By Kevin Ford

“You don’t need to know the future to prepare for it – you need to know yourself.” Margaret Wheatley, business professor and author of Leadership and the New Science, had just challenged a group of 30 CEOs at TAG’s annual Roundtable in Scottsdale, AZ.

The business executives, representing various industries, pushed back. They didn’t buy her “new science” approach to management. Processes, systems, project plans, and budgets are critical, they argued. How in the world can you be successful without being able to control your organization’s future? And how do you control the future without a carefully crafted and very specific plan?

But over the course of three days of intense debates and discussions, most of these high-powered leaders were eventually convinced of her assertion: planning, in the traditional sense, was dead. As they examined their past successes, they realized that virtually none of them had been planned. Most of them had come from their organization’s ability to know their identity and purpose, respond to a rapidly changing business environment, and attract great people.

As I work with churches, I often see the same kind of thinking at work, especially among the lay leadership. We have to have a carefully constructed plan so that we can track our progress and develop airtight budgets, they will say.

Is your church thinking of launching a new initiative, such as a major renovation or relocation? Many of your lay leaders will demand a carefully crafted and detailed long-range plan before you build. This is normal because this is what they’ve been taught. It all goes back to the writings of Henry Mintzburg, the father of strategic planning. Mintzburg taught us the value of strategic plans, filled with projections, timelines, and critical areas of responsibility. His work then filtered throughout Corporate America. If your church is like many, you have lay people who are the products of his early work.

But pastor, take heart. His more recent work, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994), hasn’t yet had time to filter down to many of your lay leaders who still employ traditional planning methods. Strategic planning has been replaced by strategic thinking. The future is an abstraction. Mintzburg suggests that “strategic planning” is an oxymoron. Strategy is about synthesizing, and planning is about disaggregating. We cannot predict what’s going to happen. The best decisions, he suggests, are the decisions made in the dynamic present. I find that many well-intentioned lay leaders are focused on disaggregating, rather than synthesizing.

It is of no use to spend much time developing financial forecasts and detailed project plans. Even as you plan to build a new building, renovate your existing facilities, or look to a relocation. But you can know who you are. Are you a healthy church, able to weather the storms? Have you spent time in strategic thinking? Do you have a clear sense of who you are and what you’re all about? Or is your church’s success dependent upon following a very linear set of steps?

Preserving Heritage
Heritage Church is not really near anything. Unless you happen to live in Moultrie, GA. My associate and I had to fly from DC to Jacksonville, FL and then drive another three hours to get there. Other than a Wal-Mart and Oakwood Homes, there’s just not much there. But when we arrived, we were amazed at what we saw. The church had been planted about 6 years earlier by a group of lay people who had a common purpose. They wanted to start a church where every member was in ministry.

Moultrie, mind you, is a conservative town, deeply rooted in southern Georgia. You don’t break the rules there. Pastors do the pastoring and lay people show up in their Sunday best. Churches look like churches. Church music shouldn’t have a beat. Church is the place where you raise your kids and see your friends – and don’t try to make it more than that. But the biggest rule is not to break the rules. That’s the way it has always been. But these folks at Heritage Church had a different plan – and it was working.

They were meeting in a warehouse with a capacity of 550 on dozens of acres of land. Worship attendance – driven by cutting edge music, solid biblical preaching, and strong lay leadership – was increasing exponentially (they had also broken the church growth 80% capacity rule). They were out of space and weren’t sure exactly what to do. They had a lot of land and knew they could build something much better without relocating.

“We just thought we’d build a nice building,” Pastor David Oaks told me. The initial conversations with a local architect assumed that Heritage Church would build a rather traditional sanctuary and the cost would be around $4 million. When they brought us in for “strategic planning”, they assumed that we would help them develop a series of linear action steps, pert charts, and budgets over a 3 year period of time. They also thought that we’d help them select a design / build firm, a fundraising consultant, and so forth. The new building was going to cost about $4 million, they reasoned, so why not spend a few thousand to develop a good plan?

We started with focus groups and interviews – newcomers, longer-term members, and leadership. One by one, the people told us what the church meant to them. Many of the other churches in town were focused on budgets and buildings. They were run like businesses, at best, and country clubs at worst. But this church was different. It was truly focused on ministry. The building was incidental. In fact, being in a warehouse communicated something very important to them about the church’s priorities. The core value was simple: ministry over buildings. And since “every member in ministry” was part of their genetic code, the core value was even more important.

Well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they needed – a bigger warehouse, with a price tag that would be half the original estimate! If they had followed a long-range planning approach, they would have ended up with a traditional sanctuary that was totally incongruent with their own identity as a church.

When many churches announce a new building project, they see an initial decline in attendance. But Heritage Church took the time to align their building plans with their genetic code. As a result, they are cramming over 800 people into their old warehouse on Sunday mornings, and they have over 500 people in small groups – every member in ministry. If you had asked the leadership team three years ago where they would be today, they wouldn’t have even dreamed of the possibilities. They realized that they didn’t know the future, but they certainly knew who they were.

The Healthy Church
At TAG, we work with all kinds of organizations – Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies, large non-profits, and churches. Over the years, we started noticing a universal pattern of characteristics. So, we began a research project, based on our experience and with the help of a management professor from Georgetown. From this research, we identified a set of principles that determine levels of organizational. This formed the backbone of an online survey that we now use in virtually every church that we work with – the Healthy Church Index. In fact, we are currently using this instrument in a new research project – a study of older churches who have sustained significant growth over the last five years.

As the Healthy Church Index began to gain national recognition, we were approached by a national alliance of design / build firms (The Cornerstone Conference Group). They told us that entering into a relationship with a church was often a huge risk – for both sides. They had a good process for conducting feasibility studies and demographic research. But they had no way of predicting whether or not the project would be a success. When we asked why some projects failed, they cited a variety of primary problems – lack of shared vision, lack of emotional support, dictatorial leadership, internal conflict and so forth. Project planning was not the issue that they needed help with. The church’s vision, leadership, and people were the issues that they wanted to assess before entering a relationship.

While the Cornerstone Conference Group has not conducted a true financial analysis of the cost-savings, they have estimated that an accurate assessment of the church’s health saves both sides an average of $40,000 in soft dollars alone. In the Healthy Church Index, we measure a variety of factors (benchmarked against national norms), that help determine how healthy a church really is. The church depicted in the graph was considering a building program – but their scores on the Healthy Church Index told them they were not yet ready to build.

We look at whether or not people understand and are committed to the church’s identity and direction; whether or not people are effectively mentored and developed as leaders; how well the church equips members for daily life. We look at how healthy the church’s communication and boundaries are. We examine how members perceive the church’s impact on the local and global community. We measure member satisfaction and levels of involvement. The Healthy Church Index assesses levels of trust – trust in financial management, trust in leadership, and support of the church’s direction. Since a building project or new initiative represents a change, we want to know how well the church has managed change in the past.

While the Healthy Church Index measures other factors, these are among the most significant. I’ve seen too many examples of churches that develop a “building plan”, without looking at who they are and what they’re all about. A committee develops a step-by-step action plan to conduct a feasibility study, hire an architect, contract with a design / build firm, start a capital campaign, and so forth. They have deadline dates, assigned responsibility, and measurements. But along the way, it all falls apart – regardless of how well-crafted the plan is. Why? Because many churches don’t take the time to look at their own identity, or to examine what level of health exists within their church.

The CEO of Nokia recently said that his long-range plan is now 90 days. We can’t look much beyond that. Churches don’t operate within the same kind of volatile context, but things change rapidly. In the 1950’s, information was doubling every 200 years. Today, it is doubling every 18 months. Identity is fundamental. Vision and strategy are critical. Church health is essential. Planning, however, should be short-term at best.

Invest Wisely, Plan Fluidly
I’m not suggesting that you fly by the seat of your pants. Go ahead and do your feasibility studies and demographic research. Get an outside look at whether or not your church is healthy. Develop your values, mission, vision, and strategy. a fundraising firm, architect, and design / build firm. But don’t waste your time on detailed action plans that extend beyond a few months. You will not be able to control the future or the changing environment. Invest most of your time in strategic thinking and discussion – so that your church is prepared for whatever the future may hold. Your plan should be fluid. Think of it more as the North Star, providing direction on the open sea – rather than a roadmap that gets you for point A to point B.

“We realized that our church loved the warehouse,” David Oaks told me recently. “It communicates who we are – a functional facility that allows us to do ministry. Our vision is to be a passionate community of disciples who significantly impact their world for Jesus. That vision came out of our first strategy session with you. And we live it and breathe it every single day. Every member knows what we’re about. It has taken three years of strategic thinking to get to where we are – and we still haven’t broken ground. That’ll come in February. But if we had just built a nice building, and developed a series of steps to get there, we would have killed our church – and wasted millions of dollars in the process!”

About the Author
Kevin Ford is the Chief Visionary Officer of TAG, a sponsor of Cornerstone Conferences. He provides consulting services and strategic planning services to businesses, government agencies, and churches around the world. He is the author of The Thing in the Bushes (Pinon Press, 2001) and Jesus For a New Generation (IVP, 1995). In addition, he is the co-author of the nationally acclaimed congregational survey, the Healthy Church Index. He can be reached via e-mail at kford@877tagline.com.

The Cornerstone Knowledge Network is a central source for fact-based, experience-tested information that can help churches clarify their missions, improve organizational leadership and successfully complete building projects. For more information call 1-888-595-7360 or visit www.theckn.com.

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