Issue 10 – Finding Your New Church Dream (1)

 

Dear Bob

You asked me to write a Letter or two on Finding A New Church Dream. Here’s the first of two Letters.

The second Letter will focus on the final stages of the planning process; this Letter focuses on some critical background issues – because if we’re not clear on them, we’ll head off into the planning wilderness where many churches go when they try to do strategic planning. These churches never reach their church dreams. But first a planning testimony.

Church Dreams – A Journey Of Discovery

For nearly 20 years, I’ve been helping churches find and reach their dreams.

For the first 18 and a half years, I worked with churches across the denominations; over the past 13 months, I’ve focused on a family of churches. Helping churches find and reach their dreams has been my passion for two decades.

But if the journey has been long it’s also been very interesting. When I started, some churches were using planning manuals of a hundred pages or more and suffocated in the process. I went for brevity and even then limited those early plans to two sides of an A4 sheet—although the focus and layout of the plans was embarrassingly inferior to the way I now do it.

However God mercifully overruled those inadequacies; and even in those early years, one church I worked with doubled in size (by conversion growth) over the usually inactive summer months and maintained a 90% annual average growth rate for several years—moving into a very large disused theatre in the process. Those breakthroughs encouraged me to keep searching for a better way of doing things till last year I abandoned the old way altogether. Now, in the ceaseless search for simplicity and impact, I do it very differently. But more about that later.

Finally, to understand how the communication side of the church dream journey works, in 1992 I started an 11-year journey with Trinity College London and the New Zealand Speech Board. During those long drawn out years, I studied the great communicators through the ages—from ancient Greece and Rome through to the present day; and they taught me the basics of how communication works out so people run with a new dream.

The Church Dream Challenge

On the planning side of things, I quickly discovered that strategic plans for businesses could be very long because businesses have managers and other salaried staff to put the plans into practice. But even large churches, like Willow Creek, are largely run by volunteers—and the last thing volunteers want is to move from detailed plans at work to detailed church plans.

So church plans need to be very short; and from all the evidence I’ve seen, the moment church plans move onto a second sheet of paper, they lose 50% of their effectiveness, and plans extending to more than two sheets are most likely to get filed away in peoples drawers—as they’ve been in many homes around the country. Indeed, even around 1996, when Willow Creek was running at 14,000 at the weekend, they worked from a sheet of paper with six goals on it, and everything they did was tested against those goals.

Church plans should therefore be brief and simple, and strongly visual, so they energise the volunteers who carry them out—and capture the imagination of new people considering joining. To be effective, a church plan should be both a plan and a dream—because (as Martin Luther King found) dreams lead to action, dreams change behaviour, dreams break bad habits, and dreams enable people to reach new goals. Several pages of words never do!

If I took any church around the country that’s gone places, I’d find their dream has brought them to their promised land.

Preparing For A New Dream – The Big Picture

We start our search for a new dream by looking at the relationship between our Sunday morning church services (or ‘meetings’) and our community ministries during the week—because the community is our fishing ground and the ministries are the nets we fish with. To catch many fish in the community (Mt 4.19-20), we must use nets with the right mesh.

Many churches have few community ministries of any size so they usually catch few fish. Some churches, even small churches, have very large community ministries but catch few if any fish—because there’s no connection between their Sunday church services and their ministries during the week; their nets have the wrong mesh.

One small church I’ve worked with had a pre-school ministry to 120 people in 53 families and a growing waiting list. But, although 90% of the 120 were unchurched, only one family came to faith because there wasn’t any connection between what the church did on Sunday and what it did with the 120 during the week. The programme was excellent but it didn’t lead to people coming to faith. This small church also had another significant community ministry, the Family Store, where an estimated 500-1000 people passed through each week. But again, there wasn’t any connection between the Family Store and the Sunday church service.

Preparing For A New Dream – Tacking, Not Fast Tracking

When I started working with this church, I commented that many people think we can fast track people from a community ministry into the church – just as in power boat racing you try to get from point A to point B by the shortest possible route. But the Kingdom of God doesn’t work that way, because as Win Arn noted years ago, 75-90% of people come to faith through a relationship with a Christian, and relationships take time to develop.

When we build relationships with people in our community ministries, we help them tack their way from the ministries to the church services and faith in Jesus—much as sailors tack their way to the finishing line in America’s Cup racing. So we might put on a summer barbecue for people in the pre-school or Family Store ministries. Then we might make a pastoral visit to any who show interest in developing the relationship further, and so on.

When this is starting to take effect, we may then put on a pre-school or Family Store guest service that features the people moving in these circles—making sure our regular services aren’t too different from the guest service (see later comment). When it comes to evangelising our communities, the Holy Spirit’s method is to say to us, ‘What is that in your hand?’ ((Ex 4.2). Moses had a staff; many churches have community ministries, and those are the ministries He uses.  And to win, we need (as Bill Hybels says) to have ‘Empty seats at optimal inviting hours’. Starting services before 9.30am on Sunday, or finishing after 12 noon, isn’t usually very conducive to reaching newer people.

Winning In The Seasons Of Mission

One more recent discovery I’ve made is that not all Sundays have equal mission value because there are seasons of the year when people are more open to Christian things.

So one church I’ve worked with runs at 100 on ordinary Sunday mornings but had 150 on Mother’s Day. Another, that ran at 90 last year, had 180 on Father’s Day—and over 250 at each of the two ticketed functions on the last Saturday and Sunday nights before Christmas. These churches get these numbers on special occasions because they know how to connect with the people they contact during the week. And when the people do come to their special services, etc, they aim to get them closer to following Jesus, because just getting big numbers along isn’t the point. Getting them closer to Jesus is.

When I started writing this Letter in July, still five months out from Christmas, I was reminded of how awesome this mission principle is. A radio commercial invited us to book drivers now for our Christmas functions later. Like several years ago, when I was in a shopping mall in September, they were playing our great Christmas songs as people went about their shopping. Quite obviously, the Christmas season (which seems to start earlier and earlier!) is our greatest mission opportunity of the year because people are very open to the spiritual dimension of life. But there are other seasons of mission – so a mission strategy for a church might look like this.

Perhaps we’re a very small church with just 20-25 people at church on January the 1st next year—but we work with 120 people in the pre-school ministry, and have 500-1000 passing through the Family Store, which is mainly staffed by volunteers. Here’s how 2006 might go.

Reaching into our various community networks, we have a special focus at Easter and lift our attendance to 35 on Easter Sunday—and because the Easter service isn’t too different from our ordinary services, some newer people keep attending and lift our normal attendances to 28.

We do the same for Mothers Day, with attendance rising to 40 and falling back to 33. We do another special on Fathers Day, with attendance rising to 45 and falling back to 35. Then our special Christmas focus pushes attendance up to 50 and sends us into 2007 with 40 attending; and if we slip in other special services, like a pre-school or Family Store service, we may actually go into 2007 with 50 attending—with similar noticeable increases during the year if we’re a larger church. One church of a hundred has a significant lift in attendance every time they do something special – so they do something special frequently! And the newer people keep coming.

Mission Washing Sunday Morning

The last major area to consider before putting our new church dream together is the Sunday morning service—remembering that the average NZ church is too small to have two viable morning services, or a strong morning and evening service. So we have to do everything at one morning service, building up believers and reaching newer people. But to do this, we need to ‘mission wash’ the service so it fits both the present church family and the newer people we’re reaching. That is, the services must be seeker sensitive; so let’s create our own visual to capture this.

Grab a pen and sheet of paper. Draw a 15 x 4.5cm rectangle across the page—this is our Sunday morning service, which we enter at the left and exit at the right. Mark the rectangle off into thirds corresponding to the three main parts of the service. Write ‘Praise and Worship’ in bold letters above the first third—where many do their main singing and praying. Write ‘Miscellaneous’ above the second third—where many have their Notices and Offering, Bible readings and further prayers, a testimony, and so on (some churches swap these two thirds around). Write ‘Preaching and Response’ above the final third—with its focus on the preaching and response, often with a ministry response song or two. This first part of the exercise gives us our service structure.

Now (so we can see them) separate the well-established attenders from the newer people, putting the established attenders along the bottom side of the rectangle and the newer people inside the top side. Finally, take a different coloured pen, and moving from left to right through the middle of the entire rectangle, draw a series of arrows that sweep sometimes to the newer people and sometimes to the well-established attenders. So if it’s a four-point sermon, point one might sweep towards the newer people, points two and three to the established attenders, and point four and the response towards both groups. In other words, we’re focusing on both groups of people throughout the service—with songs and prayers etc connecting with both groups, as the sermon especially does.

We’ve mission washed the morning service so it reaches both groups of people—just as the 1 Cor 14.23-24 service, in a different context, reached all the people who were present.

The Five Yearnings

Many years ago, Robert L. Randall’s Abingdon book, What People Expect From Church, taught me that Christians and pre-Christians both come to church with the same great human longings that once brought the crowds to Jesus.

First, they come yearning to be understood. From the rough and tumble of life they make their way to church hoping that people will accept them as they are and help them become the people that deep down they want to become.

Second, they come yearning to understand—searching for explanations and pictures and ideas they can graft onto their present sketchy understanding of life so they make a better job of getting it together tomorrow.

Third, most (though not all) come yearning to belong—hoping that somewhere in the church family they’ll get close to people and form relationships that outlast the ups and down of the years.

Fourth, they come yearning for hope for tomorrow—so that when they return to their troubled world, they’ve got something to live for, something to hold onto, and something that will steady them as they struggle with the pressures of life.

Finally (and I’ve added this fifth yearning to Randall’s four), somewhere in all these dreams, they come increasingly to worship—because they’re discovering they’re made for worship and that without worship they can never really be satisfied.

The church service in all its parts—with all its singing, praying, preaching, and so on—should pick up on these deep human needs because in the average service more than 25% of those present have major needs which are the doorway to their souls. Tap into those great human needs with the gospel… and nothing will hold you back!

Before we do any strategic planning, we should plan to build those human dynamics into our plan—capturing the faith journey of the people we contact in the community as they journey from outside the Kingdom to a dynamic faith in Jesus as their Saviour and Lord. That faith journey is the backdrop, the pivot, and the focus of a good strategic plan!

Finding Your New Church Dream!

Bob, as you and your leaders begin your search for a new church dream, you must be clear about these foundational issues as you start.

Good strategic plans start with the big picture of how people come to faith through the ages, the role of the main church service and it’s link with those we’re reaching in the community, and the kind of plan needed to capture the imagination of the people in our church who will make it happen. To be of any use to you at all, your plan must be more than a ‘plan’; it must also be a dream because throughout history it’s been dreams that have changed the status quo. Pages of words, on their own, never do.

May God bless you and your leaders as you think through these foundational things. And may all your future dreams come true!

Good-bye.

Gordon Miller
Church Growth & Development Consultant

To Discuss At Leaders Meetings

• What kind of ‘traffic flow’ are we getting at present between our community ministries and our Sunday services—ie, are an increasing number of people starting to make the journey from the ministries to the services and faith in Jesus?
• If traffic flow is low, what steps do we need to take to encourage more people to start the journey—including offering to come with them to their first services?
• If we are an average church with just one Sunday morning service, how well do we connect with any newer people who may be starting to attend?
• If we aren’t yet connecting well with the newer people attending, what steps do we need to take to connect with them better—and close the gap between the way we do things on ordinary Sundays and the way we do them on special Sundays?

Note To All Readers

The Salvation Army Leadership Letter, which until recently has been monthly, will now be released five times a year—on the first day of March, May, July, September and November (like the World Vision Leadership Letter before it). The next issue will be released on 1 November 2005.

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