Will Mancini

How many truly innovative training offerings are available to church leaders today? In my opinion, not many. There are plenty of conferences each with their own twist. But most likely you’ll get motivated from the same pastor-rock-stars that walk the platform year after year after year. Or you can jump into a coaching network driven by either personality again, or perhaps a solid list of twelve or so leadership attributes to work on.  Don’t get me wrong- I think that much of this stuff is really good.  But I constantly wonder if there is a better way.

And I think there is. I have observed leaders longing for more than the next catalytic, adrenaline rush or wheelbarrow full of leadership knowledge or a pseudo-relationship with a big name. And that’s why I love what Auxano has created in the Vision co::Lab.

How this for a game-changer: The center of learning is not the platform, not what worked great somewhere else, and not a current trend or hot topic. The center of learning is you, your team, your congregation’s culture in your community context. I call it “Textbook You.” 

If that wasn’t enough, the best news is that we spend 24 hours of coaching over 6 months on one topic: vision. It’s all about your church and how to lead with better clarity, imagination and future thinking. The [::] in co::Lab  represents the [co]ntinuous and [co]llaborative nature of this laboratory with no more eight churches represented.

 In the end, we created the co::Lab because:

• We need more time to dream about what our churches could be and do
  
• It takes real effort and push to articulate your church’s true uniqueness
• Vision, is often relegated to glittering generalities on paper
• Even our newer churches become over-programed and under-discipled
• Your team and volunteers want more vision from you, today. 

New co::Labs are starting soon and I want to invite you to be a part of one.  Next week,  I am starting one in Houston, and one virtually. The following month I am starting one in Atlanta in conjunction  ChurchPlanters.com Velocity Conference. Following the conference, Sean LoveJoy, David Putnam and John Shepherd  will host a co::Lab at Mountain Lake Church. Later in the spring we will be starting co::Labs in Orlando and Dallas. 

At this link you can request more info about the co::Lab, and download a PDF brochure. 

Less cash doesn’t have to mean less mission.  Albeit painful, seasons of crunch force us to re-examine, re-engineer, and re-fine our understanding of the organization’s essence. Success has a way of obscuring the essence. It leads to what my friend Jim Sheppard calls “Fat Thinking” (Jim is with Generis.)

Scarcity, on the other hand, brings clarity. And it’s in the clarity that your organization can surge forward. Peter Drucker reminds us that the great problem of non-profits is a lack of focus. Henry Ford said that the basic human problem is that we do too much. I can’t tell you how many leaders I have heard say, “This season was tough, but we are better for it.” It’s a genuine response to the fruit of clarity.

Consider how a cutback…

• Forces limitations that spark innovation
• Exposes the #1 priority that was getting buried
  
• Consolidates redundant structures and systems
• Makes us act when we previously wavered
  
• Re-centers the core competency we were slowly neglecting
• Slows us down to strengthen our foundation
• Refreshes our faith and allegiance to the mission
• Connects us to frontline and grassroots as we “get granular”

Clarity means less weight and more passion. Maybe your cutback is what one Texas boy called, “a squat before you leap.” My dad, an instructor pilot, taught us that sometimes, you have to descend in order to gain altitude.

Maybe it’s not a cutback after all.  Maybe we should call it a “createnew.”

Whatever your opinion of the iPad roll-out today, Apple’s ability to capture the consumer imagination and bring innovative products to life is unparalleled.  Today’s 8 minute overview of the revolutionary iPad contains these phrases. What if people talked about church saying things like…

• When something exceeds our ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical
  
• It’s hard to see how something so simple can be so capable
  
• It’s going to change the way we do the things we do, every day
  
• I don’t have to change myself to fit it; it fits me
  
• We decided, “Let’s redesign it all…let’s redesign and reimagine and rebuild from the ground up…”
  
• You get an order of magnitude more powerful
  
• There’s automatic orientation 
  
• Everything gets out of the way so that you can focus on the content you care about
  
• We want to put it in the hands as many people as possible right from the start 
  
• This is a new category, but millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it

A I work daily to help the local church reflect amazing claims like this,  I believe we have a massive opportunity to be schooled by Apple’s achievement. How? Listen to the linchpin strategy of Apple’s success:

“It’s built by our hardware team in concert with our software team and what that gives you is a level of performance that you can’t get any other way. Apple is the one place that you can really do this. We build battery technology, we build chip technology and we build software and we bring all those things together in way that no one else can do it.”

The singular application is that design from the ground up is so fully integrated, that quality and innovation are unsurpassed. In church speak, we would dream that ministry content, ministry environments, ministry people and processes are so integrated that life change and accessibility to the gospel are unsurpassed.

But we prefer not to do the work of designing, thinking and building this way. We like the message of Simple Church, or Church Unique, but get stuck talking with lay leadership about original and simple design. In the end we punt essential principles in favor of ministry environments running with imported programs. We let every staff person makes decisions based on their own “operating system.” 

It’s exciting to see a kingdom leader have a great start. This week I got front row seats watching Rich Kannwischer lead as the new Senior Pastor at St. Andrews Presbyterian, in Newport Beach, CA.

One the ride home, I reflected on a dynamic interplay I observed in Rich’s leadership, between two different kinds of “wins.” Some things that a new pastor does naturally relate to felt needs of the church. Other things are more significant changes that will eventually shape the church’s culture. Both are real wins but how they happen and how they feel are very different. Great leaders use them together to maximize positive change.

For example, not long into his assignment, Rich changed both the service times and the worship strategy. (There had been no change for 30 years.)  In the first 7 weeks after the change, the new strategy, coupled with his energy and preaching talent realized a 30% increase in weekend attendance. This dramatic change met a huge felt need (given the congregation’s mildly declining attendance) by providing hope for their future.

But Rich took on two other projects in the short term.  First, he refused to move into the generous square footage of the previous pastor’s office, in favor of creating a more efficient, inviting and collaborative space. Second, he partnered with Auxano to navigate a team down the Vision Pathway. Even though the team had completed some strong strategic planning work, the language was not robust or specific enough to shape culture. Both of these initiatives required extra effort because they were completely off the felt need radar. 

Clearly, Rich is leveraging wins that meet felt needs for wins that guide a new future.

• How are you balancing felt-need wins with culture-shaping wins?
  
• Are you looking for and creating both kinds?
  
• Are you trying to do too many culture-shaping wins at the expense of felt needs?
  
• Are you only focusing on only felt needs, neglecting to challenge the status quo?

 As you review these questions consider the differences:

Wins that meet felt needs DO

• Bring immediate satisfaction to individuals
• Build immediate credibility for the leader (more chips in the bank)
• Create a positive atmosphere

 DO NOT

• Change the expectations of people
• Automatically align with the vision
• Reflect the most pressing real needs

 Wins that shape culture DO

• Introduce a new way of thinking
• Align people, tools, and process toward a clear vision
• Create long term value

 DO NOT

• Feel good at first
• Build credibility immediately
• Happen without dialogue and pushback

I woke up this morning excited for several reasons. First, Jim Randall, Auxano’s chief managing officer and I did some dreaming late into the night about Auxano’s future. Second, I can’t wait to connect with hundreds of Houston pastors in a little while at an event hosted by William Vanderbloemen, a friend, pastor of Crypress Creek Christian Church, and fellow “strategic outsider” with FaithSearch Partners. I met William several years ago when he brought Auxano in to navigate the Vision Pathway with his team. Today he is bringing in Tony Morgan to talk with pastors about all things church strategy (including killing cockroaches.) 

But then I got really jazzed when I read these two posts on vision:

1) Gordon Marcy shares three principles on the source of vision in, Whose Vision is it Anyways? 

2) Mac Lake “raised me 5″ in his contribution to #visiondrip in a post called Cast Vision Everyday. I thinks its time for some others to bring their 5 to the table! 

If you have not seen #visiondrip yet, check out my post, Open Source Vision Casting