Leadership Reflections

Well, the program review is now complete and it is time to figure out what to do with the results.  The process started with selecting which program to evaluate and went on from there with development of the theory of change and logic model, the literature review, and then the research.

On Monday the final report was presented to the board.  Although programs are a staff responsibility at CCCC, the board is always responsible for due diligence under any governance model and program evaluations are a good way to show they are doing their due diligence.  They help assure the board that our programs are effective and efficient and that our mission is actually being fulfilled through our programs.  If an evaluation cannot show a program is effective and efficient and moving the mission forward, then it should be re-designed or scrapped.

The leadership team has also reviewed the final report and is beginning the process of revamping the conference.  I don’t expect significant changes for the upcoming September conference, but I do expect several significant changes for the next conference.

You can download the final report, Conference Evaluation Report – Public, if you wish to see the extent of the work.  I think it reflects a fairly comprehensive program review.  Certain parts we have labelled ‘confidential’ either because they refer to information from outside sources that we are not at liberty to make public, or they refer to new initiatives that it is simply premature to make public.

This brings the program evaluation series of posts to an end.  My hope is that you will select a program, any program, and try it out.  Let me know how you do!

Special Invitation!

CCCC is in the midst of a major strategic review.  If you’d like to interact with us as the review progresses, please visit the Strategic Review Engagement website.  I want to open source the strategic review by having as many non-board, non-staff people engage with us as possible.  In this blog, I am writing about how to do a strategic review.  On the engagement website, I am posting in real-time about how we did it at CCCC as a way of helping you see how to apply these suggestions.  That website also has the results of our strategic review, and I am most interested in any comments you would like to make about them.

Strategic Statements

Here are a few considerations for developing the three major strategic statements I’ve previously described (values, mission, vision) and some suggestions for how you can discern them in a God-honouring way that is faithful to your Christian identity.  Our draft strategic statements are available on the Strategic Review Engagement website.

Values

Values should be assessed on two levels.  First there are the biblical values that should be present in every Christian ministry and then there are the other values held by the people called to serve together in one particular ministry.

As an example of biblical values that might apply to your ministry, in The Church At Work I developed four biblical values related to relationships between ministries (the book’s subject):

• Love – In John 13:34-35 Jesus commanded his followers to love one another and Paul affirms it in Romans 12:10;
• Order – From Genesis to Revelation, we see that God is a God of order, not confusion.  Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:40 and 12:16 is that “Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way….Live in harmony with one another;”
• Unity – Our God is one, and he is Lord of all.  Christ is not divided and neither should his church be divided (Ephesians 4:4-6 and 1 Corinthians 1:13); and
• Voluntary mutual submission – We see voluntary mutual submission modeled in the life of Jesus (who made himself a servant to his own followers) and made explicit by Paul (John 13:5-10 and Ephesians 5:21).

These values suggest a strategy of collaboration, consultation, and coordination with other ministries.  Your Bible study could lead to a different set of values that are significant to your ministry.  All biblical values apply to your ministry, but some are especially significant to your ministry’s work and should become your organizational values.  Whatever you do, don’t try to make every value an organizational value or you’ll just have a list of platitudes.  Every ministry is expected to be honest, so unless lack of honesty has been a problem for your ministry, don’t include it.

Values can also be developed by asking people associated with your ministry (past and present) what they think the corporate values are.  You might ask staff what would cause them to raise or lower their pride in being associated with your ministry as a way of discovering the ministry’s key values.  Here’s how I’ve asked about our CCCC values in the current survey:

We believe that before God has called CCCC to do something, he has called us first to be a Christian ministry. How we do our work is arguably more important in God’s eyes than the actual work we do. So before we get to God’s purpose for CCCC, we’re going to explore the Christian values that we live by.  As an example, I believe that we must demonstrate just as much care for the smallest ministry as we do for the largest.  Jesus paid attention to everyone, and so must we.

This is one question, but I will ask it several different ways to help you think about values from different angles:

- What values or aspects of CCCC would you NOT be willing to sacrifice for the sake of our mission and identity?

- What would you not give up regardless of what changes in society?

- What would you not give up even if we were penalized for holding those values, or were put at a disadvantage because of them?

- Which corporate values would you keep even if they produced no tangible benefit for CCCC?

 Here’s how we developed our values for CCCC in the current strategic review.

God’s Call

The starting place for discerning God’s purpose for your ministry is to ask how people came to be associated with your ministry, since God calls people, not organizations.  Ask them how your ministry fits their own personal call to ministry and their answers will provide clues to God’s intentions for the ministry.  This information provides insight and context as you develop the strategic statements.

But be careful how you ask about a personal call because not everyone has had that experience.  You don’t want them to feel devalued or second-class.   They are faithfully serving the Lord as much as someone who has experienced a specific call. Here’s how I asked it in the survey given to staff, directors and corporate members:

For most people, their association with CCCC began because they felt they had gifts to contribute to a Christian ministry that they cared about.  Some may have felt that their association fit well with a pre-existing call of God on their lives, or a call that was discerned when they discovered CCCC.  If you have a story to tell related to a sense of personal call to the ministry of CCCC, please share it.

I asked this question of the four senior leaders: myself (CEO since 2003), my predecessor Frank Luellau (the first employee and executive director from 1983 - 2003), Ken Dick, board chair from 1978 – 1985 (when it was mostly a working board), and our founder Ian Stanley (board chair 1972 – 1978).  I also asked all current staff, board and corporate members, and as many former board members as I could locate.

Here’s how we developed our  Statement of Call.

Mission

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Vision or mission?  Normally we expect to start with a goal (the vision) and then develop the mission that is the means of achieving the goal.  But when God calls people in the Bible, he calls them either to do a task (Paul to proclaim Christ to the gentiles – Acts 9:15) or to fulfill a role (eg. Jeremiah as a prophet Jer 1:5).  I can’t think of anyone called to fulfill a vision.

In practice, developing your mission and vision statements will likely be an iterative process.  You’ll start with mission and from that develop a vision for the future that will result.  But doing that future thinking will likely help you refine your mission.  Don’t get hung up on the order – just get it done!

I asked the mission question this way in our survey:

Here we get to the heart of what we are to do. To fulfill God’s vision and purpose for CCCC, what is our specific mission?  The following questions (from What to Ask the Person in the Mirror) will help us discern our mission:

- Why do you work or volunteer with CCCC? When you could invest your time elsewhere, why do you invest it here? What do you love about CCCC?

- What would you like to tell your grandchildren or extended family about why you served at CCCC for such a long period of your life?

- What would you like CCCC to look like in ten years? What would you hope to say that it accomplished?

- What are the distinctive competencies of CCCC? What would the world lose if it did not exist?

- Do you think God had any specific intentions for how we would operate, or any conditions that he has set as boundaries? If so, please let us know what you think they are.

- We would like to know what your hopes and dreams are for the future of CCCC.  What are your aspirations for CCCC? What hopes and dreams do you have for it?

Here’s how we developed the draft mission statement for CCCC.

Vision

A vision statement always propels us towards the ideal.  It does not settle for anything less than the way it should be, in terms of our mission.  It should be aspirational, evocative and highly emotional.  Upon reading it, people should be inspired to join your cause (or at least say “That’s a great mission!”).

The vision needs to align both with whatever Scripture says that relates to your mission and vision, and also to your core values.  It needs to align with the activity of the Holy Spirit in this world.

In our survey, we asked about vision this way:

We believe that the Lord led Ian Stanley and his six friends to found CCCC for God’s own purposes. That means that we exist as part of the Christian ministry community in Canada and that there is some particular way the Lord intends us to help the church fulfill its mission.

Given that we are a support to frontline ministries, can you describe the difference that you think God created us to make?  Another way to think about this is, What is God’s vision for the state of Christian ministries in Canada that we will help him achieve?

What are you seeing that God is up to that affects CCCC?  What shifts or trends do you see in Christian ministry that might affect our strategy?

Again, you can read about how we developed our vision statement.

Written in stone?

While your strategic statements should serve you well for many years at a time, your ministry is a like a living organism that responds to the continuing work and leadership of the Holy Spirit.  Over time, aspects of your mission may be accomplished, so you move on to something else.  Also over time, your staff and board gain more insight into the possibilities for what might be, and the vision could become more detailed or more expansive.  A new or revised vision could cause a review of the mission, and the mission might be redefined, tightened up, or expanded to better fit the vision.

So don’t change your strategic statements every year, but do be willing to change them as circumstances warrant.  Next I’ll get into some other secondary matters related to your strategic statements, such as your Value Proposition and the Key Success Indicators.

Leaders read lots of leadership books, both Christian and secular.  How do you tell which secular practices may be used in Christian ministry and which should not?   That’s the question!  At Arrow Leadership’s Gala, George Barna said something remarkable:

“People lack trust in leaders because of the poor character demonstrated by so many leaders. My interviews with 6,000 Christian leaders show that one of the greatest struggles they have is demonstrating godly wisdom. The issue is how worldly wisdom aligns with godly wisdom and how to discern the difference.”

I quickly wrote the quote down because it is exactly the reason why I write this blog.  My purpose is to help Christians who are leaders become more authentically Christian in their leadership practices.  I don’t think it is that hard to figure out a Christian approach to leadership, but it does take time to reflect on your faith and your work and how they intersect.  That’s why I call this blog Leadership Reflections.  By sharing my own reflections, I hope to help you with yours.

Worldly Wisdom

Worldly wisdom is developed from a human perspective without any reference to God or his ways.  It is often positioned as the opposite of godly wisdom, as if the two were diametrically opposed to each other.  In this paradigm, worldly is bad and godly is good.  But it is not as simple as that:

• If we believe that God created our universe with certain rules for how it works, then we can study it and learn about it.
• And if God gave us the ability to think, to discover and to create new knowledge, then we should do so.

It is inevitable then, that quite apart from God’s revelation humans will work out some knowledge and wisdom about how things work, or the way things are, that is right and aligns with God’s design or his ways.  Don’t be surprised when this happens because it is simply the result of the orderly ways of God.

But sometimes we get it wrong and develop ideas that are not in alignment with God’s ways.  This happens because our values are not in alignment with God’s or we have forgotten to leave room for God.  Most often it is just a case of someone who doesn’t know God and doesn’t know any better, but sometimes a person develops something with evil intent such as when a con artist develops a con game based on understanding our (fallen) human nature.

Worldly wisdom, therefore, is not like godly wisdom.  Godly wisdom is always 100% right.  Worldly wisdom has a range, from downright ungodly to wisdom that unintentionally aligns with God’s ways.  For example, people with no awareness of God can still do good deeds because they believe it is the right thing to do.

The issue isn’t that worldly wisdom is the opposite of godly wisdom, but that even at its very best it is incomplete without godly wisdom.  On a continuum from foolishness/ignorance to godly wisdom, worldly wisdom can be anywhere from 100% wrong to being 100% right (about the topic at hand), except for its source.  If worldly wisdom meets godly standards, then feel free to use it.

Godly or worldly? Discerning the difference

So when it comes to Christian leadership, there is much worldly wisdom we can draw upon to understand group dynamics, organizational theory, governance, motivation, planning and so forth.  There are many very good secular writers whose models and advice are just fine for Christian ministries.  But we must be careful to discern where worldly leadership wisdom is deficient and falls too far short of godly wisdom to be able to use with integrity.  And that is why a Christian leader needs to take time to reflect on his or her leadership practices.

How to distinguish the difference?  How to tell if a secular leadership technique is appropriate for a Christian to use?  Here’s some advice from a great little book:

“From a Christian point of view, it is only when the direction and the method are in line with God’s purposes, character, and ways of operating that godly leadership takes place.”
(Reviewing Leadership by Robert Banks and Bernice Ledbetter)

That is how you tell.  Ask the question, Does this align with God’s purposes, character and ways of operating?  This is why I say it is helpful if at least one of your ministry’s senior leaders has formal theological education.  It is not good enough to just find a verse here or there to justify something.  In this context, verses are little thoughts, and you need BIG thoughts.  You need to know not just the verses, but taken as a whole, what does Scripture say about God and his ways?  What’s the big theological picture?  You also need a vibrant personal relationship with God in which you submit to and then experience his leadership.  You will get to know pretty quickly how to assess opportunities or methods for suitability.

Here are some illustrations that may help:

• In a commissioned sales environment, sales managers are trained to motivate their staff by appealing to their self-interest and greed.  They have them develop vision boards – pictures of all the good things in life they want to have or experience.  Looking at these every day motivates them to sell more.  Since when would God have us motivate people by appealing to their greed or self-interest?  What relationship does this build between the salesperson and the customer?  Instead of truly helping customers, the salesperson has objectified them into a means to an end, an end in the best interest of the salesperson, not the client!  Does the technique work?  I guess so.   Is it godly?  No.  This style of management cannot be introduced into a Christian workplace.
• Traditional strategic planning is based on analyzing the past to predict the future.  To ensure the plan is achieved, staff are evaluated based on achieving goals that support the plan.  Where does this leave room for God to do something new?  When God told Paul to go to Europe, Paul went.  He didn’t say, “I’ll fit do it on to my next mission trip” or even worse, “I’ll have to work it into my next 5 year plan.”  The Holy Spirit blows where he will, and we have to stay nimble and flexible to respond quickly to his leading.  Traditional strategic plan also relies heavily on setting your strategy based on distinguishing yourself from a competitor, but God wants you focused on what he has called you to do.  In traditional strategic planning, your strategic options are limited by your SWOT analysis.  Since when has God been restrained by your weakness?  I’ve written more about this in Strategic Planning for Christian ministries.  Strategic planning can be done, but be careful to design the process to include God!

So when I am confronted with a new leadership technique, I look for the aspects of it that need to be tested against God’s purposes, character or ways of being by asking:

1. What is this advice or method based upon?  What assumptions does it make?  Why does it ‘work’?
2. How would this affect the way I relate to another person or group?
3. Why does this appeal to me?  What emotion or motivation makes this solution desirable?  Does the appeal call upon something in me that runs counter to the fruit of the Spirit?
4. How does it maintain or contribute to my status as “a holy vessel, consecrated to God” and to our ministry’s representation of what life in the kingdom of God looks like?

Then compare your answers to what you know of God. Be wise.  Be discerning.  Take time to reflect.

CCCC is reviewing its strategic statements and as we do, I’m doing my best to be faithful to our Christian identity and leave room for God to speak into the process. Over a couple of posts I will lay out a review process which I hope you will find fresh, stimulating and effective.

The Strategic Statements

Every organization has a core ideology (its vision, mission and values) that is the underpinning for everything that it does.  This ideology is the driving force that inspires and propels the organization forward.  Vision explains why the organization exists (what it wants to accomplish), mission is its overarching strategy for accomplishing the vision, and values are the rules it lives by.

A hypothetical example will show the difference between vision and mission.  Two ministries might have the same vision: Local churches thriving under excellent leadership, but have very different missions because they have different strategies to grow excellent leadership.  One mission might to be provide excellent seminary training while the other ministry might be to provide coaching services or to publish church leadership books.

Three other items should be part of the strategic statement package:  the Tagline, the Value Proposition and the Key Success Indicators.

The tagline is a three to five word phrase that clearly positions your ministry for your audience.  It is what you want to be known for and evokes the first thought or feeling you want people to have when they hear your ministry’s name.

The value proposition:

• defines what you believe your ministry’s contribution to the church’s mission is, and is one of the justifications for your ministry’s existence as a separate entity,
• can be a key component of your fundraising, marketing and recruiting literature, and
• provides focus for strategy development.

The value proposition for a local church might answer the question, “With so many churches in your town, why should there be another one?”  For an independent agency, it could answer the question, “Why not merge with another ministry and save the duplicated overhead costs?”  Perhaps your methodology is different, or you have a denominational distinctive in theology or culture you want to maintain.  Perhaps it is the mix of what you do that is valuable.

People writing about strategy and marketing use the term ‘unique value proposition,’ but I’m not keen on using unique in a ministry environment where every church has the same mission and every other ministry is working on some part of that same mission.  I do, however, think you should be very clear about your ministry’s contribution to the church’s mission.  What makes you stand out from the crowd?

The value proposition needs to be defined before the programs are designed because it should have a key influence in designing your strategic initiatives and programs.

The success indicators:

• provide evidence that your ministry is moving forward with its mission,
• build a compelling case for support for your fundraising program, and
• ensure board and staff stay focused on mission as the priority, and not programs.  (It’s easy to get so wrapped up in programs that the mission they serve becomes just an after-thought.)

The success indicators need to be defined early in the strategic review because they will be used later to assess the effectiveness of your current strategies and programs.  In this regard, be especially careful that success indicators are set based on the strategic statements alone, because only the strategic statements define organizational success. 

You must fight the tendency to define success in terms of your programs. 

Some people have pet strategies and programs they want to ensure will survive the strategic review, and if you give them the opportunity they will craft these statements accordingly!  That would be the tail wagging the dog!  Whether or not a program is successful can only be determined in light of what constitutes organizational success.  (A program could be highly successful on its own and yet not contribute to an organization’s mission success.)

A Christian perspective

The source of a Christian ministry’s core ideology is the revelation of God through Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The Bible provides the context for all Christian ministry, so you must know it very well.  At least a few senior leaders on your team should have some formal theological education.  Scripture lays out the ideal future that God is leading us towards, the values he wants us to have, and the character traits that should guide us in all our work and relationships.

Some aspects of the ideal kingdom life may have more relevance to your mission than others, just as some values and traits may be more central to your mission than others.  So feel free to highlight those and make them prominent in the life and work of your ministry.  For example, God’s love for all humanity, his concern for the poor, or what he views as proper worship could each have greater significance in a ministry devoted to one of those issues.  Perhaps you have been quite isolationist as a ministry and you want to take special care to be more relational in the future.  Highlight that.

As you go through your strategic planning process, keep asking, “What in Scripture relates to this?  What do we know about God and his work that should inform how we think about this?”  These questions need to permeate every aspect of the strategy review process.

You must pay close attention to the Holy Spirit because he is the one who:

• calls us to a particular part of the mission,
• gives us a vision for what we can accomplish through our part of the mission, and
• guides us as we make decisions so that we can work faithfully as God’s agents.

It is critical that you are willing to be led by the Spirit, and are not just bringing your plans to God for his blessing.  If you don’t give the Spirit time to lead you, all you have is what the human mind can conceive.  I learned years ago that my mind is no match for God’s.  Give God space by practising the Christian disciplines of silence and solitude.  A great book to help you do this is Space for God.

Strategy making in the 4th Dimension

God has a specific purpose for your ministry, and to discern what it is I suggest that you consult with the directors and staff whom God has called to serve in your ministry, not just in the present, but in the past as well.  Churches should also consult with their members.

Why should you pay any attention to people who are no longer active in your ministry?  Because God spoke to them, and their voices must be heard.  I love this quote from G.K. Chesterton in which he talks of a democracy that crosses time and death:

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the [voting] franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils.

While the present board and staff can make strategic changes, they are not free to do so without due respect to the past. Are the old strategies outdated? Has the mission been accomplished? Are there new aspects to the mission that didn’t exist before? By all means, make the necessary changes, but don’t just arbitrarily think that you know better than your predecessors. That would be chronological arrogance!

To fully understand God’s purpose for your ministry today, do a chronological review of the strategic statements to see if there is a trajectory that ties them together. Is there an overarching common vision? Talk with the people who led the ministry over the years (if they are still available to you) or read their plans and other documents.

If there is a trajectory, look carefully at what changed between the versions and look for underlying trends. Perhaps there is movement from crisis intervention (shelters, food banks, etc.) to advocacy for systemic change to prevent poverty in the first place. Maybe your congregation is expanding its view of what church is all about. Most ministries will show some development over the years.  Try extending the trajectory forward to see where your ministry is headed.  Is this where you want to be?

Special attention must be given to the people whom God has placed in senior leadership because they acted in the capacity of stewards of the ministry and its mission, and presumably were placed in the senior leadership role by God for a reason. Each may have contributed to a different understanding of the mission while also adhering to the core ideology.  At this point, keep your focus on the the strategic statements and leave their strategies and programs, which are secondary and tertiary matters, for later.

In part two of this post I will give you specific practices and questions to help you discern your strategic statements.

Last July I took my whole family to Bangkok to visit our daughter Jessica, who is on a 2 year teaching assignment (Grade 4) and who will be taking on a 2 year missionary assignment in Bangkok when that comes to an end.  She really wanted to go to a restaurant called The Flying Chicken.  I thought, what an unusual name!  Must be like The Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings or a supposedly real pub name “The Dog’s Breakfast”- just an interesting name.  Surely it couldn’t be chicken dinners flying through the air!!  But much to our delight, when you order a chicken dinner, the chicken really does fly through the air.  No exaggeration.  I did not take this video, but it is what we saw and it is how our dinners were delivered to us!

Watch a guy on a unicycle catch five flying flaming chickens at a time!  And remember, each one ends up delivered to a customer for dinner.

If flying chickens aren’t your thing, perhaps flying fish at Pike Place Market in Seattle are. When someone buys a fish, the employees first have fun throwing it around to each other. It’s for real and is what makes this fish stall fabulously successful.

What does this have to do with Christian leadership?  Well, I’m having fun sharing these, and more to the point I’m sure the employees in the restaurant and market are having fun too!

We in Christian ministry are in the serious business of introducing people to a loving relationship with their Creator and in bringing our Creator’s love and care to all parts of the Earth.  But must we be only serious in doing our work?  Is there any room for fun?  In Fun Works, Leslie Yerkes makes the claim that fun creates energy, is a stress reliever, builds relationships, stimulates creativity and improves performance.   But you can’t ‘do’ fun.  You can’t institutionalize it, program it or tell people to have it!  Leaders can support a fun environment, but they can’t make it happen.  Yerkes says that having fun is a grassroots thing.  It is spontaneous.  It bubbles up.

Yerkes details eleven businesses that are very serious about getting hard, tangible results.  Employees are held accountable for performance.  Make no mistake, a fun work environment does not mean that serious results aren’t achieved.  No workplace will survive without results.  But each of the eleven workplaces has found ways to allow employees to incorporate fun into the workplace while maintaining professional standards of service.

I have no idea what fun might look like in your ministry or mine, because if you try to copy someone else’s fun it won’t be fun anymore.  So take a risk and as a leader, when you see fun happening in your office, encourage it as much as you can.  If it goes too far you can gently set some guidelines, but I think most people are quite aware of what is appropriate for the ministry and what is not.  It’s worth a try to see what develops!  I enjoy Pizza Tuesdays at CCCC and hearing laughter in the halls and wonder what else might develop.

Do you have a fun work environment?  Why not describe it here and how it developed?