Seminary PL8: Thinking Missionally

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

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

1. The last four posts have been about strategic planning. The typical process begins by clarifying the mission of your church in a way that leads to a sense of vision for its immediate future. Often the core values of the church or organization are also clarified before the church sets specific goals to work toward. Thus far we have been looking at the first two steps--clarifying mission and setting vision.

In this post and the next, I want to mention two key factors a church should take into account when working through this process. Again, many will intuitively connect these dots, but it is worth mentioning them explicitly. The first has to do with the divine opportunities of your church's context. The second has to do with the specific strengths of your church and ministry. Today's post is about the missional opportunities of your church's context.

2. One of the "books" of this Seminary in a Nutshell series has to do with mission. In theory, that entire topic would come into play in strategic planning. For example, one post in that series will have to do with demographics--what do the people who surround your church look like? While there are plenty of churches where the people drive in from some distance, there is something peculiar about a church that has no connection with its immediate environment.

The key to thinking missionally is to think about what God is doing rather than what your church or ministry wants to do. God is on a mission to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:18-20), and the church is his agent in the world to bring it about. While we may talk about "our" mission, we are really about God's mission.

A key question in strategic planning is thus, "What is God already doing here?" What is God already doing in our community to reconcile it to himself? What is God already doing in our church? The missional question is, "How can our church join God in the mission that he is already doing here?"

What does our community look like? What are the greatest needs of our community? What people groups are not being reached in our community? What tools does our church already have that we can use to good effect?

3. It is unlikely that your church can do everything or reach everyone. Certainly you do not want anyone to feel unwelcome. Certainly you must not exclude anyone from the reach of your mission. Certainly there is no aspect of being in the kingdom that you want to leave completely out.

But focus multiplies the effort. A well known pastor in my denomination was once convicted that his church was almost completely Caucasian while his community was incredibly diverse. To put it in missional terms, he realized that his church was not participating in the mission of God in the community to which it belonged. He engaged in a mission to see his church look more like his community.

Then, as the congregation had increasingly come to look like the community, he made sure that the leadership of the church began to look like the community as well. Finally, he himself turned over the senior leadership and transitioned to another ministry.

In the city where I live, there are dozens and dozens of churches. Different churches serve different groups of people. There is a "college church." It certainly wants to reach everyone it can, but it simply is not as likely to minister to "blue collar" individuals in the city. Yet there is another growing church that does an incredible job ministering to that cross section of the city.

We are not arguing for complacency here. We are not arguing that a church segregate itself. There are great dangers in a church "excusing" itself from groups that should be its primary mission. So the college church I mentioned has worked hard to minister to the community immediately to its north, which tends to be quite different than the college community immediately to its south.

So there is a tension here. The mission of God in your church's community may not look like your church currently looks. That should tug on the church's conscience, and it should strongly consider strategic goals to change that fact. Yet a church cannot do everything and should focus its ministry. And you can't minister to anyone if you destroy the church trying to change it.

There thus has to be a balance. Is it worth splitting a church over the mission? If those that leave are weeds rather than wheat, maybe it is (Matt. 13:24-30). But God cares for the souls of those who might leave too, and sometimes it is the leader who is in the wrong, not the objectors. There is a time for the pastor to "wipe the dust off her feet" and move on too (Matt. 10:14). Or it may be time to wait, to continue to minister faithfully until a window opens for movement. Or there may be opportunity to work more subtly, creating a parallel ministry that can be integrated later.

It is also a fact of human nature that people cohere the most when they consider themselves part of the same group on the same mission (a slightly reworked version of the so called "homogeneous principle"). The pastor who integrated his congregation led his congregation to own the vision of a church that looked like its community. Although the church is now diverse, they still see themselves as a single church with a common identity and vision.

4. The bottom line of this post is that a church and its leadership should think missionally as they formulate their vision, while also taking into account the realities of their situation. The mission of your church, if it is legitimate, will always be a subset of God's mission. What is God doing in your community and how can your church get on board? This should be the primary question, not "What do we want to do?" or "Who do we want to be?" Rather, the question is what God wants to do with your church.

How might God use your church as part of his mission for your community? How might God use your church to minister to those already part of its congregation? How might God use your church to minister to the world?

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 9: Evaluating Strengths

Seminary PL7: Vision Statements

This is the seventh post in the Pastoral Leadership stretch of my Seminary in a Nutshell series. The

first six were:

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

1. Let's say that the whole church has come together for a brainstorm. What is our mission? Perhaps the pastor began the process with a sermon on the mission of the Church. Or perhaps there were two meetings, at the first of which the pastor made a presentation on the mission of the Church. Perhaps the pastor had someone else give that presentation to secure buy-in, someone the church deeply respects. Maybe the pastor even asked a key informal or formal influencer give a presentation on the history of that local church.

The goal is not to manipulate the congregation but for everyone to own the process and the goals of strategic planning, the church moving forward on the mission of God. The goal is to get buy-in and to minimize frivolous opposition to what is a significant and meaningful process leading to a good and important goal.

Then let's say that a strategic planning committee has formulated a mission statement that has gone through the appropriate channels and has been adopted. Perhaps it went to the church board and they were given time to weigh in before voting on it. Or perhaps they were given time to give feedback prior to a vote of the whole congregation. Perhaps the church as a whole was given time to put in feedback. Then let's say finally that the church as a whole adopted the mission statement.

2. By the end of this whole process of strategic planning, you want the church or organization to have a clear sense of what goals it is moving toward. Often associated with this process is a vision statement and a statement of the church's core values. [1]

A statement of vision is often thought to follow next. Perhaps. If the pastor or the strategic planning team has a clear vision, then it is appropriate to introduce it after the church or organization has agreed on the mission. The vision has to do with the next five to ten years, where does the leader or leadership team want to see the church or organization go. Aubrey Malphurs has emphasized that a vision statement is about seeing where the church is going. [2]

At other times, there may not be a clear vision for the future. In that case, the church may want to spend some time reflecting on what its core values are, which can clarify a sense of direction. Similarly, a church may want to do a self-evaluation, such as a "SWOT analysis," to identify its greatest strengths. These also provide a natural sense of direction.

In the next post, we will talk about the idea of God's mission. The idea of a church being missional prioritizes what God is doing in your community and getting on board with his mission. Before you set a vision for your church, you might take some time to identify what the needs of your community are and what God is already doing to meet them.

It is common to think that the vision for your church will come as a mandate from God. [3] You may think that you need to "pray down" the vision God has specifically for your church. Certainly prayer should be involved in this whole process. Perhaps God does have a specific path he wants your church to take. We used to speak of getting a "burden" for someone or something. This is a strong sense of concern that draws you in a certain direction.

But God does not plan everything for us. Sometimes he works together with and even inside our wills. If a pastor or leadership team has a peace about a certain vision, move forward with it, even if there is not a overwhelming sense of urgency and "tugging." On the other hand, if there is a "check," a gut feeling of reservation, you might spend a little longer in prayer. [4]

3. A vision statement can be fairly succinct, like the mission statement, or it can be a little more involved. The previous president of my university had a vision for Indiana Wesleyan University to become a premier university. The current president adopted a vision statement that simply says, "Indiana Wesleyan University: A truly great Christian university serving the world." Can you see it? It is where we are moving. We want to be a truly great Christian university.

Of course both of these dicta are somewhat undefined. That's where the specific strategic goals that follow come in. My home church, College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, has three components to its vision. It wants to transform its community, develop leaders, and resource the church. The former president of Indiana Wesleyan University used to summarize the vision of Wesley Seminary as to provide "practical, accessible, and affordable" ministerial education.

4. A vision statement is meant to motivate and communicate general direction. Malphurs defines a vision statement in this way: A vision is a clear, challenging picture of the future of the ministry, as you believe that it can and must be. [5]

What is it that your church really wants to focus on in the next ten years?

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 8: Thinking Missionally

[1] It is probably worth reiterating that the process we are unfolding here--mission, vision, core values, goal-setting--particularly suits a particular, methodical personality. Churches have personalities and pastors have personalities. Many churches and pastors, however, have intuitive personalities. It is possible that a church or organization has an assumed mission, vision, and set of core values on which pretty much everyone agrees.

In such cases, this slow, methodical process may seem like a waste of time to many. In such cases, it might be more efficient simply to focus on what the primary goals of the church or ministry should be for the next five years, short-cutting months of time in the process. Or, in such cases, the pastor or leadership team might simply submit a mission, vision, and core values statement with which they are fairly certain the church will agree.

[2] Aubrey Malphurs, Advanced Strategic Planning: A 21st Century Model for Church and Ministry Leaders, 3rd ed (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 132.

[3] E.g., Andy Stanley, Visioneering: God's Blueprint for Developing and Maintaining Vision (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 1999), 14, says, "You were tailor-made, carefully crafted, minutely detailed for a selected divine agenda." This is not the perspective of my tradition, the Wesleyan tradition, which believes that God empowers us to cooperate in the planning.

[4] It is wonderful when everyone feels the same way about a course of direction. There are times, however, when most feel good about movement forward and there is still one or two in leadership who do not want to move forward. The leader will have to weigh and carefully evaluate this situation. Are you wanting to press ahead for personal reasons or is this really a case where you need to agree to disagree and continue to move forward?

[5] Malphurs, Strategic Planning, 134.

Seminary PL6: Casting Vision

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

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

1. In theory, the mission statement of a church or organization leads naturally to a vision statement. In our next installment, we will look at vision statements in more detail. However, in this post we want to strategize about how a leader can move a church or organization toward establishing these sorts of statements.

What we are talking about here is the broader matter of "leading change." Far more important than having mere statements about a church's mission/vision is a church embracing that mission/vision. And far more important than "buy-in" to a mission or vision is movement toward reaching that vision. "A leader without followers is just going for a walk." [1] Statements are meaningless if they don't actually result in change.

2. Here we have to face a fundamental reality. Having a position does not make you a leader, at least not a significant one. There is "formal power" and there is "informal power." Formal power is the power that comes from having a position or office. To the extent that an organization takes a position seriously, having a position can give a person a great deal of power and influence.

The duties and responsibilities of "formal polity" should be clearly defined to avoid unnecessary conflict. The boundaries and powers of an office are best set before conflicts ensue. It is difficult to set such parameters in the middle of a conflict. In such cases, a superior may have to intervene and make a power-based decision. At the same time, job descriptions can be modified to fit the individual strengths of a person playing that role.

But "informal polity" is sometimes even more significant than formal power. There are often individuals who have more influence than those who formally hold positions of power. The impulse to squash such influence often comes at great price. Indeed, it often leads to defeat and ministry failure. A leader needs to pick her battles.

Notorious here is the so called "church boss." There are often individuals in small churches who more or less run the show no matter who the pastor is. A pastor--especially a new pastor--should not think that he or she is really the boss just because they have the office of leader. It usually takes some time for a new pastor to gain the much more important informal authority. This dynamic can apply to many organizations.

3. So when it comes to formulating mission and vision statements, who should formulate them? Sometimes a pastor or leader has a strong sense of what they want such statements to be. Sometimes a leader is excited to see such statements emerge from the congregation or from a smaller group of leaders. Each situation will have its own unique dynamics and challenges.

For a mission and vision to go far, it will need buy-in from those who are going to live it. This fact immediately raises questions about the personality of the group. Is the congregation happy to go with whatever vision the leader casts? Are there informal leaders whom you will need to get on your side? Are there formal leaders you will need on your side?

Negotiating potential opposition is an art rather than a science. Timing is important. Contrarians are more likely to oppose something they hear about indirectly than if a leader has already secured their support before they hear of ideas, especially before some public unveiling. But they can also undermine movement if they are brought in too soon and do not join your side.

4. A colleague of mine used to say that "If there are more than six people in the room, then the decision has been made somewhere else." Big meetings rarely make significant progress on anything. Decisions are more often made at the water cooler or around the coffee pot or in the restrooms.

A leader is wise to have a strategic team, a go-to group that he or she strategizes with before moving forward. Formal polity usually involves a board that makes official decisions. It would be ideal if the official board were a leader's strategic team. But often those who hold official positions are not those who have the most insight.

Again, the path to generating a strategic vision can be more an art than a science. If your church or organization has a strategic planning committee, then the path to an official mission or vision will have to flow through it at some point. However, leaders often have a special "go-to" set of people who help them formulate their best ideas. This group can be as simple as two or three people you regularly email when you are contemplating a decision or strategy.

One way to work toward buy-in is to have a brainstorming session with a large group at the beginning of a process of strategic planning. Such a group is ill-suited to formulate a specific mission or vision statement, but they can generate a host of possibilities from which a smaller group can then select the best ideas. In this way, the larger group has a sense that they are involved in the process long before any final presentation is made to them for adoption.

5. Getting buy-in usually requires that key influencers put their fingerprints on the process and the final product. It's usually prudent to leave some aspects of a mission or vision or plan open to change. It's unwise to think you have a finished product when a statement or plan will have to go through several hoops. Each step of a planning process will almost certainly involve change.

So a leader should identify the key aspects of the mission, vision, or plan that he or she wants left alone and which parts can provide key constituencies the chance to put their fingerprints on the process.

6. As a process unfolds, a leader should informally build support among key influencers. Ideally, everyone should feel included. However, there are often difficult personalities who need to be negotiated carefully. Of course a leader should always listen to those difficult personalities. Sometimes they are right! There are some people whose personalities make you want to say no to anything they say, but a good leader will take the time to consider if they may actually be right. Always remember the old adage, "Don't ask a question if you don't really want an answer."

When it is important, a leader may need to marginalize difficult personalities. Often, these personalities have already marginalized themselves from others. But at times, difficult people have significant informal power. Although it is not ideal, a leader may have to keep plans carefully guarded, securing as much official and informal support before a final showdown at the right time. Hopefully, assuming it is important for the plan to succeed, by that time the plans will be far enough along or there will be enough support that the contrarian will not be able to kibosh movement forward.

7. There are costs for pushing forward in the face of opposition. A leader has a certain amount of capital that comes with the office and with the authority he or she has earned informally. There is not an infinite amount of capital to spend. Try to impose too much against the will of the church and you face the possibility of a coup. Win one battle today, you may be assassinated later in a weak moment.

It is unwise to try to push through a plan in the face of overwhelming opposition, even if you are sure it is the right plan. There is the leader that sacrifices him or herself for the good of the organization's future. They take down a bad leader or push through organizational change, but are "killed" in the process.

But, in the vast majority of cases, a vision for a church cannot go anywhere unless the church embraces that vision. There is a time to give up on a plan. There is a time to move on. There is a time to back off. Part of being a good leader is being able to read the times.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 7: Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses

[1] John Maxwell

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