Where’s Your Church On The Developmental Response Continuum
Mark Tidsworth, Team Leader
How’s your church responding to these volatile days?
Here is a tool for your church leadership to use in assessing your church’s response. We published it first in Shift: Three Big Moves For The 21st Century Church. Since that book was about adaptive change, this tool (Developmental Response Continuum), served to give churches a way to identify how they were responding to the large-scale shifts around us. It’s funny how some tools become less effective over time while others increase their usefulness. We are glad to provide a pdf of Chapter Two in Shift, encouraging you to share it with your leadership, moving to dialogue about how to lead effectively given your church’s relationship with the volatility in our world. The introduction to this Developmental Response Continuum follows. May it serve to help churches advance in mission-congruent responses to the story we find ourselves in.
“Coaching clergy and consulting churches provides the opportunity for observing the reactions of churches to our shifting context. The variety of reactions is fascinating. As you read through the following, consider where your congregation may be in its journey. Some of the following reactions are more adaptive than others, as you will notice. I offer these descriptions with no judgment. Change is difficult and resistance is inevitable. We must grow sufficiently convinced that what we are doing is not advancing the mission before we will change. Perhaps these are points on the developmental response continuum when we encounter unexpected change, when currents change direction. Clergy, church staff, lay persons, and entire congregations find themselves somewhere on this response continuum.”
