Will Mancini

Leadership Network (LN) is an great organization, and they are doing more amazing stuff this year. Some of Dave Travis’s comments on their Learnings Blog have hinted to their 2nd big online conference, called Aha! Fresh Voices, New Ideas that will happen on March 3rd, 2010. Dave mentioned that the official announcement and details will be made early this week by Todd Rhodes. (Aha! Link is now up.)

What can you expect?  The same incredible format as their first online conference The NINES – a totally free online experience, with a mix of some great folks you already know as well as some new faces. Look for fewer total participants (40) and shorter clips at 6 minutes each. Contributers were asked to focus on a key learning and “aha!” moment in their life and ministry.  

Where did the name originate?  About ten months ago, I worked with LN’s team to distill down their six values. They named this conference after their second value. Here is the list:

1. What’s next? - We explore what could be.
2. Aha! - We create environments for collaborative discovery.          
3.  Positive deviants*  We work with the exceptional.           
4.  Generous relationships. We invest in the success of others.
5.  Results, results, results… We pursue BIG impact.
6.  JESUS  We strive to model Jesus in everything we do.

The mission of Leadership Network is to accelerate the impact of 100X leaders. See a fun little interview on LN- Ben Arment with Dave Travis.

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.” 

Today I am hanging out with Mel McGowan, a thought  leader in the area of designing sacred space. We are collaborating at a blue sky session with one of his new church clients in Houston. Mel’s passion is to “tear down the metaphorical walls that separate a church from its local culture and create places that help re-connect the community to the message of Christ.” His background in film and a decade-long stint with the Walt Disney Company influenced the designs he has created for more than 60 faith-based clients including Saddleback, Mariners in Irvine and Southeast Christian in Louisville.

Why do I love Mel? While most church architects have led us to “do church” in the United States of Generica, Mel is showing a better way- the way of Church Unique.  I have worked up close with two churches that have used the services of Visionering Studios, and the product is impressive. 

The church pictured here is Northside Christian Church, in Spring, Texas. Northside is an Auxano client that went through Vision co::Lab, and brought us in to do a Guest Perspective Evaluation. Post grand opening, Northside doubled their attendance from  600 to 1200 in the first six months. This true “third space” comes with stocked pond for fishing and disc golf course among other features.  Imagine having to solve the problem of people smoking weed on your church property. Or wait, is that what architectural evangelism is all about. The first step in their stated strategy is “hang out!”  

What guiding principle drives the redemptive heartbeat and unorthodox creativity behind their design process?  They follow the tenet “form follows fiction,” rather than the traditional “form follows function.” All faith communities have a story to tell, and church buildings provide the perfect medium for this narrative. 

The bottom line: Don’t wrap your unique vision with generic brick and mortar. Find someone like Mel when its time to integrate your DNA and story into a one-of-a-kind building solution that serves as a tool for mission. Read more on “form follows fiction.”

Find out about our co::Labs starting soon both virtually and in Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Dallas.