Video Transcript: Completed Actions

Welcome back. We're continuing in our study of developing great commission  skills. We're going to be moving with this session into a skill topic called  completed actions. Now the skill that we're seeking to develop here is the skill of setting objectives and establishing accountability. Now as we move into this  particular session, we're really making a deeper dive into that idea of  accountability. How are we going to make accountability happen? Well,  accountability is greatly enhanced when our great commission objectives are  viewed as completed actions, completed actions, rather than as just hopes or  dreams or even targets, when we use, when we use this idea of completed  actions, we're stating things in past tense. Now, what does that mean? What  does it mean that we're working in past tense? Well, what it means is that these  things have already been done. So that's when we're going to give ourselves  credit for taking a step in terms of this particular objective. Is, when is that  objective actually done? When is it a completed action? And that's when we're  going to mark that off. Now here is a principle that I would like for you to  consider. What's important is what is accomplished, not what is intended. Let me say that again, what's important is what is accomplished, not what is intended. I  think you you might agree with this, that the idea of having good intentions, it's a helpful sentiment, but until we actually do something that creates an  accomplishment that we're going to describe as a completed action, that  intention really doesn't do much for us. Intention doesn't move the needle.  Completed actions is what moves the needle. You know, we we have that  expression in our culture, actions speak louder than words. Well, I want to take  that one step further, and I want to say that completed actions speak louder than words. When the action is completed, that's when we're really making some  noise. Now, a tactic that is purposeful in pushing toward accomplishment of  great commission objectives is the use of the past tense articulating desired  outcomes as completed actions. Now, I think I've probably said that four or five  different ways now, but I really I just want this to sink in. Completed actions is  where the action is. Now. Let me show you how this works when we're looking  at setting a an approach to objectives. This is what it looks like on the to do list  approach. We might list something like recruit five new group leaders. That's on  our list of things to do, but putting it on that list, intending to do these things will  not get the job done. So here's a better way of phrasing this, using the  completed action approach. The way we articulate this particular action is  recruited five new group leaders, and you'll notice that on our list we include the  date that this particular action was completed. Now I want you to imagine, you  know, a strategic plan, where steps have been laid out in the form of completed  actions that need to be taken. Each of those actions, including a space to list the date of completion, the date completed. Now there are some actions that will be  consecutive, like we have to get this done before we can do that. We have to do  that before we can do the next thing. So some of these will be in order of the 

order in which they need to be completed. Stated in consecutive orders. There  are other actions that might need to be taken where the order of the action isn't  particularly important. So those might be a little bit more varied. We can do one  

ahead of the other, or vice versa. These are working concurrently rather than  consecutively. But you'll have to decide, you know, how you want to articulate  that in terms of keeping track. Now, I use this technique in a variety of ways to  push progress forward. So let me. Let me share with you one example. I'm  currently working with a number of churches. Altogether, there are 10 churches  that have been part of this particular project. It's called the Go project. You'll  notice that the word go is used a great deal in the nomenclature of our training  material and our approach, and every time that people see the word go, we're  hoping they're going to think about the Go and make disciples mandate. So the  Go project is the Go and make disciples project. It's a revitalization process, and it's designed to be completed in about 18 to 24 months on average. Now, I will  have to say that with the coming of covid, this has changed somewhat. We've  had to be very flexible. Remember, in our vision questions, that second  question, what did God mean by that? Well, you know, covid was one of those  things that we bumped into that we didn't see coming, and we've had to adjust.  So had to adjust. So this idea of 18 to 24 months has been expanded in order to accommodate the effect of the pandemic on chronology of events, but  nevertheless, we're still moving through that project thinking in terms of  completed actions, some of which are consecutive, while others are concurrent.  Now, over the over the time frame of the project, churches will move through  what we call five markers, and each marker is further defined by a set of  checkpoints, checklists and outcomes. So just structurally, just picture that in  your mind, five markers. I'm not going to go into what the markers are and how  they work. You know that that's something that we might cover in another course altogether. But I want you to see the shape of this, the structure of it, five  markers, and each marker is broken down into a set of checkpoints checklist  and the outcomes that we are anticipating, and when it comes to these markers, these checkpoints, these checklists, we are going to be Tracking dates  completed now outcomes is another matter. Of course. They are produced by  the completed actions, so we don't need to assign dates to those. Now, this  information is captured on a document, a tool that we call the Go project,  roadmap tracker, you know as the name implies. The idea here is to track the  progress along the roadway of the Go project with these markers. So let me, let  me give you a little snapshot of a piece of one of these trackers, the Go project  roadmap tracker. Now the various things that are included on this are not  particularly significant for for our purposes with this video, but what I want you to notice is that, you know, what we've got here is a list. It's a checklist of  checkpoint outcomes, and we want to make sure that we are checking off the  checklist. And as it turns out, these particular actions that are being articulated 

here are moving consecutively from one to the other. The first one refers to the  Go leader team, the GLT. This is a team of people that is the leaders that are  overseeing the congregational project at large, this would be your your pastoral  staff, your elders, your senior leadership, that that the people that are going to  be part of that go leader team have been identified and they have been  mobilized to accomplish the things they need to accomplish, even though the  Go leader team will not be directly involved in articulating vision and strategy,  they need to be there to be in support of vision and strategy, and they need To  play a leading role in helping the congregation understand the importance of the Go project and the necessity to move forward with it. So you see that that  particular action was completed on March the 15th, training for the Go leader  team in the four leadership dynamics revitalization conducted, okay, there's a  training piece to the regimen that the Go leader team needs to go through. In  this case, it works in two ways. On one hand, it can be a live on site training that usually encompasses a Friday night and all day Saturday or it's also delivered in a set of, I think it's seven video sessions, and that was conducted on July 25  check it off the list. Now the vision team is a team of people that will be very  hands on in discerning and developing the vision and later in casting vision and  creating ownership. So the action is that the vision team has been selected and  the vision team has been mobilized, meaning that they are now beginning to  hold their preliminary meetings. Our recommendation in working with the church is that the vision team be meeting together, preferably twice a month as a  minimum. The reason for that is that if you put too much time in between  meetings, people lose momentum, and they lose track of where they are in the  process. And so you know, when you have a meeting following a previous  meeting with a gap in between, a lot of times you have to spend half of the  meeting trying to figure out where you were when you left off last time. But I  have found that when, when groups that are embarking on an endeavor such as this, when they meet twice a month, they're meeting often enough that whatever the discussion was, whatever the decisions made happen to be, these remain  fresh, so you can pick up where you left off, meeting to meeting. Now I favor,  personally, this is just a sideline tip. I favor frequent meetings of short duration,  rather than infrequent meetings that are stretched out to be very lengthy in  nature. And then finally, the prayer teams to support the vision team have been  recruited and they have been mobilized, meaning that the prayer teams that are  supporting the work of the vision team are now routinely meeting and have their  schedule laid out. They're getting together, and they are praying the prayers of  support in support of the work of the vision team, and you'll notice all of these  have a date during which these tasks were completed. Well, this is how you  move a project forward. This is how you make sure that what was intended has  actually been accomplished, and it's in the accomplishment that progress is  actually made. Again, notice the value of using past tense, very important to 

keep track of that it's in the completion of each action, that progress is made to  be very blunt, very candid, intended actions or partially completed actions don't  count. And yet, I've seen numerous times where you know a vision team that's  keeping track of the tracker is starting to check things off the list before they've  

been completed, because they've been talked about, a plan has been put in  place for completion. But I'm telling you, you need to hold the line there so. You  need to stay the course and do not check off an action until it has actually been  completed. Now, there are numerous challenges to establishing accountability. I  can't list all of them here, but I do want to share several with you. First of all,  there is the culture of a particular church. Here's the thing, every church has a  culture. It may not be a culture that developed intentionally, a decision to craft a  particular culture that was followed through to actually create a desired culture.  The cultures that are typically present in a church are cultures that have simply  developed by default, the manner in which leaders conduct leadership, the way  that planning is done, the way that meetings are conducted, the way that  services, for instance, start right on time or maybe a few minutes late. You know, these things simply develop habitually over time, without necessarily planning  them to be that way. But you do, you do realize at some point, if you stop and  think about it, every, every church has a particular culture. Now there are many,  many churches that have a culture of not getting things done in a timely fashion. I have found, in my experience, having worked with dozens, perhaps hundreds  of churches, I find that this is more the rule than the exception. They just don't  get things done in a timely way. And there are reasons for that, but they're not  good reasons. It's just that the history of how the church conducts ministry is  loose in terms of time commitments. And there's always this feeling that, well, if  we couldn't get to it today, we'll get it next week or next month or next quarter or  next year or next whenever. But we're constantly allowing things to roll down the line, partly because we don't set a date of completion, and then we don't hit that  date. If we did have a date of completion in mind, it's very loose, and that can  be, that can be the culture of a church. It's important that we address decisions  that need to be made, progress that needs to be made toward Great  Commission, ministry as a matter of urgency, we have to somehow break out of  this mold of untimeliness so that we can make things happen in reasonable  amounts of time, establishing a sense of urgency. Now I want to share with you  a quote from a book by John Kotter. I think I might have mentioned him in a  previous session. He's a bit of an expert on helping organizations work through  change. He's got a couple of books in particular that are noteworthy. One is  called leading change. The other is called the heart of change. But both of these books include what Kotter refers to as the eight stage process of navigating  significant change. Now the first stage of the eight stage process is this,  establishing a sense of urgency. So let me share this quote with you.  Establishing a sense of urgency is crucial to gaining needed cooperation with 

complacency high, transformations usually go nowhere because few people are  even interested in working on the change problem with urgency low, it's difficult  to put together a group of people with enough power and credibility to guide the  

effort or to convince key individuals to spend the time necessary to create and  communicate a change vision. Now, Kotter is referring to business  organizations, but I dare say that this is equally applicable. To the church, how  the church functions, or, I might perhaps say, how the church dysfunctions.  Urgency is largely missing now. We should have a sense of urgency to serve  God. Well, we should have a sense of urgency to go and make disciples. When  Jesus, Christ, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, our Savior and Lord, has  commanded us to go and make disciples, we should have some urgency in how we approach that. But largely these are absent. So you know, first of all, there is  that culture overcoming the culture that likely is present in a particular church.  Now let's go look at a couple of other challenges to establishing accountability.  Number two, church leaders are inclined to set ministry apart from other  organizations or businesses. It's really kind of an interesting phenomenon that  many of the leaders in churches are folks that are leaders in whatever their  professional pursuits are in secular society. They might be owners of a business, work at a bank, be a school teacher, be a doctor, you know, be a construction  worker, a foreman, whatever it might be. You know, people are involved in in  leadership of all kinds of enterprises outside of the church, and they tend to be  effective leaders, and they tend to have that drive. Maybe we wouldn't describe  it necessarily as a sense of urgency, but they do have a sense of  professionalism, a sense of moving forward, a sense of following through and  getting the job done. But oftentimes, when they walk into the church, they take  all that and set it off to the side, thinking that, you know, the church is different.  The church is a spiritual enterprise. So we don't want to bring that  professionalism into the church. It's a it's a different vibe, it's a different feel, it's  a different atmosphere, it's otherworldly. And so very often, we don't apply the  same efficiency and effectiveness to how we lead in the church, to how we lead  anyplace else. And I want to suggest to you that that is a mistake and that that  can lead to to problems. Now. Number three, pastors and leaders are largely, if  not exclusively, working with a volunteer ministry workforce, a volunteer ministry  workforce. Now the volunteer ministry of the church is a wonderful thing that  people give of themselves and their time and their energy and their talent to  serving in the church is a wonderful thing, but because they're volunteering to do this, they're not being paid for it, we sometimes allow too much slack. We lower  our expectations of what people might might do with that volunteer position, but  we we reason that. Well, they're volunteers, but I want to challenge that thinking. Remember this. First of all, when people are challenged in healthy ways, they  tend to respond. They tend to rise to the occasion, and also we can't forget  about the fact that when we serve in the church, who are we serving? We're 

serving God. We're serving the Lord, God the Father, God the Son, God the  Spirit. Deserve our absolute best, even if we are working as volunteers. So we  want to make sure that we set the bar high, that we appropriately challenge  people to step up, that we expect the same follow through, if not more so than  our than is expected of people out in their professional lives. We can't be slack  just because we're working in the church. If anything, we should level up now.  There are many. More challenges out there. We can't talk about all of them, but  to overcome those challenges which can be done, what we need to see is that  the kinds of behaviors, the kinds of follow through, the kinds of accountability to  assignments, to tasks, to accomplishment. It's got to be modeled by our leaders. Our leaders cannot expect people in the congregation to go places that they  haven't been themselves. So we must model those kinds of behaviors as  leaders and as leaders, we have to promote that model. We have to encourage  other people, we have to train other people. We have to hold other folks  accountable. If the key leaders want to shift the culture, new habits, new  disciplines need to be formed, and the bar of accountability can be and has to  be raised. Now I want to share another quote for you. This comes from a book  called The organized executive by Stephanie Winston. Now, again, this is a  marketplace book, but I think it applies. So let me share this with you. Keeping  track of yourself and others is the essential flip side of the action process. There  is no other way to be sure that commitments are honored, deadlines met, calls  returned and long term projects tracked through their various stages. Failure to  keep track can result in any number of serious consequences. Well, I think that  just speaks for itself. If we are going to engage people in meaningful Great  Commission ministry, we absolutely must infuse accountability into the process.  Now, remember what I said earlier in our session. What's important is what is  accomplished, not what is intended. Now this completes our video in regard to  completed actions. And I want to call your attention to our next session, which is  going to be directed toward the skill topic of calendar commitments. Part of  holding ourselves and each other accountable is to lean into the calendar and  make time work for us. So next time we're going to look into Calendar  commitments as we continue our study, setting objectives and establishing  accountability. So I pray that God will bless your efforts on his behalf, that you  would serve him well in the name of Jesus. Amen