Transformation Leads, Visioning Follows
Mark Tidsworth, Pinnacle Team Leader
It’s been tried….over and over again. “A primary and popular way to revitalize your church is to do visioning or strategic planning,” was the thinking. Up until around 2000, church paradigms were fairly stable in this USA. During that time of great stability and cultural approval, Christian churches were energized by freshening their focus through visioning processes. Church paradigms themselves didn’t need changing, only our focus and commitment levels. Visioning processes worked.
How about now? Now that we are in the Postmodern transition, along with cultural disregard for faith communities and high organizational change for every business, corporation, non-profit, and church…what are the common outcomes of visioning processes? Typically, with no intervention in the life of a church before visioning begins, the outcomes are forms of:
· Nostalgia – “Let’s do what we did when our church was in its hayday”
· Quality Improvement – “Let’s do what we currently do, but with better quality”
· Buy In – “Let’s do what we currently do, yet with greater commitment”
· Player Shuffling – “Let’s do what we currently do, but with better players (pastor and lay leader changes)”
All of these approaches reflect a people much like the ancient Hebrews who found that over time, Egypt came to be a land “which knew not Joseph.” Those who still practice visioning, expecting their church to revitalize as a result, are unaware that their paradigm itself is the problem. Perhaps they will gain a temporary bump from visioning, yet their irrelevance will grow over time since their ministry environment no longer resonates with their expression of church. Their community simply doesn’t know Joseph (this form of church) even though the church has been tuned-up through a visioning process. This approach to church vitalization typically increases collective frustration.
Conversely, there are woke churches, energized and moving on. Rather than stop and settle at the grief stage after recognizing their paradigm is outdated, these churches kept moving, discovering new wineskins. Transformation is the best word we’ve found to describe what’s happening. These churches give themselves permission to follow Holy Spirit nudges along with permission to adjust the way they are church together. They are discovering that life in Christ is always new, always unfolding.
So how does this happen? The ultimate answer is God, of course. These churches open themselves to the nudges, whispers, and sometimes shouts of the Holy Spirit. And here are two specific ways these churches are entering adaptive and transformational change.
1. Intentional Congregational Learning and Exploration – Churches intuitively know things are different, yet plenty don’t have conceptual maps to help them make sense of their landscapes. Instead, they find ways to make sense of what’s happening through erroneous maps, leading to problems and conflict. So churches who become vitalized expressions of themselves give themselves opportunities to learn what’s actually happening in the larger world and then in their particular world. An outcome of effective congregational learning is the clear awareness that what we did in the past will not get us to where God is taking us in the present and future. When they make this conceptual leap, then the fires of spiritual renewal begin to burn with possibilities. Our Making The Shift Weekend is a congregational learning and exploration activity providing accurate understandings of the Postmodern shift, along with three life-giving shifts churches are making. Experiential events like this are a must for transformation’s fruits to ripen.
2. Living Into Spiritually-Guided Culture Change – The days of visioning teams doing the work for the church and bringing the plan back to the church, delivering the vision are clearly over. Now we are in a season when the church itself must engage the adaptive process in order for adaptation to take. Churches who make this shift find ways to involve their people in the actual practice of adaptation. The congregation itself needs practice living into new expressions of itself. Our Making The Shift 10 Week Small Groups are a great example of a “learn by doing” process through which disciples experiment with being church in new ways.
Typically we don’t talk much about what we are doing in these articles, preferring to focus on our readers. But I have to tell you that we are SO hopeful since steering churches more toward transformation than visioning. Yes, we still do some visioning work with those who are not ready for more. We are finding though, that relevant visions flow from transformation in this current context, not the other way around. We are discovering more and more churches are ready for something more, recognizing their needs are different than before,. So you are invited to explore our Transforming Church Initiative on our website to find adaptive processes which are up to date, approaches to transformation reflecting real time conditions in our ministry environments.
May we remember those first disciples who went before us, engaged in a social/spiritual movement which radically changed their world (See Acts, Holy Bible), living into the best expressions of ourselves (churches) yet.