Approaches to Engagement

James Davison Hunter wrote in To Change the World that there are two basic approaches most Christians take towards engagement with the non-Christian world:

1. Theologically conservative Christians tend to raise defences against the secular world, creating (for example) alternative schools and media so encounters with the outside world can be minimized. The consequence of this strategy is that the outside world sees very little of conservative Christianity except when we protest an issue.
2. Theologically liberal Christians, including progressive Evangelicals, have tried to be relevant to the outside world by downplaying creedal confessions in favour of appealing to the public’s felt needs. The problem with this approach is that the distinctiveness of the Christian faith becomes much less apparent.

Hunter makes the case that Christians of all stripes, and also those who see the world differently than we do, have all resorted to politics and the law to promote their preferred society. By politicizing everything, we have actually decreased engagement and civil discussion by polarizing the issues, forcing people into a win/lose proposition where each side sees the other as the opponent or, more likely, the enemy to be defeated. In many cases, the rhetoric has become downright uncivil. The opposing sides never actually meet to talk, they just shout at each other in court, through the media, or while talking to their own supporters. It becomes a winner take all scenario and no one wants to lose.

But as I’ve written previously, politics and the law can only do so much. They can coerce but they can’t fully address the human elements. They can force a change in behaviour but not in attitudes, because they can’t instill values.

We should learn from our past and behave differently going forward. There has to be a better way, one in which we actually sit down and talk with each other. That’s what engagement is all about.

Why Engage?

If we don’t engage, it’s hard to see how we could possibly accomplish our mission. We can only go and make disciples of all nations if we engage the non-Christian world.

• We must engage so we can lead people to Jesus Christ.
• We must engage because we have a distinctive perspective that the world cannot find anywhere else and they need to hear us speak prophetically to the issues.

In addition to our spiritual riches that we have to offer, Hunter notes that Christianity has much to offer through its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, and its service to the needs of others. This is why I’ve posted about the need for the church to make its intellectual and artistic life a priority, and why I will post about the church’s life of service two posts from this one. Right now, though, let’s dig a little deeper into the two key reasons why we must engage society.

To Evangelize

Rodney Stark, the great historian and sociologist, has spent a career researching the growth of the ancient church, and he says that conversion happens when social relationships with religious people outweigh all other social relationships. People generally won’t convert until they have a relationship with someone who is part of the religion they are converting to. If we restrict admission to our churches (whether intentionally or not) to Christians only – if we don’t want those people sitting in the pews with us – we won’t win converts. Those people need to be with Christians if they are to become Christian.¹

To Speak Prophetically

We engage because we have something to say to society. Stephen Block acknowledges in his secular book Why Nonprofits Fail² that charities speak for the conscience of a society and are the driving force behind efforts to improve the quality of life. He says that, historically, charities have been associated with championing not only popular causes, but also very objectionable causes which society has not always appreciated.

I might add that most of these charities were Christian in origin. For just one example, the now secular Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded by William Wilberforce, the same Evangelical who worked so hard to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. The humane treatment of animals was part and parcel of the same robust theology which led him to invest most of his life crusading against slavery.

Unpopular initiatives, such as Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery, can find widespread support over time, so we should not back away from taking unpopular positions. According to Block, it’s been said that the impetus for every major social reform in the United States has been sparked by voluntary action (i.e., by charities).

Speaking prophetically to society is still the role of the church today. To fulfill this role, the church must remain an alternative community which has something distinctive to offer society.

Jesus Engaged His World

Michael Frost notes in his book Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture that Jesus lived among his fellow villagers for thirty years and when he began his ministry, no one said, “I always suspected there was something strange about that kid.” He wasn’t isolated from the people who obviously could not be as good as him. He didn’t consider them too sinful to be around. The villagers knew him well enough that when he began his ministry, they “wondered where he got all this messianic stuff.”³ It wasn’t like Jesus was a loner, isolated from the society of his village, who popped up out of nowhere with his messianic ideas. He was integrated into village life and the villagers thought they knew him and what he was about…until he began his ministry!

Jesus was righteous, but he was also ordinary. He lived in close contact with the world around him, yet was not sullied by it. Frost concludes that “We are called, like Christ, to be godly, but we are expected to live it out fully in the midst of others.”

Inspiration from the Exile

As exiles, we must maintain a critical distance from our cultural context to remain faithful to Christ while at the same time being deeply immersed in the cultural context to bring Christ into it. Our role models for living in exile are Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, and Esther in Persia.

As an example of faithfulness in an exilic culture, Don Howell notes in Servants of the Servant: A Biblical Theology of Leadership, that Daniel mastered the language and literature of his host culture. He used the Babylonian name which was given to him. He served with distinction for nearly seventy years in the upper echelons of several successive secular, idolatrous governments. And through it all he retained the cutting edge of his faith and impacted the culture for God’s glory. He was an exceptional administrator who was without a trace of corruption and who retained his trust in God even under threats of death.⁴ He did not withhold his gifts from his host society, nor did he separate himself from it. He was fully engaged as a faithful Jew.

How We Should Engage

So, how should we engage our world today? Michael Frost suggests that an incarnational witness will include four aspects:⁵

1. An active sharing of life, participating in the fears, frustrations, and afflictions of the host community. The prayer of the exile should be, “Lord, let your mind be in me,” for we need the mind of Jesus. We need to be living the vicissitudes of life with our families, neighbours, and workmates.
2. An employment of the language and thought forms of those with whom we seek to share Jesus. After all, Jesus used common speech and stories: salt, light, fruit, birds, and the like. He seldom used theological or religious jargon or technical terms. We should understand the metaphors, cultural references, and the channels of communication used by the world today, and creatively incorporate them into our communications.
3. A preparedness to go to the people, not expecting them to come to us. As Jesus came from the heavens to humanity, we enter into the realities of human society. That means enlarging our lives as we go to where the people are.
4. A confidence that the gospel can be communicated by ordinary means, through acts of servanthood, loving relationships, and good deeds. This idea has been well captured in the famous saying: Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary, use words. We can’t do any of these things at a distance from the person we are serving or loving. We have to get up close, and let them know who we are as we get to know who they are.

In another post, Harry White (CEO of Ray of Hope, a ministry to the homeless, addicted and young offenders of my city) explains to my neighbours how to build community with people who are not like us.

Conclusion

Engaging the public will take many of us outside our comfort zones, but we need to do it anyway. There is always a risk when you engage with people who are not like yourself, but we need to overcome that risk and its potential to stop us by focusing on our call to represent Christ well.

Andy Stanley remarks in Deep & Wide that when the early church was facing the ultimate risk of extinction due to persecution, instead of praying for protection, they prayed “Now Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.”⁶ May we do likewise.

Key thought: We can only advance our mission if we are engaged with the world around us.

The post Engaging Society Well appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

What would happen if a local congregation and all the economic and quality of life contributions it represented suddenly disappeared? If a church closed its doors, would anyone notice?

Do Churches Benefit the General Public?

As the percentage of the population with no faith grows, people are more and more wondering about the value of public support through the tax system for churches and other places of worship:

• “Aren’t they really just private clubs?” some wonder.
• Why should donations to churches receive a charitable tax credit?
• Why should churches be exempt from paying property taxes?
• Who cares if a community has a church or not?

Many people pass by churches every day without giving them any thought, and certainly without thinking how they personally benefit from a having a church in their community, whether or not they ever attend it.

CCCC, together with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, several denominations, and Cardus, funded a study just published by Cardus called the Halo Project about local places of worship. The goal was to find out if the value of a local church could be quantified economically so that secular policy analysts and city planners could be convinced of their value.

Communities Benefit Greatly from Churches!

Well, the results of the study are in!

This [study] clearly shows that faith-based groups generate substantial and measurable value for local neighbourhoods…The value of religious congregations to the wider community is somewhere in the order of four to five times of a congregations’ annual operating budget. [Local congregations] are economic engines that not only support local economies but also contribute to the good of all.
Milton Friesen, Cardus

Phase 1 of the study examined ten congregations in the Greater Toronto Area. (Philadelphia, Calgary and Cambridge Ontario have had other studies looking at the same or similar factors). There are plans to raise the number of churches studied to fifty to make the results more robust, but these ten churches already corroborate the results of the identical study done in Philadelphia.

Since public policy treats all religions the same, it was important to include more than just Christian congregations. The study therefore included two Islamic centres in addition to a cross-section of Christian denominations: Pentecostal, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, United and an independent church.

The ten congregations contributed a total of $45 million of economic value to the city based on a combined operating budget of only $10 million. In simple terms, the dollar value of having a church in a community is about 4.5 times its annual budget. The difference between what the church actually spends compared to the value that it provides is called the “halo effect.”

The study examined 41 commonly used economic and market indicators such as are used to measure the financial contribution special events might make to a host city or province.

The economic benefits include:

1. Outside space – parks, playgrounds, parking, recreation
2. Direct spending on operations, capital projects etc.
3. Education – nursery, day care, schools
4. Magnet affect – drawing people into the area for events and life celebrations
5. Direct impact – suicide prevention, job hunting, addiction recovery programs, health promotion, youth civic engagement, immigrant support etc.
6. Community development – housing initiatives, job training, lending programs
7. Social capital and care – space for social programs to operate from, volunteering, in-kind support

The Public Benefit of Advancing Religion

The Halo Project is a critical part of the case for demonstrating the public benefit of advancing religion. Churches wanting to contribute more to the good of their communities will find this report a great resource for ideas of how they could do that.

The Halo Project report is being heavily promoted by Cardus to municipalities and other levels of government. You are invited to make use of it in any way you can.

The post Churches and Halos: Why Even Atheists Should Appreciate Local Churches appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

And yet a study of evangelicalism will show that one of our assumptions is that to change people is to change culture. We just need to change enough people. Our default strategy for culture change is evangelism, winning the world one-by-one, hoping that a tipping point will be reached where democracy reigns and our culture shifts to become what God designed it to be. The goal of this strategy is to change culture from the bottom-up.

Will Our Strategy Work?

James Davison Hunter, in his book To Change the World gives two examples which clearly show that shaping contemporary culture is not a democratic, bottom-up process. In Hunter’s words:

1. “Jews have never comprised more than 3.5 percent of the American population…Yet the contribution of the Jewish community to science, literature, art, music, letters, film, and architecture is both brilliant and unrivaled.”¹
2. “A similar story of influence can be told of the gay community. At most 3 percent of the American population, their influence has become enormous, again disproportionate to their size.”²

In contrast to these two communities, evangelicals make up about 12% of the Canadian population and 25% of the American population, but the two smaller groups have been able to effect much greater cultural change. Obviously the tools of democracy won’t make the changes we want to see.

How Culture Changes

Cultural Elites

Culture change is initiated by cultural elites. They are philosophers, academics, and high concept artists who have the intellectual capacity and the social capital to initiate and sustain cultural change. They use their platforms and networks to set their agenda in motion.

Initiating Cultural Change

Cultural elites think at the most abstract, theoretical, high-brow level. They are largely unknown to the general public because their audience isn’t the general public, but instead other cultural elites and people who can use their positions of power or influence to convert the output of the elites into something more accessible to the public.

Disseminating Cultural Change

The output from the cultural elites is then disseminated through people who can interpret it and pass it along to the leaders and opinion-setters in society. Professors spread the new ideas in universities and publish peer-reviewed articles in law journals. Advocates pick up the ideas and publicize them to politicians and the public. Writers create screenplays based on their ideas and movie producers bring them to the masses.

Implementing Cultural Change

Finally, the public experiences the new culture as it is realized. The theoretical becomes practical and we start living the new culture. The high brow becomes low brow and the rest of the creative arts and literature communities jump in producing their interpretations of the new culture. Abstract morality is given legs, for example, in terms of what we choose for our own lives, what we promote in the public school system, and the type of volunteer work we do for our communities. When all this is happening, we can say that culture has been changed.

The following chart summarizes the components of culture change.

Scaling

Changing culture is never a task for loners and it can’t be accomplished with just one or two tactics alone. Culture change demands a multi-pronged holistic approach. It needs the whole package described above, every element working together, to make real, lasting change. Advocacy alone, for example, isn’t enough because it is not supported by the intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic components of enduring culture change.

The matrix of people and institutions working together which Hunter describes is a very powerful strategy called scaling. Cause-related secular organizations take scaling very seriously because it works!

In the face of such a concerted effort by elites from different sectors all coalesced around a common goal, one-off legal and political victories won through advocacy don’t mean very much. Those wins just aren’t sustainable against a holistic campaign by the cultural elites that seems to come at the general public from all sides.

Looking through history, Hunter finds that:

“At every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize and propagate an alternative culture. Often enough, alongside these elites are artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision. New institutions are created that give form to that culture, enact it, and, in so doing, give tangible expression to it….They do not gain traction in the larger social world until they challenge, penetrate, and redefine the status structure at the center of cultural life. Invariably, as we have seen, this process results in conflict.”

Christians and the Elites

Christians are noticeably absent from the ranks of the cultural elite in contemporary society, unlike in the days of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect,” when they themselves were among the cultural elites. Today’s cultural elites likely have no religious background at all and, as Eric Metaxas writes in his essay “Cultural Elites: The next unreached people group,” they are people who need to know Jesus.

We also don’t have much in the way of institutional or other support for abstract, theoretical, thought leadership.

• Evangelicals, for example, have lots of institutions, but they were created to fulfill our own needs, not to influence culture.
• What institutions we have are on the periphery of cultural production.
  • Our books, for example, aren’t reviewed by the major reviewers.
• Physically, Hunter notes that Christian institutions are not located in the cultural power-house cities of New York and Los Angeles, but in smaller cities away from the limelight. The situation is the same in Canada. Lorna Dueck’s show Context, is an exception, being located right in the CBC’s Broadcasting Centre on Front Street in downtown Toronto. Lorna is located literally in the very centre of cultural production, and her show presents a thoughtful Christian perspective on issues of the day that everyone is thinking about. Her ministry deserves our support!
• Our Christian cultural output (art, books, etc.) is for the popular market, not the conceptual or intellectual market.

Culture shaping at the abstract, theoretical, high-brow level currently just isn’t a priority for Christians, so it doesn’t look like the situation will get any better soon.

• Hunter found that, in 2004, four secular foundations alone provided over $200 million in grants to secular arts and culture. The largest Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave a total of $10 million.
• On top of that, one secular foundation alone gave $12 million for individuals (called ‘geniuses’) working in scholarship, invention, and social innovation. The Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave nothing to support our promising people.

The only Christian think-tank in Canada that I can readily think of is Cardus. They are doing a lot not only in thought leadership on big picture societal issues, but also in promoting the value of religion to the Canadian public. They also deserve our support!

Imago Arts Canada is another ministry worthy of support. It promotes Christian art, advocates for the arts, has addressed social issues, and promoted science/religion dialogue.

Solutions

So, what’s the way forward?

Theological

Jeremy Begbie writes in For The Beauty Of The Church that when the New Testament writers write about a vision for the future, they move from the future to the present. They start with what “God will finally do,” and then “dare to claim that this future can start now.” The Holy Spirit invites us to share in his work of re-creating the present in light of that future. This is what Jesus did when he announced the in-breaking of God’s kingdom. Right where he was, he lived life the way it should be lived.

Begbie notes five aspects of the future described in Revelation 21 which we should reflect on and see what we can do to introduce them into the present:

• The Spirit unites the unlike – there is a diversity of peoples and nations in heaven all united under God.
• The Spirit generates excess – God’s provision is more than enough to meet the needs of the nations.
• The Spirit inverts – the rewards of heaven are not based upon the way we earn rewards in this present life.
• The Spirit exposes the depths – sin is exposed for what it is, and the reality of suffering is acknowledged, and then tears are wiped away and replaced with joy.
• The Spirit recreates – the world is liberated from all that isn’t right.

Let these five observations about God’s future become a matter of prayer and reflection, and see where the Spirit guides you.

Faithful Presence

Hunter Baker, in The System Has a Soul, and James Davison Hunter in his book, both call for us to have a faithful presence in our society. Baker describes what that looks like, saying:

“A faithful presence involves offering critical resistance to those things that do not lead to human flourishing, and making an extended effort to retrieve social goods that have been lost or are in danger of being lost. But all of this should be done without any real effort to impose….Faithful presence means that we pursue, identify with, and labor toward the good of others.”

Again, make this a matter of prayer and reflection. How could you and your ministry have a faithful presence where God has planted you?

Engage & Join the Cultural Elites

If we want to join the cultural elite and contribute our own ideas to the mix, we need a three-pronged strategy:

1. First, we should treat the cultural elites as an identifiable people group who have not yet heard the Gospel, and engage them. They need Jesus as much as anyone.
2. Then we should get behind and help advance the careers of Christians who have the potential to be among the cultural elite. Mentoring and scholarships would be key components of this strategy.
3. Finally, we should build our institutional capacity in the fields of education, philosophy, and the arts to support our cultural elites.

This last point is brief, but it holds within it a huge, complex project similar in scale to the one developed by Billy Graham and his cohort in the 1940s. Have you a heart to do something similar today? What can you do to make it happen?

Key Thought: Christians need to build the full mix of cultural resources if we want to participate in the development of our culture.

The post How Culture Changes appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

However, if what you actually do does not align with what you aspire to do, then your identity will be defined by what you really did. And people will remember what you did a lot longer than they will remember what you said!

I surveyed 350 pastors for my church-agency relationship research and was surprised that of the 46% of pastors who had had at least one bad experience with an agency, 84% were able to remember the name of the ministry and/or person involved! (My book, The Church At Work, uses this research to help churches and Christian agencies work better together.)

But there is one other important, strategic statement you should have that tells donors and beneficiaries what they can expect from you. It also tells your staff and volunteers what you expect from them — a value proposition.

Why a Value Proposition?

You may have heard of a value proposition under one of its other names: Unique Selling Proposition, Brand Promise, Customer Value Proposition and similar variants. I like value proposition because it is modest. It doesn’t claim to be unique, so it doesn’t imply that you are better than anyone else. As you know from a previous post, I don’t think Christian ministries should have a competitive stance towards each other. They should be devoted to their missions, doing the very best they can at program delivery and fundraising, and depending on God to provide the necessary resources.

A value proposition is simply a definition of the contribution your organization makes to Christian ministry that others value.

It isn’t what you value, because that by itself will not help you achieve your mission. It’s about what your supporters and beneficiaries value.

When others value your contribution, then you are on your way to mission fulfillment! Of course, it greatly helps if you are passionate about the same value that others are, because it will become core to everything your ministry does, and you and your staff need to eat, sleep and breathe it so that everything you do is infused with that value.

When you know your value proposition, you will:

• know what to keep in mind when planning
• be more committed to aspects of your work that you may formerly have under-appreciated
• change your messaging to donors and beneficiaries to highlight what they value about your ministry
• not accidentally lose something of real value because you will pay attention to ensuring the value proposition permeates everything!

Developing a Value Proposition

Even without a value proposition you probably have a pretty good idea what it is. I know we did at CCCC. For the first nine years I was here, these words were used many times in our management discussions. We knew they were important, so when we started thinking afresh about strategy, four words jumped off the page as the four critical words to describe our value proposition to our members. We confirmed them when we looked over our theory of change and asked ourselves what our members really need from us, because the same four words came to mind. So while none of them were new to us at the time, our commitment to them over and above the many other good and valuable things we do, is new.

Our value proposition is only four words (the brief definitions are for internal use):

• Credible: What we produce is correct and no member should feel the need to get a second opinion
• Theological: Wherever appropriate, members expect a Christian perspective as part of our commentary
• Practical: Anything we produce must include how to apply the knowledge in real-life ministry situations
• Affordable: Our pricing philosophy is based on the premise that any Christian ministry that wants to use our services can do so in an affordable way

To test whether or not our members agree that this is our value proposition, we reviewed what they have said to us over the years through:

• member surveys
• “thank you” emails we’ve received
• our visits to member ministries
• stakeholder consultations held by the board
• program evaluations by us
• event evaluations by our members
• comments made in response to communications received from us

If you don’t know what your value proposition is, start asking outsiders. Use the bullet list immediately above this paragraph as a starting point. It may be you could provide better value than you currently are, so be sure to ask the people you serve what they value about your ministry and its services and also what they would value that you don’t yet provide. You can also have an internal discussion, because some of your staff and volunteers likely have a good idea of what your value proposition is.

Using a Value Proposition

Once you have a value proposition, it becomes one of the lenses through which you assess the quality of any proposals you develop, programs you evaluate, training that would help staff and volunteers provide the value, and the way you promote your ministry to external audiences. It may also help you identify areas that need development.

The post Value Propositions for Ministries appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

End Statements

I’ve already provided the traditional definitions of vision and mission: vision explains why the organization exists (what it wants to accomplish) and mission is its overarching strategy for accomplishing the vision. Now let’s remind ourselves what an End Statement is.  According to John Carver (the developer of policy governance), End Statements:

• define which human needs are to be met (usually shortened to “what good”), for whom, and at what cost. Written with a long term perspective, these mission-related policies embody the board’s long-range vision.¹
• are developed in terms of the mission to be accomplished, its outcomes.²
  • Ends are not about intentions. Carver criticizes a statement that says the commitment is that the organization will “seek to bring” its good works to people. Good intentions are insufficient because you don’t actually have to do anything to fulfill the mission.
  • Ends are not about what the organization does or what it values. Another statement that Carver criticizes says the association will provide “support…in an effective and caring manner.” It doesn’t say what difference it will make.
  • Ends are not about activity. Carver says to be wary of any prominent verbs in the End Statement. Ensure Ends refer only to outcomes.

Although Carver used to describe the End Statement as a specific type of mission statement, he rarely uses the word mission anymore because it can lead the board astray from policy governance into less rigorous, less theory-based practice. He says if the staff wants to have a mission statement, it can have one because having a mission statement is a means (the organization’s strategy), not an end. It might be good for public relations or inspiring staff, for example, so if it is helpful you can have one, but it is not a part of policy governance.[1, Boards That Make A Difference p 84.]

The examples he gives for “at what cost” are “at a competitive cost”, “at a reasonable cost”, and at a cost “no greater than comparable associations.” Carver approves of one example that does not mention cost but says he does not recommend it. He says cost can be left out because the Executive Limitation against imprudence imposes a ceiling on costs in relation to benefits anyway, but he fears that the cost element may get lost among the Limitations[1, Boards That Make A Difference p 92-93.] to which I say, “Surely not!”

Ditch the Cost Factor!

Strategic statements need to be succinct and powerful. They need to motivate board, staff, donors and other stakeholders. Statements of the obvious are not powerful and just add unnecessary verbiage. They sap energy and are completely uninspiring. So here are my reasons why (in most cases) you should leave cost out of the End Statement:

• The sample Carver-approved End Statements all have what I would call ‘motherhood’ cost statements. Would anyone say they will produce their good at an “uncompetitive cost,” at an “unreasonable cost,” or “at a cost greater than comparable associations?” I don’t think so. What ‘value’ does the value component of the End Statement contribute? The only time a motherhood statement is useful is when it hasn’t been true for a particular organization. So if a ministry has been woefully inefficient in its operations and wildly overspending on programs with no commensurate benefits, then the board may want to bump the cost factor up to the End Statement and limit spending to what is reasonable or comparable to other ministries. Otherwise such a statement adds no value.
• The issue of costs can be quite adequately dealt with through three mechanisms other than the End Statement:
  1. Executive Limitations and budget: The board can say that the CEO shall not allow programs to operate at an unreasonable cost relative to other providers. It can set whatever limitations it wants around how the budget is developed. Then it can do a direct inspection of the budget by asking management to explain how decisions were made about allocating resources to the various programs, administration and fundraising. It can then check that those decisions comply with the Executive Limitations.
  2. Corporate values: The board can also insert into the corporate values a statement about being good stewards of the ministry’s resources. One of the tests to run before approving any organizational decision, at the board or staff level, is to assess the recommended decision against the corporate values to see if it aligns.
  3. Organizational and program evaluations: The board can require that program evaluations be done to ensure they are effective and efficient. Cost/benefit analysis will ensure that costs are reasonable. An organizational evaluation examines the bigger picture, looking at how well the ministry is accomplishing its End Statement. This corporate-wide evaluation examines spending on administration and fundraising, thus ensuring that all costs are tested for reasonableness.

My recommendation is to leave cost out of the End Statement unless management has demonstrated poor judgment in this area and needs to have costs highlighted at this level. Otherwise, the shorter the End Statement, the better. The big benefit of leaving cost out of the End Statement is that the statement is focused solely on mission and that makes it much punchier and highly motivational.

A Case Study

A vision statement is a picture of the final condition an organization wishes to see. The draft that we were working with in 2012 at CCCC was: A vibrant community of exemplary Christian ministries working together to effectively fulfill their missions.

A mission statement describes the overarching strategy to accomplish the vision. Our draft mission statement at the time was We are the Canadian Council of Christian Charities and we are privileged to develop Christian ministries into strong, healthy organizations that serve Jesus Christ with integrity. This is written in the format of a Statement Zero, which I find highly motivational. The strategy for seeing exemplary ministries is to help them serve Christ with integrity, while the strategy for helping them effectively fulfill their missions is to help them be strong and healthy organizations. Each of those key words can be unpacked as to what we mean by them.

If you have to choose only one statement as the basis for crafting an End Statement, start with the vision because it depicts the external change that you want to cause. Here are the steps we went through as a staff at CCCC to come up with a draft End Statement for the board to consider:

1. It didn’t take long to decide for whom the good will be done — our members. We recognize that our influence goes far beyond our members, mostly through the 127 denominational offices that are members, but we can only commit ourselves to doing good for our members.
2. The longest and most difficult conversation the board and staff have had has been about our claim — our stake in the ground — against which we will measure our success. The stake has to be outside our organizational boundary. The outcomes belong to our members not us. The change that we make is outside of ourselves. We were stuck on our role in creating the change. Do we build? Develop? Assist? We finally decided the strongest claim we could make is that our members will be something as a result of using our services. So instead of saying “CCCC develops…”, we now say “CCCC members will be…” The stake in the ground is still there. If we determine that our members are not what we want to see, then we have to take ownership of our failure to achieve the expected outcomes by asking:
   • Were we not persuasive enough?
   • Did we show them step-by-step how to do it?
   • Were we not relevant?
   • Did we communicate in an understandable way?
   • Did we understand the real issues faced by our members?
   • What are we missing?
3. The good that we want to do for our members is whatever it takes for them to become a vibrant community of exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries.
4. We finally dropped reference to the vibrant community because that is a secondary goal that we have but it is not our primary focus.

The final version of the End Statement approved by the board is short but powerful:

CCCC members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries.

We then developed a two-sentence commentary on what we mean by the End Statement:

Within the CCCC community, ministries find practical, expert resources to help fulfill their missions and demonstrate a compelling Christian witness. They choose to access our services to heighten their performance, enhance their sustainability, and stimulate their creativity.

These statements reflect our hopes for Christian ministries and outline the work that CCCC needs to do:

• We want them to share best practices with each other, so we must prepare a way for them to receive resources from CCCC and each other. Our online community, The Green, facilitates sharing.
• How they operate will be a powerful witness of applied Christian faith, so we need to talk about theology in action. We include a theological perspective wherever appropriate in our knowledge resources and created God’s Workplace that contains devotionals that applies faith to the operations of a ministry.
• They will be high-performing organizations with sufficient resources of money and people to endure until their mission is accomplished, so we need to help them attract people and money. We have many programs that address these needs.
• With the inflow of new ideas they will be always looking for better ways of operating, so we need to highlight what’s new in organizational leadership and operations.

May the Spirit guide you as you consider developing an End Statement.

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