Will Mancini

As I reflect on Steve Job’s resignation this week,  I am grateful for how his achievements inspire my own thinking. Here are some updated thoughts on a post I wrote from 18-months ago.

Whatever your opinion of the Apple products, they continue to capture the consumer imagination and bring innovation to life.  With the historic moment of the iPad’s original release, now about 18-months old,  I want to revisit some of the actual sound bites of the marketing blitz. Quotes from the release include:

• 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

What if the ministry of our local churches could reflect amazing claims like this?  Go ahead and reread the list, but this time thinking about your church.

Is there even room for a comparison of Apple’s advancements to gospel-centered ministry? I believe so and I think the magic of this tech revolutionary  has something to teach church leaders.

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 of Steve Job’s success to church leaders 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 often doesn’t happen. Why not?  We simply  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 relying on existing models. We get weary of talking with lay leadership about real changes in ministry strategy. We get satisfied with the good results of duplicating a program rather than the great results of incarnating our own. We get so busy on the ministry treadmill that we let every staff person makes decisions based on their own “operating system.”

What would happen if Steve Jobs decided to make disciples?

How would he design the church? What adaptations would he make to your ministry design? What would he stop altogether?  How would he redesign from the ground-up?

No, you don’t need a cooler mission statement so you can call it a mantra. No you don’t need a better sounding slogan. You need to know what the heck your church or ministry is ultimately supposed to be doing and you need to state in a clear, concise and compelling way. This is a leadership statement to direct and integrate all of your thinking, speaking and acting. Let me repeat- this is a leadership statement, not a marketing statement.

Start leading today by doing one or more of these activities.

#1 Rewrite your mission on a sheet of paper as many times as there are words in it. Each time write a different word in ALL CAPS. Reflect on each word of the mission. (Note: If your mission has more than 20 words in it, its too long. Proceed to idea #7)

#2 Look at your worship guide from last Sunday. List all of the ministry opportunity categories that were promoted and force rank them with regard to how effective each is at fulfilling the mission. (Great to do as a team.)

#3 Write the mission real big on a white board or white pad in your office and see how people interact with it.

#4 Ask the next ten people you meet in your church office or church service  if they know the mission of the church. (Make it fun and tell them you are doing research for blogger friend.) Pay attention to their response. (And let me know what happened.)

#5 Do this exercise with a person you are eating lunch with: Write the mission on a napkin and ask them, “What does this mission mean to you?” Listen. Then ask them, “When, if at all, did this mission come into your conscious thought?” Listen again.

#6 Create a five minute devotional using your mission, finding an appropriate biblical text to share.  Use the devotional with the different groups you lead this week.

#7 Read this FREE chapter from Church Unique on mission. It’s called Carry the Holy Orders. If you need to re-articulate your mission statement, spend 30 minutes planning time and decision-making steps to get it done.

#8 Make a list of five people that you believe model the mission of your ministry. Send all five of them a quick note to say something like, “Thanks for living the mission. You inspire me!”

#9 Write your personal “shadow mission.” What tends to drive you practically? What tends to drive your church practically? Go ahead and really write it out. (For example, a shadow mission might be, “We want to draw bigger crowds every Sunday with great teaching and worship.”  Compare and contrast the shadow mission with the real mission. Repent. Share this with other leaders.

#10 Spend time in prayer with you leadership team using your mission. Create time and space to pray through the mission and each word of the mission.

Dennis Easter is a friend of mine who is deeply rooted and widely connected as a catalytic leader in the Foursquare Church. As a Church Unique Certified denominational leader, he appreciates all things vision and passed along this great quote from Steve Pavlina:

“If you aren’t yet at the point of clarity, then make that your first goal. It’s a big waste of time to go through life being unclear about what you want. Most people wallow way too long in the state of “I don’t know what to do.” They wait for some external force to provide them with clarity, never realizing that clarity is self-created. The universe is waiting on you, not the other way around, and it’s going to keep waiting until you finally make up your mind. Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize—grab a chisel and get busy!”

My favorite line is, the universe is waiting on you. What phrase struck you the most?

This morning I am working with Methodist pastors in my area at Gateway Community Church. Here are the links from the training:

1. Church Unique Visual Summary
2. Common Church Unique Tools (Vision Frame, Clarity Quiz, Thinkholes, Vision Casting Spider Diagram)
3. Ken Werlein Video on Mission Measures (Faithbridge UMC)
4. Outreach Article Referencing 3 Houston Methodist Churches
5. Branding Examples
6. How to Create  Gospel Centered Tagline
7. Strategy Design Questions
8. Strategy Icon Examples

I was recently dialoguing with a very successful pastor about the ten-year vision horizon of the large church he pastors.

He made a striking comment.

“I don’t want to coast on original vision.”

It made me wonder, how do you know if you might be coasting on a vision that “used to be?”

1. You use adjectives that position the vision as historical: original, founding, previous, last season, former chapter, etc.
2. You have increasing realization of how far you God has taken your ministry in the last five or ten years.
3. You actually feel less excited about a the ideals, aspirations, or pictures of the future you used to have.
4. People around you express ask more questions about the future and show increasing curiosity for things like clarity.
5. You don’t hear younger generations say anything that resembles the vision as it was previously expressed.
6. You have updated your campus or changed your key players once or twice without revisiting the vision.