Video Transcript: Ministry Clarity

welcome back. We're continuing with our study on working with staff and leaders as part of our course developing great commission skills. Now the particular skill topic that we're going to be looking at today is the skill topic of ministry, clarity.  Ministry clarity. Now, here's the here's the problem. The emphasis on ministry by programs often leads to programming silos in a church. Programming silos in  the church. Now, what are we talking about with ministry silos? We're talking  about the fact that all the ministries of the church might be operating  independently of each other. What what they're doing might be wholesome,  might be good, might be beneficial, but they're not unified. They're not pulling  toward a central, common, common, unifying core mission. And of course, the  way that we're approaching this is that that mission is going to be centered on  the Great Commission. So we want every ministry in alignment with that, and  that's going to require ministry clarity. So what's the solution? Well, two  dynamics will need to be present. First of all, the the all church or the whole  congregational ministry, must have unmistakable ministry clarity as such that all  ministries within the church are clear on their mission priority. Now, taking that a  step further, the ministry clarity of all church ministry must be centered on the  Great Commission, such that all ministries within the church are clear on the fact that their mission priority is the Great Commission. Now that has to be there for  a church to become truly a great commission. Church, you know, focus on  expanding the church, expanding the kingdom, growing the kingdom, maturing  people as we go and we make disciples. So let's take a look at a principle Great  Commission ministry. Clarity is a critical element of working with staff and  leaders. Effectively. You see, as we focus our attention on working with staff and leaders, if we want our all church ministry, our congregation wide ministry, to be  focused on the Great Commission. Then That, of course, has to be an element  of how we work with staff and leaders, all staff, all leaders, all ministry, all  everything within the church has to be crystal clear, crystal clear on the fact that  our central priority is the great commission that will give us ministry clarity. Now  there is a book out there that I use quite a bit in this regard establishing ministry  clarity. The book is called simple church, returning to God's process for making  disciples. Sound familiar? There are four elements that are emphasized in this  book, and those elements are clarity, movement, alignment and focus. So take a look at this particular quote from that book. To have a simple church, you must  design a simple discipleship process. This process must be clear. It must move  people toward maturity. It must be fully integrated into your church, and you  must get rid of the clutter around it, bingo. So let's take a look at these four  elements that are emphasized in the simple church discipleship process. The  four elements now clarity is described as starting with a ministry blueprint. In  other words, there is a plan of ministry, and that plan is to be shared by  everyone in the church, all staff, all leaders, all ministry areas a ministry  blueprint, and that blueprint is centered on Great Commission. Ministry 

movement is about removing congestion. There are no bottlenecks in the  progression of how people move through ministry. The movement through  ministry is smooth. I want you to think back to those levels of commitment. For  example, the way that people move from lower levels of commitment to higher  levels of commitment is smooth, without interruption. People are moving.  Ministries are moving, and everyone is pulling in the same direction. You might  think of this, I have one analogy that I use quite a bit in this regard, the idea of  the Viking ship, where you had up to 72 people that were manning the oars.  Now imagine that these 72 people were not pulling in the same direction or at  the same time, the same pace, the same consistency, but when you get all of  the oars in the water all pulling in the same direction at the same time, then the  ship moves quickly toward its destination. That's what we're talking about with,  with having clarity, having a ministry blueprint, and then removing congestion.  Movement is moving congestion so that there are no blockages. Alignment has  to do with maximizing the energy of everyone, and everyone is contributing to  that core mission, that core priority, which is the Great Commission, and we  have focus described as saying no to almost everything. Now my experience  has been that in the church, our tendency is to try to say yes to everything. We  try to think of all ministries as being equal, all people in the church, whatever  emphasis they might favor, we want to say yes to that? Well, that's a kind  sentiment and an inclusive sentiment, but it's a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe  for confused ministry. It's a recipe for splitting resources up to such a degree  that we don't have enough resources concentrated in the priority area of the  church. So clarity, movement, alignment, focus. Now I want to move deeper into  this idea of alignment for a moment, because alignment is something that is  central to the revitalization process that we have developed at the Go center  that depends heavily on alignment. So let me walk you through that. It's very  complementary to what Tom Rainer and Eric Geiger have done with simple  church when we look at the five alignment tracks for church vitality, here's what  we see. We start off with aligning Great Commission perception. Now the idea  here is that we're making sure that pastors and church leaders in terms of their  perception of themselves, that they have an accurate perception of themselves.  My observation is that many times, pastors and leaders of a given church don't  really have a an accurate perception of who they are, how healthy they are. they tend to think of themselves, perhaps as a church they used to be back in  whatever was the prime time of the church. They're not facing the reality of  where they are right now. Now, aligning perception answers the question, Where are we really we look into the proverbial mirror and see ourselves as we really  are and make an accurate assessment, my experience tells me that most  pastors, most church leaders, perceive their churches to be somewhat more  healthy than they actually are. So we're trying to bring that perception in  alignment with reality. Secondly, there is alignment with great commission vision.

The question here is, where do we want to be? Now we've talked quite a bit in  that very first skill about discerning and developing vision. So remember, vision  is not created. It's discerned. And when we discern God's vision for His church,  one of the key elements of that vision is the Great Commission. God has a  vision of a church that goes and makes disciples, that baptizes. that teaches  obedience. So we want to make sure that our vision for ourselves is in alignment with God's vision for us. Now understand that when we take a look at these first  two tracks, where are we? Where do we want to be? That typically identifies a  gap. There's usually a gap in between where we are and where we want to be,  and we're going to need to close that gap. So that's where we first move to  strategy aligning Great Commission strategy. We're asking the question, well,  how do we get there? How do we close that gap? How do we move from where  we are to where we want to be? Well, we develop our strategy, a great  commission strategy for how we're going to go and make disciples and baptize  and teach obedience, growing people in their faith. Now we move into aligning  great commission structure. This has to do with leadership. You know, how are  leaders going to lead us from where we are to where we want to be? We've  identified a strategy, but if we don't implement that strategy, we cannot move. So how are we going to lead? Who will get us there? Our leaders will get us there,  provided they lead us according to a great commission strategy that has  designed, been designed to move us from where we are to where we want to  be. And then finally, there's the aligning Great Commission people who will keep us there. Now you might need to really zoom in to think about this for a moment. Leaders, by virtue of their leadership, have the capacity to get us to where we  want to be, as long as they are faithful to the Great Commission strategy. But  how do we sustain that once we get there? Who's going to keep us there. How  is that going to be sustainable over time? Well, there are two bodies of people  that we have in view here. The first group I'm going to refer to as insiders. These are the folks that are with the church at the beginning of this new vision venture.  Well, vision will be cast, desiring to build ownership with that vision. And there's  going to be buy in that comes from our insiders, and they're going to begin to  commit themselves, theorists, realist pragmatists. They'll be committing  themselves to this great commission work of building the Great Commission  vision that reaches people and grows them in their faith. They have to be on  board for us to stay there. Remember, without the people, the vision will perish,  but also, if we truly stay faithful to our great commission vision, we're going to be investing more and more of our time and energy into reaching into the harvest  and bringing lost people into the kingdom, into relationship with Jesus, into the  church, and the church is going to expand? Well, we have to make sure that we  align these newcomers with the new vision, so that they are not just the  outcome or the product, if you will, of that new vision. They become as they  grow in their faith, they become participants, and the very people that we 

reached through our vision are now working with us. They're part of us in  reaching someone else. So that's how we put this together. That's how it works.  Now in this book, simple church, when you get to chapter five, that whole  chapter is devoted to clarity, starting with a ministry blueprint. And so I  encourage you to to take a look at that if you have the opportunity to do so well I want to move now back into giant worldwide their approach to leadership  development. They have some material that focuses on this idea of  organizational clarity. In our case. Ministry clarity, because we are a ministry  organization. So how do they do that? Well, we have a diagram that gives us the pathway that they recommend. And of course, there's a lot of overlap between  this diagram and the things that we've seen with simple Church, the things that  we've seen with the Go Center's five alignment tracks for church vitality, starting  with vision and mission. And the questions here are, is our vision clear and is  our vision our mission compelling? Do people understand what it is and is it  positioned in such a way that they might be able to own that vision and be  drawn in. Then there's values. We haven't spoken much of values, but the  question here is, Do people know and live the values of our church. Well, values and vision are very closely related. One, in a sense, feeds the other. You might  look at it this way, our vision tends to be a reflection of our values, if we value,  for example, commitment to reaching people with the gospel that's going to  contribute to our vision of being a great commission church. And if we have a  vision of being a great commissioned church that's going to fuel our value of  seeing lost people come to Christ and then subsequently grow in their faith, then we come to leadership. Are the roles and responsibilities clear at every level of  leadership? You know, this has to do with, you know, aligning structure is the  leadership in place? Are they clear on what they are to do, their roles,  responsibilities, clear at every level. At the next level, we have two things. We  have strategy. We have structure. Strategy is asking the question, how do we  win? In other words, what does effectiveness look like, what is it that we're  aiming at? What are the outcomes that we want to see, that we should see if we follow this very consistent, great commission path and our structure, do we have the right people, the right systems in terms of our leadership in place, and with  the giant diagram, they include the idea of capital. Do we have the right capital  in place? Well, in the church, we don't really talk that much about capital, but we do talk about finances and how finances are being distributed. Are they being  distributed in a way that is consistent with our great commission, vision and  values and strategy? Are we putting our resources behind our vision, behind our values, behind our strategy, and taking a step deeper from strategy, the big  picture of what we're going to do. What about our tactics? Those people that are going to actually be the boots on the ground that are moving our ministry  forward? Do they know what to do? Are they tactically trained and deployed to  execute the strategies that we have designed in order to fulfill our vision, our 

mission, in a way that truly reflects our values. Now, when all of these things are in place organizationally in the center, there are certain attributes that will  emerge. One of them is that our ministry will be simple, simple church. Our  ministry will be scalable in that it can expand upward, our capacity to minister  can expand and it will be sustainable. Remember that question, who will keep  us there? Well, the assimilation of insiders and newcomers led by leaders who  are attending to the strategy that fulfills the values and the vision and the  mission. That's how this organizational diagram works, and I think that it  provides a helpful guide for moving forward. Well, speaking of moving forward,  I'd like to take a look at. I'd like to take a look at another model that will help us  in the area of execution, an area of implementation of application. There is a  book out called the four disciplines of execution. Four disciplines of execution.  And the formula is 4DX, four disciplines of execution, 4DX. It's referred to as  4DX model. Now this book is written by three gentlemen by the name of  McChesney, Covey and Huling. Now Covey, this Covey is the son of Stephen  Covey, who gave us the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Now they describe outcomes of execution of implementation as lag measures, and  they describe the elements that lead to lag measures as lead measures. So let  me, let me explain how how that works for a moment. The lag measure is the  result of what the lead measures produce. So let me give you an example of  that. Let's say that there's a particular church that has an objective of expanding  its its small group ministry from five small groups to 12 small groups. Well, the  having 12 small groups with the 4DX model would be described as a lag  measure, and very often what what happens is, once a target, such as this, is  identified, that becomes the focus. And so when, when leaders are talking about their ministry objectives, they'll say something like, you know, 12 small groups at such and such a date, and their focus is on that group. Here's the problem,  focusing on that target will not cause that target to be hit. Hitting that target will  be the result of other actions that are taken. Okay? So for example, in order to  go from five small groups to seven small groups, one thing that we'll need to do  is recruit seven additional small group leaders. So under that lag measure of 12  small groups, we might list a different kind of objective. Recruit seven small  group leaders. Now in the language of 4DX, recruiting seven additional leaders  is a lead measure that will lead us to having 12 small groups, the five that we  already have, the seven new groups added together is 12 groups. So the  emphasis in terms of execution, in terms of implementation, the emphasis is on  the lead measure. We need to concentrate our focus on recruiting seven  leaders, because that is an action that once it's taken, it's going to contribute to  the lag measure, the measure that lags behind the lead measure of reaching our target. So I really, I really appreciate the 4DX model, because I do believe that  our tendency in the church is to focus on measures that are, in fact, lag  measures. Well, lag measures are outcomes. They're not causative, they're not 

catalytic. They don't make things happen. They're simply targets that we're  shooting for. It's the lead measures that create progress, so that distinction, I  think, can be very helpful in crafting how we move forward. Okay, so where are  we? I want to take a look, then at some lead measures that might lead us to  creating ministry clarity. See, we might think of ministry clarity as a lag measure.  We want to reach the place where we have ministry clarity. Well, how can we do that? Well, capitalizing on the giant organizational clarity model, some of our  lead measures might look like this, discerning a clear and compelling Great  Commission vision or mission, building great commission values into your staff,  your leaders, your congregation, defining strategy through the lens of what a  great commission win looks like creating a great commission structure that puts  the right people and systems and resources in place, training everyone in  executing his or her great commission tactical roles with effectiveness. So if you  follow through on the slide there in front of you, you see we're tracking with that  organizational clarity diagram from giant, from vision to values to strategy to  structure, all the way into tactical execution. That's we're connecting a lot of dots here, and I hope that you realize how strategically important this element is, and of course, it ties in to working with staff and leaders, because staff and leaders  are going to be the primary people who are leading this charge, the ones who  are getting us from where we are to where we want to be Now, these lead  measures are going to lead to your lag measures that are listed there in the  center of that organizational clarity diagram. The ministry will be simple, similar  to the Rainer Geiger approach of simple Church. The ministry will be scalable,  easy to expand as we increase our cadre of leaders and have greater capacity  to minister to more people. And then finally, it's going to be sustainable, because more and more of our congregation, our insiders, are on board. More and more  of our newcomers are fully on board. We have a vision, and we have the people  to back up that vision. Now, one final thing we're going to take a look at here.  We're going to take a look at another diagram from giant worldwide, this one has to do with creating a healthy culture. How do you create a healthy culture? Well,  they talk a lot about vocabulary that is expressed in visual tools that creates a  leadership language that impacts a leadership culture. Now this idea of  vocabulary and visual tools very important. These are the things that help to  reinforce all of these different concepts that we have been talking about the  formula looks like this, Vocabulary Plus visual tools, equals leadership language, and that language would help to establish or mature into a leadership culture.  Very, very important indeed. Now, as I have worked over the years in  revitalization, we have developed a certain vocabulary. One of the things that we talk about is the life cycle of a church. Now, if you can imagine a typical bell  curve in very simplistic terms, the upside of the church life cycle we refer to as  incline. It's that season of life cycle when things are expanding and growing,  then when we top off across the top of the life cycle, we refer to that as recline. 

The church has entered into plateau. It's in a maintenance mode. It's just trying  to hold on to what it has. And then, of course, down the backside of the life  cycle, we refer to that as decline. So we have incline, we have recline, we have  decline. Now that's just one example of a lot of vocabulary that we have poured  into our model. But whenever we begin working with a church, you know, we're  using that language over and over and over again until it starts to become the  vocabulary the lexicon of revitalization. And I've had so many pastors and  leaders over the years remark to me that we had given them a language by  which they could talk about these issues. In fact, I remember very vividly  speaking with a church leader once, and this person was telling me that they  were having a discussion about a certain ministry item, and a certain suggestion had come up that sounded good at the time, but then someone made this  remark. They said, Well, we realize that as much as we liked that idea, it really  was reclining behavior. You see, in that case, the vocabulary of incline, recline,  decline had become so embedded in the thinking of those church leaders that  they were actually using it in general conversation. That's when you know.  That's when you know that things are really sinking in now. Why is culture so  important? Why is culture so important? Well, let me share a couple of phrases  with you. One is this culture trumps strategy, and in a bit more colorful language. I've seen this phrase in multiple places. It says culture eats strategy for lunch,  and some sources attribute that particular phrase to business guru Peter  Drucker. Well, what are we saying here? Culture trumps strategy. Culture eats  strategy for lunch. All right, here's the thing, if all you have going for you is your  strategy, you've made some adjustments in your strategy, you're pushing toward Great Commission effectiveness, but you run into a problem, something  becomes uncomfortable, something doesn't look quite like you thought it might.  The congregation is seeing that. Wait a minute, I'm concerned about this. Maybe there's a person or family in the church that has gotten upset. Maybe someone  has been offended. For some reason, here's what tends to happen, whatever  the prevailing culture is will surface. Now, if that culture is the culture that existed prior to making this commitment to a great commission, vision and strategy, then the strategy is going to dissolve, and the dominance of culture is going to  essentially consume this new endeavor, this new movement. In other words, in  order for the new movement, the new vision, to be sustainable, there has to be a new culture that champions the new vision, so that when those negative issues  surface, When those barriers are crashed into, when those problems raise up,  the culture of great commission ministry is able to stay the course, culture  becomes an ally to the vision, rather than an adversary. Now here's the thing,  when strategy and culture become adversarial. Culture wins. So if your culture is the culture that used to be, the new strategy will disappear. If culture has  become a new culture that is great commission centered that culture will be able to uphold the new strategy and we're able to stay the course. Change in strategy

alone is not sufficient. There must be a change in culture now that wraps up our  discussion of ministry clarity. We are now turning our thoughts to our next  session, and when we get together next time, we're still going to be talking about clarity, but the issue won't be ministry clarity. It will be role clarity. So that will be  our skill topic for next time as we continue to consider working with staff and  leaders. Now I pray. That God will be with you as you continue to study, as you  continue to serve, as you continue to envision where great commission ministry  might take you in the name of Jesus, amen