Tuesday, November 17, 2009

What are we called to next?

The Church's vision and mission does not change. It is set by our CEO Jesus Christ. Our vision is to fulfill His Great Command and our mission is to implement His Great Commission. Our objectives in fulfilling the two can be tweaked from time to time, and we expect our leaders to help us develop an annual strategy to keep us forward moving but let's be clear the CEO sets the vision and mission for the Church. So what's our role?

Our role is to keep our objectives as a Church relevant in all that we do. Whether we are reaching up to God in worship, over to one another for support, out to our world in service or inward for Christlikeness, we must ever be evangelizing, encouraging, equipping, edifying and helping others experience to best, most fulfilling life possible. We must continuously discern God's will and assess the needs of our community and strategize accordingly. We must set annual goals that are "SMART" (Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound) and then follow through.

As a Church we must re-strategize and re-structure at least annually to avoid stagnation. Let me share with you the typical life cycle of a ministry. It goes like this: "Dream, beliefs, goals, structure, ministry, nostalgia, questioning, polarization, dropout" (Pete Stenkie, Implementing Positive Change). In every ministry of the Church we must interrupt the nostalgia stage (and the consequent downward spiral) with our vision and mission each year. A healthy ministry cycle looks something like this: vision + mission + objectives leads to dream, belief, goals, structure ...(assessed through the lens of vision + mission + objectives) leads to re-dream, beliefs, goals, structure, ministry ...(assessed through the lens of vision + mission + objectives) leads to re-dream, beliefs, goals, structure, ministry ....

It is our responsibility as a Church - to follow the vision and mission of our CEO. We must structure our ministry and use our resources in such away that His objectives are met. We appoint leaders and call pastoral staff to assist us in the setting and implementation of our strategy and we need to measure our success accordingly in all areas of our corporation. God help us to keep on dreaming together and may we never grow stagnant in following our CEO - Jesus Christ.
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Thanks for stopping by!
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Adrian

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