“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’m sharing selected points of interest from the courses. I look forward to having time to reflect on both the readings and the classes to draw some conclusions, which I will then work into future blog posts.

The Church Always Needs Reform

This course was taught by Father Henry Wansbrough, a Benedictine monk and impressive scholar who has served on papal commissions and was the general editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. He is a great example of a humble man. With his intellect and experience (he worked at Vatican II), his answers to challenging questions were always restrained and reasonable. He also surprised me with opinions that were not what I expected. For instance, he agreed with many of Luther’s critiques. He also modelled receptive ecumenism quite well, which I’ll explain right away.

Receptive Ecumenism

Receptive ecumenism is the willingness to listen to others to see what you might have missed, to correct where needed, to learn from others, and to enrich your faith.

We may not agree with everything the other person asserts, but we should be humble and accept the possibility that we ourselves may not have everything right either. Shouldn’t we want to be as true to Christ as possible? If we can be better Christ-followers by picking the good out of someone else’s ideas, shouldn’t we? For instance, we may be so focussed on one part of our faith that we’ve missed out on another.

Original Sin

The Eastern church has a much more optimistic view of humanity than the Western church. We both see humanity as made in the image of God, but in the East the Fall was more of a stumble than a fall. When toddlers stumble while learning to stand and walk, we know that the stumbling is a natural part of growing up, and we encourage them to try again. We don’t punish them for stumbling. In the same way, the East sees the Fall as humanity’s natural stumble. As another professor once said, Eastern Christians believe the image of God in us is still whole, but is covered in mud. It has been marred, not broken. They have no concept of original sin because Augustine was not read in the East. The Orthodox believe we are still fundamentally good people beneath the dirt. Christ cleans off the mud and restores our goodness.

The Western church has a much more pessimistic view of humanity. The image of God has been broken by the Fall and needs to be made whole again. The Fall was a willful rebellion, not a stumble. Now we are fundamentally bad, born in sin, and under condemnation. Christ rescues us from our badness and makes us new and whole again through his atonement for our sins.

Papal Infallibility

Papal Infallibility was confirmed in 1870 at Vatican I. It has only been invoked twice, but both times it related to doctrines of Mary and both uses had the effect of making rapproachement with the Protestant church more difficult. The two doctrines are:

1. The Immaculate Conception of Mary – 1854, before Vatican I, but the concept of papal infallibility had been around for a long time: This doctrine states that Mary herself was born without sin.
2. The Assumption of Mary – 1950: The doctrine that when Mary died, her physical body was taken to heaven.

To speak infallibly, the pope must explicitly state that he is speaking ex cathedra. Otherwise, he speaks with an authority that should be given both weight and deference. However, and this was surprising, there is no requirement for Roman Catholics to obey him. He can be disobeyed if conscience demands it, but Father Henry says anyone doing so should feel uneasy about it. Disobedience should not be lightly done.

Vatican II

Vatican I was all about power, specifically the pope’s power. Vatican II was quite different. It was all about service. Some of the new thinking that came out of Vatican II includes:

• Bishops are vicars and legates of Christ, not of the pope. The pope has no control over the bishops, and those bishops no longer rule their dioceses; they serve them.
• The church is a Messianic, holy people, a priestly community; not an ecclesial organization.
• Infallibility is no longer at the centre of the papacy; leadership is. So popes since Vatican II have taken more of a global leadership role based on moral suasion. They have travelled extensively and promoted world peace. Pope Francis is focused on pastoral sensitivity and mercy over justice.

Historical Accuracy of the Bible

When Abraham bought the land for a tomb, it says in verse 17 that the purchase included the trees that were on the land. This has apparently puzzled scholars for a long time. Why would the trees be mentioned? Surely they were included with the land!

The reference to trees was considered an unexplainable peculiarity. But then, fairly recently, other land purchase agreements were discovered from that time period and area, and all of them mention that trees are included in the transaction. A small detail shows that the Bible is right!

Evening Lecture by Diarmaid MacCulloch

We had a special evening lecture on the Reformation. Diarmaid MacCulloch was introduced as the world’s foremost Reformation scholar. He said that Medieval Europe (500 to 1500 AD) was an oddity in the history of the world. There was one religion, one leader, one basic political unit, which made for one culture on the continent. This has never happened before or since, anywhere in the world. The Reformation, which created divisions and ultimately a plurality of Protestant streams, simply returned Western Europe to a normal state.

The difference between those who stayed with the Catholic church (now the Roman Catholic church) and those who became Protestant comes down to which aspect of Augustine’s work they put priority on:

1. Those who stayed Catholic followed Augustine’s thought on the church, with an emphasis on obedience.
2. Those who became Protestant followed Augustine’s thought on grace

On ecumenism, MacCulloch said it is good to work together and eliminate hostility between Christians, but it is a waste of time trying to merge organizations.

The demographics for the future of the church are worrisome, but there are many surprising stories throughout Christian history of incredible advances when the future looked bleak. I’ve read elsewhere that in Medieval times the church had been reduced to a rump in Western Europe and seemed doomed, and then it exploded with rapid growth. MacCulloch referenced South Korea and India as modern day examples of explosive growth of Christianity in unexpected territories. Christianity is the religion of the oppressed and has much to offer today’s world.

No faith in religion?

The content of this course doesn’t lend itself to summary reporting. We discussed some very heady topics like ontology, epistemology, and a process to help congregations figure out what their strategies should be. There was also an excellent Bible study on Jesus’ last words and how they reflect the agendas of the Gospel writers. Each of these is way too big to fit into a summary post like this. However, a few points and quips are worth repeating and do stand on their own.

• Whatever the church teaches, the teaching should be reflected in how the church manages the institutions of the church.
• God loves you as you are, and loves you too much to leave you as you are! I’m sure I’ve heard this before, but it is so good and worth repeating.
• An interesting connection between a prayer and a promise. The books of the Hebrew Bible appear in a different order than in ours, and the Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles. So the Hebrew Bible’s last words are a prayer for the faithful person going into exile: “May the Lord his God be with him.” The last words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, which was written for a Jewish audience, are “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” The prayer has been answered with a promise!
• We go to church for the sake of the God who is present and the people who aren’t.

This course was about distinguishing faith, which is powerful and liberating, from religion, which is the institutional expression of the church. The conclusion is that religion, how the institutional church operates, needs reform to become more empowering. It must help Christians engage in lay ministry and serve their communities. The church hierarchy should be servants to the laity, in the same way as Vatican II changed the focus of bishops from ruling to serving.

Next Week

I’ll be taking two courses on Christian Faith and Modern Thought, and C S Lewis and the Christian Imagination. I’ll post as I can.

The post Update #3 from Oxford University appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Victimized by nostalgia and buffeted by fear, the church is focused too much on merely holding the small plot of ground that it currently occupies to confidently reimagine a robust future. The result is a retreat into some fundamentalist us-versus-them model. Michael Frost in Exiles

Nostos is Greek for homecoming (such as after a long trip), and algos is Greek for pain. The words were combined in 1688 to make the word nostalgia. At that time it meant acute homesickness. Today the word means a sentimental longing or a wistful affection for a time or a place in the past which has happy personal associations. 

My Nostalgia

Until the year before I got married, this is the house I called home. It evokes fond memories of:

• family celebrations
• playing with siblings
• safety and security
• supportive family relationships

In short, a world in which, from my perspective as a child, everything was simple and straightforward. All was good and all was at peace. As far as I knew, this was what the world was like and it was normal.

Life today is not normal. As an adult, I know the world is much more complicated and challenging and not as secure and carefree as it was in the experience of a child. There are finances, politics, international conflicts, social inequities, and all sorts of other issues making life way more complex than I conceived of it as a child.

I feel nostalgia for the “normal life” this home represents, and the part of me that daydreams sometimes wishes I could go back to the world I knew as a child.

But of course, I can’t.

To drive home the impossibility of even daydreaming about it, my siblings and I sold our childhood home five years ago and the new owner demolished it. I’m left with only a memory that I can cherish, but not resurrect. There is no hope of a return. It’s gone, and the adult me has a different normal that is reality today.

The Church’s Nostalgia

The church experiences nostalgia too.

• Many of our Christmas productions feature Victorian Christmas scenes and portray a far more deeply connected social world than most people experience today.
• Ministries produce nostalgia. I have just over 500 episodes of Focus on the Family’s great radio series Adventures in Odyssey, which takes place in an idealized small town America that we all probably wish we had grown up in.
• Many older people associate hymns nostalgically with a time in their lives of great church or spiritual experience.
• Just mentioning the words ‘camp meeting’ can take people back 50 years or more and make their eyes sparkle with excitement!
• Even the King James Version can be nostalgic. It’s not just another translation. Luke’s Christmas story in the KJV takes me back to Grade 4 in a public school, when every student had to recite the Christmas story by heart to the class. Psalm 23 in the KJV takes me back to when it was read aloud by the congregation at the magnificent church I grew up in and the feelings of wonder and awe that particular church inspired in me for God.
• Older people in my own church today wax nostalgic about the glory days of bus ministry and an evangelism movie that attracted thousands of people.
• We remember when Canada was “Christian” and its laws supported a Christian worldview, when public schools had Christmas pageants and each day started with students and teachers reciting The Lord’s Prayer together.

The Pros and Cons of Nostalgia

Recent studies¹ show that on balance nostalgia is good for you.

• It makes you feel more socially connected with others, something that builds positive feelings about yourself. That in turn boosts your self-esteem, which increases your optimism. You are happier and probably more successful because of nostalgia.
• Nostalgia provides “context, perspective, and direction” that give meaning to our lives.
• Nostalgia is the flip side of anticipation, which can be defined as enthusiasm for some future positive event. One fondly looks back, and the other excitedly looks ahead. Nostalgia and anticipation are like two bookends which keep us from falling over in the present. “The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.”²
• Collective nostalgia, the nostalgic memories shared by a group, strengthen the group and bond people together in a common narrative.³

But nostalgia has its downside.

• A 2006 report in Psychology Today warned that “overdoing reminiscence” risks an absence of joy derived from the present, and a reliance on past memories to provide happiness.
• Damian Barr warns “You shouldn’t revisit [the past] as a way of avoiding the present or not thinking about the future. If you spend too much time thinking about the past, you are simply not going to be prepared for the future socially or emotionally.”⁴
• If overindulged, nostalgia can give rise to a utopia that never existed and can never exist, but that is pursued at all costs, sapping all life and joy and potential from the present.
• People who are worriers or who are already depressed will usually be more so after experiencing nostalgia because the memories tend to heighten the sense of loss or how far they are today from happier times.

Using Nostalgia for Good

Dr. Constantine Sedikides suggests that if people who worry or are depressed focus on the past in an existential way—‘What has my life meant?’—then they can potentially benefit from nostalgia.⁵ This is good advice for all of us. For example, I will benefit most from my nostalgia if I give up the idea of recreating the specific circumstances associated with my childhood home and focus instead on how that experience shaped me.

• What values do I want to carry forward?
• How can I make my children feel as safe and secure as I felt?
• What family celebrations should I be developing for my own family?
• How can I build strong family relationships?

The church can likewise find ways to carry forward the ideas behind its nostalgia. For example:

• The KJV is remembered so fondly for the beauty of its language. Could we not produce prayers, devotionals, and even blog posts as eloquent or beautiful today? Could we reintroduce memorable, beautiful, even artistic, recitations of the Psalms?
• How could we build authentic deep social relationships in real life, and not just portray them in plays?
• How do we make the church an important part of society without access to official power or influence?

What We Can’t Do with Nostalgia

Something we must not do is get stuck trying to recreate the specific contexts and circumstances that existed in those nostalgic times. For at least half of the 20th century, most Canadians self-identified as Christian. There was broad consensus about Christian values and laws based on those values. Even the Supreme Court of Canada agreed with this assessment as recently as 1963. But the religious make-up of Canada has since changed forever. We can’t go backward.

There is a part of the church that yearns for the past and is stuck trying to recreate it by creating Christian enclaves within which we can pretend we have gone back. But unintentionally all they’ve done is create unhelpful separation. They’ve withdrawn from the very society they are supposed to influence. We need Christian institutions to support our spiritual growth and our mission work, but we cannot be faithful by building walls to protect us from the bigger world.

We can only be creative about our future when we accept the reality that, just like my demolished childhood home, Christian Canada has already been dismantled and reconstructed into something new.

Breaking the Pull of the Past

To overcome the powerful pull of the past, we must understand its attraction in order to resist it. The past is attractive due to three factors:

1. It provides certainty. The memory of what has already happened and been experienced is much more comfortable than the uncertain mystery of a future not yet lived.
   • We must embrace mystery and accept that uncertainty about the future is the new normal.
2. Alignment with our worldview and values. The past is a safe harbour while the future is an open sea with threatening weather on the horizon.
   • We must embrace adventure and develop a higher tolerance for risk.
3. It requires less mental effort. It’s easier to rest in wishful nostalgia than to deal with reality and to answer the question: “How do we get our mission done in the face of strongly held alternate worldviews?”
   • We must embrace challenge and be more creative, persevere longer, and increase our motivation so that no obstacle will stop us from fulfilling our mission.

Resetting Our Normal

What I thought was my normal life was only normal for part of my life. I live in a new normal today. And so does the church. I may be sad that society has changed so much during living memory. I might wish I had been born a generation or two earlier. I could wallow in nostalgia. But that wouldn’t be reality. I need to live in the only time that God has given me.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo says he’s sorry that the ring was found when it was: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” To which Gandolf wisely responds, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

We Need Faith More than Ever

When the state supported our faith, it didn’t take a lot of faith to live faithfully for the benefit of others. The state carried a lot of that weight. And it doesn’t take a lot of faith to live faithfully today if we accept the secular idea that our faith should stay in the private sphere.

What would challenge our faith, Miraslav Volf writes, is if we took it seriously that by our faith we are to be a witness to others. That means living out our faith in the public sphere. If faith is bracketed out of our lives in the public sphere, then it doesn’t make much of a difference in our lives.⁶ Christ calls us to live a very public life of Christian witness.

A church that doesn’t adjust to changes in the outside world and which simply retreats into a smaller and smaller world, has failed to be the church. It cannot fulfill its mission with a fortress mentality. The church is wrong when it retreats from or assimilates with the society that surrounds it.

A faithful church will seek the fresh inspiration of the Holy Spirit to find ways to be missional in today’s public sphere.

Key Point: God has us on a journey forward to his ideal future, so keep looking forward!

The post The Powerful Pull of the Past appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The purpose of this entire blog is to help Canadian ministry leaders, of both churches and agencies, lead their ministries effectively. In this particular series, my purpose is to encourage you to creatively rethink how you pursue your mission. It’s time to check our assumptions and challenge our paradigms. Is what we are doing working? Is it effectively moving us forward for mission success?

When I look at survey information about religion in Canada (which seems stalled at best) and hear arguments being made about the place of religion in society (which want to relegate religion to the personal sphere only), it is clear that we have a lot of work to do. God said he would bless Abraham, that in turn Abraham would be a blessing to the world, and that all people on earth would be blessed through Abraham. As Abraham’s heirs, we want to see everyone, every human being, experience God’s blessing.

To play our part, many of us need to hit the reset button to adjust to the world that exists today. Many ministries have already done this and are thriving. Others have yet to seriously address the changes in society that have occurred over the last 50 years.

I regularly hear remarkable success stories from ministries all across Canada. These welcome stories inspire me and greatly encourage me, because they show what can be done when we do ministry well and in a way that fits with where the non-Christian world is at today.

Now is the time we need more than ever to hold on to our historic faith and stay true to our mission, but also to adjust to a changed relationship with the world around us that is new to our generation, and almost unprecedented in the history of the church.

So, let’s get started on developing a fresh way forward. Each post will contribute a small but important part to the overall project of helping the church be successful in our times.

Time to Call It as It Is

Almost three years ago, in what is now the first post of this series, I reviewed Mark Noll’s turning points in Christian history, and gave my opinion that the church is either at a new turning point or is at least experiencing a significant new trend:

Not since [before] Christianity became the Roman state religion in 313 has Christianity been so counter-cultural. In a world that worships ‘me’, ‘my rights’, and ‘my convenience’, the church stands out for holding perspectives and values that are most emphatically not shared by general society.

I now believe we are experiencing more than just another major trend. We are indeed at a turning point, and if we do not do something about it now, we leaders will later be found derelict in our duty by the generations that follow us.

The Turning Point

Christianity enjoyed a favoured status in Western society for almost 1,700 years. Both the state and culture reflected, however imperfectly, a generally Christian worldview.

But Christianity has been gradually losing its favoured status for several hundred years, and in the last thirty years it feels like there has been an unprecedented, aggressive, all-out, sustained assault on the Christian faith and its place in the public sphere. In the Western world, faith is being squeezed into a small box of private belief which is not to be opened except in the privacy of one’s home or place of worship. The result is that society is far down a trajectory based on secular values, and orthodox Christianity today is as counter-cultural as it ever was.

What makes this a turning point worthy of historical note is that, unlike the sometimes severe persecution the church has suffered in specific countries in every century, the change in status is not localized but is affecting the faith throughout the Western world. However well or poorly the church deals with it, the ramifications will be felt throughout the Western world for centuries to come.

We’ve Been Here Before

Today, Christianity in the West is in very much the same place as it was in its first two centuries in the Roman empire: it is a minority religion in a society which is a free-for-all for religious thought, competing against an overwhelming state ideology that stands against it. The Roman state ideology was the cult of the emperor; the Western world’s state ideology is the cult of the individual.

Movements have their ups and downs, but our beleaguered situation today is outside the normal fluctuations of fortune. Only once before, in the 700s to 900s when Christianity was reduced to a rump in western Europe and its future was in doubt (from a human perspective), was our faith in as difficult a spot as it is today in terms of its relationship with the world.

Finding ourselves once more in such a defensive posture is a significant turn of events that warrants serious reflection on how the church thinks of itself and does its work. If the church does deep soul-searching, I believe it will emerge stronger than ever. In three or four hundred years, the 20th and 21st centuries may well be seen as another low point, just like the 700s to 900s, from which Christianity emerged as a healthy and effective world-changing agent.

Looking Forward

In the West, we have been travelling for almost two millennia along a pretty straight road through a society that affirms Christianity, a road which is now taking us from one period of history to another. As we cross the bridge between the old and the new, the road ahead travels through a society that does not give any special place to Christianity. The other end of the bridge disappears into the fog of uncertainty, a shroud of mystery. It’s our job now to discern what God has for us in this new place in which we find ourselves. That’s what this series will explore.

The Problem

The problem that has us stuck is that many Christians still cling to the privileges they once had, grabbing hold of them, trying to reclaim them. They are fighting to go back to something that doesn’t exist anymore. The cat’s out of the bag. The horses have bolted from the barn. Even if we wanted to go back, it is too late.

Instead, we need to have the attitude of Christ, “who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (Phil 2:6). Jesus Christ gave up his rights and privileges in order to serve humanity, and by making that sacrifice he put himself on a road that inevitably led to suffering and death. We must likewise give up our privileges in order to better serve humanity knowing that God will vindicate us just as he vindicated his Son.

We need some paradigm shifts, three to be exact.

New Paradigms

The three beneficial paradigm shifts we should make are:

1. In the paradigm held by most Christians, the loss of favoured status can only be regarded as bad, as a setback, as a loss. A better, new paradigm is that the loss of status is the start of God doing something new and good. Such a loss could be very good if it forces us to think afresh about the church, how we live out our faith, and how we take our place in society. And if you can’t see the loss of status as a good thing, then be assured that God will redeem our loss in some way for our good (Rom 8:28). Either way, rather than cling to the old, we must let go to grasp the new.
2. Another shift relates to how the church conducts its mission. Instead of expecting institutions of the church to do Christian work for us, we should see Christian work as the collective responsibility of both institutions and individuals. Historians and sociologists agree that in the first few centuries of the church, evangelism was mostly done by individuals in their neighbourhoods and on their travels as they shared their faith. There were evangelists and apostles to be sure, but the driving force behind the spread of Christian faith were the individuals who remain nameless in history. Charitable works were also done by individuals. Lecky, in his History of European Morals¹, wrote that “The active, habitual, and detailed charity of private persons, which is such a conspicuous feature in all Christian societies, was scarcely known in antiquity.” It’s time to reawaken individual Christians to their responsibility and their potential for Christian mission wherever God has put them. Churches and Christian agencies can do a lot of great work, but individual Christians can add significantly to what they can do, because individuals are everywhere.
3. The loss of status could lead to a third beneficial paradigm shift – a redefinition of mission success. There is a tendency to think of success in terms of win/lose, of advance or retreat, We think of success in terms of public life – especially in terms of politics. In later posts I will be exploring what success looks like and therefore what the indicators of success could be in our new world.

Consequences of a Bad Paradigm

As I wrote up above, I travel the country and hear great testimonies of the good things God is doing everywhere in our land, and I rejoice. But then, when I read the stats about what Canadians believe or don’t believe, and even what Christians believe and don’t believe, I have to wonder “Have we really accomplished all that much in the last fifty years?” It sometimes feels as though all the good news reports I hear might be all the good news reports there are.

James Davison Hunter wrote in To Change the World about several spectacular success stories of Christian ministries, but then concludes, “The problem is that these initiatives represent just a fraction of the potential within the church to bear witness to the love, grace, mercy, and truth of Christ.” Why would he think that? Maybe we are distracted from the good work we could be doing, individually and collectively, by fighting too much to preserve what we believe is rightfully ours.

The Prescription

I feel like Dorothy when she first stepped into the land of Oz and said, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

We are at a point in time where we must stop and reflect on where the church is at in relation to our society. We can’t go forward if we keep imagining that somehow we will restore the church to its former privileged position.

I’ve just been asked to join a small group tasked by a ministry that is more than a century old to take its mission and, starting with a green field, redesign everything about the ministry from the ground up. If it assumed it had no history but were starting fresh today with its mission, what would the ministry look like and how would it do its work? This is exactly the bold, radical fresh thinking I’m talking about. This readiness to reinvent ourselves and to allow the Holy Spirit to do something fresh in our generation gives us confidence that we can thrive in our new environment.

The way forward is to reflect on Christ’s Incarnation. When he entered human experience, he relied on no earthly power and did not cling to divine power, yet he changed the world by being obedient to his Father. How, then, should the church go forward? Stay tuned.

Key Point: Our world has changed in a very fundamental and historically significant way

The post The Church Is at a Turning Point appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

A road to the Honduran town of Choluteca needed to cross a river, so a bridge was built that fulfilled its purpose for many years. But in 1998 Hurricane Mitch dropped 36 inches of rain on Choluteca (18 inches in one day alone!), swelling the river to six times its normal width, destroying the road and moving the river. When the storm was over, the bridge was standing in perfect condition, but with no reason to exist because it connected no roads and spanned only dry land.

The bridge didn’t change, but everything around it did!

As leaders, we must be ever vigilant that we don’t allow our ministries to remain impervious to the constant changes taking place around us. If we do, this picture could easily be a picture of our ministry a few years down the road. One of the reasons why we might not adapt to circumstances is the hold that history sometimes has on us. It is precisely for this reason that Christ gave us his Spirit to guide us after he ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit enables us to faithfully adapt to an ever-changing world.

Change Is Constant

Heraclitus wrote 2,500 years ago that nothing endures but change. As long as there is life and creativity, there will be no steady state for our society to achieve. We can never think we have found the immutable formula for ministry success that will endure for the rest of our careers. Many people say “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got,” but that’s not true. Because the world is constantly changing, the truth is “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get less than what you’ve always got.”  I’m sure your ministry was perfectly designed for its purpose years ago, but that is no guarantee that it is still perfectly designed for its purpose today. The world changes, and so must your ministry.

I think most ministry leaders recognize this, because when Don Simmonds gave his plenary speech on organizational change at a CCCC conference, he asked the audience “How many think their ministries need to change?” and it appeared that every hand in the room shot up!

Also, my job gives me the opportunity to talk with ministry leaders all across the country, and many ministries are either in the process of innovation, re-invention, and/or experimentation, or they want to find out how to do it. There is a groundswell of desire for fresh strategic thinking about our missions and the means of fulfilling them.

Getting Comfortable with Change

But some ministries seem uncomfortable with change, which is understandable for two reasons.

The first is that when results are tolerable or even good, the risk of fiddling with proven strategies is pretty high. The solution is to be in continual renewal and make change a way of life for the ministry, not a special event. Always be evaluating your programs, scanning for new ideas, watching trends, and challenging your assumptions. Anything that is coasting will sooner or later come to a grinding halt. I’ve written a post that addresses this issue by asking the question, Is your ministry near its ‘Best Before’ date? My wife’s email signature file contains a great quote from Walt Disney, “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” You can’t reach your destination if you are only looking in the rear-view mirror!

The second reason why ministries might be uncomfortable with change is that the weight of ‘corporate culture’ and stories of iconic leaders from the ministry’s past can dampen enthusiasm for doing something new and fresh today. The weight of your predecessors and the history of their deeds can be crushing, but it doesn’t have to be. You can let it go, as I wrote about in this post.

I have a high regard for my elders and predecessors, so I share the reluctance of others who are attached to their organizational history and don’t want to abandon what a respected former generation created. But there is a difference between respecting and honouring your predecessors and fulfilling your leadership responsibilities today. I find it helpful to remember two things:

1. Mission is fixed, strategy is not.
2. History is fixed, the future is not.

I doubt that the people who gave life to your ministry by being innovative and entrepreneurial would be any less so if they were around today. They made wise decisions years ago, and if they were here today, they’d still make wise decisions, although not likely the same decisions as they made back then. That’s because they would examine today’s situation and make decisions accordingly, just as you should. They would look at today’s situation, not yesterday’s.

When you think of the leaders who led your ministry in previous years, the question shouldn’t be “What did they do?” but “How did they think?” Don’t try to imitate your predecessors; be yourself and, with an awareness of the reasons for their success, invite the Spirit to guide you forward using your gifts and talents. R.W. Southern once wrote, “Without the renewing of the Holy Spirit, the incrustations of time come to be valued as the most distinctive feature of the organization and the organization fossilizes.” ¹ When tradition is higher priority than function or purpose, it’s time to scrape the barnacles off your ministry.

Use History to Move Forward, Not Backward!

History is great for inspiration but don’t let it become a limiting constraint. John G. Stackhouse Jr. used his plenary speech at a CCCC Conference titled Renewed and Ever Renewing to mine church history and show the adaptable and evolving nature and methods of the church. Stackhouse quickly ran through 2,000 years of church history, not once but six times! Each time he followed a different track: denominational splits, higher education, spiritual renewal and so on, driving home the point that the church is anything but a static institution.

John told me that too rarely do we draw the inspiration and wisdom we can from history, and the CCCC’s conference was one of the very few times he’s been asked specifically for that perspective. It is a shame to waste the rich resources left by our predecessors in the stories of their lives and deeds. I’ve written about how CCCC has mined its own history to find inspiration for new ideas and also to hold on to the parts of our history that still benefit us today.

A Harvard Business Review article entitled Your Company’s History as a Leadership Tool, says history has four useful functions:

1. To unite and inspire people by instilling a sense of identity and purpose [and, I would add, values], and suggest goals that will resonate.
   • I mined CCCC’s history to discern our sense of call, to define our values, and to express our mission in a fresh way that remained faithful with the past and documented how I did that in this post.
2. To put adversity in context and to help heal rifts.
   • I wouldn’t limit this point to contextualizing adversity. History helps contextualize whatever circumstances we are in.
3. Looking back to plan forward.
4. A leader’s well-developed, long-range perspective on his or her company may be the only antidote to the pressures of quarterly earnings reporting.
   • Even in the charitable sector, we can fall prey to a focus on short-term results. When this happens we focus on outputs of our programs instead of mission-related outcomes. The programs are a means to an end. The mission is the end and we need to interpret our program results based not on how well the program works or how busy it is, but on how much it moved us forward in accomplishing our mission.

The New Testament writers certainly modeled how to use history to contextualize the present and find a new way forward. The Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation is a very scholarly examination of the interpretive techniques that governed their use of Old Testament texts.

The one big takeaway for me from the Handbook is that the New Testament authors did not limit themselves to examining direct prophecies from the Old Testament that they thought applied to their times, but broadened their use of the Hebrew Bible to include “the redemptive-historical relationship of the new, climatic revelation of God in Christ to the preparatory, incomplete revelation to and through Israel.” ²

In other words, they looked at the big picture of the overarching meta-narrative of God’s Word to understand his intent and his heart and then applied that to their times. Peter did exactly this when spoke to his fellow Jews and interpreted recent events in light of their own history in order to bring them to Christ.

A final thought about using history as a resource: History provides both positive and negative examples for us to learn from. Think of history as a laboratory where you can observe experiments and their outcomes, assess the conditions that led to success or failure, and figure out what you think will hold true today and what might have different results because of different circumstances.

“The Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post Corporate History – Resource or Constraint? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• before you need to,
• before you are desperate,
• while you are still strong, and
• when there is still time for a new strategy to mature enough to carry the organization.

Why Ministries Die

I’ve wondered why ministries sometimes die, since the mission of the church continues until Jesus returns and there is still lots to do! Once a ministry has been established for a while, I think death must result for one of two reasons:

1. A ministry’s programs and methods are simply no longer relevant, or
2. Its leadership does not grow with the ministry and becomes increasingly not up to the task as the ministry outgrows them.

The good news is that both of these scenarios are avoidable. If leadership is on the ball, there is no reason why a ministry should die.

Attitudes to Avoid

But ministries probably will continue to die because we think we are so much smarter than the leaders in the case studies of organizations that have failed. I’ve read How The Mighty Fall, and as I read about all the failures I thought to myself, “Okay, so I won’t do that” or “I’ll watch out for that!” But I shouldn’t be so sure about not repeating their mistakes. In Not for Free: Revenue Strategies for a New World, Saul Berman outlines the failures of many companies but then warns his readers:

Do not think that you and your colleagues won’t make some of the same mistakes as the media industry has. Do not think that you are invulnerable to being blindsided by technology change, market change, or new competitors. Do not think that it will not be difficult to innovate your revenue model as rapidly and as thoroughly as you need to. Do not think that you have “plenty of time” to work things out. Those are exactly the same mistakes that media made. Too many of the executives thought they had more time, thought they had a good read of the market, thought they could wait for “better” ideas and options to come along. They neglected opportunities, failed to invest in revenue innovation, stuck to their segmentations, pricing, payers, and packaging not because they were dumb or blind but because they were normal. The easy path, the normal path, is to find all the reasons not to innovate your revenue models rather than seizing opportunities for revenue innovation. Don’t be normal. Don’t take the easy way out. There are no second chances and the clock is ticking.

Berman was writing about the particular problem of consumers expecting services or knowledge for free. What’s the issue in your ministry sector that has the potential to be a seismic shift? Donors will support the ministry that does what they care about the way they think it should be done. If you are still doing things the way the founder did them forty years ago, you are likely finding it harder and harder to raise donations because donors expect your methods to adapt to today’s methods and situations. Some anonymous person said, “Even if you are on the right road, you will eventually get run over if you just sit there.” You never arrive at a place in your lifecycle where you can camp for the duration. You’ve got to keep moving!

Find Your Ministry’s Lifecycle Age

Do you want to know how long your ministry will last? One clue is what your expectations are. Ichak Adizes says in Managing Corporate Lifecycles that organizations will remain young as long as the leaders expect more than the results they are currently getting. When leaders accept current results as the expected results, then the organization starts to age.

Determining where your ministry is in its lifecycle is important, because once you start on the downward trend it is very difficult to revive the organization. In Stall Points, the authors say that once you have a significant downturn, research shows only a 7% chance of ever recovering to see moderate or high growth again. If you wait until you plateau, it is too late to do very much. The problem is that long before you hit your revenue peak the basis on which you were viable has already expired. You’ve already used up much of the grace period to get something new going. Are you still growing? Well, sheer momentum will carry even a dead organization forward for a number of years before it finally collapses and expires! There is no reason to delay jumping to a new lifecycle once you are solidly on the growth track of the first one. You keep the first one going as long as it continues to grow, but when it is done, you have something else to go forward with.

Ichak Adizes has a free online assessment and a diagram of a corporate lifecycle to help you determine where you are in your corporate lifecycle. It takes about five minutes to answer some questions and generate a graph showing where you are. You want to be on the left side of the bell curve. That side, because of its shape, is called the S-curve because it is the shape of an “S”. There is a slow period of growth at the beginning of an organization’s life, then rapid growth as its products and services catch on, and then the growth flattens out as the organization matures.

Leading Indicators of Organizational Death

There are also some leading indicators that can help you find where you are.  In Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There, Nunes and Breene say there are three hidden S-curves that will flatten out well before the revenue curve does. If you watch those, they will tell you when you are approaching the top of your revenue curve. The three hidden S-curves are:

1. Relevance – Over time you can lose your relevance either to your donors or your beneficiaries.
2. Distinctive capabilities – Over time you can lose your distinctiveness and become just another ministry.
3. Talent attraction – People sense when an organization is past its prime and it becomes harder to attract and retain good staff.

If you have reason to wonder about your ministry’s relevance, distinctiveness or ability to attract people, you need to take action!

Some leaders can only see one S-curve, and can’t conceive how to start something new (anything that is really new will always appear radical). But if you only exist on one S-curve, you will end up simply trying to outdo other charities doing what you do, attracting donations solely on the basis of incremental improvements in cost or quality or both. Perhaps who has the lowest overhead percentage! This is not a long term solution. It often ends up as though you are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Nunes and Breene say when you compete like this, the future is bleak and can only end in organizational death.

Organizational Renewal

A healthy way to think about your ministry’s future is to imagine that it has a shelf life and will expire unless it is renewed prior to its ‘best before’ date. The key word here is ‘renewed.’  You can’t plan on the same old, same old taking you into the future. The same mission, yes. The same values, yes. The same methods and assumptions? No!!

An expiry date is stamped on everything you do. If you don’t watch the dates, there will come a day when your entire ministry will expire. Organizational longevity is dependent on keeping those expiry dates as far out as possible.

Tips for Longevity

I wrote the following points in 1997 for a business column, and I think they have stood the test of time (I’ve adjusted them to suit charities):

• Understand the reasons behind your success: A truism I’ve used often is “Success breeds success.” We learn from our successes and each success generally opens the door to more opportunity. However, success also breeds potentially harmful attitudes, such as the feeling of invincibility. You think success is a ‘right’ you’ve earned. You may even believe what reporters write about you. The issue is that since you have been successful at a particular period and in a particular set of circumstances, you may now believe that success is an automatic, ongoing condition. When you enjoy success, make sure you understand what conditions and decisions led to success. If you don’t understand why you were successful, you won’t recognize when those conditions change and you will take a hit.
• Challenge your “sacred cows”: Some leaders know what led to success and elevate that causal factor (a strategy or a program) to the status of a ‘sacred cow’. This is equally dangerous because it reduces your thinking to a set of limited options. The antidote is to recognize that for a particular set of conditions, the ‘sacred cow’ is the appropriate means to success but it may not be appropriate tomorrow. Identify your ‘sacred cows,’ let people know they are no longer ‘sacred’ and get your team to challenge their continuing effectiveness.
• Examine your strengths: Often the areas in which we feel strongest are the breeding grounds for our downfall. Our strengths are assumed to be safe areas and therefore aren’t examined as carefully as they should be.
• Plan for today and tomorrow: Your ministry must maximize the fundraising value of its existing programs while developing their replacements that will attract future donations and grants. Tomorrow doesn’t just happen, yet many organizations rest on their current successes without realizing it is only a matter of time until their current programs are obsolete. Get people thinking both for today and tomorrow.
• Stay fresh: Make room for new initiatives by abandoning old initiatives that have served their time. Stay fresh. Keep the real winners, but let go of anything limping along. Treat the continuation of every strategy or program as a fresh investment decision. No matter how good they’ve been, which ones will provide the best results for the future? Support those. Extend the shelf life of your ministry by developing the next generation of programs now while you still have cashflow.
• Re-examine current operations for potential improvement: Over time you always lose efficiency. Either people get sloppy or performance improvements elsewhere surpass you. Keep your head up and look for ways to improve. Always assume you can do better. Make your equipment work harder and help your people work smarter!
• Look for new opportunities: Look for unmet needs your beneficiaries have and fill those; and find out why some people choose not to support your programs (so look for donors who have never given to you but who do give to similar ministries).

Conclusion

At CCCC we are checking our own “best before” date and beginning a process to find the next S-curve for us. I’ll keep you posted as we progress in a series called “Strategic Review” which you can access from the right navigation bar.

I don’t know what the future holds for CCCC, but I really like what Peter Drucker said:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Rather than waiting for external forces to act on CCCC, we are choosing to ask Drucker’s question

If we were starting today, knowing what we now know, would we do it the same way?

We are re-designing our ministry and, in turn, our future. How about you?

The post Is Your Ministry Near Its “Best Before” Date? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Let’s talk about strategic decisions you can make today that may not bear fruit immediately but that should bear fruit in the future. In other words, moving beyond a focus on results during your own tenure in leadership to a focus on results that will benefit future leaders and the ministry in their time in leadership. Such as when King David raised the funds that his son, Solomon, used to build the Temple after David’s death.

I was at a conference once and heard a terrific story that just amazed me and the entire audience. It was a thrilling example of farsightedness that looked ahead five centuries! The speaker assured us the story is absolutely true. It’s about a college at Oxford University. Here’s the story as it was told.

New College Roof, Oxford University

New College, Oxford, is actually very old. It was founded in 1379 but was the second college at Oxford named for Mary, the mother of Jesus, which is why it is called the ‘new’ college. Like the other colleges, it has a fabulous dining hall with big oak beams supporting the roof. These are about two feet square, 45 feet long.

In the 1860s, the roof beams were found to be full of beetles. The massive beams would have to be replaced. But where to find wood of those dimensions in the nineteenth century? It turns out that when the college was built, the board knew the beams would have to be replaced some day, and to ensure they would have the necessary wood to replace the roof beams, the college board bought some property at the same time they built the college and planted oak trees on it so they would grow and be ready over the course of several centuries. This plan had been passed down from generation to generation for 500 years!

When I heard this story, I thought that while it was amazing that anyone would think so far ahead to plant the trees, the really incredible part was that over all those centuries, none of the college’s leaders ever succumbed to selling the forest to raise capital for current projects. They could have done so and said, “Let the future look after the future’s problems, and we’ll look after today’s.” But they didn’t. Their planning horizon spanned half a millennium.

Planning Horizon

How far out is my planning horizon? Yours? Are we setting our ministries up only for success during our watches or are we setting them up for our successors’ successes?

I attended an international convention once where a man gave a plenary speech about long-range planning. He said he had a 300-year plan for his family. He said great things take longer than a single lifetime to be accomplished, so he had a plan for himself, his kids, his grandkids, and on and on. That seemed unreasonable to me, because who knows what will happen to any family over a 300-year period? Will his kids even have any kids? He never said what the plan was, but how could it account for societal change, economic upheavals, personal choices, and technological innovations?

Future vs. Futurity

No one can predict the future and plan accordingly. As Peter Drucker wrote, no one can foresee discontinuities, the game-changer inventions. You can’t predict what has not yet happened. What we can do is think about the future effects of events that have already occurred and where they are likely to lead. Drucker called this “the futurity of present events,” or to bring it to the level of management and leadership, “the futurity of present decisions.”

A decision to plant a forest in the present makes it more likely that in the future the wood would be available. It doesn’t guarantee it will be—there could be a fire that destroys the forest only 40 years before the wood is needed—but it has a higher probability of success in the future than hoping that an old forest will exist in 500 years that will be available for harvesting.

Drucker said that to try to make the future happen is less risky (even though the outcome is uncertain) than coasting along assuming that nothing is going to change. The purpose of trying to make the future what you want “is not to decide what should be done tomorrow, but what should be done today to have a tomorrow.” He says there are two strategies to follow.

1. The Future That Has Already Happened

There is a time lag between something that happens and its full effect, such as when the birth rate climbs or falls. The change has already happened, but its impact has yet to arrive. That will occur as the generation ages. Think about the Baby Boom and how it is affecting geriatric care today! We knew seventy years ago that this day would come.

There are opportunities of the future based on what has already happened. Leaders should be following demographic and societal trends, always asking “What does this change mean for us?” “Has anything happened ‘out there’ in other countries or industries that might affect us?” is another good question. And a final really good question is, “What are our own assumptions regarding society and economy, market and customer, knowledge and technology? Are they still valid?” Virtually every Christian ministry would benefit from addressing these questions as they relate to our missions and then looking for opportunities in the future that are consequences of what has already happened.

2. The Power of an Idea

Drucker’s second strategy is “to impose on the as yet unborn future a new idea which tries to give direction and shape to what is to come.” He calls this strategy “making the future happen.” The question he says should be asked, in a business context, is “What major change in economy, market, or knowledge would enable us to conduct business the way we really would like to do it, the way we would really obtain the best economic results?” For Christian ministries, I might rephrase the question as, “What major change in societal thinking or expectations would enable us to conduct our ministry the way we would really like to do it, the way we would make the most progress in achieving our mission?” An example that comes to mind is The Truth Project by Dr. Del Tackett. The problem that he is addressing is relativistic thinking that makes it difficult for people to accept a universal truth claim. Tackett plants a seed, an idea, in the videos that he hopes will grow and shape the future in a way that will help people accept the Good News of the Christian faith. So, thinking of your ministry, what seeds should you be planting today to create a more favourable future? Sometimes ideas float around for several hundred years before they really take hold, so this really is acting today for a future result.

A tutor (professor) at Oxford University said in a class I was taking that the first seed that brought us to the individualistic, self-centred, relativistic world we live in today was planted by Renés Descartes in 1637 with his famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am.” It took almost 400 years for that one idea to grow into the worldview that dominates us today. So, if you want to shape future society, start now!

Both of these strategies hold lots of opportunities for Christian ministries. Reflect on both as they relate to your mission and see what comes to mind.

Now, please DO NOT leave this blog before reading another post. You see, the story about the oak beams is not exactly true after all. I fact-checked it because I wanted to use it, and discovered that the facts have been adjusted to make the story more compelling. But I also discovered that there is another story that makes the same point and it is absolutely true! You can be inspired by the true story in my post, Truth in Storytelling.

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