Video Transcript: There's a Price to Pay

Welcome back. As I said, we are talking about leadership. As I mentioned last time, in this session, I want to just talk about for a moment, the fact that there is a price to pay for living out a vision and leading people in a vision. And the price to pay is real. And so I want to talk about it a little bit, just the reminder, when that area of leadership, the leader, interacting with the culture, to define a preferable future, and then later, we're going to get into the planning, and the impetus for the planning and prayer that needs to happen to make the vision a reality. But the vision is that star that's going to lead us; it's a star, that's going to leave the thing we keep in mind as all the other stuff goes on down here. It's the one that's going to be the thing we steer by, like a North Star. And so as we talked about that vision, last time, I talked about vision killers. 

This time, I want about to talk about the fact that when you are trying to fulfill a vision, there's going to be a price to pay for you personally, not just for the people. But for you. Personally. This man has been one of my mentors. His name is Harold Korver. When we were looking at relocation, I remember calling up Harold, he lived about 40 miles from me in Southern California, which means anywhere from a 40-minute drive to a three-hour drive, depending on the time of day. But I called Harold and I just said I want to have lunch with you and just bounce some ideas off from you. I could do that on occasion. And so I began to share with him, you know, the fact that we had gotten this visions change, a vision from building where we were to a relocation to this new local area, where there was an expected 150,000 people moving into that community. And so we had this opportunity, and we got this great vision of reaching them in the name of Jesus Christ. And wow, it was exciting. But I just wanted to bounce it off for him, because I was in that thing of fear. You know. 

And so he was one of the people I consulted. And so I shared with him. And together, we started to look at all the variety of costs that there were going to be for this: you know, there were financial costs, of course, that, you know, the expansion that we're looking at where we were was going to cost somewhere around 2 to 3 million, whereas the relocation was going to cost who knows, but it was going to be upwards, far above 10 million, we could accurately predict that. And so, wow, there's going to be that cost. But then there were going to be the costs for people that were rather significant as well. And that, you know, as we talked about, with the whole idea of vision killers, they were going to have to change. People who are used to walking to church in our neighborhood church before were now going to have to drive. It wasn't far, it was only three or four miles, but they were gonna have to drive on Sunday morning. And that would upset their normal routines. And we've talked earlier about how important routines are. And so that was going to be a price to pay. 

And then he talked about the fact that the program was going to be different just because it was I mean, we this time, we were in multiple services. And as we built this new building, which was going to have seating for 1,500, and was going to have a youth area, it was going to have a children's area, large children's building, and there's going to be a preschool with it, that the patterns were going to change, worship times were going to change, some of our worship was going to be tweaked differently, because now we have the stage with a large auditorium. And that was going to affect the kind of band we would put on stage or the kind of music we would have, and a discussion about whether we'd have an organ or not, and etc, etc, all of these kinds of things that were going to be upsetting to people, that were going to be need great leadership in order to keep the vision going, especially the idea that we were going to relocate twice, we are going to move from our building, the original building of the church, we're going to sell that and move into a temporary housing situation. I've talked about that before. And so that was a cost and a cost and history would tell us and people's experiences would tell us that there were going to be losses each step of that way. 

And so we looked at each of those and the conversation and I just remember him looking at me and saying Bruce, you better not do this, unless you have a fire in your belly for it. Unless you are are passionate about this, because otherwise, this is going to burn you out. Now, I've shared earlier about some of my reactions to that time, fulfilling this vision but today I want to talk about what are some of those prices that you have to pay for the vision to become reality. They are your prices. Nobody else's. Everybody else has a price to pay as well, but these are going to be yours. 

The first is going all in. John Maxwell is somebody who is known in leadership circles and he puts it this way: people buy into the vision after the leader buys into it. I began to realize the truth of that very soon; people were looking to me. Now in the tradition I come from the pastor, they try to protect a little bit from things like raising money, you know, so we aren't identified with raising money. And so we had, as we built the whole process, we tried to make my job the vision, and somebody else the asking for money. And so I would go around and some of the fundraising things we were doing, we did small groups, in houses where various people would gather together and have dessert together. And then I would show up, and I would show up with other church leaders and the consultants, then, and my job would be to give the vision, to talk about the difference this was going to make in the lives of children, and youth, and adults. And the fact that this was going to bless this community and the fact that God was going to use this powerfully My job was vision, then they would come and say, You know what, this is going to cost a lot. And this is what we want you to consider: how can you sacrifice in order to become a part of this great vision that we have for the future? You know, what are ways you can sacrifice, gave ideas to them, gave guidelines to them about how much we were going to need, etc. And so I didn't talk about the money at all, but I was the vision speaker. 

And on Sundays, when we would talk about it, we did series of messages. You know, I did one from Nehemiah did one from Ezra about the whole idea of relocation, of building with a rising bill. I was the one identified; it was my thing. And there's a price that comes with that, that I can't do as I mentioned last time, I can't talk negatively about it, even though I want to identify with those who have have questions or concerns and are are traditionalists or complacent or are fearful, I can't identify with them publicly. Because people have to see me bought into the vision. In fact the consultant recommended very quickly that I and my wife make a very big sacrificial pledge, a three-year pledge to this building program. So that when people saw that I was bought in, they would buy in to people be are buying into the process, after you buy into it. And so that's a price you're going to have to pay. You're just going to have to pay it. That's all there is to it. 

Another price you're going to have to pay is physical, emotional, spiritual, financial. I put down there the example of Karen Bennett, I was rereading in preparation for this class. Andy Stanley's good book on this called Visioneering, in which he covers all kinds of topics around visioning and envisioning, but as he tells the story of Karen Bennett. Karen Bennett was a member of his church in Atlanta, Georgia. And she was somebody who was in her 20s and was living as a fairly typical 20-year-old, but she had gotten involved with a ministry that was an inner-city ministry in Atlanta. And as a result, she began to get a vision for what could possibly be there, they began taking their care kids that was their ministry down there in the inner city. And so as she began to look at her life, he realized that, you know, before this, her goals were kind of, as he says, you know, the next purchase of the Gucci bag and something greater than the Honda that she was driving. That's the way Stanley put it, but the emptiness she saw in the eyes of those children was something she could not ignore. As their big vision began to take shape, she became convinced that there should be a safe place for children in the middle of what was, and continues to be, a drug infested warzone. So Karen and her friends decided to plant a children's church in the inner city. After allowing the idea to incubate for several months, they began looking for a site. And now here's Karen's reflection. "Month after month, we kept going down there until we felt like it was time to have a church building for those kids. We started looking at old warehouses and old buildings in downtown Atlanta. Finally, we found this one old nightclub that sits right in the middle of 25 major inner-city projects. I called the owner up and I said, Well, how much do you want for this place? And he said he needed $2,000 a month rent. While he could have told me it was 2 million. I didn't have that type of money. I was on a church salary living in an apartment in the suburbs. But on the way home, we each stopped by our bank and cleared out our checking and savings account. We looked for every nickel and dime we could find that night. We dumped it all into one pot. And between all six of us we had $52." She began contacting other churches that maybe would support her the process and nobody seemed interested. 

So now she started to pay the price. It's one thing to get the vision with her and her friends. But now the price comes. This is how she describes it. "It ended up that my staff and I got together that night, and we just talked about it; it was one of those nights that we just had to be honest with ourselves, is this what we were going to do? Or was this one of those things that we were just going to talk about until we were 40 or 50 years old. So we decided that we were going to take a chance. Because every once in a while, you've just got to do that. The next day, we went to our landlords and we handed in our notices to the leases on our apartments. We couldn't afford to have our nice apartments and have a church for those kids at the same times." And two weeks later, she and her friends moved into that nightclub. She described it this way. "I remember that when we moved in, it was 20 or 30 degrees outside and it was about 20 or 30 degrees inside. We forgot to check if the building had heat before we moved in. It didn't have heat, and it didn't have air conditioning. It didn't have a toilet or a sink or shower. It didn't have anything. We had to drive down to Hardee's fast-food place to use the bathroom. Our new home came complete with cement floors and 17-inch sewer rats. We call them gophers up our way, cuz they go for you. We kept on trying to get the building upgraded. But nobody believed in us. Our parents thought we'd lost our minds. Sometimes you wonder if you really heard from God or not." And they continued to each week dump their paychecks from their other jobs into a pot. And they would take 20 bucks a week each out for their own personal expenses. They had a vision, they had a dream and began living it out. And as Stanley says at the time to this writing. Today, Karen and her 16 member staff have ministered over 3,000 children every week, in multiple weekend services. They sponsor a youth service that draws over 200 teenagers, they established a private school in the community. Tuition is $20 per month, they have 125 students enrolled and over 500 on a waiting list. Now when Karen talks about those times of is this going to be real or not? Am I willing to pay the price or not? She says she really feels like it was a test from God, was she really willing to go forward. So that's a price you're going to have to pay. 

A third price is simply this. The critics will come. Now I've shown you this bell curve before, of how people respond to new ideas and how they respond to visions. I'll just run through it again, to remind you that 2.5% of the population are considered to be innovators. In other words, if there's a new idea, they'll grab onto it. They are the ones who are waiting in line for the new iPhone. They're the ones who are buying the new product. They are ones that are checking out this new model of automobile. They're innovators, they want what's new, and advertisers know this group well, because they advertise everything is new and improved. Right. And so they want what's new, there's a new kind of soap, I want to try that. Innovators. The early adopters are close behind them at 13 1/2%. These are the people who are saying, okay, yeah, yeah, I heard about that. I really want to do it. You know, I remember, you know, when the internet was being developed, I'm old enough to remember that, and how quickly my children caught on to this whole stuff. And how quickly they adopted it. They were early adopters, I was probably part of the early majority, or maybe even a late adopter, a late majority. But they grab on to it because Oh, hey, it's new. And look at the needs and look at how neat this could be. 

The early majority of a new idea are those ones that will come on board, when they understand why something is being done. When they understand your vision. When they understand the vision of your organization. They'll be on board they'll give financially they're early adopters. 

Late Majority are those people, 34% again, who will come in, but only after it's proven. You know, that's why the short wins are so important, as we're going to be talking about, as we have talked about and going to talk about in change theory to have short wins. These people when they see short term wins. When people see that it's working, the late adopters will come on board then there's the laggards. 16% Maybe will come on board maybe not. And a percentage, which nobody has put on them that I've seen are going to be critics. These are people who are going to look at what you're doing and their response is going to criticize it. Now, criticism hurts. It just does. Now you've seen the interview A little while ago, of my good friend Frank Weaver's. And how somebody said that they, in effect said a wish you were dead. Saying this is a coffin for our pastor, as a church was going through the dramatic changes of a relocation that that cuts deeply. I remember the day when one of the critics had spoken to someone else who felt like they had to share it with me? Now I hear my critics fairly often and fairly well, you know, through email, through mail, etc. But it still would cut deeply. And this time, the critic said, as we were looking at relocation, looking at building a large church facility. The critic said to someone else, says Bruce is just trying to build his own kingdom. Wow! Now, the person who felt like they had to share that with me, I don't know why, sent me into a tailspin for a while. Because as with any criticism, you try to identify if there is a nugget of truth here. Is there some truth that I have to be aware of, some truth that I have to address here? And so I had to look at that carefully. And I had to say, am I? So am I, because of my baggage because of my personality? Because of my need to succeed? Am I really about building my own kingdom? Is this God's vision? I've been through a lot of that. And so very quickly came to the idea that No, that's not who I am. That's not what I'm trying to do. I firmly believe that Jesus Christ is calling us to take these steps now, so that we can reach more people for him, so that we can make a greater impact among the poor of our community, so that we can affect the character of our community by having Christians who are growing in their faith engaged in various ways. But then it still sits there. 

Now one practice I tell you, if you're in a church or an organization, some people will try to send you letters. And they will be unsigned, because they don't want to own it, I very, very quickly developed a pretty sharp principle. And that was, if the letter is unsigned, I would glance at a letter. If it was unsigned, it went into the trash. I would not give it the time of day. In fact, just an aside, that was when I quit having evaluations of staff contain anonymous statements by people I used to send out for staff, you know. And so and so we're looking at making them as efficient as they can be. And as great as they can be for the kingdom of God. Can you give some response about what their strengths or weaknesses and suggestions for them, and it was anonymous. And after that, they don't need to know who said it, but I need to know who said it. It cannot be anonymous; people like to own their critic. That just seems to be a principle in the kingdom of God. We're going to talk about that when we talk about conflict later. Conflict, it's a reality. 

Now it's fascinating when you look in Scripture, that Nehemiah becomes an incredible model of this. Remember, in chapter four, he's got his plan of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem which is seen as a threat by Sanballat, Tobiah, the other people around there, begin to see this as a great threat. And so they're even suggesting that they're going to sneak among them, they're going to attack and they're going to kill it and destroy the people who are rebuilding the building. This is after mocking them and saying, Yeah, building such a fragile thing, it will fall down. If even a fox would run on top of it, it's just gonna fall apart. And so all of those kinds of things, how would Nehemiah respond? He even got a letter one time saying, I want to meet with you in such in such a place and, and, you know, Nehemiah was able to sense that this was a not of God, first of all, but that they were actually going to try to harm him. They were that seriously threatened by the new vision of this walled city that was going to exist in Jerusalem. 

And so how did he respond? Well, first of all, he prayed, he remembered the source of the vision and he revised his plan. He prayed, this is his prayer. "Hear, oh our God, how we are despised, return their reproach on their own heads and give them up for plunder in a land of captivity. Do not forgive their iniquity and let not their sin be blotted out before you, for they have demoralized the builders." Now, that's a powerful prayer. I don't think we pray that in New Testament days. God, don't ever forgive them for what they're doing here. I mean, we're to be people of grace and were to respond to critics with grace as well. And certainly mercy and forgiveness and all those good things. But he is identifying here a very real thing about this kind of price to be paid. And that is, it can demoralize people. It can demoralize you, but it can demoralize the people who are involved sacrificing, the people who are working hard to make the vision a reality. When they hear the critics, they're going to look at how do you respond? And so I find it a real powerful thing that he responded with prayer. He did not defend himself. He didn't go to these people and say, Oh, no, you've got it wrong. We're not just, I'm not, you know, I never took that chance to get up in front on Sunday morning. So you know what, somebody has accused me of trying to build my own kingdom. No, you know, that's not true. They didn't defend themselves, he went to prayer. And he let God be the one who was going to determine how that price was met. But he was going to pay the price of dealing with the fact that the critics will come, then he spent time remembering the source of the vision. In fact, this is the way he put it. "So when I saw their fear, that is the workers, I rose and spoke to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people: do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord who was great and awesome and fight for your daughters, your brothers, your sons, your wives and your houses. Remember, remember, God is in this," he had previously recited all the wonderful things God has done and out of the hand of God had been with him as he walked this way to create this vision for a new wall around Jerusalem. And God supplied through the kings. Not only are you letting him go to be the leader in this, but paying for it as well. 

So you remember, when the price starts coming home in any of these ways, it's a time when you remember, you reflect on the vision God has given you. You think about, is this really God's vision? And the answer, almost always will be yes. And then you say, Okay, Lord, I am your servant. I think of Paul having done it, my wife and I are reading Acts right now in our devotions. And as he's going to Jerusalem, God has told him, he's going to testify in Rome, as he's testified elsewhere. And the prophets are coming as he's getting closer and closer to Jerusalem. And Agabus in particular, becomes one who ties up his hands with Paul's belt. And said the Spirit says, the one owns this belt is going to be tied up like this. And that's a huge price to pay, right? I mean, Saul has been, Paul has been traveling all over that area of a world sharing the good news, he's been faithful in his mission, to be the great evangelist and now he's looking at imprisonment. But what he said was, whoa, I'm ready to give my life if that's what's required. I met Jesus. And he gave me this vision of a church that would begin expanding throughout the world. And I'm willing to do anything for it. So I remember that God called me remember that first thing. In fact, he recites that often the time when Jesus met him on the road, and he started to get a vision. What God told Ananias was, Jesus said to Ananias, you know, I am showing him how much he is going to suffer for my sake. He knew it going in, there was a price to pay. But he was willing to give himself entirely. So remember the source of the vision, and then choose your pain. I like that phrase, just because that's comes from a friend of mine. They were going through changes the church he was part of had been on decline for many years. And so they were instituting changes. As he came there. And they were changing worship, they were changing times, they were changing, or even talking about changing, location, a variety of things. And one time talking with him, we would meet for prayer together at that time, he and I bought a variety of things. And so we were praying about this one time, and I said, but how are you doing? you know, how are you doing with all of this? He said, Well, I realized I get to choose my pain. He says, my pain before was people leaving the church. And they were leaving because we weren't relevant. And they were leaving, because you know, the music didn't meet their expectations. It wasn't relevant. And so it was very traditional music that they were leaving for a variety of reasons. He said, I could live with that pain. Or I could choose the pain of making changes that will allow them to be retained and more like these people to be coming in and making a greater impact to the kingdom. But the pain is still there, because the critics are there. Choose your pain. And then Nehemiah revises plan, "But we prayed to our God. And because of them, we set up a guard against them day and night." Okay the plan going along to get the rebuilding teams but now there's this glitch, there's this threat to what they're doing. So he says okay, we've got to set a guard now. So they changed things and some of the people were working some were standing guard, and they revised their plan. So be open to change. Don't confuse your plan with the vision. Sometimes you're going to have to revise it. And that's the price you're going to have to pay. So, just want to conclude with words of Robert Schuller, our longtime leader builder of the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. He was often criticized, criticized within the church criticized by Christians. He just dealt with criticism almost all of his life. But he responded once I was in a seminar where he was speaking and somebody asked, How are you dealing with this? Because the church community in general was condemning how much it cost to build that Crystal Cathedral, etc. And his response was, "I would rather attempt something great and fail, then do nothing and succeed." 

Let me say that, again, there's a price to pay, but it's a worthwhile price. I would rather attempt something great, and fail, than do nothing and succeed. Now, in our contexts, whatever yours is, attempt something great. Yeah, it's going to cost something from you. It will. It's going to cost something. But the reward is going to be incredible as far as living out our vision God has given you in building his kingdom. And so much so that you can look back when you end your life and you meet Jesus Christ and hear him say, Well done, good and faithful servant. You've been faithful in a few things, and it was costly. I'm going to put you over many. That's what I'm looking forward to. That's why I'm willing to risk.

Strategic Planning Part 1

All right, exciting day, we get to move on to another aspect of leadership. Now, you know, just a reminder, again, we've been talking about leadership in terms of this model, that the leader enters a situation and interacts with the culture, and interacting with that culture and the people in it, he develops a vision for the future, and then provides the impetus for the prayer and the planning that need to happen in order for that vision of the preferable future to become reality. And so in the next sessions, we're going to focus on what it means to our prayer and planning. 

And in particular, we're going to talk about what it means to do a strategic plan. And then some of the things you have to keep in mind, as you think about planning strategically, for getting from here to there. Now, we talked in rolling out the vision that it's all about being here, and what this is, and then going there, and why that is so much better. So we're in that section, that is, this is how we're going to get there. These are the specific steps, we're going to have to take. Wow, that was a tough one to get out. Specific steps were going to have to take in order for that vision that we've had to become reality. Now I showed you this diagram, this model, a while back, this is by executestrategy.com. And this is a good one. In this session, I'm going to go through how they recommend developing a strategic plan. And then in the next session, I'm going to look at another model for doing it, another way of doing it when you've got the vision established, and how you can go about you know, refreshing the vision, renewing it on a regular basis. 

Now, just a word about strategic planning. There used to be a general wisdom that you would make a strategic plan for five years, and then you would change it or update it at year three. Nowadays, I stopped doing that as far as strategic planning for five years and start a strategic planning for three and updating it at years one and two. Now, the reasons for that are obvious; change is just becoming more rapid in our world. And so making a change, a strategic change, may become irrelevant two years from now. And so you've got to be ready and keep your people and yourself on top of all of those changes. And so you've got to keep looking at certain things. And the other thing that made me change it is I found that in year one of a three year strategic plan 70%, something like that of your goals are attained in year one. And so you have to get your people and yourself to rethink what are the next goals? What are the next thing, but in this model, it starts with a vision, you spent time developing, praying about talking with key people and develop a vision for a preferable future. Then after that, you look at a variety of things, the values of your organization. Now in the area and culture, you went through that process of identifying what are the values in this particular culture. And then you get to focus areas. So those are the three areas I really want to key in on today. Let's look at how that'll work. You've got a vision, and you've got a value system. And you're going to look at how in the world, this value system is going to be worked out in various areas of your ministry, and I'm going to speak from my experience with the better church, you're going to have to translate it into your own. 

So you've got a vision, and you've got a value. You've done your visioning. Now what? Well, now you ask questions about how you achieve your ministry, what has God called us to be and become through the mission and vision, and then what values reflect the completion of the mission. In other words, here's where things get rather testy. Because one of the things that are going to have to change, if you are going to accomplish the vision that God has given you, is that some values will have to change. Values are very much part of a culture and this is how the culture is going to have to change. Now, as I've said, culture is powerful, that force of keeping things the way they are is powerful. One person likened it to a rubber band, you know, the further you stretch a rubber band, if you get the rubber band between your two hands, and you stretch it, the force to push you back to what was the starting point becomes greater and greater. The further and further you go? Well, in many, many respects, the values that you hold, the values that your organization holds, are part of a culture, this inborn, inbred belief about what is true about their group and what is important to their group. And so there's becoming growing pressure to push you back into what was. Now when I was first in ministry, as I shared before, I didn't know the first thing about creating a vision or selling or, you know, verbalizing, going public with a vision or bringing the key people on. And so we would just create visions, a few people, and I would just create a vision of the future. And that future and that little church was that, you know, we were going to build a new building, our building was made to seat 90 some people, and we were going to expand it maybe to seat you know, over 190, would go up to about 200. But that would involve either changing dramatically our worship space and being out of it or building an extension to our building. And so we began talking about it in those terms. But then I looked at the history of that church, and it had a history of growing, you know, to that maximum of about 100. People in worship 90 some people do or work people in worship, and then you know, it would go down, and then would go back up and go back down similar to that pattern, of a new church planting as we're going to talk about it. And I realized that there was all this force that was being exerted to make us go back, you know, we'd like to the way it was. And so those values, when you're talking about changing those values, you've got to know that this is where the rub comes. And this is where vision can help you overcome the reticence to step back and push back in ways we've talked. 

So how does that happen? Well, in the church, I served in Southern California, I've shared some of that. And so we looked at some of our values and we realized that they had to change. There were traditions that were very important in that church, some of the traditions involved the church building and what went on in various places in the church building. Some of them involved programs. For instance, in my tradition, you know, we recognize years and years ago that we needed something to do for children, right, we wanted to be part of training children in the knowledge of what God wanted for them, that they were loved by God, and that they were precious, and God wanted them to respond to that love in meaningful ways. So we were going to build a children's program, which involved Sunday school, of course, but then we did something that we saw happening elsewhere, Boy Scouts, but we didn't trust Boy Scouts as an organization. So we created our own and called it Cadets. And then we created one for girls that was called Calvinettes it became Gems. Now, good programs, good programs, good people involved in them. But we realized that nobody identified with them, anybody who was coming in from the community that was becoming joining our church, anybody that was connected with various of our small groups or mission groups that were out in the church, if you talk to them about Cadets, they wouldn't know what that was. But they knew Boy Scouts. And so we were going to make some decisions that were going to change how these things were perceived, and how they were administered. So the new value was going to be relevant to our community. That involves worship. I'll talk about that in a moment about that. And, and it created a bit of a push. When we decided we got into our new facility, we relocated, and we decided that we were going to invite some of the leaders of Boy Scouts, who had joined our church to hold their meetings in our building, free of charge, open up our building to them. In fact, we had a whole section of our campus at that point that was dedicated to ministry with kids with boys. And so there were power tools and other stuff that they can use. But we said we're gonna open that to the Boy Scouts, because that's more relevant to our community than our traditional group. Now, the group that was the traditional Cadet group, or they rebelled, they didn't like it at all, it took a long time for them to come on. But each time, we're talking about the fact that this wasn't my decision, it was a decision based on our vision to become more relevant to become people who are reaching out into this new community where we were coming. And we were inviting people, and in fact, Boy Scouts was going to feed into that because these families we expected will come join us. Once that they experienced the good people that we had involved there, they become part of our church. So that's a change in values. 

So you’ve got to look at your values; you’ve got a vision, and then look at your values in terms of vision. In our church, we were closely identified, as I said earlier, with a Christian school in the community. We were supporting a church of that in other words, we helped families who couldn't afford the tuition to pay the tuition so that they could send their kids to the Christian School. We were listed on the Christian school materials as one of the supporting churches of that school. We had money set aside in the budget to support the Christian School. The majority of families at that point in our church, sent their children to the Christian School. And we said, We've got to change that. If we're going to fulfill our vision of becoming a lighthouse in this community, we can't have people coming in as they were, and saying, oh, man, to really be part of this church, you've got to send your kids to the Christian School. Now, some made that choice, and that was fine. But we wanted everyone to feel welcome. And so we began to talk more about the value of being a church for the community. And having new people you become part of that. And some people who even out of mission and vision left the Christian school to have an engagement in the public schools, teachers who are in the public school system, leaving the Christian school system to teach in the public school system, so that we could have a greater impact there have a way in to share the good news, and that very important part of the broader culture of our community. So that was a huge change, ethnic change, as we looked at our community, we found that it was 53% Hispanic, and the number of Anglos was going down. And we looked at our congregation said, you know, what, we're mostly white. Now, that's a monoethnic group is normal in church in the United States. In fact, there's a church growth principle called the homogenous unit principle, and that is that people gather with people who are like them. And others have criticized that saying that, you know, Sunday morning is the most segregated time in the in the church in the United States, because people gather with their own groups, ethnically, but we looked at our community, we began to get a vision of creating a multi ethnic church, a variety of ways of doing that of inviting people in of creating strategies with this new value and new vision, creating strategies that will allow us to make inroads into other ethnic groups. And that resulted in eventually a Hispanic church, that was meeting in our community, and we begin to do things together. And gradually, as some people became more comfortable with English, and their children became more comfortable with English, they would join our church community. But it meant a change in values. That we aren't about being white, we're about believing being believers. 

One of the huge changes was what was known as the worship wars, the old music to contemporary music. Now, we had a very good worship team and experience and staff and worship. But our worship was very, pretty traditional. We sung out of a couple of hymnals, we had a choir that sang in robes, we did all kinds of things like that. But we said, you know, if we're going to be relevant, people don't hear this kind of music out in the world. And we're trying to win the world. So what's relevant to them, and we began to have people listening to that music and coming back and reporting about it doing studies, surveys in our community to say, what kind of music do you listen to, and start saying, we got to have that kind of music here, so that when they come in, they find that we are relevant to them, we are important to them. And so we went through a short period of time of introducing it, I made some mistakes. When we talked about change theory, I'll talk about some mistakes I made in that regard. But these are the kind of value changes that are necessary. 

So after you do the vision, and the values, you look at those, what's the vision now what values have to change in order for us to get there, because the vision is now going to rule the values, then you start looking at focus areas within the church. So what are going to be the areas that have to be thinking about strategies in order to accomplish that vision and live out the new set of values? I'll give you some examples for us in a church, here are just some of the focus areas worship that department, children's ministry, youth ministry, outreach, or missions, a local and international preaching you're preaching is going to be changed as a result of the vision as a result of renewed values.

So what does that look like? Well, let's say some part of the vision is to see 100 people come to faith in the next year through our ministry. Now, that's a huge goal statement. But it's also a visionary statement saying, You know what, we're going to lose our ingrown character, and we're going to become this outreaching and receiving body of believers. We're going to do that by setting this goal out there that we want 100 people to come to faith; that's part of our vision for this next year or next two years, the next three years. 

So what does that look like for focus areas? Well, the core value is we're going to be an outreaching ministry. We call it Relevance Reaching Out These are things are important to us. And this is going to guide our choices for the next years. So in the area of worship children's and Men's Ministry, for instance, worship means things like, we're going to give an invitation regularly. We're not going to assume, anymore, that everybody's sitting there is a believer. In fact, we're encouraging our people, we are training our people, we're reminded our people, we're challenging our people, to be inviting others to come into worship, to be engaging them in their communities. It meant making music relevant and inviting. It meant holding up the value of being an outreaching ministry in worship. And so when people would come to us and say, We don't like what you're doing, we say, Yeah, but this is why we're doing it. And we preach on relevant topics within the light of Scripture. And so occasionally, we would preach on those things like the family, because that was a huge felt need back then. 

Now, this is important. Because if you are able to articulate your vision and your values well, then when you get into these kinds of areas where you have to make decisions. And you're doing things that people don't like, it gives you a reason to respond, and people will respond better that way. I have in mind a delightful couple, who are now in their 90s. If they had their choice, they would be worshiping probably an Episcopal Church. And what I mean by that is a highly stylized liturgy, a liturgical kind of worship. I know that's not true in many Episcopal churches anymore, but that's what they liked. They liked the organ. And occasionally, they would go there, but they were avid supporters of our church. Why? Because they would say, we don't really like this for us. But we're doing it because we want them to come and know Jesus Christ. And so as you're making strategic plans, and you're saying, This is what we're going to do, they'll say, Okay, I recognize that, I reckon, because I bought into the vision. And so this is the way it works. 

In the Outreach Department you're going to have to train people in evangelism, because not everybody is going to come in. And you don't want to be just being attractional ministry, we want to be out in the community, so training people to lead their neighbors to faith in Jesus Christ, to engage their neighbors, and then events that touch the community. That may be change things for your church; it's a little bit controversial when we decided on one Sunday, a year initially, to cancel our worship service. Instead, we asked people to gather together and go out and serve the community. And so we each had blue t-shirts, and it was called Day to Shine. And we would gather at church, we'd just do a brief thing, gathering in our teams praying for the day, and then be sent out on Sunday morning, to go out and serve in the community. There were some people who hated that. I mean, it was unbelievable to them that we would cancel a worship service, because that was such a powerful, powerful part of our culture, powerful part of our tradition. And yet, as we began to explain it they'd say, it's not for me, I'm not going to leave the church, but I'm going to church somewhere during that day. And so I would tell my friends in ministry around, be watching, on that first Sunday in May, you could expect some of our people. But what happened was, we got a reputation in that community over several years, that involved people coming to us, just because they saw our passion for the community. You know, one man's story is probably fairly typical of what happened. He was on Sunday morning, what he did is go to the coffee shop, and he would take one of his kids and he'd sit and have coffee and have a muffin with one of his kids, and they would talk and they're on the way to the coffee shop that day in our town. And as he's traveling, he sees he's traveling by a city owned group of shops with docks by them. And he sees a group of people in blue shirts, just cleaning up, putting down mulch, planting new flowers, that sort of thing. Drives further and he goes by the beach. So we're a beach town here in Michigan. And he sees another group of blue shirts are just picking up the beach and pulling up the snow fences that are put down for the winter, and getting it all ready. And then he drives around and he's heading up the street. And he sees another whole group, which is putting mulch on a bike path. And he's so curious what all these blue shirts, he's thinking, are these a bunch of convicts out there. What is that? And so he stops and he goes to a group of blue shirted people and he says, Who are you people anyway? And the man said, Well, we're from Covenant Life Church, and this is something we do, we're committed to this community. And so we cancel our worship service, because we said, it's more important that we be out here today, then that we be there gathered together. And the guy was so impressed that he went home talked to his wife, and said we've got to check out this church. And in fact, he became part of a church plant. Few years later after that but he came became part of us. Because he saw service, it became so much that we are identified with a community that the city we are part of Grand Haven, Michigan, hired or paid 12 of their workers to work with us on various projects within the city. So we had like 6-700 people going out to 30-40-50 different projects, all around our region, from raking leaves, to painting things to working in the schools, being by the hospital, a variety of things in the nursing homes. It was an affirmation of our value, our new value. It was an affirmation of our vision. So outreach would be important that department developing strategies for becoming more relevant in our community, children's ministry, offering parenting training events outside the church. 

I put in there the example of Central Wesleyan Church, Jack Lynn was a consultant who used to be executive pastor there, and we hired him at one point. And he tells about the time when they were looking at their middle school ministry. And they were averaging about 200 kids. And they began thinking about what does it mean, to be more connected with our community, they were looking to that value kind of statement. And as a result, they changed some of their practices. And they decided that instead of gathering in the church, where they had about 200, people gathering, they said, What happens if we put this out in the community? And so they identified eight different places. Now there's a price to pay. Now all of a sudden they had transportation issues, getting kids here to there, they had training of leaders issues, because now the paid staff couldn't be in all eight places. They have issues of parents reticence etc. But they did it eight people, they have 200 people, when they started gathering regularly, by the end of that year, they'd grown by 35%. To 270, kids regularly gathering, that kind of thing. So strategizing, how can we do this better, and in children's ministry, training volunteers, in welcome, etc. Now, that's all part of it. And then you get the focus areas, and then you move on to goals, specific goals in each area. So if you've got staff or volunteers, this is a tough one. This is well known stuff. 

So, I'm just going to go through it quickly but you need smart organizational goals. A goal must be smart. That means asking questions like who, what, where, when, which, why, you know, who's going to do it? What are they going to do? Where are they going to do it? When are they going to do it? Which of the choices are they going to do? Why are they going to do that instead of something else, that's what it means to be specific in the SMART acronym. 

And then they've got to be measurable. So that, you know, when that goal is reached, it can't be just a general statement of, well, we want to become more welcoming. That's not a goal. That's a desire, it will be nice, but it's not a goal, our goal would be, you know, we're going to recruit and train an intergenerational group for people to welcome at the doors. And then certain people we're going to recruit and train by such and such a day, this number of people, and we're going to train them to be people who follow up on visitors, etc. So some measurable you know, when it's reached, and you know, when it's not reached. 

It's got to be achievable. In other words, it's within the realm of the possible. I like that, quote, "undersell over deliver" that's written by a man originally coined by a man who owned a whole group of car dealerships. And his was different. He said, because in the typical car dealer in the United States, what you do is you over promise and under deliver. In other words, a salesman will promise the world to people to get them to buy the car, and then they'll find out the problems later, when they find out that the dealer can't quite deliver on the kind of service they said that they deliver. But he said he flipped that around and undersell, but once they sold, they would make sure these people were passionate about what happened, that they were there was an over delivery when they were asking questions, they would more than get them answered. Said that was the secret to repeat sales and that sort of thing. Well, it's true here to. The goals have to be achievable. You don't put out a goal that you're not going to reach, you're not even going to come near; you got to reach a goal that's achievable so that you can have a short term win that you can celebrate. 

And then they've got to be real, realistic. In other words has been done before somewhere else and you've got to be able to say you don't yet this is doable, look so and so did it. We used to talk about benchmarking certain other ministries and churches. 

And then finally, the T is in Smart is to be as time limited. Here it is in our table specific what will be accomplished what actions will you take measurable, what data will measure the goal? How much how many how well, it's achievable? Is the goal doable? Do you have the necessary skills and resources to do it, it's relevant. How does the goal align with the broader goals of the ministry? And why is the result important? And then it's got to be time based. What is the timeframe for accomplishing the goal? Now you notice, in this one, the R is not it's listed as relevant where in other things, it's listed out differently from that, it's listed as realistic. So here, it was relevant. Just want to point that out. 

Here's another way, you know, the criteria specific, it's precise, simply written, easy to understand, even for somebody with a basic knowledge of the process, etc. You know, you get all that here's, here's a table you can use, draw that on paper and say, okay, and this area of our ministry, what's the goals? What are the goals for this year, for this three years, and then for this year, what action is going to be taken? Who's going to do it, when is it going to be done by etc. Now, all of that is just to say, that's the pattern for strategic planning, starting with the vision and working it down to the goals that are going to carry out the vision. Now next time I'm going to show you a different way that you if you've had the vision in place for a while, another way that you can go about strategic planning. So see you next time

Strategic Planning Part 2

Welcome back. Last time, we looked at a model for strategic planning. And you'll notice this session is entitled, Strategic Planning 2. Again, we're in that part of the model that goes beyond vision now to prayer and planning and how this has taken place within your leadership process. So prayer and planning. And the last time we talked about strategic planning, and how it starts with a certain kind of vision. So you develop your vision, and then you look at your values, the values of the culture you are in, and you decide which of those need changing. And then you develop focus areas, you look at where, who needs to take action in order for the vision to become reality. So in a church, it's, you know, the various departments in your, your ministry, it might be something else. But you look at those, and then you begin developing goals for each of those areas. And we talked about smart goals and what those look like. So today, I want to look at the fact that there are many of you who are involved in ministries or churches or various nonprofit organizations, or wherever you are, there are some of you who have had a vision that you've been working with for a long time. And now it comes time to just look and do that next strategic plan. So you've been doing this vision thing. But now, the other strategic plan has run its course, you've, you've maybe reached 80% 90% 100% of your goals that were developed within three to five year period. And so now you want to redo all of that, how in the world, you make the next strategic plan. That's what I want to talk about during this session briefly. 

And to begin with this man. And notice, it's Max Dupree, I've quoted him before. Max DePree is a long time businessman here in this West Michigan area. But he's known throughout the world, for producing office furniture, he was the CEO for a company here in West Michigan for a long time. And he's written several books on leadership, expert in leadership. But his great quote is "the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you, and then between the leader is a servant." So the first step in redoing a vision is to define the reality. 

Now, you have to do that in a couple of different ways. One, you have to do that inside. In other words, in the organization, what is the reality in the organization, and that would include some of the history and where you've been, probably some of the history where you've been in living out your previous strategic plan, some of it will be what's happening within the Ministry, what's happening, what has happened within the ministry. And, for instance, here's one church that I had some contact with a few years ago. And look what happened in their ministry, you'll just see the decline in numbers. Now the top line there represents the addition of the bottom two. So the blue line and this one are slightly purple. That blue line represents professing members. In other words, these are adults, or teenagers, who have come to a point where they have officially and publicly professed their faith. The next line, the red line, down on the bottom, represents baptized members. In my tradition, we baptize children, and then we teach them as they grow, and hope that they will become covenant keepers, when they become teenagers, or shortly thereafter, they'll make a choice to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. And so those two together are the top line. Now, you'll notice many questions that come out when you do this. This is a 15 year graph of their officially reported membership statistics. And I had access to this and so did this and talked with the pastor of this church. And we looked at what's your reality? Now a lot of questions you don't like, say what happened 2006 to 2007, when you've got that huge plunge of that graph there. What happened in 2009, when there was a slight uptick in 2008, and 2009. You know what happened with the uptick in 2015 2014 to 15. What happened there, you'd ask those kinds of questions to try to ascertain reality. But the big reality, looking at a graph like this is that this church is dying. It's only one small step from death. They've gone from about 450 people total, down to a total of a little over 150, a drop of almost two thirds in 15 years. This church does not have a long life to go. That would be one of the first things that I would say to them. And in fact, it was something I did say to them, to the pastor and a couple of elders: you are dying, you're dying. So that would be one way of doing defining the reality inside. 

Now, here's another church. You'd ask a lot of questions. Well, what happened in 2009? Anyway, what that huge 2009 to 2010, wow that was a huge growth time, you know what happened in 2013 to 14 with that decline I happen to know, because this is the church that I served. And this is again defining, you know, professing members and baptized members and the totals. Now, the totals, now I can say what happened in 2013 was two things. One, we had a failed building proposal, we proposed a building project to the church and it was voted for, but people didn't vote with their money. And so we had to come back to the drawing table. And at the same time, there was a new ministry, exciting ministry, exciting church that opened up in our community. And so we had a little over 100 people go and join that other church during that time. So you say, Wow, that's, that's significant. The earlier drop, you can say there was a recession in this community back then, that was the great recession. And so we had people moving out of the community, far greater numbers than we're moving in. So you just look at some of those things. What happened in 2016, to 2017, that there were those drops? in ministry, you look at those kinds of things to have to find the reality inside; you might want to define the reality in a different way. 

How many customers? Are you receiving? You know, how many people do you have working on these accounts? How many account are they working on? How many subjects are they addressing? You know, what are people's job descriptions, those are all kinds of things of defining the reality inside which jobs are relevant, which are not all of those kinds of things are defining it inside now in the church. 

In our church, we also defined it in terms of the reveal survey that was put out by Willow Creek many, many years ago now. And they talked about the fact that there are four steps for people who are coming to faith and growing in their faith. And our mission statement was to help each other take the next step in our relationship with Jesus Christ. And so we define what are those steps, and we, we defined it other ways, but then when Willow Creek came out with this, we use their system. And we said, here are the steps, exploring Christ. In our church at that time. 10% of the people who are attending our worship services regularly, were not believers. They were still exploring Christ. they were checking him out. 44% had crossed the bridge into belief, and they were now growing in Christ. In other words, they were learning about prayer, and they were learning scripture, and they were learning. You know how God answers their prayers. 25% were close to Christ. In other words, scripture reading was normal for them. Prayer was normal for them, they found God answering their prayers, often they were serving Christ. And then the Christ centered people, were able to say my relationship with Jesus is the most important relationship in my life. It guides everything I do. 21% of our church. 

Now, as we began to look at the defining of reality inside, we began looking at those things. And that became part of our strategic plan. Because we said, how do we move people along? From exploring Christ to growing in Christ? We've got to have strategies and goals for doing that. What kind of activities can we take in our strategic plan? For those who are going from growing in Christ to close to Christ? What do we do for those people that are going to help them take that step of growth, because that's an area where people often get stuck, they come to faith, and they just kind of exist for periods of time. And then how many people go from close to Christ to Christ centered? We don't want people getting stuck there anywhere, either. Christ centered people are characterized by a willingness to give their life away in service of Jesus Christ. Now, it's easy to get stuck. 

Now, there's an old story, I suspect it's true. It was in a school. And one of the teachers was promoted, who had been there five years, was promoted into the administration. And another teacher in the same department came to the superintendent furious and saying wait a minute, he's only got five years experience, I've had 25 years of experience, and the superintendent looked at her says, You have not had 25 years of experience, you've had one year of experience 25 times. 

While sometimes if you apply that to this graph, people get stuck in the area of growing in Christ, have the same experience over and over and over again. So we've got to have strategies that help them take that next step. And so we developed those so you define reality inside and you also define reality outside what is the broader culture in which you are living? And how do you make plans in that regard now, sorry for the small print for this, but this is just some of the population as we were looking at a strategic plan in 2014. You'll notice that the population of our community was growing. In fact, from 1990 to 2000, it had grown well, an annual growth rate that was healthy. And it continued to grow from 2000 to 2009, there was a percentage of growth rate there. And it was growing again projected to continue to grow through 2014. And in fact, had, and so the population percentage was growing from 16 1/2% in that first part to 7 - 8%. And then 5%, projected growth, and we knew it was a growing community that meant people are going to be moving in, there are going to be changes, how do we connect with those people? 

What kind of households are we going to have? And how many exist? What about the ethnic makeup of our community. And if you looked at those numbers, you can see the percentages and how they're changing. And you find that, unfortunately, we live in a pretty white community, which is just starting to experience some ethnic diversity. We looked at the generations and saw the percentages of each age group. And then we looked at our church and said, How do we compare to the community? And what do we have to do? And we found out some very important information, and that is the number of children were on the decline in the community. And we had just built a building for children's ministry. So we said, how is that going to impact us? As we do our ministry? Do we scale back? Do we rededicate part of that building to something else, and we decided that we should keep that building the way it was projected. Because what we figured and turned out to be true, is that people love their children. And they desperately want them if they're a believing family, to grow up around other Christians and grow up with Christian teachers who are going to model faith with them and for them. And as some of the churches in our community were growing smaller and smaller, people began to look for a church with a thriving children's ministry. And so he said, Yep, we've got to continue to put resources into children's ministry. But it created discussion based on what's happening in the community, we find that there's a huge growing number of retired people, we are becoming a retirement community. And in fact, 22% of the community is over 65. Now, we haven't done much in living out ministry to those people. So how are we going to strategize to reach all of those people who are buying a condos in our area in usually condos, to which they retire. And we found various ways to minister to them. For instance, we found out that many men who sell their homes and move to a new area, one of the things they get rid of is their tools. And so we happen to have a full service wood workshop on the third floor of our building, the long story about how that developed as a ministry, but we decided we can do something. So we partnered with a community organization that has a broad base of membership, that's in the retired community 55 and above. And so we partnered with them, they made it known that on a certain night, we were going to have a project night, and just invite anybody to come. There'd be a slight cost for materials, but anybody could come. And so somebody in our church had caught this vision was going to head this up. Those are the kinds of things of making plans related to finding out what's the reality outside. And at the basis of this, we began talking about intergenerational worship and intergenerational experiences, realizing that in the typical church, we segment the population, right the children meet during the worship service over here, adults meet in the worship center, middle school meets here, youth, high school meets over here, and we segmented we said, what if we did an intergenerational thing where in some small groups, we were combining various age groups, where we had older people mentoring kids to grow in their faith, what if we could actually accomplish that, but it grew out of looking at the population. We looked at our population, and we found that there was a growing number of people with special needs children. In fact, only 8% of those families that had grown up that had a special needs children in their family, only 8% of them attended church because it was distracting. And we had a little bit of experience with this because we had some families who had autistic children who were on the autism scale attending and we had made accommodations for them in worship. We said what if as we did, specifically targeted goals and plans, strategic plans that would make our church a place where those families could come. And so we created a ministry called Special Treasures and it thrives, it's been growing by leaps and bounds. In the five years we had a staff person who is passionate about this and took this on. And what happened was families were so grateful to us. I remember serving communion once we were doing communion where people would come up individually or as families to have communion, and I was serving communion to this one couple, and the man grabbed my arm, and he said, I just want to thank you, says, This is the first time that my family has been able to worship together since this child was born. And we had an impact in the name of Jesus. But the plan for it came out of looking at statistics, and looking at the strengths we have as a congregation. So you look internally, you look externally, and then you gather your teams, and you do three exercises. 

Now, again, this relates to the former one, in that you've got various focus areas, right? So children's worship, outreach ministries, care ministry, you name it, you've got these various areas of emphasis. Men's Ministry, women's ministry in some places. And so you gathered teams together volunteers and staff, probably, and you have a time where you're going to be talking about vision; now could be talking a variety of ways about vision, but you share this information with them. Certainly you share it with the elders of the church, and those who are in significant decision making positions. You share it. And then you work through some exercises with them. One is, what are we doing now? What could we be doing? And what should we be doing? Now it's easy to make a list of everything we're doing now. And that's rather revealing because you realize you're doing a lot of stuff. And sometimes it reveals that you're doing some stuff that isn't really effective anymore, in attaining the vision, and the vision of becoming a church, that blessing the community, etc, we found some of those kinds of things. What are we doing now? What could we be doing? You know, what are things right now that we could be doing with just a little bit of diversion of some resources? What could we be doing that we could do? We just haven't thought of it before. And then what should we be doing? What are things like the Special Treasures came out of that department. What should we be doing to make a difference in this community, and in our church body? Now you'll find all sorts of things that come about in that kind of conversation. What are we doing? What could we be doing? What should we be doing? And then after you've done all of that, you start making strategic plans. And again, if you've got staff, that's a wonderful place for to engage them. If not, you probably have to do it as a team of volunteers. You start thinking of strategic planning, based on those last two, what could we be doing? What could we be doing? 

Now, our church, one of our great growth engines was a ministry called Bounce Around. And it was just came from the idea of a couple of women in our church would experience this elsewhere, where they had a time where they just brought preschool children, mothers and other caregivers, grandma's grandpa's, would bring a care their children, preschool children for time of exercise a time of play. So we bought it didn't cost us much at all. We bought some bounce houses, when we talk about what could we be doing bounce houses. And we opened up our children's ministry facility on Thursday mornings, air conditioning is on in the summer, heat is on in the winter, bring your kids, and the kids will be running and people from the community came in droves. And they would check us out because their kids were used to the children's ministry. So on Sunday, they could come and feel comfortable the kids could. So the parents began to come to our church as a result, but it came out of this kind of strategic planning of, what could we be doing? And then to think outside the box, you know, not just what could we or should we be doing? But let's think outside the box. Let's think of something. That's how Special Treasures came for us. But that wasn't on our radar. And yet, as we looked at things we looked internally, we looked externally, we looked at the passions of a couple of staff members who had children with special needs, and began to think out of the box about what could this ministry look like. And as they think about today, they've got all kinds of new things that they're thinking about because they continue to think outside the box. And in those terms. 

So that's exercise one, exercise two is to look quantitatively and qualitatively at who you are. And sometimes you look at things like this: name five qualitative, and five quantitative statements about where you are now, and where you want to be in five years. Now, that might be a little difficult. Here's some directions I gave to our church. A qualitative statement, by definition, is one that defines a quality, something of who we are of the nature of what we're doing. And a quantitative statement describes the quantity a number. I know that's too simple. I suspect some examples will work best. For instance, worship. Five years ago, qualitative. We were engaging people in worship they connected to what we were doing in worship, we were appealing to multiple senses. We would often have times after a message where people would come and apply that by, you know, burning incense, although that got to be a difficulty for some people; or they write something out or they would smell something or they nail something to the cross or we would burn sins, that sort of thing. We'd have them available that way quality music five years ago, qualitative. And then five years ago, quantitative we were averaging about 400 in worship, at a budget of about $30,000, we had about 60 volunteers, so five years ago, and that was, this was done back in about 2011. 

And then we look five years ahead, what is it going to look like? Well, we still want to be doing those top things in engagement, but we want to be doing more in video. So how are we going to get there? W0e want to use capitalize on that means of communication. Five years quantitative, we want to be 600-800 in worship, and then later it went from 800 to 1200, that we want to be in worship. And the budget went from $30,000 to $65,000. In that five year period, 60 volunteers went to 120. You get the idea? You know, where are we now? Where are we going to be quantitatively and qualitatively in five years. Children's Ministry, you know, five years ago, when a focus was on parental involvement organized around small groups, kids to engage in big worship. In other words, they came to the Worship Center. And they were dismissed partway through quantitative 3 part time staff, a budget of $50,000. 75 volunteers, and 39 staff hours and five years ahead. We looked at qualitative saying, You know what, we're going to put worship into the children's ministry so that there's not that time of coming here and going there. And we continued to be arranged, arranged around small groups. But we're going to make it far more professional, we hired professional help quantitative, full time person, three, or four part time people a budget of almost $100,000, $150,000, etc. quantitative and qualitative. That's the second one. 

And then the third one is rather a simple one. Writing Our history in advance, what are we going to look like? You know, by God's grace, we are going to be a church that looks like this in the future. Now, what we do is kind of a combination of these exercises is to get our elders and staff together on a Saturday and spend the day just looking at each one talking about where are we going, everybody having input, throwing it in there, and then I as a primary leader, would take that and write that in a plan. With all of the statements, the goal statements about, you know, here's what we are going to do, here are the goals, here are the ways that we're going to do it, and then the departments have to come up with the SMART goals, etc. 

So here's another way of finding out what God is calling you to do. It adjusts your vision, revises your vision a little bit, but doesn't change it. That's the important thing. You're living out the vision. But now you're checking in and create a new strategic plan. Do these things and you'll become more effective and living out of place that God has put you being an impact in the place God has put you when your ministry or you as an individual