Will Mancini

Are you going to be satisfied with a future for ministry that is more of the same?

Very few pastors break from norm of mediocre church ministry. But I am convinced it doesn’t have to be that way.

Last fall I was honored to participate in Leadership Network’s roll-out of their Leadia Experience. My conribution was FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. FLUX provides a guide for thinking, adapting, and innovating in order to discover new possibilities for your church. It starts with one whiteboard drawing and gives you a matrix for assessing and planning your future.

I encourage you to engage with the full experience. But for now, I challenge you to rethink and reimagine your ministry with this post mini-series  from FLUX.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination, do not become the slave of your model - Vincent Van Gogh

Every once in while, I find a new feature on my Mac or iPhone, because I discover a default switch or button that I didn’t know existed. In fact there is a specific definition for this:

Default: a selection automatically used by a computer program in the absence of a choice made by the user

Many times it’s no big deal, but sometimes I want to kick myself for missing out on some cool functionality. I didn’t know the default switch even existed!

After a decade of daily conversations about vision with ministry teams, I have discovered a hidden vision switch with a default position in the minds of church leaders. But this default setting is not just about missing out on a nifty feature. It’s about a fundamental mode of thinking that’s limiting us.

Let me explain.

One question I always enjoy asking church leaders is “How do you want your church to be different two years from now?”

What kind of answers do I get?

The most common two-word response is “more people.” Of course that expresses itself in many forms:

• Increased worship
• More growth
• Higher attendance
• Additional services
• Reaching more people
• Reversing decline

Think about that for a minute. “How do you want your church to be different in two years?” Imagine the infinite number of answers possible to this question. For example, pastors could have responded with answers like:

• More desperate for Jesus
• More intimacy between husbands and wives
• More engaged in social justice and civic responsibilities
• More families having devotionals together
• More friendships with people far from God
• More students serving other students

But for the most part, they don’t give answers like this. Despite the rainbow variety of gospel-centered, life-transforming possibilities the most common answer is always, in one form or another, “More people.”

Keep in mind that the one-dimensional answer of “more people” transcends an incredibly wide variety of church settings and leaders, from uptown to small town, mainline or online – from the newest staff newbie to the post-retired, hard-to-expire. Everyone wants “more people.”

And “more people” is good. Jesus wants more people too. And yes, churches “should count people because people count.”

But there’s something important behind the answer of “more people.” And that something reveals this default setting in the life of the everyday pastor. Church leaders are not just saying that want “more people.” What they are really saying is…

KEEP READING (part 2 of 3)

In the introduction to Church Unique, I shared my passion that  instead of  leading a great model, “I would rather work behind the scenes as a model maker. My greatest joy is seeing a leader for the first time articulate a stunningly unique model of ministry for his or her church.” As this month marks my eleventh year as a full-time coach/consultant and the fourth birthday of Church Unique, this passion has never been stronger. So I am teeing up a few special posts on ChurchUnique.

I am still moved when I read a review that captures the heart behind the book and the pulse that keeps its ideas alive. It encourages me that the concepts resonate with all kinds of church thinkers and ministry leaders. And I imagine the “aha” synapses firing as leaders see the better future for their church.

Therefore, I am grateful for pastor and blogger, Andy Kinsey’s and his thoughtful review on the blog, Notes on Practical Divinity. His understanding of these days as church-history-crossroads  is well-stated:

“with the rise of congregational studies, and the increased focus on church practices, organizational theory, spiritual formation, and the growth of emergence and missional in the church’s consciousness, there is something unique happening at this moment in history… Church Unique is part of a much larger movement, one that is coming to terms with a rapidly changing, postmodern culture on the one hand and the fragments of a vibrant post-Christendom culture on the other”

There is something unique happening indeed!

Here are a few highlights from the review.  If you have already discovered your church unique, I hope these nuggets inspire you to stay the course.  If you have not, I hope these pique your curiosity to learn more.

Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture and Create Movement:

• prompts deeper questions into why the church does what it does

• guides leaders into how they may understand their church’s own particular ‘microculture’ and discover ways to minister at the same time to the church’s surrounding ‘macroculture’

• highlights the pitfalls of church growth strategies that move into uncritically adopting assumptions that are harmful and not truly ‘purposeful’ of local church culture and custom

• functions as a manual to discover, the ‘Kingdom Concept’ that drives the church to realize Christ’s Great Commission and Commandment, while helping leaders cast the vision uniquely given by God’s Spirit

• brings out the specific ways churches may work to bring into alignment the various parts of their histories, cultures, and ministries

How has Church Unique influenced you as a model maker? I would love to hear your story!

In Church 3.0, Neil Cole discusses several catalysts for creating movement. One of them is called the “Surprising Proposition.”

First of all why would anyone want to go through life without a Surprising Proposition to share? If we belong to the infinite creator God, are being transformed into the likeness of the living Jesus, and are leading others into eternally significant ministry, wouldn’t it be natural to have a few bold ideas to guide your leadership?

Sure it would.

And, it’s more than worth the time to process, pray, dialogue, wrestle, sweat and figure it out. What is God calling you to do and what difference will it make in the world?

Remember that the Gospel is God’s Surprising Proposition and this message is at the center of everything. Now co-create with God and remix your ministry’s DNA and audacious vision for your time and place.

Neil gives three examples from Church Multiplication Associates in his chapter on the subject:

• “We want to lower the bar of how to do church so everyone can do it, and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple so that everyone will do it.”
• “If you want to win this world for Christ, you’re going to have to sit in the smoking section.”
• “Bad people make good soil for the Gospel; there’s a lot of fertilizer in their lives.”

Here are a few of ours at Auxano:

• Clarity isn’t everything but it changes everything.
• God wants to do something cosmically significant and locally specific in your church
• If your vision isn’t stunningly unique, you probably don’t have one.

Now grab a journal page or a napkin and give it your own a shot. What’s your Surprising Proposition? I would love to hear your ideas!

Leadia was just announced by Leadership Network and it will rollout to the world tomorrow at the online conference, The NINES.  What exactly is Leadia? In short it’s “leadership + media-” It’s a short digital book, combined with embedded video, audio and social media. Check out the intro video:

I have been working with the LN team on it for the past couple of months as a contributor of one of the first four Leadia Experiences. Here is my take on why you are going to love this innovative app.

#1  It’s a totally new genre that’s more fun and more effective than other ways of learning

#2  The experiences are less than 10,000 words so you can interact with them in one sitting

#3  The learning is customized and expandable allowing you to go deeper if you want

#4  New and diverse content will come from a broader range of authors

#5  The content costs less than a book and lots of ebooks

#6  It’s downright fun because use you can be surprised as you go through the experience

#7  It’s great for individual or team use.

I will be sharing about my contribution (FLUX: Four Paths to the Future) once Apple approves it for publication within the Leadia app.

Before jumping into this third post on “Vehicles for Vision” I want to remind you that it’s useless to talk about vision delivery if you are a little foggy on vision. Don’t feel bad if you are- it takes attention, time and work, but the payoff is infinite.  Here is the tool you may want to use to nail down the identity and direction of your ministry- we call it the Vision Frame.

Now…

Is it possible that there is one vehicle of vision that is literally a missing link? For practical purposes, yes.

The missing link is the leadership pipeline as the second vehicle for vision.

Why? The answer requires a bit of explanation.

Remember, because it’s easy for a pastor to rely on preaching alone to deliver vision, they can miss the more important vehicle of the church’s connecting environment. We dealt with this challenge in the first post.

Now, let’s say that you agree that vision should be delivered through small groups or whatever version of group life that your church serves up. The big question is then, “How do you lead through the volunteer leaders who facilitate and guide group life?” The question reveals why a leadership pipeline is the missing link. It’s impossible to conceive of using your connecting environment as a vehicle for vision if you don’t have a linkage or some mechanism to make your connecting environment leaders carriers of the vision. Strangely, this leadership development piece is missing in most churches.

The quick test of wether or not you have this in place is a few simple questions:

• When was the last time every leader in your church gathered for training and vision casting?
• What does your church do to build a leadership community identity among all leaders?

Again, when I ask these questions, I often receive a blank stare.

We miss this important ministry of leadership development for two primary reasons.

First, pastors are taught study scripture, preach, and maybe even lead small groups. But most pastors are NOT trained in how to develop leaders.  As a result pastors can focus entirely on DOING the ministry rather than RAISING UP others to do them ministry. (The purpose of this post in not to argue for the basic, nuts and bolts Ephesians 4:11-14, but it may be worth revisiting the text.) Second, if your church has a few decades of history, you have existing structures and decision-making processes that simulate “leadership” but don’t function as a “leadership pipeline.” That is, increasing numbers of leaders are not multiplied and mentored through a process in which the vision and DNA of the church is transferred.

So here is a set of questions to get you thinking about what a leadership pipeline might look like:

If you had to rely on your small group leaders or class facilitators alone to deliver the vision…

• How often would you get this group together?
• How much time would you spend with them?
• How much time as a group vs. one-on-one?
• What kinds of things would you do together?
• How would you model the vision with them?
• How would you teach them to model the vision?
• How would you train them to communicate the vision?
• How would you pray for these people?
• How would you measure their progress?
• What tools and support would you provide?
• What ongoing questions would you ask them?

In the end, you will never multiply your ministry if there is no dedicated time and process for leaders sharing the vision with other leaders. And this is unfortunately a missing link in American evangelicalism.

If you would like more information on this subject, Aubrey Malphurs and I wrote a book called Building Leaders on how to build a leadership pipeline for your church.