Seminary PL13: Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals

This is the tenth and final post on strategic planning in the Pastoral Leadership part of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom of this post for the entire leadership series thus far.

1. It may seem a matter of common sense, but after you have set goals as a church or organization, you should be sure to revisit those goals at the appropriate time to evaluate what kind of progress you are making. Then you should adjust accordingly.

So in the goal-setting stage, you laid out some short term goals (e.g., six-months or less), some medium range goals (a year, three years), and some long term goals (five years, ten years). When you get to the deadline of each goal, it is time to stop and take stock. Did you meet the goal? Are you making appropriate progress toward your longer term goals? If not, what adjustments need to be made.

Again, this is common sense, but some of us are personalities that love to set goals but are not so big on reaching them or evaluating our progress.

2. Remember, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. There is a reason for each one of these characteristics. For example, if you cannot tell whether you have met your goal or are making progress toward it, perhaps you did not set a measurable goal. You may need to re-adjust it so that it is measurable.

If you set goals that were vague rather than specific, your sense of reaching it may be vague as well. If so, then reformulate your goals so that they are more specific. Also, you cannot anticipate every circumstance that will arise, and sometimes you may not know what is truly realistic or achievable. If your goals prove not to be realistic, then reset them accordingly.

On the other hand, perhaps you will happily find that your goals were much easier to reach than you thought. Perhaps you played it safe with your goals and find that you have reached them much sooner than you planned. Great! Reset them and make them a little more challenging the second time.

3. If your church or organization is enthusiastic about its vision and goals, there's a good chance you will be taking your temperature constantly. How far toward the goal are we? If you are not excited about the goal, that speaks to a potential problem as well. Was there not real buy-in to the goals?

Reaching goals can build enthusiasm to move toward the next one's. If you meet a goal, make sure that the congregation knows it and celebrates it. Then move on to the next.

Here endeth strategic planning.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 14: Leadership Pitfalls

The first twelve were:

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths
• Identifying Core Values
• Setting Goals
• Leading Change

Seminary PL12: Leading Change

This is the ninth post on strategic planning in the Pastoral Leadership part of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom of this post for the entire leadership series thus far.

1. My colleague Bob Whitesel suggests that there are four basic forces of change in a church. [1] The first is what he calls "life cycle forces." Where is your church in its life cycle? Is it getting older? Is it fairly new? Does it feel alive or is it growing stagnant? If a life cycle force is in play in your church, it probably came up when you did your SWOT analysis as a set of strengths or weaknesses.

The kind of force that strategic planning especially introduces are what Dr. Whitesel calls "goal-oriented forces." You have now set some goals. That is providing your church with an opportunity for momentum in new directions.

A third set of forces are "conflict-oriented forces." We are often content to be mildly dissatisfied or even happy with less than what could be when everyone is somewhat getting along. We can even ride that complacency all the way to our church's grave. Nothing sparks change more than conflict.

Finally, there are "trend-oriented forces." These are forces--opportunities and threats--from your church's environment. As such, they probably showed up in your SWOT analysis.

2. So how do you lead change once you have set goals and thus put some "goal oriented forces" in motion? The standard reference here is John Kotter, who suggests an eight stage process for creating major change (22):

• Establish a sense of urgency
• Put together a coalition
• Develop a vision and strategy
• Communicate the change vision
• Empower broad-based action
• Generate short-term wins
• Consolidate gains and generate more change
• Anchor new approaches in the culture

These points are the context in which the entire strategic planning process should take place. Indeed, Kotter suggests that these steps normally need to be accomplished in this order (25-27).

3. Goal-setting can of course be initiated without there being a crisis. When a pastor takes a new church or perhaps nothing has really been happening at the church, these are fair enough reasons to initiate strategic planning. A sense of need for change doesn't have to be church-wide. There just needs to be enough sense of a need for change among the leaders who can initiate change.

Of course crisis or conflict provides momentum for change. We can question the ethics of manufacturing a crisis in order to push change, but a moment of crisis or conflict can provide a kairos moment to seize upon toward change.

You need to have enough support to effect change. If votes are involved, you need to have the votes. There's no point in making a proposal if you don't have the votes. You need the right people on board at the right times.

This entire series of posts is about establishing vision and a strategic plan. Once the mission and vision, the values and goals have been set, if the broader congregation has not been involved in the planning (hopefully they have on some level), the leaders of the church should communicate that vision and strategy. It is easy enough to do so from the pulpit or, perhaps, in a special meeting.

4. Presumably, those who have set goals for the church have the authority and power to move toward those goals. As we mentioned in the goal-setting post, some of those goals should be short term goals, perhaps six months out. These should be goals that are attained fairly easily, to give a sense that progress is being made. They keep momentum going.

Each goal attained should be celebrated and used to energize toward the next goal. We will talk in the next post about making adjustments. If part of the goal-setting is to change the mindset or the culture, then the right words, the right metaphors, the right practices have to be reiterated over and over again. This is where having repeatable slogans (e.g., in the mission or vision statement) can help. "We care about people." "We want to reach everyone." "We are the Gideon church." "We are third."

Over and over and over again.

We can go through the whole process of strategic planning, but if these overall change dynamics are not in place, it probably won't go much of anywhere.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 13: Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals

[1] Also see his book, Preparing for Change Reaction. Get it, instead of "chain reaction" it's change reaction. For some reason it took me forever to get that.

The first eleven were:

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths
• Identifying Core Values
• Setting Goals

Seminary PL 11: Setting Goals

This is the eighth post on strategic planning in the Pastoral Leadership part of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom of the page for the entire leadership series thus far.

1. Thus far in strategic planning we have identified a mission and vision for our church/organization. We have uncovered our core values. We have done a SWOT analysis of our church in its context, including a look at our context from a missional perspective. Now we get to the most impactful step yet--we need to set some goals for our church.

Taking the factors above into consideration, your church should be able to identify some objectives that you want to shoot for and reach in the future. In common speech, an objective and a goal mean more or less the same thing. But for strategic planning, we might think of an objective as more general and your goals as more specific and measurable. Your objectives should have an obvious connection to your values, strengths, and opportunities. Your goals will be more specific paths to reach those objectives.

[I might throw another word into the mix here, outcomes. In educational circles, we speak less and less of goals and objectives. An "outcome" is the measurable product in knowledge, skills, and dispositions that we want a student to have by the end of our course or degree.]

In strategic planning, however, an objective might be to increase the number of people from your community who attend your church. In relation to this objective, you might have short, middle, and long term goals toward its achievement.

Your goals can be arranged in a certain kind of hierarchy. What I mean is that there may be a broad objective that has several dimensions to it. So you can have layers of goals and objectives. If your vision is to become a thriving church engaged with your community, what are the objectives that might go along with that? Is community contact an objective?

Lets say you want to create three regular points of contact with your community over the next five years. You want to start a Celebrate Recovery group. You want to start a "pastor swap" event once a year. You want to start a monthly bazaar downtown hosted by your church. Your bigger objective of "to better engage your community" gave birth to three long term goals. But these long term goals will require many sub-goals in the interim.

2. So how do you decide what kinds of objectives you should have? This is especially where discernment and the Holy Spirit are essential. Your leadership team should definitely spend some time in prayer at this step because this is the juncture that really makes a difference. All the planning so far is helpful, but it will only have an impact if it translates into objectives and goals.

Some attempts have been made to quantify this step, to spell out what the most logical goals might be given your SWOT analysis. Bob Whitesel, in a chapter titled, "Strategic Planning: More Than a Process," sets out a mathematical process to clarify what the most likely direction of your church would be.[2]

For example, one tool helps generate possible strategies by looking at the cross-section between strengths and opportunities, strengths and threats, as well as weaknesses and opportunities and weaknesses and threats. He has a church create a nine box chart (called a TOWS matrix) where strengths and weakness are in the top row and opportunities and threats are in the first column. In the boxes where they intersect, you brainstorm possible strategies at the intersection between each factor.

Now to decide which strategy to pursue, he has the church "weight" the importance of each strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. Then as the church looks at each possible strategy, he has the church rate the strategy in relation to each strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. Part of the rating should be how much that strategy seems to inspire internally in relation to each SWOT and part should be how well evidence from other churches suggests that strategy might address each SWOT.

Finally, you multiply the weight of each SWOT by the "attractiveness" rating of each SWOT. The strategy with the highest total is a logical strategy to pursue.

This approach may seem a little too mechanical for some, but it captures what we do intuitively. As we have said, a church should probably focus more on its strengths than its weaknesses--utilizing strengths almost always accomplishes more than addressing weaknesses. Looking at what is or is not working elsewhere is always important, although there is a time to set the trend and break the curve, to be a leader and not a follower. Internal inspiration is a key factor, as is the missional importance of your goals. And it all should be bathed in prayer.

In the end, the goals and objectives of a church are a spiritual art. Wisely, there should be an evidentiary, logical element most of the time too. But good leadership will always, in the end, require discernment for a specific context.

3. The bulk of your goals--especially the ones you are most likely to achieve, will be "SMART" goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. By "specific and measurable," we mean you will be able to tell when you have achieved them because they are specific and demonstrable enough that you can clearly say, "Yep, we reached that one."

A goal like, "to become a better person" is vague. How will you decide whether you have achieved it? On the other hand, a goal like, "I will perform one act of random kindness each week" is a specific goal that you can know whether you did it or not. "I will run three times a week for 45 weeks this year" is specific and measurable.

The goals above are also achievable and realistic for many people. It might be unrealistic to do a random act of kindness every day or to run every day this year (also not a good idea). We all have different capacities and hopefully we know something about what is realistic for us. The same goes for our churches and organizations. What are realistic and achievable goals for us? You do not want too many goals, for example.

4. The "time-bound" element means that you have set an expiration date for the goal. In general, you should have short, middle, and long range goals. The purpose of short range goals, say six months or a year out, is to generate what John Kotter calls, "short term wins." We humans often have trouble seeing the far off. So many of us get discouraged or lose motivation when our goal is years away from achievement.

Establishing some achievable and realistic goals for the near future is always a good idea to keep your church or organization (or yourself) motivated to keep going.

The long term goals will usually represent bigger, more audacious, and perhaps more complex objectives. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggested that organizations should have at least one "BHAG," a "big, hairy, audacious goal" that will take 10 to 30 years to reach. [1]

We should also be realistic. Most pastors are not going to be at the same church in 10 years that they are now. The average tenure of a college president is something like seven years. The five year goals are probably most realistic as long term goals for any church or organization. You can have your eye on where those five year goals might lead, but to focus further out is probably not going to be as helpful.

So if you have six month goals and five year goals as your bookends, set some intermediate goals in the middle--one year goals, three year goals. The nature of your objectives will help determine what time frame makes sense in the middle.

5. There is more than one way to get from Marion, Indiana where I live to Indianapolis or Chicago. There is a shortest route when there is no traffic or construction. There are circuitous routes. But often times, to get from a to c, you have to pass through b.

For some people it is common sense but others will need to consciously think through the steps necessary to get to a goal. So you might logically start with the five year goals and work backward to the short term wins. A certain personality insists that it must be done this way, but as long as the final chart of short term, mid-range, and long term goals ends up making sense--and doesn't take an inordinate amount of time--they can just spend a little more time with their therapist that week. You could argue that it is just as valid to have a free-flowing brainstorming session where boxes are filled and ideas captured as they flow. Then you can tidy up the chart at the end.

If you have your five year goals in place, what mid-range goals are necessary or appropriate to reach them? And if you have your mid-range goals in place, what shorter term goals will be necessary to reach them? And what are the "short-term wins" you are incorporating to keep enthusiasm and momentum going? In a later post, we will talk about project management, which is a more specific version of this sort of goal setting, one aimed at very specific projects that might be part of a goal.

You will want to capture these goals. When you publicize the strategic plan, you will probably want to do so in words and paragraphs. But behind the scene, you might create a chart something like this:

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 12: Leading Change

[1] James Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (San Francisco: HarperBusiness, 1994), 113.

[2] Bob Whitesel, "Strategic Planning: More Than a Process," The Church Leader's MBA: What Business School Instructors Wish Church Leaders Knew About Management, ed. by Mark Smith and David Wright (Circleville: OCU, 2011), 73-112, esp. 96-97.

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths
• Identifying Core Values

Seminary PL10: Identifying Core Values

This is the tenth post in the Pastoral Leadership part of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. The first nine were:

Leadership in General

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead

Strategic Planning

• The Mission, Great and Small
• Identifying Mission
• Casting Vision
• Vision Statements
• Thinking Missionally
• Evaluating Strengths

1. The last six posts have been about strategic planning. Another element in that equation is to identify the core values of your church or organization. If you have followed the sequence thus far, you have identified the core mission of your church and you have set an overall vision for what your church might be in general. Now as we move toward specific goals, it is often helpful to identify what the core values of your church or organization are.

It seems to me that identifying core values is usually a more crucial step than creating a mission statement (which are often so general as to tell you little) or vision statement (which does point toward a course but only in the most general of ways). When you create a list of five to ten values, you are beginning to name explicitly aspects of your church's identity that you will want to translate into concrete reality.

Again, many churches in the past have intuitively known such values and have skipped the methodical and process oriented sequence thus far and gone straight to goal setting. We should be careful never to crown one personality as superior to another. Many process-oriented personalities give a logical basis for doing something, but have a hard time ever doing anything. Intuitive, task-oriented personalities can get things done, which is after all the very purpose for strategic planning. The value of strategic planning is that the best tasks are set in motion.

2. When Wesley Seminary was mainly a dream, my friends Russ Gunsalus and David Smith called a joint meeting of the undergraduate ministry department and the graduate ministry program at Indiana Wesleyan University. In that meeting, we together brainstormed and drafted a list of eight core values for a new MDiv degree that might eventually become part of a new seminary. [1] These values actually became part of the official proposal for the new MDiv degree.

The church where I attend has identified six values: transforming, discovering, preempting, resourcing, including, and belonging. The university where I work has four key "strategies": great students, great people, great programs, great scope.

These sorts of explicit value statements can help a church or organization stay on task. All organizations only have a limited number of resources. If you try to do everything, the chances are that you will do very little of anything. A core values list is one thing that can help keep your church on target. And if you find yourself increasingly branching out into ventures that aren't part of your core values, perhaps it is time either to modify them or get back on target.

3. Aubrey Malphurs gives nine reasons why core values are important: 1) they determine your ministry's distinctives, 2) they dictate personal involvement, 3) they communicate what is important, 4) they embrace good change, 5) they influence overall behavior, 6) they inspire people to action, 7) they enhance credible leadership, 8) they contribute to ministry success, and 9) they determine ministry mission and vision. [2]

This last comment on his part suggests that the order in which some of these strategic steps are taken is fluid. For example, one might clarify your ministry's values before you set the mission and vision. A church can use common sense in these things. What are we clear on and what are we not so clear about?

4. Values can be an embodiment of aspirations. We value innovation but we are not very innovative. Let us move forward in an innovative way. Or we are about to start something that we want to be innovative. What are going to be the distinctives of our new church?

Values can help clarify new direction. We have been doing too many things and are spreading ourselves too thin. By identifying our key values, we are helping ourselves decide which ventures to continue and which to let go.

Too many values suggest that you are not focused as a church. You are trying to be all things to all people, which is rarely possible. A list of five is better than a list of ten.

Some values may relate to what you do or who you are. Others may relate to how you do things. Are you more a "being" church or a "doing" church, or both? Do you value worship more or outreach? Are you more about holiness or evangelism? After you have brainstormed a list, you might ask what is missing. If some core feature of the church is missing, it might be time for some self-examination.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 11: Setting Goals

[1] The eight values were 1) missional/kingdom focused, 2) accessible, 3) application-focused, 4) spiritually formative, 5) innovative, 6) value-adding, 7) high quality teaching and learning, and 8) global.

[2] Aubrey Malphurs, Advanced Strategic Planning: A 21st Century Model for Church and Ministry Leaders (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 150.

Seminary PL5: Identifying Mission

This is the fifth post in the Pastoral Leadership stretch of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. The first two were:

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead
• The Mission, Great and Small

1. It's good for a church or organization to have a strong sense of why it exists. Most have some intuitive sense of what they're there for. Probably most people at a hospital think they are there to help sick people. Probably a number of people at a college think they are there to teach students. A pastor may think she is there to minister to people.

But there are often competing senses of what an institution is about. Many professors may think they are there primarily to push the bounds of knowledge, not to teach students. At some universities, that may actually be the case. Many ministers think the primary goal of the church is to reconcile the world, not to minister to those who are already coming.

Often, there are not absolute answers to these questions. There is room in the universe for churches with slightly different senses of their identity and mission. Like the "body of Christ" in 1 Corinthians 12, some churches may focus more on one part of the mission and others on other parts.

2. We should neither over- or underestimate the significance of a mission statement. For the intuitive, a mission statement gives power to what you already feel by naming it. In that sense, a mission statement doesn't have to be something new. It can simply put words to what everyone already feels. But once your already assumed mission is named, it can serve as a rallying point, a tool to synergize a vision to move forward.

For churches or leaders with a planning personality, it is absolutely essential to generalize one's overall sense of identity and purpose before you can move forward. This personality should be careful not to dismiss the intuitive personality. The intuitive can sometimes view the planner as pedantic and as wasting everyone's time by spelling out what they think everyone already knows. Meanwhile, the planner can view the intuitive as chaotic and directionless.

Both characterizations are false. Intuitives do often see things that the planner cannot see until it is spelled out. But planners often save an organization from wasting its resources by clarifying and prioritizing the values and purpose that lead to direction. An institution that only empowers one group diminishes itself.

3. A mission statement can either make explicit the general identity an organization already has or it can serve as a launching point for an attempt to change identity and purpose. A mission statement should not be changed very often, perhaps no more than once every ten years. They can last for much longer.

Mission statements are usually so general that many different visions can be set out within the framework of the same mission statement. My former colleague Keith Drury used to say that mission statements usually say much more about what an institution is or has been at the time the statement is drafted than about what the organization will actually be going forward.

For these reasons, an organization should not belabor its mission statement too much, nor should they use them to prevent organic developments that may take place after they are made. There may come a time when the identity of an organization has changed so dramatically that everyone senses that the mission statement is out of date. At that point, a change is in order.

4. The mission statement of my local church, College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, is "CWC partners with God to restore people and redeem the world by reflecting the image of Jesus Christ." You can see how general it is. Probably any church in the world could use it. Nevertheless, it captures some of the key categories of those who drafted it. They looked at people through the lens of the "image of God." It fits within the missional movement in its language of partnering with God (rather than the mission being that of the church itself). It says nothing of worship and presumably sees discipleship as part of restoration, assuming that all people are less than whole.

The mission of Indiana Wesleyan University states that IWU is "a Christ-centered academic community committed to changing the world by developing students in character, scholarship, and leadership." As of 2016, the university is under the third president since this mission statement was drafted and there has been no need to change it. In itself, the statement is general enough that three presidents have now been able to implement their specific visions for the university under the same overall sense of mission.

When would it be appropriate to change it? If a future stage of the IWU community ceased to think of itself as "world changing," then it might want to change it. Or if new leadership ever arose that had a distinct enough sense of the future that it wanted to initiate a new direction, it might create a new one. It has been long enough since the first statement that it could be changed.

However, the current president, David Wright, wisely did not reformulate the university's mission statement when he became president. For one thing, he was present at the university when the mission statement was drafted. He therefore already had some ownership of the mission.

But it would have wasted valuable institutional time. The university's sense of identity has not changed enough in the last 15 years that a new mission statement was necessary. Keeping it both gave a sense of stability/continuity and allowed his leadership team to move on to the specifics of his vision and goals. These are the real mechanisms of institutional change because they are more specific and targeted.

A new leader who wants to implement a new mission statement should not do so too quickly. If the organization does not have a mission statement or if the old statement is generally perceived to be out of date, it can be done in the first year. In other cases, a leader may want to settle in a little before implementing such change.

5. In Advanced Strategic Planning, Aubrey Malphurs suggests that a good mission statement for a church is broad, brief, biblical, is a statement, and is what the ministry is supposed to be doing. We can assume the mission of any Christian institution will fit with sound biblical understanding and orthodoxy Christian belief and practice. If a church wants to be explicit about that connection, it certainly can, but it can just as well be assumed.

We have already given some sense of why a mission statement should be broad--it should have some staying power. That it should be a statement also makes sense in that a question or command does not capture identity and purpose as well. Brevity means it will be more memorable and inspiring. When IWU first set its mission statement, then President James Barnes would give any employee 5 dollars if, when he randomly approached you, you could state the new mission statement from memory.

The previous post attempted to present some generalities about the Church's mission in general, what the Church is supposed to be doing. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, a church trying to formulate a mission statement has plenty of examples to choose from. Most churches have their mission statements on their websites. The team that proposes a mission statement should look at a variety of precedents and find those elements that best capture the identity and sense of mission in their particular context.

The mission statement will often have both a "being" and "doing" element.  Church X is something that aims at something by doing something.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 6: Casting Vision

Seminary PL4: The Mission, Great and Small

This is the fourth post in the Pastoral Leadership stretch of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. The first three were:

• Categories of Leadership
• Styles and Traits of Leaders
• How does God lead

1. One task to which a pastor may give oversight is strategic planning. Strategic planning is the process by which an organization determines what its goals are for the future and how it plans to meet them. Strategic planning is rooted in the organization's mission, which in turn leads to a vision for the future, which ideally results eventually in strategic goals and implementation plans.

Without goals, a person or organization just tends to wander aimlessly through its existence. Without a sense of mission or vision, an organization is unclear about its identity or purpose. We can of course have such things without them being fully conscious or thought through, but the more intentional and conscious we are about them, the more likely we are to meet them.

2. A local church at some point might develop a mission statement. This is a statement of the church's basic identity. For example, the mission statement of the local church I attend states that it "partners with God to restore people and redeem the world by reflecting the image of Jesus Christ." This is a very general statement that could refer to just about any church in the world.

In most respects, the mission of the Church is more or less the same no matter where you are in space and time. A church should not spend too much time developing a mission statement because in themselves they say very little that might not be said of any other church at any other time. Nevertheless, in some cases, developing a mission statement for a church--or for you as an individual--can capture a sense of identity, which can be very significant indeed.

3. So what is the mission of the Church? The Church is the body of Christ. We are God's hands and feet in the world, and the communion of saints which extends to heaven. The mission is actually God's mission rather than ours, and we only participate in it.

There is both a being and a doing dimension to God's church. We are the kingdom community of the Spirit, the collection of all those throughout history in whom the Spirit of Christ has dwelt, the people of God for all eternity. We fellowship. We meet together for worship. Although the Church universal is one, holy, universal, and missional community, the church local is where the word of God is rightly preached, the means of grace are rightly administered, and a community of individuals is rightly ordered.

The mission of the Church is to participate in the mission of God, and the mission of God is nothing less than the reconciliation, restoration, and glorification of the world. The world is alienated from its creator. The image of God is marred in humanity. All have sinned and are lacking the glory that God intended us to have in the creation.

The "Great Commission" of the Church is of course found in Matthew 28:19-20. At its heart, this commission is to "make disciples" by a process of baptizing and teaching. Churches have often reduced their sense of this commission to a shallow form of evangelism, but the grammar of the sentence focuses on making disciples and the bulk of what that means is "teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you."

So the mission of the Church involves going. It involves seeing the world reconciled to God, of which baptism signifies entrance into the people of God. It involves discipleship of that people once they have crossed from death to life. It involves service to its surrounding community and world, since social justice is one of the central teachings of Jesus.

4. All these are part of the mission of the Church: to worship our God, to go and participate in the reconciliation of the world, to disciple the people of God, to serve the needs of others, and to live together in unity and community. Individual churches may focus more on one of these than the others. Individual churches may use language that fits closely with its time, culture, or tradition.

But this is the overall mission of the Church, and the mission statement of a local church will likely present some element or elements of the Church's overall mission in its sense of its local identity and purpose.

Next week: Pastor as Leader 5: Identifying Mission