Will Mancini

Yesterday I led the first of three Church Unique mini-conferences for the Florida Baptist State Convention this year. Attenders included peer learning groups, churches undergoing revitalization and large fast-growing churches like Calvary Baptist in Clearwater and Flamingo Road. Two things about the day struck me. First, the diversity of the leaders in the body of Christ never ceases to amaze me and constantly underscores the message of Church Unique. In the same room sat Troy in his designer jeans and Jerry in his three-piece suit. Both men were thoughtful and passionate contributors and effective leaders in their contexts. Troy recently spoke to sixteen thousand people this Easter. In a recent series called “The Bed,” Troy delivered his message from the platform while him and his wife “talked in bed.”

The second thing that struck me is the need to “unconference.” The day was not designed as an info dump but as a “process on-ramp” that concluded with a clarity challenge. I urged each leader to spend one day per month for nine months to hammer out their own vision with greater clarity. I overviewed the Vision Pathway we use at Auxano and equipped them with questions, models and tools, to discover their own strategic model of ministry rather than to photocopy one from another church or the latest trend.

Last week I highlighted the need for a brand to stay consistently consistent. This week I was shocked by the yellow and pink, NOT green, Starbucks billboards peppered around the Houston highways. It brought to mind a another attribute of great branding which is staying fervently relevant. The billboards are signaling visually several priorities that Schultz has underscored upon his return to company leadership, spearheaded by the new brew, Pike Place Roast.

Staying consistently consistent yet fervently relevant presents a dynamic tension that lays at the heart of great branding. How does Starbuck’s recent rollout of its vintage logo look and simple bright billboard do both? In this case staying relevant for Starbucks means “going back to the future.” The new logo (we don’t know how long it will be around) is a slight modification of the company’s original. It brings an authentic, original feel to a brand that has been attacked for its aggressive growth which lost its authenticity with its ubiquity. Yet, the billboards got my attention with their unexpected, almost florescent feel. Consistently consistent and fervently relevant at the same time? While many “experts” are wincing at the move (see the gif below by Von Glitschka), I liked the attention-getting simplicity and boldness of the new campaign as well as the “grounded” look of the brown, return to dry roast look. Not to mention the clear reminder that the chick in the middle is really a mermaid!

I ran across this short article that is worth passing along. The author is a business guy who talks about “aspirational fields” as a way to align culture and energize an organization. The aspirational field in an organization acts like a magnetic field that aligns all of the small iron filings (like some of us did in chemistry lab growing up). In the organization, its the people that all face a common direction with a shared heartbeat for a better future. The article is, A Shortcut to Cultural Alignment by Paul Levesque

I rarely get a chance to visit a church that I am not consulting navigating for, so I like to choose my visits very carefully. In this case I struck pure gold-City Church San Francisco led by Fred Harrell. The leadership has done a fantastic job not only with their articulated vision, but integrating it with intentional communication. I was inspired by:

• A compelling mission and values; they demonstrate thoughtful articulation and contextualization, albeit given the strong influence Redeemer Presbyterian in New York. Their “purpose” includes the ideas of “being the very presence of Christ in word, deed and lifestyle,” and “following Christ in mission to a beautiful and broken city and through the city, the world.”
• A skillfully woven thread of vision into the preaching event itself, that did not detract from the biblical text, but gave a clearer understanding of church’s vision through the text.
• An accessibility for unchurched in their midst to a liturgical worship style and high-view of sacrament. They decoded the partaking of the Lord’s Supper beautifully.
• A preaching event that could have done nothing less than captivate the prechurched and dechurched, both young and mature believers alike in the 20 – 40 year old congregation. For example the use of “self-quake” to describe both the “negative” moment of repentance and the “positive” moment of calling when “Christ steps in your boat.”
• An stunning brand that organically reflects their style, context, theology and even their unique rented facility- The Russian Center. The brand was executed in a masterfully designed worship guide that was clear, uncluttered, and elegant. (Unfortunately their brand is not executed on their website yet.)

This line is from the stellar strategist- Andy Stanely. When my friend Caz McCaslin (founder of Upward sports) first heard the “systems talk” at the Catalyst Reverb conference, he called me and we discussed it for what seemed to be hours. As a piece worth pursuing, Andy’s flow of thought follows these ideas:
• God created systems
• Systems create behavior
• Our leaders and volunteers action are guided by the systems we inherit, adopt or create
• We overestimate our ability to guide change, when we are not thinking on the systems level
• Systems have embedded expectations, rewards (lack of), consequences (lack of), communication stye, and behavioral patterns of the people in charge

The idea of integrating the mission and vision into the systems of the church is a massive gap in our best training environments today. (In response, the Auxano team has spent years developing a tool to address this need- we call the Vision Integration Model, which debuted in Church Unique.) So how do teams apply what Andy addresses and does so well intuitively? How does a staff have continual conversations so that alignment, attunement and integration can really happen? One phrase from Andy holds the key to getting started. He comments almost under his breath that leaders need to have “big, bold, multi-day discussions” together. A great take-away exercise is three questions for having your first big, bold conversation:
• What are three bahaviors that you wished your group exhibited? (The group may be your entire church, the volunteers in your ministry area or the leadership team itself.)
• List at least one thing you can do systematically to encourage and motivate each behavior (process-driven not event-driven).
• What are we doing that accidentally works against this kind of behavior?