Will Mancini

The Church Unique Visual Summary has been a fun little project for me and the team at Auxano Design. I hope it helps you engage the concepts of Church Unique by way of review or for the first time, if you have not yet cracked the cover.

Check out the Visual Summary  full screen version in the reader below or download the PDF for free.

Who do you know who might benefit from the Visual Summary? Thanks for taking a moment to pass it on!

This post continues a series where I am using the “lens of clarity” to look at 11 talks from the The NINES online conference by Leadership Network.

In this post, Jonathon Falwell pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, discusses how clarity can release your personal calling.

Problem: You will never fulfill you vision if you are copying someone else.

Here are some of my highlights:

• I was studying hundreds of perspectives and models
• I was getting confused about the direction I should take
• I was trying to adapt other models
• I thought that to be successful I had to take all of the best practices of other churches and put them in place here
• The most important lesson I learned as a new senior pastor: God created me and called me to be me
• Realize that if God placed you where you are than no one can do a better job in that place
• When I quite trying to be like someone else I was free to focus like never before

This post is the second part of what I spoke on two weeks ago at Leadership Network’s Rapid Growth Leadership Community. The first post was, 4 Personal Hazards of Pastoring a Growing Church.

As we look to the organizational side, there is a different enemy to reckon with as the church grows. The personal hazard had to do with success shaping our identity- we called it growth idolatry. Now we will deal with the problem of growth complexity. In the growing church, success assaults clarity in the organization.

This unfolds in five different ways:

#1 Church growth can dilute redemptive passion. Every church is only 100 people away from diluting it’s redemptive culture. In other words, the next 100 people who arrive may threaten the very passion that attracted them. Think about it.  Imagine a church planter walking into a Starbucks. How intentional is he as he engages the environment? Extremely! Every person is a potential new attendee! What happens as the church grows? The more dramatic the success the more the senior pastor can loose the white-hot intentionality he started with. Before long, he begins to look for a quiet, secluded place to eat lunch. He ducks for cover when entering a Starbucks.

#2 Church growth can compromise “body” culture. Every church has an ethos and a collective soul. The culture is guided by boundaries and expectations that hold it together and define its best. But as a church grows, it can be tempted to make decisions out of alignment with its culture. What do we call growth in our body that is out of alignment with our DNA? Cancer. Think about it. That illustration wasn’t used at the pinnacle of our “Church Growth” era. Not all growth is good growth. If growth compromises a value its not good.

#3 Church growth can scatter strategic focus. More people means more needs, more resources and therefore more options.  More, more, more means more complexity and less focus. In fact, growth can kill focus. The deadly part about it is that you don’t feel it. While you are still buzzing with momentum you starting making decisions that create side-ways energy. Silos pop up here and there. You are completely unaware of the dynamic until the growth slows and possibly stops. You are successful until you are not.

#4 Church growth can strong-arm bad scorecards. That is, growth can reinforce weak or ineffective measures of success. Speaking of the buzz of #3 above, when you are on a growth run, you get used to those appealing metrics- attendance, building and cash. You get so into them, you may not want to live without them. As the church grows, the business side metrics can dominate and take over the real mission metrics of discipleship. That’s why you have Reggie McNeal and Ed Stetzer writing books with subtitles about “changing the scorecard.”

#5 Church growth can multiply competing pictures. At the end of the day, the true measure of clarity will boil down to some mental model or picture of the future. So do we multi-site or do we plant a church? Do we start another worship service or not? Do we emphasize personal prayer or missional living in the next series? From a 3 year horizon to a 30 day horizon it’s key for leadership teams to be on the same page. When the church grows, the multiplication possibilities for alternative pictures of the future is insane.

So how do you address these hazards? Allow me to offer a few words: In a nutshell it’s team process. Time, dialogue, prayer, discernment, dialogue, articulation, vision casting, vision dripping.

Is it time to close a program in your church? Many leaders will tell you, “When the horse is dead, dismount.” But this classic advice rolls of the tongue  much easier than it plays in real life.

As a leader in ministry you have no doubt faced ministries that just ought to go. Like sour milk, they live past their shelf-life. But for various reasons, you just can’t do it. Maybe there is still a group of precious saints being served by the program. Or maybe the decision-making culture of the church just requires more time to process.

The question becomes, “What are the strategic alternatives, to cutting a ministry altogether?” There are three I recommend regularly.

#1 Combine the ministry with something that is working well

Combining ministries is like creating an internal merger. Look for the similarities to something that is working. Talk to the leaders about leveraging the momentum of one with the other. Seek the win-win with diligence and you might be surprised. If the merge works, then you have cut the duplicate work of promotion, communication and  leadership training for two initiatives into one.

#2 “Contributize” the ministry

Before you make fun of my poetic license with the word “contributize” listen up! Think of a ministry that is only trickling with effectiveness as an opportunity to redirect that trickle into a more effective stream. In other words, turn the program into a contributory for a more strategy ministry. For example, what do you do with that monthly men’s prayer breakfast that’s been dwindling in attendance for the last 3 years. Rather than shutting it down, ask the leader to integrate a promotion for immediate and urgent opportunities for service in the last 10 minutes of the morning.

#3 Cage the ministry

Caging is close to just cutting the ministry, but with one big difference. You essentially make the ministry “dead to the world” with regard to promotions, communication, staff-time allocation and new funding, while allowing the ministry to exist. Think of it as a strategic way to allow a ministry to die with grace. Sure you may have some hard discussions or even some battles to fight. But its easier to fight for not publicly promoting a ministry  than it is to shut it down.

In the end, the predicament of change-resistance is not a programming issue or a people issue, it’s a vision issue. Use these three strategies to solve the clarity problems of yesterday. But walk into the future with a clear vision that will keep people emotionally connected to your direction and values, not your programs.

I recently spent a day with Eric Geiger, who has just joined the Auxano team. In addition to serving as the executive pastor at Christ Fellowship in Miami, and having co-authored the highly influential book Simple Church, Eric helps walk churches through Auxano’s Vision Pathway.

During Eric’s 7-year tenure at Christ Fellowship, the church has grown from 1200 to 6500 in weekend worship.  During an hour conversation I drilled down with Eric to explore the strategic side of the growth equation. He mentioned four factors that drove different seasons of growth.

Before jumping into his response, it is absolutely critical to underscore the role of providence in studying fast-growth scenarios. For scores of leaders who are doing things “strategically correct” there may be one who finds a particular favor by God’s grace of right time and right place.

THREE  STAGES

Eric immediately identified 3 stages in the recent years of growth. The first two growth factors occurred in stage one, and the other two occurred respectively in the following stages.

STAGE ONE: The first stage was growth from 1200 to 2500  in attendance, identified as the “simplicity chapter.” During this season, a foundation of simplicity was built as growth factor #1. Eric highlighted that all following phases required clarity and simplicity in order to succeed. The importance of a process-oriented, disciple-making culture is the thrust of the book, Simple Church. The key words of this emphasis are clarity, alignment, movement and focus.

During this time, factor #2 was identified as strong children’s and student ministry. The church made a conscious decision to not compromise in this area. As a result, resources and leadership were allocated to build top-notch ministries.

STAGE TWO: The second stage from 2500 to 4500 in attendance was identified as the  “multi-site chapter.” Building on a simple ministry strategy, the church continued to grow as it multiplied campuses, factor #3. Rather than the more expensive route of a bigger centralized facility, Christ Fellowship learned that they could launch new sites with no debt and much less capital. In 2007 they had two sites. Today they have five.

STAGE THREE: The third stage enabled sustained growth from 4500 to 6500. Eric identified this as the “external focus” chapter. Again building from the prior phases the church turned up the heat on serving the community as factor #4.

For example they launched a separate not-for-profit called “Caring for Miami” that serves the under-resourced and hurting throughout Miami-Dade County. Eric mentioned several heart-gripping stories and statistics such as men being transitioned out of homelessness, an estimated 1000 babies a year being rescued from abortion through the two women centers, hundreds of un-insured people in Miami being served through a mobile medical/dental unit, and families of migrant workers being served via tutoring for their children. At a life stage where a church can grow inward, and protect its “accomplishments,” Christ Fellowship has kept the redemptive passion hot.

My favorite nugget from Eric came as he discussed the relationship between the phases. He said, “You can’t be externally focused if you’re complicated!”

FOUR GROWTH FACTORS

1. Building a culture of simplicity to bring alignment and movement
2. Uncompromising quality with children and student’s ministry
3. Multisite expansion reflecting good stewardship
4. External focus to keep the church on mission