I recently read Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger on a cross-country flight. I loved it. Extremely helpful book as we go into our strategic season at NCC. Just thought I’d share a few 30,000 foot reflections over the next few weeks as we gear up for our annual strategy retreat in December.
I’m convinced that the healthiest churches are the most focused on the mission. We have to constantly be reminding ourselves of what we’re trying to accomplish. What are our primary objectives? And then we need to invest our time, energy and money trying to accomplish those things.
Every church has the same mission: make disciples. We want to help people cross the line of faith and grow into Christ-likeness. But I think we need to break it down into measurable objectives or practical steps.
Here are few of our primary objectives off the top of my head:
1) Get people plugged into a small group.
2) Get people plugged into a ministry.
3) Send every NCCer on a missions trip.
4) Challenge people to go public with their faith via baptism.
5) Show the love of God in practical ways via outreach.
6) Experiment with new ways of doing church.
7) Equip people to practice personal spiritual disciplines.
Turn attenders into inviters.
9) Help people develop a God-honoring giving habit.
10) Help people develop a biblical worldview.
Our planning retreats boils down to this: what are we trying to accomplish as a church and how can we do it better? We need to be evaluating and upgrading all the time!
Here are two strategic questions:
1) What do we need to do better?
2) What do we need to stop doing?
In order to do something better, you generally have to stop doing something so you can rechannel your energy. Sometimes you need to curse a barren fig tree. If something isn’t producing fruit, you need to kill it. We killed our second Saturday night service earlier this year. Then we resurrected it a few months later with a few tweaks and it is thriving. If we hadn’t killed it, I think it would have died a slow death.
We honestly try to put everything we do on the table at our annual strategy retreat. Too many churches have too many sacred cows. One of the ways you stay simple is by killing what isn’t working!
