Planning: Undoing the Gordian Knot

INTRODUCTION

The blog has been dark for a couple of days, but not for want of trying. This one has been hard to write. It is all about untying the knot that often exists around mission statements and strategic plans. I have been wrestling with a couple of issues: first the traditional choardic “lenses” used for planning don’t fit the needs of a church quite as well as they do other types of organizations I have worked with; second, they have never been as clear as some other models I have used, and, finally, I suspect that they over complicate the problem. To that end, I am working to integrate the ideas embedded into the chaordic lenses into a workable framework for a church.

PART I: THE MISSION STATEMENT

Why does everyone groan when the topic of a mission statement comes up? One simple reason - it is a paaaain-ful process. The task forces shanghaied to do this work often take an inordinate amount of time and expend great effort, most often based on the unsupportable belief that it a mission statement is so central to the church, it requires painstaking care to develop and create. I have seen committees wrestle for months or even a full year on a mission statement. Often surveys are taken or there are extensive interviews. A lot of research happens. There is lots of wordsmithing and focus on individual words freighted with meaning. At the end of the day, the statement is usually bloodless, it appears in print periodically and most people forget it. Certainly no one ever uses it. Moreover, because new or fringe people didn’t labor over every word, they do not get all of the subtle meanings conveyed by the statement. This same sort of complicated process often occurs with strategic planning. Committees, surveys, church meetings and all sorts of effort can go into creating the strategic plan. A church can spend way to much time talking about what it is going to do rather than doing it. Moreover, the marginal improvement on the mission statement based on this time commitment is mot much better than one that could have been created less than an hour.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that hard. You can arrive at a mission statement and strategic plan very, very quickly if you have a handle on some basic principles and know how to structure the meeting. If done properly, everyone in the room already has all of the information they need to create the statement and the plan. Church groups are, by their very nature, pretty homogeneous in terms of the attitudes, beliefs and values of the people who have gathered. Not only that, but they know each other and have history together. That type of solidarity makes creating the mission statement and the strategic plan pretty simple.

So here is the recipe for a mission statement:

1. Gather your Board, minister and Committee on Ministry and, if you like, the chairs of your various committees. Do a check in and a brief explanation of the purpose of the meeting -that is: To come up with a mission statement for the church. If any important stakeholder groups are not represented in the group, make sure that you invite one or two from those groups.
2. Identify the ten or so biggest needs that the church meets in the lives of its parishioners and in the world. (Note is is important to figure out what needs the church is meeting in the world beyond its four walls.) Don't spend a lot of time on this - when it seems you are simply refining the list, it is time to stop. Given the people in the room, it will be accurate enough.
3. Narrow that list of ten or so down to at most four. This is usually done by grouping like things together and coming up with a word for each of those clusters of needs. For example, Connection, Significance, and Personal Growth. This part is fun, and now you have a very clear idea as to why your church exists! It is there to meet those needs in your lives and in the life of your community.
4. Craft a simple, simple statement that a reasonably intelligent fourth grader would be able to understand and repeat to tell the world why your church is there. For example based on the above words, you could end up with something like this: “We are a people connected to each other and the world around us, a people who seek to make a significant difference by thought, word and deed, and who seek to fulfill our human potential individually and collectively." Yours will be more artful because it will be a group effort and it will grow organically from your discussion.
5. Congratulate yourself on coming up with a mission statement and break out the champagne. The only trick now is to use it almost ever Sunday – recite it in the words of gathering, the chalice lighting, prior to the offering whenever it makes sense in your community (though it should be ritualistically included almost always in the same spot in the order of service). You should decide as a group where in the service this will go. Get to the point that everyone who is committed to the community has memorized it and everyone who is new hears it when they visit.

PART II: THE STRATEGIC PLAN

If you have time in your meeting, you can go on to do the strategic plan. There are two parts to the strategic plan: the work you must do because of your size and the work that is your own because of the particular nature of your community.

Prior to this phase of the meeting it is important that people understand the different sizes of church (Cell/Family/Pastoral/Program/Corporate/Mega) and the characteristics of each one. You orient them by having everyone read something before they come or have someone prepared to present on these stages and their most important traits. Have some discussion until there is a consensus in the room as to what size of a church you have. It should not be an option to say that you are sort of this size and sort of that size...you have to land in the type that you most closely resemble. (Remember your church type is more like probability cloud than rungs on a ladder - if you are a pastoral sized church, it is likely that 10-20% of your structure and patterns of relating are similar to a family sized church and about the same percentage is reflects a program sized church.)

A. The Work You Have to Do

The work you have to do is based on the size of the church you are. For example if a pastoral sized church is all about communication, leadership and incorporating new people, you have to include a statement in your strategic plan about each of these areas. For more information, click here.

Next you are going to ask yourselves some questions. First you want to know what your church would be like if it was firing on all cylinders in each of the areas you have to be focused on in a church of your size. Here you want to ask 1) What would it feel like? 2) What would it look like? 3) What structures would be in place behind the scenes? 4) What are the values that drive this? These are the questions of the individual, the behavioral, the structural, and the cultural from the last article. Discuss these questions. Everyone should be taking notes at this point to remember important parts of the discussion.

The Goals That Are Your Own.

Now we come to the stuff your church should do.

Looking above, you recall that you identified the three or four basic needs your church meets. In our hypothetical church, the needs were: Connection. Significance. Personal Growth. Again you want to ask what it would be like if the church as firing on all cylinders. Again you want to ask:

• What would it feel like?
• What would it look like?
• What structures would be in place behind the scenes?
• What are the values that drive this?

These are the questions of the psychology, behavior, the structure, and the culture from the last article and can be diagramed like this:



You could even use this diagram in your discussion. Put the major need on top and the observations to each question in each quadrant.

The next question is the hard one: What negative feelings, behaviors, structures or values are we dealing with that keep us from embodying the ideal we just articulated? It is time to get really honest. This is the shadow side of the church community and perhaps even a few individuals in it. Unless you deal with it the plan has no chance of success.

Creating Your Plan.

You should now have 3 or 4 areas that arise from the nature of the size of your church and 3 or 4 that are based on the needs you meet among yourselves and in your community.

After you discuss each area in turn, you can then begin to structure your strategic plan. This a great time to break into small groups and give each group the task of writing up one of the needs that must be met to progress and the one that is specific to your church and the needs your church in particular meets in its current and potential members. Using the area of “Connection” from above, you might come up with the following:

We want each person to feel deeply connected to at least a few others in the church, connected to the mission of the church, and that they are doing something constructive to make the world a better place. We want to have this type of compassion and concern as a core value and will design specific pathways to
that end. We will support a culture that encourages connection by creating structures that allow us to meet in different kinds of settings and cause us to deepen our connections. As much as possible, we, as leaders will commit to modeling behavior that is supportive of creating connection both in terms of what we do and what we refrain from doing. We give one another permission to remind us of this goal. As a community, we recognize that one of the things that tears at our ability to create connection is unkind criticism of others behind their backs. We resolve to change that behavior in constructive ways.

Note that this statement contains what you hope people will feel based on shared values with an eye toward culture and structure and a discussion of behavior. (In other words it address all four quadrants.) It also identifies the shadow and how you hope to deal with it.

It is critical to identify how you want people to feel, because is the connection between their need and the church structure and programing that is absolutely critical to their commitment to and involvement with the church.

The last thing to do is to have each group add a matrix for measuring success for their group's portion of the plan. Every plan must have some tools to measure progress. The measurement tool should have a way of gauging the feelings of the individuals, the behavior of the community, the creation of successful structures and the growth in values. For some of these, before and after questions or surveys are almost always useful. There are other creative ways to do this as well.

To bring this to a close, you would then bring the groups back together to simply share their work. No comments, no judgments, just sharing.

You now have the backbone of your strategic plan. The next step is to get a small group of volunteers together to edit the statements created by the various groups and circulate it for comment to the people at the meeting and others.

Now that was painless and fun and it didn’t take six months. What a relief. Let’s move on to implementing the strategic plan.

If you jumped into the middle of this discussion, you can begin at Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.