“A constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change — we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.”

If you believe that “God causes all things to work together for good,”¹ then you must be wondering what God is going to do to redeem the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Disruption’s Opportunity

Whatever our thoughts, stances, and opinions are in relation to the pandemic, one thing is clear: it has disrupted all of us. Disruptions are jarring because they are unplanned and usually happen very quickly. Typically, when disruptions affect us, our reaction is to think of them as problems. But their positive side—and yes, they have one—is that they force our attention on to a new reality and create an urgency to do something so that we survive the disruption with good prospects for the future. 

Now is an opportune time to reimagine ministry to meet the challenges of new conditions and take advantage of the opportunities they provide. I believe those opportunities are a gift from God to the church. While the pandemic is a terrible scourge, it is not beyond God’s power to redeem it by bringing some good out of it. We need to open this gift of opportunity and use it! How will you participate with God in drawing out that good to bless others? CCCC members can discuss this post in The Green.

Surviving a disruption requires a mindset that goes beyond incremental changes to how we think about and do our work. There may be some very helpful tweaks to make, and those should be done, but more importantly when in a disruption, we need bold, creative ideas for completely new initiatives that make the most of the possibilities inherent in the disruption. 

Some questions to start a discussion with your team about innovation in your ministry include:

• What new needs have been created by the disruption?
• What other ways to pursue our mission does the disruption make possible that weren’t possible or desirable before?
• How can we make sure we are open to the expansiveness of God’s possibility and will for our ministry in this moment and going forward?

Whether we like it or not, both we and our society will be changed by the disruption of COVID-19. But there is good news in that if we take the initiative and act proactively we can achieve greater mission success because of those changes. 

The choices we make might even bring about changes that are much needed and overdue.

Without minimizing the terribleness of the pandemic, this time of disruption holds an opportunity for churches and Christian ministries to further develop and expand how they work on their missions.

Making the Most of the Opportunity

The current disruption is already benefiting the church in that it has:

• Highlighted more than ever the difference between the church and its buildings,
• Forced us to find new ways to be the church without relying on buildings or large gathered groups, and
• Upset regular routines and practices, making people more open to change than usual.

What we learn from our experience during the pandemic can continue to be used when large gatherings resume. Our new skills and practices can go forward and augment (and in some cases replace) the traditional ways of doing ministry. 

To make the most of the disruption, churches and ministries need to think innovatively about their activities with respect to two time frames: what they can do during the pandemic and what they need to do to prepare for ministry after the pandemic.

During the Pandemic

“Saddleback has never been closed during these past eleven weeks,” Warren says. “On the contrary, we’ve been doing more in our communities than ever before. Our buildings have been closed, but the church is not a building. We are a living, breathing body …we are a people, not a place.”

Rick Warren

A number of churches and ministry leaders have shared how they are creatively responding to the pandemic. Follow the links to be inspired by their stories and then see what ideas your own team can come up with.

• The quote above comes from Rick Warren’s interview about how Saddleback Church is making the most of the pandemic not only to serve but also to evangelize through its members rather than its programs.
• This church transformed an existing program that was no longer needed as it was into a high value program meeting specific pandemic-related community needs. 
• Some churches are thinking about the new possibilities of being a church without walls.  
• Fresh Expressions helps churches build new forms of churches alongside themselves to attract non-church people. Their post discusses how distributed leadership makes possible a distributed church that can minister during the pandemic. It also covers integrating your church into the digital era and listening, loving, and serving your neighbourhood.
• Here are a number of suggestions for engaging and re-engaging people with your church while reaching out to new people with new programs.
• Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix, AZ developed a new mental health program based on text messaging, their website, and telephone and is providing financial assistance to individuals for their first ten counselling sessions.
• A ministry leader offers ten creative ideas to continue effective ministry.
• Here’s a church that turned to the ministries it supports to find ways to help them with their missions. The church is also supporting its local Social Services office.

But don’t just look at what other churches or ministries are doing. For real game-changing ideas, look to see what other industry sectors are doing. We are all in the same boat, having to innovate during the pandemic. Secular charities could have great ideas and so could the retail, manufacturing, hi-tech and other sectors of our economy. Hospitals, for example, improved their patient management system by examining automotive factories. Look for transferable ideas from sectors that are very different from our own. 

For guidance and ideas in developing creativity, please see my post on imagination. 

Preparing for after the Pandemic

During this time of disruption, churches and all other ministries should re-explore their missions and take a deep dive with a fresh perspective into what the words of their mission mean, what success of their mission looks like, and how their mission can be fulfilled. A process for how to do this will be the topic of my next post.

Conclusion

If the church makes the most of God’s gift of opportunity in disruption, it will emerge from this pandemic fresh, reinvigorated, and highly relevant to whatever the new normal turns out to be. 

The post Finding God’s Gift in Disruption appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I’ve been recommending for years now that ministries should be telling their stories. Some ministries are pretty good at telling stories to their supporters, but they could be telling some of their stories to the public too. Not only does public storytelling promote a particular ministry, but it also increases awareness of the value of the Christian ministry sector to the public. When people wonder what good Christian charities produce, your stories are powerful answers that not only support our public benefit (and therefore our charitable status), but make our faith more attractive to potential believers as well!

I just came across a publication of the Bible League of Canada (a CCCC Certified Member) called One Dominion, which tells the story of how the Word of God shaped the Canada we live in today. I’m bringing the book to your attention as an inspiring example of how a story for the public might be told.

Here’s why I think the Bible League’s way of telling this story is effective:

• It is topical: The softcover coffee-table quality book was published to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, so it has a connection to an event that the general public is currently interested in. They are more likely to read the book now than they would at some other time. Kudos to the Bible League for a timely publication!
• It builds on the familiar: They’ve successfully connected the story of Canada to the story of their cause – the Word of God – by showing how Scripture has been publicly or quietly behind key events in our history. It takes facts that should be familiar to the public and weaves in the not-so-familiar facts, leaving people feeling that the Canada they know has been explained to them and they now understand it better. Some of the connections with the Word of God are written in stone (such as on the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill), and other connections are in the way the Word of God has motivated people to live out their faith in a public way, such as by creating an educational institution or a hospital.
• It has a through-story: The Bible League crafted the story well. Its structure reminds me of the structure of Luke-Acts, which has a trajectory from the remoteness of Judea to the centre of the world, Jerusalem, and then travels away from Jerusalem to the outermost parts of all the world. In a similar way, One Dominion starts with the entire nation of Canada and our place in the world, then zeroes in on individual people of faith throughout our history who did something good, and finally projects outward exploring how individuals today might affect the world tomorrow. It seems to come full circle, leaving the reader to wonder, “I know what individuals did to make my world so great, so now what can I do to make the world of the next few generations great as well?”

The story’s point is that Canada was shaped by Christians for a purpose, and Christians today should still do what they can to support that purpose. 

Although the book’s distribution isn’t all that wide (primarily sold from the Bible League’s website and a few Christian bookstores), it presents our faith well to those who do not yet believe, and who may even question what good Christianity has done for Canada. It presents Christian faith in a way that others can appreciate what it accomplished, and perhaps might even give it some consideration for themselves.

My only suggestions for improvement, if there is a second edition, are:

1. Indicate where the gorgeous pictures were taken! There are many places I’d love to go based on the beautiful photos, but where are those locations?
2. Since it is essentially a picture book with commentary, put a picture on the front cover.

Thanks to the Bible League for their investment in such a worthy project! It is a well-crafted book that all Canadian Christians can be proud of. Through this project, the Bible League of Canada is inspiring other ministries to creatively tell their stories in the public realm. Well done!

“The book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc.”

The post How One Ministry Is Telling a Story appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Day two started with a great presentation from Lisa Kay Solomon of Innovation Studio. She says that scaling is about leading the design of better futures. Scaling includes designing the conditions within the organization that are needed for change.

Start the scaling process by defining the response you want to trigger in other people that will lead to mission success.

When it comes to your own staff, the people whom you want to be successful in their work every day, Lisa says that people who believe they’ve had a good day are more successful than those who don’t. And the most significant factor in judging whether or not you’ve had a good day is whether or not you feel you made progress that day. So leaders, design your organization and its work so that staff and volunteers can know they made progress every day. Her book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change describes how to do this.

The key points are:

1. Create conditions for discovery. Exploring always involves risk of failure, but the key is to fail productively. Others have said that when you fall, “Fall forward.” Encourage curiosity, zest and optimism among your staff. Have strong ideas to give clear direction, but hold them loosely to encourage creative thinking. Have fun exploring. If everything has been reduced to a Powerpoint presentation, she says little can go wrong, but then little can go right too. Risk exploration.
2. Be an ‘otherish’ giver. Collaborate and set your partner up for success. Engage others outside the organization to think and imagine with you.
3. Think visually. This really helps you to break away from linear thinking and it is much more creative. Dan Roam has two great goods about thinking visually: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Blah Blah Blah: What to Do when Words Don’t Work. She also recommends Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers because you can’t scale anything if your don’t know its business model. I have this book and it is outstanding! And yes, charities have business models just as much as for profits do!
4. Act like a television or movie producer. They are the people who steward the vision for the show and make sure that it gets produced. You need to ensure that everyone is creatively working on the vision. Don’t let the organization drift away from what you are trying to achieve!! Sometimes we get bogged down in process and perfectionism and lose “the fire”. We lose urgency. Keep the organization stoked, active and committed.
5. Create a culture of hope. This will help everyone get through the tough work of scaling up.
6. Move beyond the “Yeah, but” people. They need to develop a more adaptive way of thinking. They are stuck in a rigid perspective and can’t see past their reservations. So when you hear “Yeah but”, ask “So how can…?”

Some Lessons on Scaling That Were Shared

Michael Smith of the Social Innovation Fund shared some lessons he’s learned over the years about scaling up.

• One in eight American NFPs (Not for Profits) spend no money on evaluation, and more than 50% have no theory of change. Their typical success measures are either simply a story about a person who was a success for one of their programs (was that person the only one?) or a statistic about the number of people served (yes, but did anything actually change for them?). Evaluate results! A template for how to do evaluations (a step-by-step guide) is available for free.
• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.
• The three ingredients for scaling are: 1) collaboration, 2) a fierce sense of urgency, and 3) plans for sustainability.
• A really hard, demanding mission. A mission that is hard to figure out how to do is better than an easy mission you already know how to do. Aim high, think big!
• You must know what the system is that you are working within. What are all the parts? How do they relate to each other? You must bring all parts into alignment with your desired end result. A great book to help you define systems is The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. This is another one I have and it is well worth reading for several reasons.

Collective Impact

Lalitha Vaidyanathan of FSG spoke about getting results at scale. She defined collective impact as having the commitment of actors from different system subsectors holding a common agenda to solve a problem at scale. To build collective impact, you must first know within what system(s) you are working. If you were to work with others across this system, who would be involved and what work would you be doing together?

Here are the elements for effective collective impact:

• Five conditions for collective impact
  • A common agenda
  • Shared measurements (for learning and accountability)
  • Mutually reinforcing activities (no duplicate effort)
  • Continuous communication
  • Backbone support. The backbone is the people who are dedicated to making the group work effectively.
• The mindset and disposition for collective impact
  • Shift from technical solutions to adaptive solutions.
  • Shift from focus on evidence to focus on evidence and relationships
  • Shift from looking for the silver bullet to using silver buckshot
  • Shift from taking credit to sharing credit. Ask “Who can we blame the good results on?”
  • Be willing to take risks. Nothing happens by staying safe.
• Structure everything for collective impact
  • The old way of structuring has predetermined solutions to implement.
  • The new way of structuring has predetermined rules of interaction from which the solution will emerge.
  • Be intentional about impact and uncertain about solution

Conclusion

This two-day conference really was all about working with others in a spirit of open-handed generosity to get a common mission accomplished. The key concept woven through everything was creativity. I really liked something that was said at the end of the day:

Imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions!

The post Stanford Day 2 – Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

And that raises an interesting question: Which is more important – growing your ministry or growing your impact? The first is internally focused while the second is externally focused. If your goal is to grow a large ministry because you want to lead a large ministry, I’d suggest you take a hard look at your motivation.

• If you could achieve much greater mission impact but with no growth and even less visibility than you have today, would you do it?
• Is leadership driving you or is your mission driving you?

Here’s what I learned on Day One.

Achieving Transformative Scale

Jeff Bradach of The Bridgespan Group gave us nine pathways to scaling up for impact.

1. Distribute through existing platforms. You don’t have to build everything yourself. Many other organizations have developed assets you can use to get your messages and programs out in public. Think about cooperation and collaboration. Or at least think about using them as a supplier.
2. Recruit and train other organizations. This goes beyond simply using someone else’s platform. Here you actually give them a packaged program that they can then run (and even adapt) themselves.
3. Unbundle and scale for impact. Perhaps it is too challenging to think about scaling up everything you do. Why not take a complex program and break it down into pieces that are easier to scale? Scaling a small thing is better than not scaling at all.
4. Leverage technology. Research shows that for profit companies spend double the amount on technology than what nonprofits do. Social media, apps and other technologies can greatly broaden your audience.
5. Strengthen the field. Find ways to lift the performance of all the players in your field. What can you do that would enable others who are working on the same mission (or closely related aspects of it) to do better? For example, could you develop shared measurements of mission performance? That way, everyone can try their own methods, but have a basis for comparing results and seeing what works best.
6. Examine the ‘system’ you are all working within. Could you change a critical part of it so that everyone wins? Jeff said that bad systems trump good programs every time! Change the system and maybe your programs will work better.
7. Influence policy change and you’ll change the playing field.
8. Consider for profit models. If you can, minimize your reliance on donations and grants. A good example is the micro-credit sector that has become a viable, standalone business.
9. Change the attitudes, behaviours and norms that work against mission success. Are there negative communal habits that should be changed? Smoking and drunk driving are two examples where bad habits became socially unacceptable.

Jeff reminded us of a few important strategies not to forget while scaling up:

• Keep replicating what’s working. Don’t just do new things.
• Cost matters. Innovate to drive costs down (but not at the cost of effectiveness)
• Money matters. You need large capital for new capabilities, so rethink your funding model and see where you could generate additional revenue
• Constituent engagement matters. Sometimes we rely on experts instead of grassroots wisdom. Instead of either/or, think both/and

 Building networks and movements for social impact

Heather McLeod Grant of Open Impact said that the best nonprofits work outside of themselves, engaging business, government and other nonprofits with their cause. Here’s her definition of scaling:

Scaling is a leader building an organization that can build a network to grow a movement.

NFPs (Not For Profits) often stifle movements by saying “Here’s all that could go wrong.” If we don’t support movements of creativity, we will be sidelined as irrelevant organizations.

Design Thinking and Rapid Innovation

David Viotti, CEO of Smallify, talked about how to attack a really big goal. To smallify something is to get to the root cause of a challenge and then take quick action. It is to break something down to a small piece that can be worked on.

To smallify is to make small bets with relatively low risk and an affordable loss if it doesn’t work out. The attitude needs to be, “What can we do this Monday?” Do something, anything, NOW!!

Viotti gave five tools for rapid innovation:

1. Experiment more and fear less. Don’t wait for the perfect idea, just start testing and don’t be afraid it might go wrong. You’ll learn something and move forward.
2. Empathize and show up. Approach the challenge from other perspectives. Talk to people and discover what they think about. Be an actor – do something – and not just an observer.
3. Generate and say “Yes”. Be creative and be open to trying new things out. Think of options. “How could we…” is a great question.
4. When you are up against constraints, take them as gifts. They force you to be more creative, and that’s always good.
5. Your mindset is a choice. Do you believe that intelligence is fixed? If you do, then you will give up more easily and achieve less. If you believe that intelligence grows, then you will embrace challenge and achieve more. Choose to believe that intelligence grows. Every time you try something, you learn something, and then you are closer to achieving your goal.

Viotti taught us “the innovator’s bow.” Say “I am [name] and I have failed.” Then take a bow. Well done! You did something even if it didn’t work. That’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.

He also warned us that people who say, “Let me play the Devil’s advocate” are really saying, “Let me kill your idea!” Turn the “Yes but” answers to “Yes and”. Ask “So how can we do it?”

Scaling up Excellence

Bob Sutton of Stanford University said that when you have a pocket of excellence, the challenge is how to spread excellence from the few to the many without “screwing it up.”

Scaling isn’t just about the numbers, numerical growth and so forth. It really is about spreading a mindset – getting people to get on board with a new way of getting real world impact. Organizations that spread excellence have people who feel they own the organization, and the organization owns them. They share a mutual accountability for each person living up to the ideal and getting the job done well.

Scaling isn’t about getting more resources to do more. It’s about doing more with less. You start by cutting out all the ineffective things – those things you do only because everyone else does them.

Scaling is about getting others to help you accomplish your mission. That means that you will have to address the issue of whether you will enforce a cookie-cutter approach or allow for local variation on a theme. Allowing variation may encourage better employee engagement or it might lead to delusions of uniqueness. Some people want to change a program just so that they have exercised some control over it. Variation because of real variations in the local areas are quite okay, but don’t let people reinvent what doesn’t need to be reinvented.

How to Spread Excellence

• Start by firing up contagious emotions first. Trying to enlist people by making a rational case for their work just doesn’t work. Get their emotions in high gear over your cause!
• Then guide people to do the desired tangible behaviours. Get them active, doing what needs to be done right away. Research shows that strong beliefs are created and maintained based on what we do, not what we are told or what we say. Action builds commitment to the mission. Leaders need to live the mindset they want staff and volunteers to have, not just talk about it. Excessive talk and thinking keeps us from doing what we know and believe we should do.
• As organizations get larger, you need more structure and process. Many people think this means having a bureaucracy, but the purpose of hierarchy is to defeat bureaucracy and organize people to work together effectively.
• Keep teams small. Once a team gets to about six people, it starts to have problems. If it has more than ten members, the system gets clogged.
• Cascade excellence by putting people with the right mindset in positions to influence those who don’t.
• Start with a small team of diverse people, so when they go back to their own diverse groups, ideas will spread faster.
• When it comes to attitudes and performance, bad is stronger than good. Bob says “one jerk cuts performance by 40%,” so get rid of the bad fast!
• When you can say “We don’t have time to do it the way we should,” you are doing great scaling. The point isn’t to wait for perfect conditions and processes, but to do something now and make progress. However, balance this by remembering that sometimes the best advice is just to stand there and do nothing but think about it. You’ll have to decide when stopping to reflect is the right thing to do.
• There will be times when scaling will not be enjoyable. The staff may start to lose their happiness about working on the mission. Disney knows that its guests are least happy when they are actually in the park. Anticipating and remembering the park experience are when they are happiest. That’s why Disney makes sure you know where the best places are to take pictures and why they provide photo ops with their characters. When your staff is unhappy, talk up both the past and the future. We are going from somewhere to somewhere. Let’s remember the progress already made and anticipate achieving the vision.
• Scaling up is a manageable mess. It isn’t neat and tidy. So clean up the best you can and keep muddling forward!

I highly recommend Bob’s book: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling For Less.

That’s it for the first day.

God bless!

The post At Stanford University: Scaling Nonprofits appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The second threat to our corporate witness is careerism, in which career advancement is a person’s chief aim in life. Making the most of your gifts and talents for service to God is good stewardship, but it becomes a problem when people are consumed with personal advancement. The more that ministry staff obsess over advancing themselves, the less authentic our corporate witness will be, because God often wants us to do something for someone else’s benefit, not ours. In fact, he wants us to love sacrificially and unconditionally, and this may impact our careers.

Have you ever felt a sales person had no interest in your welfare, just their commission? You can tell when they genuinely want to help you and when they see dollar signs instead of you.

“Oh, that looks so beautiful on you!”

“You deserve the best!”

If that degree of self-interest comes out in a ministry employee, it disheartens everyone else who wants and expects ministry staff to be passionate about their mission more than themselves.

I talked with a church secretary a few weeks ago and she couldn’t stop singing the praises for her church, her board, and her pastor. She was so exuberantly enthusiastic as she told me how she just loves coming to work as a church secretary because it is so fulfilling to be doing important work every day for God. I loved her passion for her job and her commitment to it. Does she make her church attractive to me? You bet! And if I didn’t already know Christ and she told me about him, I would pay serious attention because of her passion.

In fact, if you feel the same way about your ministry workplace as this secretary does about hers, please make a comment as an encouragement to others.

Ministries don’t have careers, but they do have a corporate existence that they’d like to maximize and sustain into the future. This makes it possible that ministries could behave in similar ways as careerist individuals, and have similar negative effects on their own corporate witness and on the welfare of the community of Christian ministries.

Negatives of Careerism

When most employees are working for a cause, careerist employees can have some negative effects on the ministry and its team:

• They tend to focus on themselves rather than on mission, which for them is a means to an end, not something they are passionately engaged in as an end worthy in itself. Their dampened enthusiasm for the mission could be a drag on everyone else’s motivation.
• Their loyalty is to themselves, so their employment relationship is transactional. They are invested in the ministry they work for only to the extent that it helps their career.
• A person who is in it for themselves can’t help but give out signals to teammates that they are not all in it together. Team spirit will suffer when someone is more concerned with their own welfare rather than the team’s welfare. They are unlikely to sacrifice for the benefit of the team.

The Truth

This threat can be overcome with the truth that your ministry is called by Christ to do something great for him. And that means we have a high calling worthy of our greatest aspirations! Replace careerism with response to a call. It makes a big difference whether you focus on what you do as a means of furthering your career or as a means of accomplishing a mission you passionately believe in.

At CCCC, for example, we are not called to provide information and services, we are called to equip Christian ministries as organizations so they can do what God has called them to do. We do that by providing information and services, but we are working for something much more important — the accomplishment of our members’ missions. Your mission! The church’s mission! I want people working at CCCC who are jazzed by that! I want people who are passionate about the mission, who are sold out on making it happen! I know you want the same for your ministry too.

Whether someone feels called to vocational ministry or to secular work, when they know they are serving God in the place he wants them to be, they don’t have a career, they have a calling. And that makes all the difference because, as Paul says, we are working for the One who called us, Jesus Christ.

All Christians share a general call to serve Christ. In the absence of a personal call to a specific ministry or task, they have the freedom to discern for themselves where and how to fulfill their general call. What’s important is that they know they are fulfilling God’s call to service in what they are doing. They are pursuing God first and career second. They engage with mission because it is how they serve God.

Some Christians also have a strong personal call. This is my experience. As I wrote in Discerning Your Call, I knew from my preteen years that someday God wanted me to serve the church, something I didn’t know how to do, so I did not pursue it.

But on May 25th 2001, I asked God a question while driving home from an early morning prayer meeting, “Why have you given me so much vision for my church, for my clients, for everyone around me and nothing for me?” The answer was so clear that I pulled over to the side of the road in shock. I knew instantly that God had given me a call and that the call was still valid this many years later! I didn’t know what ministry God wanted me to do, but I did know I’d have to prepare for it, so I went home and told my wife I was going to go to seminary. She instantly agreed without reservation (now that’s confirmation!).

My personal call is to serve the church, and CCCC lets me do that. Does that affect how I see my job? Absolutely it does!

Benefits

The benefits of having a sense of call, whether a general call or a particular call, are significant.

• We will have great passion for our work because it is more than a job, it is a calling. My self-identity includes my call, so my job is part of my self-identity.
• Our work has great meaning and is very fulfilling because it is a call.
• Our sense of team will be heightened as we work with people who have an equal call to the ministry and together we become part of something bigger than ourselves, a ministry serving God’s mission.
• We will work with excellence because that is what our high calling demands of us.

Special Warning to Employers

It is all too easy to abuse someone’s sense of call. We can pay too little because we know they believe God wants them doing this, and after all, aren’t we as Christians called to a sacrificial lifestyle? Not quite! As an employer, you are caring for God’s sheep and you will be held to account for the level of care you gave. Pay the worker the wages that are due. Be fair. Christian workplaces should be the best workplaces. You are a workplace, not a workhouse!

I don’t want someone working at CCCC because they can make more money here than anywhere else. I want them here because they believe in our mission. But I do want to be able to stand before God and the public and say that we paid fair wages to everyone. Not too low, and not too high.

So don’t abuse your staff’s sense of call.

Building a Shared Call

Here’s what you can do to prevent careerism from hampering your ministry:

• When interviewing people, ask:
  • Why do you want to work with us?
  • What has God been doing in your life in the last three months?
  • How does this particular job fit with your career aspirations?
• Constantly talk with staff about how the work you do ties into the church’s mission
  • Keep the vision in sight, not the activity. For example, you might
    • Provide meals (activity) to relieve hunger (immediate outcome) so that everyone experiences God’s provision (long term outcome) and ultimately is able to be the whole person God made them to be (vision).
    • Provide church services (activity) so people can praise God and learn from the Word (immediate outcomes) so that they become mature believers (long term outcome) and become the image of Christ (vision).
• Bring theological discernment into your decision process, and encourage theological reflection at leadership and staff meetings.
• Encourage people to talk about how they feel about what they do. What makes them feel significant? Fulfilled? In a mission-driven organization, this should bring out stories that are a springboard to talk about God’s call on the organization.
• Talk with staff about how God is leading them now. God may be laying something on their heart that relates to your corporate call.
• For an organization, you could think of your vision, End statement, or Social Value Proposition, as a call. What is the end good you are working to achieve? Keep that in mind as your call and it will lift you up to the greater purpose you are serving.

The post Organizational Calling appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

What pastor hasn’t read about megachurches and wished for similar results!

Which executive director hasn’t read about the latest celebrated leader and had their heart burn to “go and do likewise”?

Why, even I am tempted! While I was thinking about this post, someone told me about a successful strategy some ministry leader wrote about, and my first inclination was to get the book and find out how I could do it too!

When you sincerely pursue God’s call, stories about what has worked well elsewhere are very attractive because they show us a way forward. They may be God’s provision for our success.

And yet, success stories can become obstacles to us and to God when time spent listening to the Spirit is replaced by time spent studying other people and what they did. In this case, God has a hard time getting our attention.

Biblical Imitation

As Christians, we look first to see what the Bible has to say about imitation. There are some instructive situations

• Moses parted the Red Sea and Joshua parted the Jordan river, but Joshua did not imitate Moses. As Joshua 3:7-13 makes clear, he obeyed God, who told him exactly what he was supposed to do.
• Jesus twice told the disciples to go out on a mission trip and to “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt” (Luke 9:3 and 10:4). Yet later he told them to go out again and this time said, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36). Just because they had the same instructions for the first two trips didn’t mean they had a pattern to follow for their ministry.
• Any study of biblical healings will show that there is no rhyme or reason to how people are healed. In each case, God decides sovereignly how to heal and this prevents us from developing a formula to manipulate God for our purposes.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a positive example in the Bible where someone said “Let’s do what so-and-so did” in terms of strategy. It seems to be discouraged because God wants us to follow him. And yet books abound today with formulaic prayer strategies and so forth. The clearest example of discouraging people from copying others is when Jesus tells Peter that one day he will be a martyr (John 21). Peter asks Jesus about John’s future, and Jesus replies “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow Me!” (John 21:22). So even though copying others can be okay, we’d better be careful before we start blindly following someone else.

To reap the positive and avoid the negative of copying successful leaders, ask the question: When should we copy, and when should we not?

Copycat Leadership Is Okay When We…

Imitate Godly Character

Therefore I urge you to imitate me. 1 Cor 4:16

Paul wrote that we should imitate him, but he didn’t mean that we should all become evangelists, apostles, or itinerant ministers. He meant that we should imitate his Christian character. Paul imitates Christ (1 Cor 11:1, see also Phil 3:17), which is why the Corinthians should imitate him. The goal is for everyone to imitate God (Eph 5:1).

One of the best parts of my job is meeting ministry leaders. I deliver seminars across Canaa, and I always drop in to meet CCCC members in the area. I’ve met several people who just exuded the Spirit of Christ in a very special way. In their presence I felt like I was in the presence of Christ. They radiated the peace of God to me. Each time this happens, I pray “Please God, can I be like this leader?” (Which is to say, “God, please make me more like your Son.”) These leaders inspire me to be more godly. Imitate that!

Imitate Godly Thinking

After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Acts 16:10

Paul and his team planned to revisit all their church plants and then plant new churches further into Asia. But God had other plans for Paul. There was nothing wrong with evangelizing Asia, it just wasn’t what God wanted Paul to do. According to tradition, God sent another apostle, Thomas, to evangelize Asia. Thomas did not copy Paul’s decision to go to Europe. If he copied anything, he copied Paul’s decision process and listened to God for his own instructions.

I love to hear ministry leaders explain why they made the decisions they did. Over and over I hear stories of people

• seeking God’s leadership
• taking a step of faith after careful discernment
• reflecting on God’s character and how that intersects with their possible choices
• coming back to their mission or call

Paul’s decision to enter Europe doesn’t make me want to leave Canada and go to Europe, but it does inspire me to be attentive to the Spirit’s direction and to instantly obey. Paul listened to God. Imitate that!

Copycat Leadership May Be Okay If…

We Understand Why It Worked for the Others

Strategies may work well in some circumstances and flop in others. Make sure you understand the real reasons for their success. Story tellers tell the story they want you to hear. Messy facts may be overlooked and there are just too many details to tell everything.

Did their success depend on:

• certain types of personalities? (If so, is it ‘you’?)
• particular relationships? (Did they have access to people who gave crucial help?)
• external or internal environmental conditions? (Such as a felt need, high trust in leadership, or unity?)

Ask:

• How replicable is their experience into our situation?

We Understand What Would Have to Change and What Would be Changed

Programs and strategies require care and feeding.

• You may need different administrative systems or other infrastructure.
• You may have to prepare people for significant change, such as a congregation reaching out to a new demographic. Are people ready for youth, the poor, or the immigrant who are different from what they are used to?
• What unintended side effects might crop up? One church changed its youth program to attract kids who’d never been in church before, but kids who had grown up in the church felt lost in the change.
• It’s easy to start something new and a lot more difficult to keep it going once the initial enthusiasm and novelty wears offs. Will you find enough people who will shift their volunteer commitment from whatever they’ve been doing to the new activity?

Ask:

• What are the full demands and effects of this new thing on our organization and people?

It Fits with Our Identity

Unless you are willing to change your corporate identity, whatever you copy must fit perfectly with your values, culture, and public image. This is why major new initiatives sometimes spin off into new organizations. The policies, processes, and culture of established organizations often kill new initiatives when they are too different. If it isn’t a perfect fit with the existing organization, the new initiative is doomed before it starts.

Ask:

• Is this new initiative really ‘us’ or should we start a new ministry for it?

It Fits with Our Theory of Change

Whether you know it or not, you have a theory of change. It is the basis for every decision about strategies, programs and priorities. A theory of change explains why things are the way they are and what must change to make it better. Why don’t people know Christ? They’ve never heard of him? They refuse to submit to a higher authority? They don’t have a Bible in their mother tongue? They have family or cultural influences that prevent them from choosing Christ? If you are designing an evangelism program, you need a theory of change to explain how you will overcome these barriers.

If you have never articulated your theory of change, then you risk misunderstanding or overlooking the real reason why the program works.  You might think a Sunday School program is successful because of its focus or content, and miss that the real reason is the deep relationships that have been built between people. Did they just happen? Or was relationship building something the leaders worked on apart from the actual program itself?

If you want to copy a program, if it aligns with your theory of change you have a good rationale for doing it. If it doesn’t align, then examine how the program makes change happen. If you agree with the change mechanism, then update your theory of change. If you don’t agree with it, then don’t do it.

Ask:

• Does the theory of change implied by this new initiative fit our theory of change?

Copycat Leadership Is NOT Okay When We…

Steal Ideas from Others

Many ministries want others to benefit from their experience and creativity, so they share their success stories for others to use. In this case, feel free to consider using their ideas.

Also, if something is widely being done but you happen to see it first at a particular ministry, feel free to use it because that is in the public realm.

But if they have invested time and money to develop something new for themselves, don’t copy it without their explicit permission. They’ve done the hard development work for their benefit. If you just copy it, I would consider that as theft. Well, theft is a strong word. Maybe plagiarism is more apropos. The point is, come up with your own good ideas!

Ask:

• Is this something they invested in by developing it themselves? If so, have they given me permission to copy it?

Follow the ‘Latest Thing’ Rather than Follow God

If you find yourself constantly looking for the latest thing and jumping on board:

• Make sure you are not just lurching from one new program to another out of desperation. If you are desperate, you have bigger problems to deal with.
• Check that you are not suffering from ‘flavour of the month’ syndrome. There should be a sense of continuity and building upon previous work in your ministry. If staff and volunteers are thinking “Oh, here we go again!”, you have a leadership problem.
• Stop and ask yourself how much of God’s leadership you have personally experienced recently. Maybe you unwittingly found a substitute for God or you haven’t been able to discern God. Either way, you can be sure that God is directing you at all times, so sharpen your spiritual discernment skills and devote some time to using them.
• Reflect on the level of confidence you have in your own leadership. Copying others is a way of avoiding making your own creative decisions. Maybe you just need to be more daring to follow God and do what he has asked you to do. Sometimes that means copying others and sometimes that means forging your own path.

Ask:

• Did I seek God first?

Shift Focus from Mission to Technique

A danger in looking for strategies and techniques to copy is that your focus can easily shift from “What needs to happen to accomplish our mission?” to “What will bring in the money we need” or “What will fill the pews?” When this happens, you have surrendered strategic leadership of your ministry to someone else who doesn’t even know your ministry exists.

You also can easily shift your focus from mission results to program activity.

You can justify the new focus on the basis that more money, more people, and more activity will help you fulfill your mission. But the natural result of doing that is that success becomes defined in terms of money, people or activity rather than mission results. A focus on activity gives the illusion of working on mission, but is it accomplishing mission?

We need to know how to raise money, recruit people and run programs, but always as a means to an end and not the end themselves. Stay focused on your mission.

Ask:

• How does this help us fulfill our mission?

Allow Someone Else to Do Our Thinking for Us

By copying others you run the risk of allowing others to do your hard thinking for you. If that is the case, then that is pure intellectual laziness! The trouble is, they are thinking about their ministries and their circumstances, not yours. They are consumed with God’s purpose for their ministry, not yours.

As a leader you must immerse yourself in the issues related to your mission. Only then will you get deep insights and creative ideas. If that deep thinking leads you to look for a particular type of program or technique to use, then use it knowing you have strong reasons for copying it, as opposed to desperately grabbing at straws because you can’t think of anything yourself.

Ask:

• Am I personally an expert on our mission?

Copying Has Its Place…

There are lots of transferable ideas and programs out there and many can be very useful to your ministry. Just be sure that they are a good fit, that you have been ethical in acquiring them, and that you are not allowing others to supplant God’s role as your true leader. Do your spiritual due diligence before copying.

The post Copycat Leadership: When Should Leaders Imitate Other Leaders? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

A successful small church might be an oxymoron to some, but I (and I’m sure many others) believe that small churches can be called a success when the church is committed to its mission, its people are growing spiritually and are active in their faith, and it is able to sustain itself financially.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the small churches I visited are in pretty good shape. They can’t compete with the programs and extras that come with larger churches, but in spite of their struggles most are finding ways to be successful, vibrant, and healthy. Others, however, are fighting to stay alive, at least partly due to their choices.

I’ve sprinkled pictures throughout this post of some of the delightful people I met.

The Positive Lessons

Be a True Community

Whether you are a church or a Christian agency, a strong, healthy community is the backbone of a strong, healthy organization. A community reinforces values and ideals, and shares the work that needs to be done. People learn to work or live together and how to apply their faith to their relationships. A healthy community will persevere when individuals might be tempted to give up. Whether a church or a workplace, community is always good.

This is where small churches can excel. Rather than bemoaning what they lack, successful small churches have accepted their size and made the most of it by building strong communities. If they remain open to newcomers, the church has a bright future.

I met several church leadership teams, and was impressed with their obviously close, intimate community and convivial fellowship. The deacons, elders, pastors and lay leaders seemed to really know and care for each other. Even when meeting with a pastor alone, I heard stories of how supportive and helpful their boards are. Given that we at CCCC often hear of the problems of church boards, this was quite refreshing to me.

Larger churches and ministries have to work much harder to develop a true community, but it is worth the work because this is the only way to model what life and relationships look like in the kingdom of God. Many successful large churches rely heavily on small groups so people can develop deep relationships and have a place where it matters that they came.

Gary Portnoy’s theme song for Cheers includes the words, “Be glad, there’s one place in the world where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.” He wrote that about a bar! How much better that those words be said about a church or Christian ministry! Christianity is a faith centred on relationships, so make relationship building a core part of your strategy.

Reflect Deeply on Mission

As long as a ministry is vigorously working on its mission, it has a reason for being and should see God’s support. If its focus shifts from its mission to anything else, especially self-preservation but also running its programs for the sake of the programs, it has lost its reason for being, and possibly God’s support.

Many people said their congregation reflected deeply on its mission and thought about how to be faithful to it given their circumstances. They were willing to explore the mission and let it guide the church rather than relying primarily on a church growth model.

One inner-city church, formerly “bursting at the seams,” has no parking and no programs. They’ve gone back to the mission and decided they will not be program driven. Instead they will love each other and be a big family for each other, and if someone feels called by God to do something, they are encouraged to go do it.

Until a year ago, the youngest person in this 80-member congregation was about 60. Then some younger people started coming. As I left the church, a prayer meeting was about to start and several young adults walked in.

Successful small churches put mission before methods, allowing the Spirit to do fresh work. They are mission minded, not program directed.

All ministries would do well to ensure that programs don’t wind up taking supremacy over mission. Programs serve the mission.

Small churches have been forced by circumstances to ask the question, “Why should we continue to exist?” By answering that question, they know why they exist, and they keep it front and centre. Mission rules! In larger ministries, ask yourselves “How often do we intentionally discuss our mission, our theory of change, and design our programs with those thoughts in mind?”

Take a Risk

Every organization, every ministry, has a natural life cycle, but unlike the human life cycle, you can start the organizational life cycle over again. But it always involves taking risks. Think back to when your ministry was founded. Surely there were some risks taken. People stepped out in faith. They experimented with new methods. You need to keep taking risks like your founders did.

One church had declined from 400 to 65 people, and the average age had risen quite high. The board brought in a pastor with a young family to start the process of reaching a younger demographic. But now they’ve done something even riskier. With no young adults in the church, they’ve hired a young adults pastor! There’s vision! There’s faith!

Another church, with the approval of its denomination, hired a young man as pastor who has no denominational credentials as yet and who has never been pastor of a church. As his first church, he is helping them reach a younger demographic and they are helping him complete his education and credentialing. It appears to be a successful arrangement as the fruit is evident in his sermons and in new people attending the church.

As any organization grows, it tends to lose its entrepreneurial edge that was the source of its growth. The focus inevitably shifts from risk to safety – protecting what has been gained. But while protection is important, if it drives out all risk and kills the willingness to try something new, it has sucked the life out of the organization.

Small churches are taking risks because the risk of organizational death is almost certain if they don’t. In that sense, they have little to lose. But by trying something new, they have hope and they are giving the Spirit something to work with. And they are demonstrating faith based on a careful discernment of what God would have them do.

One person I met is taking more risks at a personal level too. She has a heart for evangelism and is on fire for God! On her own, she has started a Bible study in a nearby retirement home. She reminded me of the importance of encouraging all church members to go out into their own communities and find ways to be the church there. That should be the natural consequence of a church discipling its members – they go out and they do personal ministry wherever God has placed them.

Larger or older ministries must work hard to avoid the fossilization that naturally accompanies growth and aging. Organizational youth and vitality can be recovered if a ministry is willing to risk suffering some form of loss by taking on something new. If your ministry wants to retain its vitality and continue to adapt to a changing world, take a few risks!

The Cautionary Lessons

Resistance to Change

There were some small churches that did not give me much hope for their future because, although they wanted to grow and attract younger people, they were determined to do it without changing anything. I’m reluctant to give details, but one congregation literally had what (in my opinion) was their solution staring them in the face and they refused to consider it because it would have involved a change in worship style.

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, if the leaders who created our organizations years ago were to come back today to start them again, would they start something that looks like the one they started so long ago? Not likely. They would of course take their entrepreneurial creativity and create something that would be successful today. Yet some people are so fixed on preserving what worked fifty years ago that they are actually working against the vision of their ministry’s founder. If your founder were around today, he or she would likely be changing things to suit today’s world. So you should feel free to do the same.

Resignation and Passivity

The other choice that I saw made in the small churches that are declining is a choice I’m sure they did not intentionally make. They just fell into it. Some of the board members lamented that their children and grandchildren don’t attend church anymore. And they never asked the question why, but told me that’s just the way things are today. Others felt there was nothing they could do, so there was nothing to try. Defeatism kills!

I don’t believe it is ever God’s desire to see a church close, and yet it happens. I understand why it happens, but should it happen? Would it happen if we proactively looked for alternative ways to be the church? If we believe in the church then we must shake off the lethargy that dulls us into passive acceptance of dwindling prospects. Wake up! Wake up and be the church and people will be attracted!

My prayer is not that every church will be a large church, but that every church will be a successful church.

And Just to Confound Us All…

For those who think that great leadership is the key to growth, I visited a church in Montreal that used to be 250 people and had declined to 55, which is when the pastor resigned. Since then, they have had only supply pastors, and the congregation is now averaging 75-85 per Sunday and steadily growing! They’d still like to find a pastor, but somehow the urgency is not quite so keenly felt.

May God richly bless your ministries!

The post Strategic Choices & Organizational Life or Death appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

When we share our tough times and what we learned from them, we all learn a bit more and our donors appreciate our confession of being part of the same fallible humanity as they are.

The post Annual Failure Report appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

What Really Happened in Fleming’s Lab

Fleming’s lab fills the tower bay. It is the middle level of the three vertical windows.

Wikipedia and other sites describe Fleming and his lab as untidy, messy, or cluttered, but if you visit the lab, which is set up exactly as it was in 1928, you will find out that what appears messy and cluttered is just another aspect of his experimental work. (Sorry, no pictures are allowed inside the lab.) The museum guide told me that when Fleming was done with an experiment (the experiment he intended to do), he always left samples of his experiment out for at least several days as an experiment to find something unintended that he obviously wasn’t looking for.

Another practice was to combine things just to see what happens. In 1921 he had a cold, and put some of his nasal mucous in a petri dish and saw that it dissolved the bacteria in the dish. He discovered a natural human antiseptic, lysozyme, which would have guaranteed his place in history even if he had never discovered penicillin!

Practices such as these made it possible for Fleming to be surprised by the unexpected. He was very intentional about creating opportunities for discoveries to be made. If this made his lab untidy or cluttered, so be it.

Furthermore, it wasn’t an accident that he just happened to notice something unusual in a sample. He always inspected the samples very carefully, and this time he noticed a clear spot on the slide where the bacteria that he was experimenting on should have been. The organism had been killed by something on this one part of the slide, and the killer agent turned out to be a mould that he first called mould juice and (wisely) later called penicillin!

The real story is that the discovery of penicillin was not so accidental. Fleming deliberately left the cultures out to allow time for something unexpected to happen. He deliberately inspected the samples to see what, if anything, had developed. He deliberately followed up an unexpected observation to find an explanation for it. And he deliberately invested time to think about the implications of what he had discovered. Anyone who does what Fleming did is likely to discover something sooner or later.

In summary, Fleming’s method was:

1. Create opportunity to be surprised.
2. Be on the lookout for surprising things.
3. Be curious about the surprises you find.
4. Look for ways to take advantage of the surprises.

My Discovery Using Fleming’s Methods

Although I did not realize I was using Fleming’s methods at the time, I discovered the idea for this post following the same principles as Fleming. It was no accident that I stumbled upon the lab that led to the story that inspired this post. Here’s an example of Fleming’s method at work:

Create Opportunity to Be Surprised

• I was on a layover in London while returning home from Zürich on the last leg of my round-the-world sabbatical trip. I had not intended to visit the lab, but I had made the decision to make the most of my time on this once-in-a-lifetime trip by taking every opportunity to explore. So when I had two extra hours available before I needed to leave for Heathrow airport, instead of killing time at the airport or the hotel I got out my GPS and looked to see what tourist attractions were nearby. Fleming’s lab was the closest attraction and it was only a mile a way. Using the GPS as my guide, I walked to St. Mary’s Hospital and found the museum.

Be on the Lookout for Surprising Things

• As the guide told the story of Fleming’s discovery, he made it clear that Fleming had deliberately left the cultures out after he finished his experiments with them. He said it was not a case of being messy, but that this was his usual practice. That I found surprising.

Be Curious about the Surprises You Find

• I had never heard this aspect of the story before, so I asked why he would do that. That’s when I heard about his looking for the unexpected. This was a surprising idea because I thought scientists always had some concept of what they were looking for, an hypothesis to prove or disprove. Simply putting something ‘out there’ to see what happens is quite different from the scientific method I learned in high school.

Look For Ways to Take Advantage of the Surprises

• I was not expecting to find something to blog about in that two extra hours I had, but as I heard the true story behind the discovery of penicillin I realized I had accidentally discovered a great leadership practice just as Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin and I should share it on this blog.

My ‘Accidents’ at CCCC

When I arrived at CCCC in September 2003, I decided to provide leadership that was open to opportunity. In fact, we would search it out. I decided that we would be willing to shift priorities based on comparing new opportunities with our current action plan. To make this happen, the board and staff were told our action plans were simply default plans that we would follow as long as nothing better came up. Then staff performance review criteria were set based on exhibiting our team values rather than reaching pre-set goals. That way we could be flexible and nimble. Here are a few examples of how that has worked out:

• CCCC sponsors the Best Christian Workplace survey in Canada, and it all started because I just ‘happened’ to be attending a conference in the States where I saw the second annual presentation of awards for the American Best Christian Workplace survey. But I was at the conference because I was looking to see what’s new and different, so I set the stage for opportunity. I immediately connected what I saw with what I thought Canadian ministries needed because I was already on the alert for new ideas. Within a couple of weeks, we had an agreement to do it in Canada. I took action on an idea instead of just thinking, “That was interesting.”
• CCCC was a partner in the 35<35 program that recognized young Christian leaders because I just ‘happened’ to run into Carson Pue in a hotel hallway. But I attend EFC’s Presidents Day each year because it is the best place for me to meet a lot of ministry leaders at one time when I have no responsibilities of my own to attend to. I was open to some collaborative work and wanted to talk with as many people as I could about what they are doing. When Carson Pue and I crossed paths, we chatted a bit and when he asked what was on my mind, I told him we wanted to do something to recognize and encourage young Christian leaders at our next conference. Wouldn’t you know it, he was wanting to find some partners to promote young leaders too and he had the idea for the 35<35 recognition program. That turned out to be a great success for both of us (and Bridgeway Foundation and Christian Week—our other partners in that program).
• Jerry White, International President Emeritus of The Navigators, is probably the highest ranked speaker we’ve ever had at our conference. I ‘happened’ to have a personal connection with him that made me think of him as a speaker. But I didn’t just ‘happen’ to meet him. While writing my first doctoral research project in 2005 I was critiquing his 1983 book on my topic and I wondered if this author were still alive. I tracked him down, and since then we’ve met a couple of times and had some phone calls, and he ended up not only speaking at the CCCC conference but also writing the foreword for my new book, The Church at Work. Lots of good has come about because I didn’t just read and critique a book but took the additional step of contacting the author, not knowing at the time what was going to come of it. I had no expectations at the beginning that anything would develop. I just thought Jerry would be an interesting person to talk with and get to know. But that created the environment in which other good things could develop.
• Our horizons at CCCC are rapidly expanding as other staff members are also creating intentional opportunities for ‘accidental’ discoveries!

Creating Intentional Accidents at Your Ministry

How much do you leave out to see “what might happen?” In what ways do you create opportunity to be surprised? To find opportunity you did not know existed? Do you have an intentional plan to find the unexpected? Some things you could do are:

• Talk with people outside of your usual circles who might introduce a new idea from their sphere into your sphere.
• Investigate what beneficiaries or clients do outside of your programs that might affect your program design.
• Read a good book like The Eureka Effect, to stimulate your creativity.
• Encourage your team to experiment on their own and be willing to try a small-scale pilot project.
• Visit unrelated ministries doing a different part of the Christian mission and find out what’s new with them.
• Just tell everyone you meet what your ministry does. The more people who know about you, the more you are likely to hear about opportunities.
• If you have field staff, pay close attention to what they are actually doing. You’ll probably find a lot of good creativity on the front lines!
• And of course, pray hard that God would bring unexpected opportunities your way!

You can never know in advance, of course, what will be discovered by following a strategy of intentional accidental discoveries, but that’s the fun and amazing part of it! All you know at the start is that discoveries will be more likely because you have put yourself in a place that is conducive to discovery. You won’t believe what good things will happen once you set the ball in motion by stepping outside of your zone. Just watch what develops!

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of how to make accidental discoveries more likely. Please add your own ideas.

The post The Strategy of Intentional Accidents appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

How a Literature Review Helps

A literature review will:

• Broaden your thinking by providing context for the issue. It’s possible to be so consumed with the immediate work at hand that you miss the big picture. A lit review will correct that. An inner-city mission might be founded to feed the hungry. As they read about hunger they will find that it is very much related to poverty and poverty is related to several issues, including mental health and joblessness. So the mission might add counselling and job skills training to its services. But causes related to individuals are just part of the problem because there are systemic reasons why poverty exists. So the inner-city mission may engage in advocacy work, seeking legislative change or systemic change that will help minimize poverty. A literature review will help you think BIG BROAD thoughts!
• Take you deeper into the nuances of the issue. It will help you think DEEP thoughts. While writing my dissertation about church-agency relations, I started with the understanding that the divisive issue between them was one of control. Most of the authors framed their discussions this way, and yet as I did the literature review and dug below the surface of their arguments, I realized control wasn’t the issue – responsible relationship was. The solution to the problem could not be resolved if the debate centred on control, but it is easily resolved once we address the underlying goal that was shared by every one of the authors. This is the subject of my book The Church At Work: A manual for church-agency relationships that will be coming out by the end of the year. Exploring the breadth and depth of your mission will stimulate all sorts of creative ideas.
  
• Reveal the points of controversy and the resulting key choices you need to make. Let’s say you are a Bible study ministry producing educational materials. A literature review will show that adults and children learn differently and that there are various theories of learning that compete with each other. There are methods of studying the Bible that compete with each other too. There is even controversy over which version of the Bible is the best one to use for study. There are many choices to be made in each of these topic areas and by understanding the points of controversy or divergence, you can make an intelligent decision for what your ministry will do and you’ll know why it is the best choice.
• Keep you up to date in your field. Missiology, for example, has changed enormously in the last 50 years, and even the last 10 years. If you are a sending agency and are still using a missions model developed in the 1950s or 1960s, you are badly out of date. Missiologists have changed their thinking on relationships between sending and receiving countries and created a new paradigm for global mission. Not only has the theory changed, but so have the practices. A lit review will help you be a leading-edge ministry.

What to Do a Literature Review On

Review your theory of change and logic model to find researchable topics. The topics might not be explicitly listed, but look at each box and ask, “What topics are related to this box?” Based on my previous post about the program review of our annual conference, some possible researchable topics for our program review include:

• conferences: trends, promotion, logistics, why people attend, business models etc.
• adult learning theory and converting learning into doing
• networking

How to Find the Literature

• Books often have the most thorough treatments of a topic. Look especially for recent books based on primary research. For help in selecting books, read this post. Don’t forget to go to the library to see what you can borrow before buying a bunch of books.
• Online websites, blogs and journals are where you will likely find the most up-to-date material. If you are referred to journals that only have excerpts, or if you have to pay for the information, check if your your local university, college or seminary subscribes to the journal. If not, you can likely do the search from within the library and see the results because they have already paid for access to databases of journals and you can read them or print them out at the library.
• Ask people to recommend sources for you. If they are in the same field as you, they can usually recommend either a title or an author.
• You can stop looking for additional literature when you find that all of the citations and references are to articles and books you’ve already seen, or when you find the material has become repetitious.

How to Analyze the Literature

First of all, the purpose of this literature review is to design better programs and services. For a real-life excellent example of how to do the lit review, see Andy Harrington’s example which I highlight here. Since you are not doing an academic literature review, the only issue to resolve is whether or not the information is useful to your ministry. How you analyze the literature depends on whether you are reading about application and execution (to tweak a program) or about ideas and theories (to test the design of the program).

If you are looking for application and execution ideas, you simply make a list of the ones you find in the lit review that you want to consider. For example, a list of technologies that can enhance a conference experience. If you are researching at the theoretical or idea level, then you have some additional work to do to get below the surface of differing opinions:

• What are the premises on which the various opinions are based? Are they valid? Do they apply to your situation? Especially in the social and political spheres, you have to ask if the premises and conclusions are theologically acceptable.
• What are the authors’ goals and values? Can you reconcile their various views? Can some be discarded because they conflict with your goals and values? Sometimes their goals and values are explicit and sometimes not, in which case you have to try to infer them. In my dissertation research on church-agency relations I discovered that some authors were primarily concerned that individuals be able to use their gifts while others were more concerned about showing unity to the public. Some had a Christological focus while others had a Trinitarian focus. Some used very strong language heavy on the ‘control’ aspect yet when they gave examples of what the relationship should be, the examples were much more moderate in tone. I was able to reconcile the positions of authors who at first appeared to be diametrically opposed to each other. The result was a new model of church-agency relations that all of the authors should be able to live with. In fact, one of the authors I critiqued read my work and said he agreed with the end result even as he disagreed on how I got there!
• Finally, look at the recommended action steps or the model they propose. Have they made a convincing argument to support their recommendations? Do they make sense to you?

 The Outcomes of a Literature Review

• A literature review should make you aware of what the choices are for how your program is designed and delivered. Based on this, the program review would then assess if the current design would benefit from a change.
• It may determine questions you should ask as you do the program evaluation.
• It should help you identify hidden assumptions you have made, which you can then test to see if they are valid.
• It might suggest that some further research is needed in a particular area.
• It could provide a shopping list of enhancements to the current program or a list of ideas for new programs and services.

Conducting a literature review will help ensure that, as you progress through the program evaluation, you are well informed and up to date on the subject you are evaluating, and it will help you focus on the areas that need more scrutiny.

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