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