich at the same time.

But I would, on the other hand, say that there are very clear, non-negotiable elements to a local church. Proper preaching, proper administration of the Sacraments, proper church discipline–these must be as intentionally present as possible. Weakness in one area is one thing, but if leadership intentionally rejects or subverts one of these, then do you have a church? Even an irregular one? I don’t want to be in charge of figuring out the moment when this happens, but in theory, I think you have a lot of buildings with crosses on top, or converted gymnasiums with soul-patch wearing religious standup comics as the MC, that are not actually having church.

These non-negotiables (there are others, assumed orthodoxy) function as a foundation, and from that, all sorts of creativity and programs and strategies and such can flow, all the way from a sub-100 church like ours to a mega church with multiple locations and fiber optic cables running like Christmas tree lights throughout the city.

The Model may not exist, but we must fight for the non-negotiables that it (irregularly) demonstrates and not equate the sale and trade of pragmatic strategies with true gospel-maturity in the church.

http://www.churchthought.com Matt Steen

FYI, I am pointing people to your comment on tomorrow’s post.

David Treloar

Hey Bro,
Not long ago, Christianity Today ran an article by the guys at Mecklenberg (NC) entitled, “Not Everyone Needs a Small Group” or some-such. (The original article is no longer available on CT, but I came across another blog that references it: http://www.ministrybestpractices.com/2008/05/church-of-small-groups-or-just.html)

It was a compelling thought. In some respects, I think a lot of the challenge of small groups is related to context (surprise, surprise!). My fear with groups is that it becomes “one more thing on the calendar” for over-busy people. So I offer the CT article not as a critique of what you post here – I think you’re Covey-Begin-With-The-End-In-Mind approach is dead-on. My wrestling is with… um, heh, execution.

How do we make intentional community/discipleship part of the DNA of the organization?

Love your 3 components. Do you think that there is a place for incubation too (perhaps it is inherent in flexibility)? Sometimes I wonder if we don’t give our ideas enough time to germinate, let alone grow and bear fruit… too quick to pull a trigger because “it didn’t work”. Maybe?

Thought-provoking.

http://www.churchthought.com Matt Steen

There is always room for incubation… in fact that needs to be built into the roll-out of any initiative that a church pursues… I am a huge believer that many times the church will jump into something new too quickly. A church I am working with now initially wanted to launch its’ next campus with three months lead time. I begged and pleaded to get it to eight months (still about eight months too short) because in order for an initiative of that size to really work you need to have some serious buy in and training time with the teams that will make it work. My default is to double (or more!) the time that most churches think it will take to get something up and running.

As to your small groups stuff… the reason that it worked in our context was because I was out in front telling our students and their parents, that the most important thing that their kids could do each week was their small group. The large group teaching component was good… but nowhere near as important as the relationships and life on life discipleship that they would be getting in their small groups. Try convincing most churches to place the priority of the small group experience higher on the list than Sunday morning worship and let me know how that works for you. ;)

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