The Vital Need to be a Church Unique

by: Mark MacDonald

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Have you noticed? Products and services are dropping from existence regularly. Toys”R”Us have closed their doors entirely and more than 5000 individual stores closed across the country as major retailers decide it’s best for their bottom line. What’s happening?!?

Even worse, 4000 evangelical churches disappeared from the United States. I wonder if many even notice?

Why all the closings? Because another organization started to supply the community’s needs in a similar or better way. Toys”R”Us used to be “the” place to go for toys. Kids would see it as a fun destination where they could dream and wish. Parents knew if they wanted something entertaining for their kids you could find it in one of the aisles. Plus they were local and easy to get to.

Then competition arrived and offered similar benefits. Followed by the internet allowing you to search for toys in the comfort of your home. Then Amazon promised quick shipping. Then people stopped going to the physical stores that were riddled with personnel and inventory issues. Oh, and we won’t even talk about pricing. Toy”R”Us was simply an option that didn’t stand out anymore. They weren’t different.

If you have a local church that are like all the other community’s churches, offering similar ministries, then you’re setting yourself up for comparison and eventually closing. Your community will simply decide where to go based on proximity, denomination, leadership personality, and maybe how your buildings look. It may even be your landscaping that becomes the issue.

There’s a better way.

You can create a different kind of church and become known for something very different and bold apart from the others in town. People will overlook most other things and drive great distances for something that’s different.

You need to be different.

But for the church; be sure that your difference is biblically sound, and most importantly, needed by enough people. Be known for being relevant and an essential benefit to your community. Then your church will be around for a long time.

You just have to effectively communicate your unique thread. Be different. Be needed. Be relevant.

> Read more from Mark.

Tags: Church Unique, Communication, Mark MacDonald

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Making Great Decisions, Part 2: This One Step Changes Everything

by: VRcurator

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Does your lack of organizational focus keeps everyone too busy, especially you?

Do you feel like most days you are running on a ministry treadmill? You know the feeling – it’s when the busyness of ministry creates a progressively irreversible hurriedness in your life as a leader. The sheer immediacy of each next event or ministry demand prevents you from taking the time to look to the future horizon – and sometimes even today’s calendar – until it crashes in on you.

All too often, today’s demands can choke out the needed dialogue for tomorrow. When this occurs, your multiplied activity accomplishes little of value and prevents you from ministry with a clear sense of what God has called you to do.

THE QUICK SUMMARY – Escape Velocity, by Geoffrey Moore

In Escape Velocity, Geoffrey A. Moore, author of the marketing masterwork Crossing the Chasm, teaches twenty-first century enterprises how to overcome the pull of the past and reorient their organizations to meet a new era of competition. The world’s leading high-tech business strategist, Moore connects the dots between bold strategies and effective execution, with an action plan that elucidates the link between senior executives and every other branch of a company.

For anyone aiming for the pinnacle of success, Escape Velocity is an irreplaceable roadmap to the top.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION – Execute Your Vision

While forecasting the future should be seen as a necessary action for ministry today, Auxano Founder and Team Leader Will Mancini believes that for every leader who surfs the waves of cultural change there are a hundred who are stuck in a whirlpool vortex – and they feel they can’t keep their heads above the waters.

The world outside us is not stuck. It is changing rapidly even as we find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper into the comfort of yesterday.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board for vision, strategy, and execution.

The larger and more successful the enterprise, the greater the inertial mass, the harder it is to alter course and speed.

What if there is some hidden force that is working against your best efforts? What if this force is operating inside your own company, with the full support of your executive team, your board, and indeed yourself? What if this force is able to mysteriously redirect resource allocation so that it never quite gets deployed against new agendas? That force is the pull of the past.

To move beyond the pull of the past, you must organize and shape your approach to the planning effort of next year with three goals foremost:

• Articulate a compelling vision of the future that others will want to support.
• Set a strategy consistent with your vision.
• Resource your execution so that it can accomplish your highest aspirations.

To free your organization’s future from the pull of the past, to escape the gravitational field of your prior year’s operating plan, you need to apply a force that is greater than the inertial momentum of current operations.

Newton’s first law of motion states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to continue in the direction in which it is currently moving. The same goes for resource allocation.

When organizations begin their strategic planning effort by circulating last year’s operating plan, they reinforce the inertial properties of the resources as currently allocated. This is not a good outcome, but to be frank, there is no help for it.

What you can do, however, is get yourself and your colleagues out in front of it. Execution is acting and reacting in real time to an ever-changing set of circumstances, all the while maintaining your strategic intent. Execution power, by contrast, is created in advance of the real-time moment of truth and focuses on getting the right resources in the right position for maximum impact and efficiency.

Geoffrey A. Moore, Escape Velocity

A NEXT STEP

It’s time to develop a visionary state of mind by practicing two essentials. First, you need to grasp that clarity isn’t everything, but it changes everything. Too many times, church leaders are making decisions and having conversations without the vantage point of clarity first. Is there anything greater that we should be working on? Why would we put our foot on the gas petal before the fog lifts? All activity is not progress. In churches today, it’s all too easy to be busy without intention or direction.

Second, we need to state our vision framework before we frame our vision statement. Leaders must work from a common template to understand and communicate vision, or everyone will stay confused. The story and vision of the church won’t work its way into staff meetings, volunteer training, membership moments, casual conversations or our prayer lives.

Introducing the Vision Frame

No leader should lead, no team should meet, and no initiative should start without understanding the Vision Frame. In short, the Vision Frame reminds us that there are five irreducible questions of clarity. Your church’s vision isn’t totally clear until your leadership team can answer all five questions in a concise and compelling way:

• MISSION as Missional Mandate: What are we doing?
  The missional mandate is a clear and concise statement describing what your church is ultimately supposed to be doing.
• VALUES as Missional Motives: Why are we doing it?
  Missional motives are shared convictions that guide the actions and reveal the strengths of your church.
• STRATEGY as Missional Map: How are we doing it?
  The missional map is the process or picture that demonstrates how your church will accomplish its mandate on the broadest level.
• MEASURES as Missional Life Marks: When are we successful?
  Missional life marks are a set of attributes in an individual’s life that define or reflect the accomplishment of the church’s missional mandate.
• VISIONPROPER as Missional Mountaintop + Milestones: Where is God taking us?
  Vision Proper is the living language that anticipates and illustrates God’s better intermediate future.

When you commit to clarity, great things happen. You empower a movement of people to tell the story of what God is doing in and through your church. You can seamlessly share the what, the why, and the how.

Don’t let all the different vision terms and concepts excuse you from being an everyday visionary. It’s time to stop stabbing at the future with a few short phrases. You can guide your church with stunning clarity. Remember Jesus. He walked on Earth with total clarity about His identity, His mission and His destiny. Shouldn’t His body today do the same?

Download a Vision Frame Overview and work through it with your lead team.

Start a conversation with an Auxano Navigator today to learn more about how the Vision Frame can help you execute your vision.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 64-2, released April 2017

This is part of a weekly series posting content from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders.

SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; each solution is taken from a different book. Additionally, a practical action step is included with each solution.

As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS Remix provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

>> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<

Tags: Church Unique, Execute your vision, Geoffrey A. Moore, SUMS Remix, Vision Frame

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Execution >

The Real Measure of Making Disciples

by: VRcurator

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Looking back, 2016 was truly a landmark year. From Olympics to Elections to Chewbacca Mom, the year contained moments worth sharing and remembering. The year contained new beginnings, new opportunities and the potential for new ministry impact.

Maybe 2016 was also supposed to be the year that you finally implemented a discipleship strategy, but there never seemed to be enough time, the right team or an applicable model.
In this, the last issue of SUMS Remix for 2016, the Auxano team wants to help you jumpstart the implementation of an intentional discipleship strategy for 2017. We are proud to feature disciple-making strategy solutions from three foundational books of the Auxano Vision Framing process.

There is no time like right now to develop a discipleship strategy that engages hearts and inspires growing faith every day. Do not let 2017 slip away. Start building the disciples of tomorrow, today.

Develop the Measures of a growing disciple

THE QUICK SUMMARY – Church Unique, by Will Mancini

Church Unique, written by Will Mancini, outlines a new kind of visioning process to help churches develop a stunningly unique model of ministry that leads to redemptive movement. The process guides churches away from an internal focus to emphasize participation in their community and surrounding culture.

In Church Unique, Mancini explains that each church has a culture that reflects its particular values, thought, attitudes, and actions. It also shows how church leaders can unlock their church’s individual DNA and unleash their congregation’s one-of-a-kind potential.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

Imagine that you are sitting in front of five or six people at your church. They may be elders, council members, volunteer leaders, or members of your small group. For the sake of our illustration, imagine that these people are paid staff at the church.

Then you ask them the simple question, “What ministry bull’s-eye are you all aiming at together?”

Would you see blank stares in response to this question? Or if the staff does attempt an answer, the bull’s-eye descriptions are never the same. In other words, it is almost impossible to walk into a church where the top leaders have a shared articulation of what results they are looking for.

The question becomes, “How do you know when all of these components are working as they should? In other words, when do you hit the bull’s-eye?” The answer is found in defining Measures as Missional Life Marks.

Auxano defines Measures as a set of attributes in an individual’s life that define or reflect the accomplishment of the church’s mission. The Measures are the church’s portrait of a disciple and definition of spiritual maturity. Measures supply the standard by which the mission can be measured with respect to an individual’s development through the ministry of the church.

The old maxim goes, “Your mission is what you measure.” Every church feels the gravitation pull to measure only the ABC’s (attendance, buildings, and cash). The problem is that you can be very successful with the ABC’s but be a circus. So what measures are appropriate for kingdom-minded leaders in the missional church? By defining your measures, you can focus your church on the Spirit’s work of soul formation, and Jesus’ agenda for multiplication. 

Although Measures can be a straightforward and simple definition for pastors, it’s strangely missing in our churches. On a typical leadership team, most people could scratch out a basic definition of a disciple within five minutes. Yet years and years go by without ministry staff ever having a shared definition to work from.

Will Mancini, Church Unique

A NEXT STEP

Use the following exercises to determine the top-level outline of your Measures.

Teams should create four to six categories as the outline of their Measures. More than six will be difficult for people to remember. To stimulate creative juices, here is a sample of ideas and exercises to get you started:

Mission man: Have small groups of leaders draw a stick figure on a large white pad. Using parts of the body as a creative spark, develop a list of the attributes of a disciple that corresponds to the body part.

Red-letter maturity: Have groups scan the red letters of the gospel— the words that Jesus spoke directly. Organize them into no more than six categories that describe a mature follower of Christ.

Missional interviews: Bring in three to five people who represent the most missionally minded people in your church. Talk to them about their story and life practices of following Christ. Ask them to list the six most important characteristics of their walk with Jesus. See how their individual lists compare and from them develop your own.

Obviously, these exercises are meant to stimulate the expression of biblical foundations already present on the leadership team. For a more thorough treatment, find books and Bible studies to work through together. Of course you can always study the Measures of other churches like those found in Church Unique. But don’t get too preoccupied with the expressions of others. Do the hard work of your own process! At this stage of the process your focus should be on content—what are the most important four to six ideas you want to use to describe the missional life.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 56-1, issued December 2016

This is part of a weekly series posting content from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders. SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; and each solution is taken from a different book. As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<

Tags: Church Unique, Discipleship Measures, Measures, SUMS Remix, Will Mancini

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Discipleship >

Alignment Eats Accomplishment for Lunch

by: VRcurator

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When you have a vague or undefined strategy, your leaders will invent their own.

Auxano Founder Will Mancini believes that over 90% of churches in North America are not functioning with strategic clarity. Many churches have some kind of expression for mission and values, but not for strategy. The absence of strategy, as Mancini defines it, is the number one cause of ineffectiveness in a healthy church.

This map, or strategy picture, is like a container that holds all church activities in one meaningful whole. Without this orientation, individuals within the organization will forget how each major component or ministry activity fits to advance the mission.

When you don’t have a strategy, or your strategy isn’t clear, a threefold problem can occur:

• too many ministry or program options and no prioritization;
• ministry options that have no relationship with one another;
• ministries themselves have no connection to the mission.

Having a clear map – one that shows how you will get things done – is a strong indicator that the effectiveness of your mission will go through the roof. Strategic clarity can birth a quantum leap in your ministry.

Build for team alignment rather than individual accomplishment.

THE QUICK SUMMARY: Execution IS the Strategy, by Laura Stack

In today’s world of rapid, disruptive change, strategy can’t be separate from execution—it has to emerge from execution. You must continually adjust your strategy to fit new realities. But, if your organization isn’t set up to be fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders.

Laura Stack shows you how to quickly drive strategic initiatives and get great results from your team. Her LEAD Formula outlines the Four Keys to Successful Execution:

• The ability to Leverage your talent and resources
• Design an Environment to support an agile culture
• Create Alignment between strategic priorities and operational activities
• Drive the organization forward quickly

She includes a leadership team assessment, group reading guides, and bonus self-development resources. Stack will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and inspiration to help you hit the ground running!

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

If members of your team are working hard but have lost focus of the mission of your organization, you are facing a double threat: your overall mission is not being accomplished and your team members are likely heading toward burnout.

The most successful team members work together for more than a paycheck or for keeping busy. They are engaged in the mission, and feel that they are an important part of achieving that mission. They are serving with a sense and purpose of something that is greater.

On the other hand, team members who have lost focus on the mission of the organization may just be going though the motions of working together. When this occurs, the organization is entering a danger zone.

Even those who work the hardest will inevitably crash and burn in their productivity if they lose track of the mission. Help them reorient and align themselves if they’ve lost their focus on their mission with a 4-R Reconnection Strategy.

Reestablish awareness. Have team members evaluate their current positions by asking, “Which of my activities contribute most of my value to my organization.” If they can’t answer that, have them invest personal time in figuring out where they got off course and how they might fix it.

Realign them. Make sure the mission and their perception of it match up. If your team becomes misaligned, they may be wasting time on the wrong things. If that is the case, it doesn’t matter how hard they work to get the job done; their productivity will crash.

Repair their connection. Once your team members know where they are and where they should be, have them make any necessary course corrections. After that, help them tweak or overhaul their workflow process to get it back on track and in sync with the mission.

Rededicate them to the mission. Have the team members reaffirm their commitment to your organization. Help them understand how each contributes to the collective effort to move the organization forward.

Laura Stack, Execution IS the Strategy

A NEXT STEP

Using the Four-R process above, realign your leadership team to the mission of the church.

First, write “Our Mission” on the top of a flip chart page and hand every person a sticky note. Without looking at phones, tablets, or printed materials, have each leader write the mission of the church from memory on a sticky note. Place all the notes on the flip chart page. Discuss the results, noting the degree (or lack of) shared knowledge of the church’s mission. (Remember Howard Hendricks’ ageless quote: if it’s a mist in the pulpit, it’s a fog in the pew.)

Now write the actual mission on another flip chart page, and with a renewed focus on the missional mandate of the church, have each leader write ministry activities that CONTRIBUTE DIRECTLY to the mission on one color sticky note and ministry activities that while good, DO NOT CONTRIBUTE DIRECTLY to the mission.

How can your leaders help each other to focus activity toward mission accomplishment? How can you learn from each other and lean toward God’s calling for the church? Record some specific initiatives and next steps on a third flip-chart page, assigning responsibility to a team member.

Taken from SUMS Remix 38-1, published April 2016

This is part of a weekly series posting content from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders. SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; and each solution is taken from a different book. As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<

Tags: Alignment, Church Unique, Laura Stack, SUMS Remix, Will Mancini, team alignment

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The Time and Place for the Authentic Church

by: Will Mancini

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I have spent my life looking for the biblical, authentic church.

• When I attended VBS at a small Lutheran church in 1st grade, I was thrilled to get the little silver Bible sticker in my pocket Bible.; the kind with Jesus pictures. I always wanted to go back to that church, but we never did.

• When I attended catechism at a Presbyterian church in Augusta, GA.  I memorized lot’s of God statements. It felt like the right thing to do.

• When I attended Young Life meetings in high school. It was cool. It was spiritual.

• When I attended a EFCA church at Penn State and carried around Desiring God (by John Piper) like a sacred text.

• When I church hopped in Midland, TX working in the oil field.  While exploring the black gold of the Permian Basin, I searched  for the true expression of God’s church.

• At seminary I found a church in the black and hispanic area in which I lived. It wasn’t what I was used to so it was better.

• And still I combed the spiritual classics of centuries gone-by, searching for the hidden keys to walking with God.

• Finally, I found the best model of all. I joined the staff of a church that started south of Houston. We reached unchurched people like that big Chicago seeker church that had all of the answers. I got to be a part of a team that grew one of America’s finest megachurches. This had to be the model, the authentic church.

My guess is that you have been pursuing the authentic church as well. And we should. God has put the desire within in us.

How is your search going?

Fifteen years ago, my search ended. I found it. No, I really did find it this time. A friend and consulting colleague, Rich Kannwischer just sent these words, written by Eugene Peterson. They capture perfectly what I found:

Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever—in Rome and Moscow and London and Baltimore—the only thing changed being the translation of the menu. But if we don’t acquire a narrative sense, a story sense, with the expectation that we are each one of us uniquely ourselves—participants in the unique place and time and weather of where we live and worship—we will always be looking somewhere else or to a different century for a model by which we can be an authentic and biblical church. The usefulness of Acts as a story, and not a prescription or admonition, is that it keeps us faithful to the plot, Jesus, and at the same time free to respond out of our own circumstances and obedience.

Peterson, Eugene H. (2011). The Pastor: A Memoir (p. 119). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In light of Peterson’s words, I ask again, “How is it going?” Or maybe the better question to ask is “Where have you been looking?”

It’s my dream that each pastor find the time and place for the authentic church.  And the amazing answer is “It’s right now, right where you are.”

You may want to consider a book I wrote about discovering the authentic church for your time and place. I called the book Church Unique to highlight what Eugene Peterson is talking about here. It’s really about entering more deeply into the context that God has placed you to develop your own model of ministry. It’s about faithfulness to The Plot rather than mimicking another person’s story.

To learn more about discovering your authentic church, connect with one of Auxano’s Navigators.

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Authentic Church, Church Unique, Recasting Vision, Will Mancini

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12 Fun Facts About the Vision Frame for Church Leaders

by: Will Mancini

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What is the Vision Frame? I’m glad you asked. It is a simple napkin sketch or whiteboard drawing that is used to represent the five irreducible questions of any ministry. It pictures mission, values, strategy, measures and vision and relates them in a way that is more meaningful and memorable. Read the complete overview.

For now here are some fun facts about the Vision Frame which debuted in print in the book Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision Capture Culture and Create Movement.

1- BIRTHPLACE: The Vision Frame was born on a napkin sketch in 2001, in Clear Lake, Texas when I was playing and doodling at my desk. It is now 14 years old and sometimes wakes up with pimples.

2- CHEAP LABOR: When the Vision Frame first hit the road consulting, I was simply begging my seminary buddies to bring me in for staff retreats. I would come as long as they paid my airfare and bought lunch.

3- BILINGUAL: The Vision Frame speaks two languages— it can enter a meeting on classic planning and hangout in the missional conversation. This language roughly corresponds to leaders over 40 years of age (classic lingo) and leaders under 40 (missional lingo). In other words, the Vision Frame is proud to be multigenerational tool.

4- PERSONALITY: The Vision Frame is notoriously hard to get to know and even comes across square at first. But once you get to know it, it becomes a best friend that you will always want around.

5- NO FAVORITES: Since the Vision Frame is truly model neutral, its works for any faith tribe, ministry model or philosophy. It loves church planters, turnaround leaders, and megachurch pastors just the same. It truly has no favorites!

6- HAPPIEST DAY: Anytime a church leaders go up to a white board and shares the five irreducible questions of clarity around a box, square or anything that remotely looks like a Vision Frame.

7- SADDEST DAY: When the Vision Frame read Tim Keller’s Center Church and it was never mentioned.  It’s feelings were hurt since so many books in the missional conversation where mentioned both good and bad. After all, how can you talk about “theological vision” without a Vision Frame?

8- TRACK RECORD: Church leaders search for “Vision Frame” 400 times per month on the internet; it sells the same number of books per month after 8 years.

9- TRAVEL: The Vision Frame has spent the most of its travel time all over South America, Korea, Germany and Switzerland. The Spanish version is Iglessia Unica. The Korean version of Church Unique is literally translated, “Your Church in 10 Years.”

10- SECRETS: The Vision Frame secretly believes that when Jesus was drawing something in the sand, it was probably looked like a frame.

11- STYLE: The Vision Frame is the only organizational approach to clarity that actually uses a picture to transmit the key ideas. Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins and Peter Drucker have similar irreducible questions but never made them visual or fashionable. Furthermore the Vision Frame has icons decorating it and a 52-page gorgeously designed visual overview dedicated to it. Get it here—requires e-mail.

12- KISSIN COUSIN: The Vision Frame has a related tool, the Horizon Storyline, which debuts on January 1st of 2016:  God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates to Find and Focus Your Church’s Future. While the Vision Frame will be a little jealous there are many shout outs to it in the book.

> Read more from Will.

Would you like to know more about the Vision Frame? Connect with an Auxano Navigator and start a conversation with our team.

Tags: Church Unique, God Dreams, Vision Frame, Will Mancini, auxano

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Vision >

Church Unique’s Vision Pathway and Tom Paterson’s StratOps

by: Will Mancini

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Over the last few years, I have enjoyed learning more and more from the contribution of Tom Paterson. Tom is a brilliant consultant and friend of Peter Drucker who innovated a very specific, high-impact model of strategic planning in the business space. I am grateful for five gentleman who have been a part of my own access and “digestion” of StratOp as a certified facilitator : Doug Slaybough (pictured above & former guy beyond the success of Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven organization), Michael Murphy (current president of the Paterson Center), Greg Hawkins (executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church), Buck Rogers (friend and master facilitator) and Todd Wilson (kingdom entrepreneur behind Exponential and a fellow clarity junkie).

Most recently, I have completed the integration work of utilizing Paterson’s StratOp process for churches as a follow-up to Vision Pathway process that I have developed and used for twelve years, through the ministry of Auxano.

Why?

Simply put, The Vision Pathway and StratOp are the two best ways to solve two different but related problems for the local church leaders.

In this post I want to explore the basic differences. In the rest of a series I want to show:

• Part 2: The REAL Chemistry of Vision Pathway and StratOps
• Part 3: Why StratOps is a Waste of Time if You Don’t Have a Vision Frame
• Part 4: Why Every Church over 400 in Attendance Should Use StratOps 

VISION PATHWAY AS A UNIQUE SOLUTION

The Vision Pathway  was created to solve the problem of cut-n-paste ministry models and photocopied vision proliferated by books and conference in the church space. The result is a lack of freedom, confidence, passion, credibility and ultimately progress for a local church leadership team.

The Vision Pathway was developed in 2001-2004 from a biblical  understanding of the church in order to develop new competencies in thinking, leadership and communication for local church teams. The deliverable of the process is a fully articulated vision and ministry model that takes into account a church’s heritage, the unique community context, the distinctive congregational strengths and Spirit-guided passion of the leadership. The process was formally articulated in the book, Church Unique in 2008 with the subtitle of “How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture and Create Movement.” Church Unique continues to be the leading book in the church vision and planning category since it’s publication.

The baseline Vision Pathway requires a minimum of 6 days of collaborative work over a several month period. The Pathway is built with 5 master tools, that cover 8 big ideas, with 10 specific deliverables with dozens of “add-on” features and optional sub-tools based on church’s theological bent, size, life-stage, growth challenges and culture. There really is no other comparable process for church leaders to experience.

STRAT-OP AS A UNIQUE SOLUTION

StratOp was created to solve the problem of lengthy strategic planning process that don’t get total buy in across the executive team of large businesses.  The result is a lack of daily cooperation and coordination of diverse functional units towards the strategy priorities of the business.

StratOp was birthed through a challenge in 1980 issued to Tom Paterson to reduce the timeframe and increase the effectiveness of formal strategic planning. The design parameter was three days, which was given to Paterson by Thomas E. Bennett, who was the the Vice President for Corporate Planning for Ingersol-Rand Company. The content of the process is available only through the Paterson Center to certified consultants and facilitators. (Approximately 180 have gone through the process in the last 15 years.)

The StratOp process is a 3-day event (with a typical 2-day follow-up process with key individual leaders).  It works through 25 “tools” that are collaborative conversations ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours. The deliverable is a set of dashboard-like documents that can be used in the operational flow of leadership and management. While there are many planning processes out there, I have not seen one better for creating priorities within a one-year horizon. In addition several Paterson disciples are Jesus-followers who have applied what was originally designed for business, to the local church.

Read more from Will Mancini on his blog: WillMancini.com

Are you ready for a new level of team focus, energy, and productivity? Connect with an Auxano Navigator and start a conversation with our team.

Tags: Church Unique, StratOps, Strategy, Tom Paterson, Will Mancini, church leaders

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Vision >

A Vision Resource for German-speaking Church Leaders

by: ND Strupler

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ND Strupler, Leadership Development Director with the ICF Movement in Zurich, Switzerland, just delivered an early Christmas present to Auxano.

The Church Unique Visual Summary – translated into German.

Will Mancini, founder of Auxano and author of Church Unique, made these comments when learning of the translation:

I love the ICF Movement and the work ND does to equip church planters. I have been grateful for our relationship over the years and time I spent with ICF planters in Zurich last year.  I hope this translation will spark some intentional clarity work for many more German-speaking pastors. 

Strupler has a clear vision to change culture, and he finds that the most effective way to change culture is through healthy communities that reflect the love of God in everyday life.

I want to get things moving. That’s why I am willing to roll up my sleeves and get to work. I am not satisfied with mediocrity, that’s why I think strategically about how I can help people maximize their leadership skills.
I inspire action with a positive attitude and the passion for communication.

Strupler was born in Zurich, Switzerland and lives there now with his wife and two children. After finishing high school he successfully graduated from a 4-year apprenticeship as a professional printer. In 1997 he started to work for ICF Zurich, a church at the heartbeat of time. As a pioneer he started many ministries and projects and lead the youth ministry for 10 years.

Since 2007 Strupler has worked for the ICF Movement, a church planting movement for Europe. Main areas of service are Leader-Development, Consulting, Networking and Creative- Innovation.

Strupler was born in Zurich, Switzerland and lives there now with his wife and two children.

You can download the Church Unique Visual Summary in German here.

Tags: Church Unique, ND Strupler, Visual Summary, Will Mancini

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Are You Trying to Build a LEGO Church?

by: Geoff Surratt

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I loved building with Legos when I was a kid. (If I could make a living at it I’d probably still spend most of my time playing with Legos) My experience, however, was different from most. Instead of pre-designed kits, every year at Christmas my parents gave me a bag of miscellaneous Lego parts. (They had a hookup at the local Lego factory where they could buy Lego rejects cheap.) I never had instructions to follow or a picture to guide me; my only blueprint was my imagination. From the same bag of spare parts I built airplanes and spaceships and the Empire State Building. Many battles for New York were fought in my bedroom long before the Avengers arrived on the movie screen. While my creations weren’t that ascetically pleasing, there was incredible freedom for creativity because I didn’t have a template to follow.

Legos are a different experience now. Every box is designed to build a specific model. If you want an airplane you buy an airplane model, if you want to build the London Bridge you buy the $239 kit. Everything is pre-packaged and comes with full-color, step-by-step instructions. It’s all been figured out ahead of time and all you have to do is follow the instructions exactly and you’ll get exactly what is on the cover of the box.

I’m concerned that church planting, and church leadership in general, is going down the trail of Legos. Rather than an individual vision of what God has called us to do in a particular place at a particular time using the gifts and leaders he has given us, we find the church kit that we like the best. There’s the Elevation Kit, the NewSpring Kit and the Mars Hill Kit as well as the Saddleback and Willow Creek kits. Some leaders see the New Testament Church as the ultimate church building kit. If we can follow the instructions precisely then we can build an exact replica of the church Paul built to reach Greeks in the 1st century.

Learning from other churches and other leaders is important, but replicating models is boring in Lego world and ineffective in church world. Each church model is created for a certain time and a certain place utilizing the specific gifts and imaginations of specific leaders. Even the apostle Paul gave us principles to follow rather than a model to re-create. Unless you have a lot of 1st century Greeks in your community, replicating the church at Ephesus might be challenging.

As church planters, pastors and leaders God gives us a bag of Legos with which to build His church rather than a model and a blueprint. He gives us principles and parameters, but he expects us to use our gifts, leadership and imagination to build a unique church to impact the unique culture and unique time in which we live. Building without a blueprint is messy and challenging, and there’s no guarantee that what you build will look anything like you thought it would when you started. But it is a lot more fun than just following the instructions.

Read more from Geoff here.

Tags: Church Unique, Geoff Surratt, Vision Frame

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The Guide to Ministry Model Making

by: Will Mancini

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Tags: Church Unique, Vision Clarity, Vision Frame, Will Mancini

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