5 Ways That Plug-n-Playing Another Church’s Ministry Model Will Cost You Ministry Progress

by: Will Mancini

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At Auxano, we believe that local churches are unmistakably unique and incomparably different. God doesn’t mass-produce His church.

When you try to “plug-n-play” another church’s ministry model, it is going to cost you ministry progress in one or more of these 5 ways:

#1 Secondary Passion Every ministry model was originally designed to bring a deeply desired result or solve an emotionally disconcerting problem.  The key dynamic here is the passion at the point of origination that “fuels” the model. If you utilize a model that you don’t develop, the enthusiasm behind it is often less. The passion is derivative and a generation removed from the model itself. Whoever is running Andy Stanley or Mike Breen’s model will not likely embody their passion.

#2 Underutilized Strengths Every ministry model has strengths and limitations. So does your congregation. If you plug-n-play another model you probably won’t optimizing the unique strengths, assets, congregational heritage, leadership learnings and Spirit-led passions of your ministry. For example Andy Stanley’s three-step strategy or Mike Breen’s ideal size for a missional community have certain alignment features with local strengths.

#3 Cultural Disconnect Every ministry model is contextualized for some group of people. Within the model are core assumptions about people, embedded language and values about how to best engage and organize and teach and train and practice the myriad of one-another commands of Scripture. If you cut-n-paste a ministry model you risk a disconnect on all kinds of levels. Some might be big and obvious. Others— and most of them—are small and nuanced. For example, when my friend Vince Antonucci planted a church on the Las Vegas strip, he could not rely on the “attractional pull” of an Andy Stanley’s worship service model or the “extended family” assumptions of Mike Breen’s model. Due to the overt sexuality on the Vegas strip and the skepticism of meeting in people’s homes, the primary environment  for Verve Church is gender-based small groups that meet in public “third spaces.”

#4 Less Satisfaction It never ceases to amaze me how much people love designing their own ministry model. (When someone can show them how.) It’s more of a job than a joy when you are running someone else’s playbook. Every time. The bottom line is that photocopying another church’s model of ministry is much less enjoyable and exciting. There is a much deeper sense of “call satisfaction” and freedom to “be who you are” when you design your own. And progress is always an immediate result when you do. You don’t work for Andy Stanley or Mike Breen. You work for the same God that called them and led them to design their own model. God will do the same for you.

#5 Faulty Measurement Every ministry model, when operating well, will have clear input and outputs (means vs. ends).  For example, Andy Stanley’s strategy has environment “inputs” and faith catalyst “outputs.” Mike Breen has ministry vehicle “inputs” and life shape “outputs.” Effective discipleship takes place when leaders are focused on the outputs in way that frees them to adjust the inputs. But when you borrow a ministry model, it is much easier to focus only on the inputs. The reason for this is twofold. First, in the desire to get the same attendance results of the ministry being copied, there is more of a preoccupation of “the how.” Second, “the how” or the methodology itself is much more “concrete” and measurable that the output of the methodology. Hence we tend to measure how many people “attend” what we are doing than the results that are coming from the attendance. Model makers are not as inclined to disconnect the means verses the ends of their model. As one famous Christian educator said, “Beware of the ends-means inversion in ministry.”

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Ministry Model, Plug n Play, Vision Frame, Will Mancini

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Church Unique Snapshot: The Inside Reveal on Willow Creek Community Church’s Return to the 5 G’s

by: Will Mancini

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During the booming days of Willow Creek’s influence, the church hosted conferences for thousands of church leaders across the country, teaching and spreading their model of ministry. The hallmark of these events was an inspiring and contagious use of crystal clear language and rich imagery that planted the Willow’s Vision Frame in the hearts and minds of church leaders.

What did that content include?

WILLOW’S 1990s VISION FRAME

MISSION – To turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Christ. (the term “fully devoted follower” is most photocopied mission statement of the last three decades)

VALUES- There were ten values that are still intact today, the most memorable (and photocopied) including

• Lost people matter to God and therefore matter to us
• Full devotion is normal for every believer (95% devotion is 5% short)
• Life change happens best in small groups
• Excellence honors God and inspires people

STRATEGY- Willow taught a 7-step linear strategy for years, which became de-emphasized around the year 2000

MISSION MEASURES- The definition of “full devotion” was based on 5 G-terms that were deeply integrated into the life of the church. During the late 90s there were entire sub-ministry conferences including Small Groups and Children (Promiseland) that produced tons of curriculum utilizing the 5G’s

• Grace
• Growth
• Groups
• Gifts
• Good Stewardship

Many churches also copied or modified these G-terms for use in their ministry. For example, Clear Creek Community Church in Houston utilizes a revised 7G list and Grace Point in San Antonio has 5Gs they have modified.

LOSS OF CLARITY

At some point Willow stopped talking about the 5Gs even though they continued selling 5G based products all over the world. The loss of clarity at Willow is a complex subject. I have had the privilege of talking to many people through the journey. This list summarizes a few reasons that surfaced over the last decade. Note: I appreciate the humility of many of these leaders who have testified to these learnings in public at different times and places.

• Bill Hybels began traveling more internationally and got distracted from leading the church.
• Staff turnover hurt the church’s opportunity to stay focused. They lost three senior leaders in a two month window.
• The seeker model went out of vogue. With the beginning of a missional reorientation, lots of leaders lost interest in learning from the model. (Some of the this was the saturation of its own success.
• After launching their first multi-site initiatives, Jim Tomberlin departed; Bill Donahue, their long-term groups guru, departed.
• Randy Frazee came for 2 years with an entirely different mission measure. He was given permission to undo the 5G’s and install his 30 core competencies from Pantego Bible Church.  But the installation of a neighborhood small group strategy did not work, further unraveling their clarity.
• Greg Hawkins began the extensive research project represented by the Reveal Study and followed up by the book, Move (a must read book, by the way). After one-on-one conversation with Greg, I am convinced that his humble and passionate pursuit of learning (and brilliant findings) happened at the expense of  increased complexity of Willow’s ministry and less clarity in their language.

FIVE G’S REINSTATED

Three months ago, the senior team at Willow decided to bring back the 5Gs. When I asked Greg Hawkins why, he summarized his answer by saying,

“People need some kind of ‘handles’ to define full devotion. We had this language for years and then just stopped using it. We realized we didn’t have to reinvent the words, so we decided to bring them back.”

I was totally surprised to hear the news. Evidently much of the work represented by Reveal, and specifically the four stages of the “spiritual continuum” (Exploring Christ, Growing in Christ, Close to Christ and Christ-centered), did not create new language for guiding ministry and shaping culture.

PRIMARY TAKE-AWAYS

• We say at Auxano that “Success assaults clarity.” Clearly Willow was a victim of its own success and was not able to manage the “opportunity creep” of its most influential years.
• Be careful hiring outside talent. A shooting star in a different church culture may flame out in yours.
• Don’t take your “eye off the ball” when it comes to language. Hybel’s first Axiom in his leadership book of 72 leadership principles  is “Language Matters.” Given the number of Axioms in the book we will cut Bill some slack on forgetting this one for the last decade.
• Don’t communicate vision or create new language without process. In this case at Willow, it applies several ways. First, new language was brought in without due process, including Randy Frazee’s 30 core competencies and perhaps the Reveal language introduced by Greg Hawkins.  Now with a decade gap, I am wondering if they moved too quickly to return the the 5G’s. I talked with one relatively high-level staff member who was struggling with the language. There was no vehicle for his interaction and input.

Please don’t mistake the critique in this post for a lack of appreciation for the role of the seeker model. Also, I am personally grateful to Bill Hybels for his giant kingdom contribution and thought leadership on leadership.  Thousands of us are better leaders, whether we drive seeker models or not, because of Willow’s influence.

TOOLS

Read Bill Hybels excerpt on  Language Matters

Read Church Unique Tool on Measures as the Portrait of Discipleship (includes the 5Gs and 30 Core Competencies)

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Bill Hybels, Church Unique Snapshot, Vision Frame, Will Mancini, Willow Creek

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Conscious Culture

by: Will Mancini

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The missional visionary is also a cultural architect. One of the basic foundation principles of Church Unique is the assertion that each church has a unique culture. While walking through the Vision Pathway, we emphasize the importance of close observation and listening in order to better understand the surrounding culture, and of unlocking the past in order to unleash the future. The leader shapes the culture with the Vision Frame, informed by the Kingdom Concept. Transforming the future is made possible because the cultural perspective is held in conscious view.

The starting point of developing a conscious culture is contained in the following three principles.

First, remember that the Scriptures reveal God’s signature.

Whatever the leader draws attention to and rallies support for, he must show the signature of God behind the appeal. The Vision Frame must be squarely and repeatedly illuminates with God’s Word. The visionary must always point back to the Original Visioneer .

Look for the passages that fuel your passion, enlarge your own vision, inform your values, and distinguish your strength as a church. Master the exposition of these texts. Then look for opportunities to ooze the vision through the pages of Scripture everywhere you go. Whenever and wherever the vision speaks, your job is to make sure God’s voice is heard.

Second, use your congregation’s folklore to tell the story.

The leader who shapes culture understands that not all stories are created equal. Folklore is a special class of story – stories that speak so fundamentally and clearly to the church’s vision that they have to be told, retold, and told again.

Life is narrative. As humans, we are hardwired to live from and respond to the stories of our lives. Story is an indispensable tool for communicating on a heart-to-heart level; for communicating things like values, passion, convictions, history and vision.

All preachers are familiar with story as either an illustrative tool or message construct for the preaching event. But it is also important to view storytelling on a broader level as a tool for creating culture. Creating culture requires the identification and development of special stories or folklore that serve as foundations, identity-shaping stories within the leadership culture. The texture and color of the culture is then pained artistically by the telling and retelling of these stories.

Finally, understand that symbols mark defining moments.

A symbol is a visible sign of something invisible. The term literally contains the idea of “throwing together” – associating something intangible with something concrete. A lion for example, is a concrete and visible way of representing the invisible, intangible idea of courage. For the leader, expression of old familiar symbols and creation of new ones can shape a culture.

One of the reasons new symbols are so important is that they cultivate a shared memory. As your vision unfolds and you see God’s work, let the use of symbols mark the moment and foster a shared memory. This memory glues the community together and multiplies the values defined by the memory.

As the leader lives the vision and speaks into the church’s culture, symbols – visible signs and symbolic acts – become powerful tools. What is the most important symbol? Does the identifying mark of your church open a door to tell a story.

Tags: Folklore, Scripture, Symbol, Will Mancini

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Compelling Environments

by: Will Mancini

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Having designed hundreds of strategies during the last decade, I find that there are three dominant environments that every local church is attempting to create: worship environments, connecting environments, and serving environments. Each one plays a significant role in transmitting and realizing the vision. Most important, amid a missional reorientation we must acknowledge that our environments have tended to be an end and not a means to Christian mission. The missional leader must constantly show that the church gathered is actually a time of preparation for “being the church” outside its walls.

First, you need to remember that before you think you are casting vision, you already are – by how you worship.

The pattern of weekly worship and Sabbath was embedded into the fabric of early church culture. Every church has some environment for worship. The question is, How does your vision integrate into your worship? What aspects of the vision are communicated during the worship experience? How do the elements and order of worship communicate values? How does the vision itself affect the design of the worship space? The vision of raw simplicity in a Quaker meetinghouse is a stark contrast to a large downtown stained-glass sanctuary.

Worship keeps our grandest visions God-centered and Jesus focused.

Second, everything must be integrated relationally.

What would church be without relationships? Every church draws people into some kind of setting where the “one anothers” of Scripture are applied. The groups may be tight-knit, gender accountability groups of three to six, or they may be thirty to forty people in an on-campus adult Bible Fellowship. Your Kingdom Concept and your Vision Frame reflect some basic unit of community through which relationships can form and thrive.

This makes the connecting environment, in most cases, the locus of both spiritual formation and vision discovery. Group members may hear about the vision in other church venues, but the rubber must meet the road in the most time-relationship-intensive environment. If they don’t get the vision in the connecting environment, the vision won’t stick.

Third, your church must learn to serve inside out.

Because God has given spiritual gifts for the edification of the body (Ephesians 4), the church is incomplete and immature unless individual members are serving one another. Every church has environments of service: leading in worship instructing children, or welcoming guests, to name a few. The Vision Frame should guide how the church builds its serving environments.

The missional mind-set pushes the envelope on how we think about service. Do we serve people only after we somehow convince them to come onto our holy environment, or do we push out into the community and demonstrate the love of Jesus in their midst. There has been growing emphasis on two dynamics related to service. One is a shared project with other community participants. Another dynamic is what Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch call “proximity spaces,” which they define as “places or events where Christians and not-yet Christians can interacts meaningfully with one another.”

The bottom line is this: we have to get out of our church boxes if we are going to effectively model the lifestyle of Jesus, who engaged and served people who were deeply embedded in their spaces.

Tags: Connect, Serve, Will Mancini, Worship

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Duplicatable Process

by: Will Mancini

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For a leader, the maxim is true: it’s not about what you can do, but what you can duplicate. At some point your vision must transcend your skills and be deposited into the basic reproducible habits of the entire congregation.

There are three processes to start thinking about about: (1) How do people move through your strategy? (2) How do your people do the work of evangelism? (3) How does your church body multiply itself?

First, remember that programs don’t attract people; people attract people.

As the leader you want to lubricate the gears of this process. This means motivating people to do whatever it takes to help others move through your strategy. It’s like building a customer service impulse into every heart and hand that calls your church home. Churches talk all the time about assimilation as an important function. Don’t miss the opportunity to leverage your vision generally, and your strategy specifically, to make assimilation a function of culture through micro steps that everyone can take.

Second, give your people reproducible steps, skills, tools, and processes for them to become evangelists.

Keep in mind that we are not talking about formulaic approaches. What we are talking about is more in line with the eloquent plea of authors Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in The Shaping of Things to Come: “We yearn for something richer and more complex, more dangerous. The one-size-fits-all to church mission and evangelism must be abandoned. Fewer and fewer churches seem to be developing evangelistic ministries specifically contextualized to the geographic area or subculture in which they are living.” These words are apt, remind us that knowing our local predicament is essential in creatively, yet thoughtfully, engaging our culture.

Third, you must decide how you duplicate.

One of the values of the missional church is healthy orientation toward kingdom growth over the necessary growth of one local church. On the basis of your Kingdom Concept and your Vision Frame, you must decide what size is best, what timing is best, and what kind of multiplication is best.

There are many questions to ask about the duplication process, making it critically important that the process be tied to the vision.

Tags: Assimilation, Evangelism, Multiplication, Will Mancini

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Intentional Communication

by: Will Mancini

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Every day, your church stewards thousands of moments of truth. Every time a member talks to a neighbor, someone drives by the church facility, a ministry email goes out, or Facebook page is liked, some interaction on behalf of the church has transpired. Every time these events happen, the church’s vision glows brighter or dims in the tiniest little increments. The leader’s role is to crank up the wattage. The visionary cares too much about the message to let it just blow in the wind, unattended. Rather, he grabs his message and affixes it to a kite for all to see.

This can happen only with a tremendous amount of intentionality in the complex discipline of church communications.

There are three places I recommend church leaders to start:

First, remember that you either grab attention or hold nothing.

Today we have more secondary screens than ever: iPads, and smartphones (in addition to our computers and TVs). Each of these digital portals, has multiple channels that each reach for attention. They wave at you, scream at you and entice you. If your church has something to say you have to compete with attention scarcity like never before.

Second, we must communicate vision visually.

Churches today pump out communications all day long and miss the opportunity to constantly reflect and reinforce the vision. Yes, your church needs to brand — it’s not a four-letter word imported from the corporate world. Branding is about taking your Kingdom Concept and Vision Frame, and communicating them with consistent consistency across all communication platforms. The baseline of your visual brand contains three components: Logo, tagline and graphic identity.

Third, church leaders can broadcast their position.

The use of organizational communication and marketing should never replace the essence of a missional heartbeat: a life-oriented, conversation-driven, love-lavished pursuit of those whom Jesus misses most. But Jesus’ famous sermon was not “ in the valley ” but “on the mount. ” Jesus positioned himself to broadcast his message. If we propose to advance the gospel in and through the culture, we can’t afford to see the cultural use of communication as an enemy but as an ally. Use of social media and even traditional marketing tools can be a powerful support to personal evangelism.

These are exciting times to steward the most important message to be heard.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Will Mancini

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Developing Leadership

by: Will Mancini

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Spiritual leaders are the carriers of God ’s DNA in the church, the shapers of a church ’s vision and core values. They are influencers of what the church embodies. The key to radical discipleship is the development of trainer – coaches that carry the DNA to the edges of the movement.

—   Michael Slaughter

The first of the five circles in the Integration Model is leadership. How will you use vision to recruit leaders, develop leaders, structure people, and divide your attention among the right leaders? Take leaders out of the equation and the visionary is a daydreamer.

The implications of these questions are so huge for leadership development, we want the Vision Room content to focus beyond the good leadership books, principles and “Maxwellisms” out there. All too often the topic of leadership development is disconnected from your church’s unique vision.

As a starting point with leadership development, I encourage pastors to consider three basic principles:

First, when it comes to hiring, get people who get the vision.

Are you doing everything you can up front to ensure the chemistry and culture fit with potential staff?

Second, let strategy determine structure.

Once you have the strategy articulated and pictured, you must go back and revise your organizational structure.  If you don’t strategy becomes impotent. Why? Because no leader wakes up with a specific responsibility (and accountability) connected to your church’s strategy component.

Third, lead leaders.

Every church I know has people who do ministry. Some of the better churches I know grow leaders. But the best churches actually lead leaders; that is, they have a leadership pipeline that is continually filling and developing people.  They have a leadership culture.

May God bless your leadership development efforts.

Tags: Integration Model, Leadership Engine, Staff, Structure, Will Mancini

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3 Kinds of Weak Vision That Entice Church Leaders

by: Will Mancini

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Warning: This post will challenge some of your assumptions about vision in the church.

Across the North American church landscape this year, many pastors will articulate a vision and compel people toward a preferred future that is weak. It’s very nature will be lacking in biblically rugged, God-saturated, deeply compelling content. Note that I said the vision will be weak; not bad and not wrong. What do I mean by this comment? The three kinds of weak vision I want to clarify are lacking potency because they are more of a means to an end that we often realize. Therefore they are missing the end-game, the bigger deal, the ultimate move. “Means” is not the meat of vision casting. For example, if General Electric wants to “Bring Good Things to Life,” they don’t show you the blueprint of the dishwasher.

Now a pastor may quickly assent to the fact that that the three kinds of vision are indeed means to a greater end. But afterwards he will practically and experientially guide his people with a lower aim. I have seen it hundreds of times. So what are the three kinds of weak vision?

• A building is a weak vision. We intuitively get this. We know the building is a “tool” to accomplish the “bigger mission.” Yet, in the daily grind of raising money in our capital campaigns, its easy to appeal only to the consumeristic impulse of the congregation. A building is a means to something.

• Going multisite is a weak vision. The move to multisite is the most relevant kind of weak vision today. The number of multisite churches is accelerating, and the average size of a multisite church is decreasing. It is safe to say that multisite is the new normal. And for good reasons. But ask a pastor about the vision driving the multisite, and you might be surprised how little they have to say. Multisite is a means to something.

• More people in worship is a weak vision. The third one is connected to the first two. Indeed you may think it is the substance of the first two. We are building a building to what end? More people of course! We are going multi-site to what end? More people of course. Now don’t get me wrong. I think every church should be reaching more people and multiplying disciples. And more people, more building and more campuses are all important features of the vision. But by themselves they are weak. More people is a means to something.

Allow me to illustrate  a strong vision with my home church, Clear Creek Community Church in Houston. Our vision is what I call a “gospel saturation” vision. We have adopted a 500,000 population area that we refer to as the “4B” area. (From the beltway to the beach; from Brazoria county to the bay.) One of two people in this area are “nones;” that is they have no faith affiliation whatsoever. In the next 15 years, our vision is for each of the these 500,000 people to be one degree away, relationally speaking, from an invitation into a gospel-centered, missional community. With this summarized substance of the vision, we can now see how buildings, multisite campuses and more people are means to a full picture, high-definition vision.  We see the need for ten campuses and know that three campuses will anchor the ten with more significant buildings. But those pieces aren’t the purpose themselves. Why is it critical important to show buildings, multi-site and more people as means and not ends?

• First, focusing on means unintentionally amplifies the self-promoting motives of church leadership. An ends-based vision, in contrast, connects the idea of “bigger” to the broader redemptive motives of God.

• Second, highlighting the means only incurs emotional connection indirectly through the personal contact to and relationship with a church leader. In other words, I don’t get excited about a mean-based vision unless I am friends with he pastor who is casting it. Ends-based vision, on the other hand, accelerates emotional connection directly with the picture of the future, not the person talking about it.

• Third, means-based vision is ultimately a church-centric idea. Therefore people let the “pastor and staff” be the owners of it. Ends-based vision, however, distributes the accomplishment of the vision to each one, every day in the congregation. The real vision must be a life-centric idea, not a church-centric one.

I know all this talk of “means” and “ends” sounds a little nerdy. (The engineer in me!) But I hope it connects you back to the simple leadership model of Jesus.

Want to read more about strong vision: Check out “The Church List for the Rest of Us.” It’s called the Unique 19 and it is 19 amazing stories of vision that are not based on church size.

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Recapturing Vision, Vision Frame, Will Mancini

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Are You a Smart or Healthy Church Leader?

by: Will Mancini

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Tags: Clarity, Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage, Will Mancini

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Five Primary Sources of Distraction in Ministry

by: Will Mancini

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Yesterday’s post on “opportunity creep” introduced a common problem for pastors. It’s easy for opportunity after opportunity to press in and vie for the precious little time God has given you.

The first step to dealing with opportunity creep is to identify the sources of opportunities in way that repositions them as distractions. If we don’t understand that most opportunities are distractions in disguise, it will be hard to say “no” to the next seemingly “good” thing. See if these sources clarify the point:

Opportunity Becomes Distraction #1: The New is Askew

Who doesn’t love something new? Especially for us creative types its easy to feel the rush of the next. But the lure of the new can drive us to do too much at the same time, or too much to fast. The opportunistic personalities among us will look for the next ministry “find” before going deeper with what we already have. This week I was with a church that lamented, “Our people aren’t clear about who we are because we re-package ourselves every six months.” In short, make sure the next new thing is a deeply “you thing.”

Opportunity Becomes Distraction #2 Off-Mission Permission

In the desire for more ministry its easy to say “yes” to the ideas of well-meaning members. The problem is that most of their ministry aspirations are misdirected because they want to create more church structure and programming rather than living out their gifts and calling in life. The church very quickly becomes over-programmed and under-discipled.  The “more is more” default mode of program-permission clutters a simple discipleship experience in and through the church. Helping people dream big for Jesus is beautiful, overcomplicating church is not.

Opportunity Becomes Distraction #3: Funny Money

There is nothing more freeing than an abundance of resources, unless it comes with the proverbial attached string. Beware of that check-cutting, money-slinging individual—whether its a new member of an influential elder—that’s ready to fund the next thing (that they brought to the table.) If a new idea is connected to designated giving, always ask, “Would our vision really have taken us in this direction?” If people are not willing to subordinate their giving to the existing vision of the church, than it’s probably as distraction in disguise. (Sorry to break the bad news.)

Opportunity Becomes Distraction #4: Knowledge Trafficking

I enjoy learning as do most called into vocational ministry. But when our pursuit of knowledge outpaces our put-in-use of knowledge we’ll get used to living with distraction. To make matters worse, now you can get a direct feed of whatever-you-want-to-learn, whenever-you-want-to-learn through the fifty devises in your life. Don’t let your smart phone turn you into a not-so-smart leader. One of the greatest benefits of organizational and personal clarity, by the way, is the ability to ruthlessly filter out non-relevant new data.

Opportunity Becomes Distraction #5: Platform Jacking

The last source of distraction meddles a bit more than the others. Platform jacking is when we divert too time and energy to gaining influence through opportunities outside of direct day-to-day ministry responsibilities. There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to “bless the capital ‘C’ church”— a noble aspiration for sure! Yet I am amazed at how quickly the favor of God on a pastor can back-fire on the mission of the ministry.  The success of the local church can become a “success distraction” for the pastor who spends increasing amounts of time growing his or her platform. Most of us have seen this in someone else, so just be discerning for yourself.

Read more from Will here.

Tags: Recasting Vision, Will Mancini

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