Just as I did in the previous post in this series, I refer to mission statements throughout this post, but I’m not necessarily referring to the traditional mission statement that describes how your ministry will fulfill its purpose; in other words, its activities. That is ‘mission’ in its narrow sense. ‘Mission’ in its broad sense is about what a ministry exists to accomplish, and the vision (or end statement) is the better description of what your mission is. Think of the vision/end statement as a top-level mission statement. If a ministry has only a traditional mission statement, they would greatly benefit by creating either a vision statement or an end statement.

Unpacking the Mission Statement

The way CCCC unpacked its End Statement and released its power worked very well for us, and you are welcome to use the same process. If you download the presentation CCCC End Statement Unpacked, you will be able to follow along as I review the steps, which are:

1. Identify the Component Parts of the Mission

Break the mission, vision, or end statement into its component parts, isolating each word or phrase that contains a single idea. The meaning of some parts may seem self-evident and not worth exploring any further. We had some like that: “CCCC members” seems clear at face value, as does “will be.” But we unpacked those terms anyway and found, despite their apparent obviousness, that they still contained more nuances than we thought and led to some rich insights for our strategy.

We broke our End Statement into six component parts:

1. CCCC members
2. will be
3. exemplary
4. healthy
5. effective
6. Christian (ministries)

CCCC calls the last four of these components the Pillars of a well-run organization. We want these Pillars to be true of CCCC just as much as we want them to be true of members.

• Exemplary, Healthy, and Effective were derived from literature related to leadership, management, and organizational success and failure.
• The fourth Pillar, Christian, is a necessary Pillar given the Christian identity of our members.

2. Define the Components

Write out what the components mean to your ministry. If your ministry is a church and your mission statement says you will evangelize or be a community that, define those terms so there is no misunderstanding as to what they mean. For example, Who will evangelize – pastors, or everyone in the congregation? If everyone, what does everyone mean – every adult, or kids too? Does your community include members only or does it include regular attendees who are adherents but not members? What about repeat but irregular attendees who have no church home? The definitions you give to your mission statement are extremely helpful for guiding how your ministry will operate.

CCCC researched the literature on how our components relate to organizational life and work, whether of a secular or a religious organization. For example, What makes an organization healthy? There’s a lot of research into that question to help us understand more specifically what we want our members to have more of. Even a simple term like “CCCC members” brought to our attention in a fresh way that our influence extends well beyond our paid membership with implications for marketing and the need for some à la carte products and services.

As examples, here’s how we define three of our components:

• Will be: We expect members to steadily progress towards becoming ever more exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. This definition means we are not expecting a ministry to fulfill our End statement in an instant. Our End statement is not a standard to comply with but an aspiration to be achieved over time.
• Exemplary: An exemplary ministry provides a compelling example of an organization operating with excellence in its life and work. This definition says that a ministry should not just be exemplary in how it runs its programs but should also be exemplary in how it operates as an organization. In fact, it should be so exemplary that anyone observing the ministry would be persuaded that they should operate in the same way.
• Healthy: A healthy ministry is well-resourced with an ongoing flow of people, money, and strategy so it is indefinitely sustainable and primed for growth. There are many other factors that make an organization healthy, but these are what CCCC considers the top-level ones. Organizational culture, for example, is extremely important, but we placed it under the People category of organizational health.

3. State the Core Attributes of Each Component

Reflect on the work you’ve done on your strategic statement and identify the core attributes of each component. An attribute is a quality, feature, or characteristic that is an important part of a person or thing.¹ This step is about describing the effects that each component of your strategic statement will have outside of your organization.

If part of your purpose is to prepare young adults to serve the church and the world, then the attributes will describe what that preparation needs to build in young adults. The attributes of an adult who serves the church and the world could include volunteerism, other-centredness, and generosity.

Here are the core attributes CCCC defined for the Exemplary part of our End statement:

1. Impeccable. The ministry has an impeccable way of being. Every part of the ministry’s organization is precisely designed to fulfill the ministry’s mission with excellence.
2. Best Practices. A ministry’s organizational life and work are models for best practices.
3. Intellectual Creativity. The ministry researches, experiments, innovates, and advances its field of knowledge for the good of the Christian cause.
4. Trailblazing. The ministry is visionary, bold, and innovative, confidently finding its own way to be relevant and practical in pursuing its mission.

4. Establish and Define Key Indicators for Each Attribute

List and define the indicators that demonstrate each core attribute is present. These indicators will likely be what you measure to prove how well your mission is progressing.

Here are the indicators CCCC developed for two of the core attributes of an exemplary ministry:

Impeccable

• Core Logic. A defined core logic model governs all activities of the ministry. Every activity clearly advances the mission and is designed based on the best mission-related research and wisdom.
• Integrity. Integrity aligns every aspect of the organization with its identity and purpose. It is above reproach. Every facet of the organization is precisely tuned to achieve mission results
• Excellence. Excellence permeates the organization. The ministry consistently achieves superior performance in all aspects of organizational life and work. It is highly regarded for pursuing its mission with the best knowledge and practices available.
• Accountability. There is public accountability for impact. The ministry welcomes scrutiny and makes scrutiny easy.

Intellectual Creativity

• Research-Based. The ministry uses theoretical and evidence-based research. It is up to date in its field and is continuously learning.
• Exploratory & Experimental. The ministry is exploratory and experimental in its mindset. It is willing to accept risks, is creative and curious, and finds inspiration in multidisciplinary areas across industries and sectors.
• Thought Leader. The ministry is a thought leader advancing its fields of knowledge and practice. It shares what it knows with other ministries to allow testing and perfecting of its ideas for the good of all.

5. Set Measurements

Finding a way to measure your progress on each of the success indicators is essential to knowing how well you are accomplishing your mission; however, measurement is beyond the scope of this already lengthy post. I have addressed aspects of the topic in The Measure of Our Success and What to Do with Hard-to-Measure Mission Statements.

When You’re Done Unpacking

Once you are done unpacking your strategic statement, compare the new and more-detailed definition of your purpose with your current programs and services. Identify opportunities to close programs that don’t fit the mission, add new ones that do, and tweak existing programs that need to more closely align with your purpose.

Finally, have every part of your organization, from human resources to administration to IT, develop proposals for how they could better support the mission.

Unpacking your mission statement is one of the best investments of time a leader can make. It will be a gift to the organization and to your staff and volunteers and create the conditions in which you can move forward on mission fulfillment faster than you might think.

The post How to Release Your Mission Statement’s Power appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Here are four theological truths that can form the basis of a theology of strategy development. Feel free to add additional truths you find meaningful and relevant to strategy formation.

1. Christ Continues to Work in the World Today

Luke says his gospel concerns only what Jesus “began to do and teach,”¹ and yet his gospel and its sequel, Acts, show that Jesus’s time on earth came to an end shortly after the close of the gospel when he ascended into heaven. So how does Jesus continue to do his work?

Luke shows that Jesus continues his work through the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew and Greek words for the Spirit mean “invisibility, movement, power, and life” and convey the idea of “God in action.” The dynamic Spirit actively guides the church and our ministries, meaning that our strategy development process needs to take the Spirit’s leadership seriously, just as Paul did when he changed his plans and went to Macedonia.

Because Christ continues to work in the world today, developing a strategy for a ministry is a cooperative spiritual endeavour between God and the ministry’s leadership team.

2. Leadership Has a Prophetic Role

People act in a prophetic capacity when they speak God’s truth into a situation. They might be speaking truth to power regarding an issue of justice, or they might be making sense of things such as Peter did in his Pentecost sermon when he effectively said “This is that”² and explained what the people were seeing and hearing that day in Jerusalem. Ministry leaders need to act as Peter did: discern God’s leadership of the ministry and then make sense of the ministry’s circumstances based on what God is doing.³ This is the leader’s prophetic role, and it is one very important way they lead the ministry.

Leighton Ford offers a specific process to incorporate God’s leadership into strategy development:

“We must observe carefully and prayerfully where people are hurting and suffering and longing, and what God is doing in the world, until in our hearts we are drawn to an area which may be God’s vision for us. We need to reflect on what we have observed, praying and reading, thinking and talking, and perhaps writing in a journal, until our sense of call begins to emerge and we “see” what it is that God would have us do. Then we must begin to act on that vision.”

Leighton Ford⁴

Ministry leaders can then bring their prophetic understanding of what they’ve discerned to the ministry team for testing, just as Paul did with the dramatic call to Macedonia, by leading the team in a group exercise of discernment and reflection.

For example, at CCCC, we feel strongly led by the Spirit to serve all Christ’s ministries in Canada. In observing that Christ left the 99 sheep to look for the one lost sheep, we understand that every ministry, regardless of size, is important in God’s eyes. For some small ministries, our membership fee, as low as it is, may be a barrier to them receiving our help, so we created the Web Membership to care for these small ministries.

Leaders, make sure your prayer time includes listening prayer and time for meditation on God’s word as it relates to your ministry.

3. God Honours Human Intellect

The Bible shows that God respects humanity, delegates to humanity, and equips humanity with intellect and skills so that we can participate creatively and meaningfully in his mission. God has given us the what to do and usually leaves us to decide how to do it. There is room in Christian strategy development for both divine wisdom and human wisdom. It may surprise some people that divine and human wisdom do not have to be in conflict. The tension between them is resolved in another post, From Human Wisdom to Godly Wisdom.

Two proverbs show that we should use our intellect when making plans:

The naive believes everything, but the sensible man considers his steps.

Prov 14:15

Without consultation, plans are frustrated, but with many counsellors they succeed.

Prov 15:22

Jesus affirmed the value of human wisdom when he told a parable in which a master commended his steward for using human wisdom to act shrewdly when he was called to account for his wasteful ways. The steward protected his future by forgiving people of most of their debt to the master, thus ingratiating himself to them for future benefit. Jesus commended the steward, saying, “For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.” ⁵ He similarly approved of kings who consider whether they can win before deciding to go to war.⁶

God expects us to use all our human abilities in his service to discern the specific plans the ministry will act upon.

4. Self-Reliance Impedes God’s Work in Our Ministry

If we believe that our ministry can only accomplish what we ourselves can do, we will only try those strategies that we know we can do and we will not see what God wants to do through us by adding his capabilities to ours.

For example, our weakness is not a limiting factor in God’s eyes:

And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness .”

2 Cor 12:9

And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

Phil 4:19

We do need to work hard at making ourselves the best possible servants of the Lord (“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed.” 2 Tim 2:15), but we should not be driven or consumed by our weaknesses. We should improve what we can, but our best mission progress will occur when we build on our strengths and actively trust God for our areas of weakness. Consultant Jim Galvin says that sometimes we need to start doing something, anything, just to change where we are and help us to find a way to go.

Honour God by actively seeking his guidance and help when developing and implementing strategy.

Because the Sovereign Lord helps me,
    I will not be disgraced.
Therefore have I set my face like flint,
    and I know I will not be put to shame.

Isaiah 50:7

Conclusion

As we engage in strategy development, we must stay open to the Spirit and the contributions God wants to make to our ministry’s work, making sure the entire process is in alignment with God’s ways.

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.

Robert Banks and Bernice Ledbetter, Reviewing Leadership

The post A Theology of Strategy Development appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The theory of change I guide you through in this post was developed based upon what I learned at Harvard Business School in their Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management course (worth every penny! GO!!) and the one book I could find on developing a theory of change titled Purposeful Program Theory: Effective Use of Theories of Change and Logic Models.

Developing a Theory of Change is a process of examining what you need to do from the perspective of your beneficiary, pinpointing the activities that will get your vision fulfilled. The model’s outputs are the positive steps that will bring about the desired external change, which is your impact on the world around you.

For a really good theological discussion of how a theory of change applies to churches, please watch this video by a Cambridge University theology professor who has a good sense of humour. He may well change your approach to evangelism.

Process for Developing a Theory of Change

There is no single model for what a Theory of Change should look like. For example, a traditional logic model is a Theory of Change that shows how inputs are converted into impacts. Here is a guide for creating a Theory of Change based on a logic model.

The version described in this post is the one that CCCC has used with great success. Its focus is not inputs but rather the conditions for mission impact that we want our ministry to create or improve, coupled with identifying and overcoming the obstacles that have prevented us (so far) from achieving the full impact our ministry wants to make. The process described below does not have a specific name; it is just known as a Theory of Change.

Note: The Bridgespan Group has a guide to develop a more detailed theory of change than the one CCCC uses.

Overview

The process for developing a Theory of Change is as follows:

1. Identify your ministry’s desired impact. Clearly identify why your ministry exists by describing the impact you want to make. This is your Impact Statement (which you might be calling a vision, mission, or end statement). An end statement is basically a vision statement used in policy governance situations. I recommend everybody use it because it is so powerful. The traditional mission statement can be used if it is the only statement, but I recommend you do the work to create a vision or an end statement. These are true impact statements while mission statements are more process or activity related.
2. List the conditions needed to make the desired impact. Identify the key Conditions that must be in place for your beneficiaries so your ministry can make its impact. The scan of the external environments is most helpful at this stage of the strategy development process. It will identify the factors you must consider that affect how successful the desired change will be. The way CCCC did its theory of change, Conditions column has a positive focus – the conditions that must be in place for your ministry to achieve what it wants to achieve. The column could also be called Problems to be Overcome, which is a negative way to address the ministry’s mission goal. This is the way I learned it at Harvard Business School, and CCCC’s first version of a theory of change took this traditional perspective. However, I thought the result was a document that had a fairly negative view of our members. We were much happier using this column for a positive description of what we want our work to achieve. An example given in a book ¹ is that the negative problem addressed by an anti-graffiti program could be recast as a positive opportunity to support creative street artwork.
3. Identify the obstacles your beneficiaries face. Identify all Obstacles that could prevent your beneficiaries from having the Conditions in place. You can also include contributing factors and opportunities in this section.
4. Determine what solutions your ministry can offer to overcome the obstacles. Determine high-level strategies to overcome the Obstacles. This column could also be called “Corrections.”
5. Identify the assets your beneficiaries need. Identify the assets that those who wish to use your services will need to have to benefit from your services.
6. Identify any other general needs your beneficiaries have. While not necessary for making an impact, your ministry might be able to help your beneficiaries by filling their other needs as you are able to.
7. Determine the initiatives your ministry will undertake. Determine the actions your ministry will take in the way of programs based on this Theory of Change. This column is titled “Initiatives” to keep the at the list at the level of strategy. Specific programs will be designed as part of the initiatives. Think of this column as a number of baskets, each holding one or more programs within it.
8. Decide the outcomes you wish to see. The outputs of your programs should result in a change outside of your ministry. For example, you provide education (an output) and the graduate gets a job (an outcome). Outcomes can be short or long-term. The short term might be the example just given – the graduate gets a job. The long term outcome could be the graduate escapes poverty.
9. Check that the logic of your theory of change leads to fulfillment of your impact statement. You should be confident that by addressing all the items identified in the Theory of Change, your Desired Impact will be made

Using the CCCC Theory of Change Template

This section will walk you through the above process in detail and show you how to complete the Theory of Change template provided. Have both the CCCC’s Theory of Change Template and the CCCC’s Theory of Change open while you read the detailed instructions that follow. These two documents will make each step much clearer.

The template is colour-coded:

• The green columns identify the impact your ministry wants to make.
• The blue columns are items that your ministry has control over.
• The red columns are the obstacles your beneficiaries face that could prevent your ministry from making an impact.
• The yellow column contains items that are internal to your beneficiaries.
• The purple column relates to outcomes your beneficiaries will experience.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Desired Impact (First green column of the template)
   • In the first green box, enter a crystal-clear statement of why your ministry exists. This is a statement of the impact you desire to make. Your Impact Statement could be called a Statement Zero, Vision statement, End Statement, or Social Value Proposition.
     • Your Mission Statement can be suitable, but only if it either does not include how you are going to accomplish the mission or you leave that part out while doing this exercise. For example, “Our mission is to evangelize our city” would be acceptable, but not “Our mission is to evangelize our city by…,” because whatever follows “by…” presupposes what the Theory of Change is intended to discover.
     • The goal is to clearly identify the actual impact you intend to make “out there” in the real world. It is not about how hard your ministry works or how much it produces. It is about how you affect the world beyond your own organization.
   • In the green box below your Impact Statement, you may add additional comments about your Impact Statement, as CCCC did in its Theory of Change. It can be helpful to have a description of what fulfillment of your Impact Statement will look like both to guide your thoughts as you develop your Theory of Change and to facilitate a shared understanding among your staff and board of the impact your ministry will make.
2. Conditions for Desired Impact (First blue column of the template)
   • In the blue boxes, enter the Conditions you identify that your beneficiaries must have in place for you to achieve your Desired Impact.
     • For example, the CCCC Impact Statement is that its members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. We assume they will be all those things if they have the required knowledge, resources, attitudes, corporate culture, and ability to integrate faith into practice. They also need to be in an environment conducive for ministry.
     • Note that in the CCCC Theory of Change, each Condition has a few descriptive words to illustrate the scope of the Condition. Those words will help you brainstorm in Step 3 below.
     • The Conditions are only assumptions if they haven’t been tested. Testing will lead to more confident planning and could be done in various ways, such as through a literature review, focus groups with your beneficiaries, program evaluations, etc.
3. Obstacles Confronting Your Beneficiaries (Red section of the template)
   • Enter the Conditions that you identified in the blue column as column headings in the red section of the template. You might wish to follow the example in CCCC’s Theory of Change by bolding the keywords in your blue Conditions column that will become the heading names in your red Obstacles section.Brainstorm as many plausible reasons as you can think of as to why the Condition in each column heading might not be in place yet. These are the Obstacles your beneficiaries might be up against that will prevent you from having the impact you want.
     • For example, when CCCC did this process, we came up with a list of many reasons why a member might not yet have the necessary knowledge, resources, etc. The obstacles were identified based on the empathy maps we developed, consultations with stakeholders and others, our own knowledge from questions our members ask us, and some small surveys. We do not believe that all our members face all these barriers, but that if they are struggling to be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries, the reason for the struggle would likely be one of the barriers we identified. We then sorted the Obstacles under each Condition into like categories and named each category to make it easier to analyze the results. The names of these categories are the Requirements needed for the Conditions to exist. For example, to have the necessary knowledge to be an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry, the staff and volunteers need to have the resources, education, focus, learning posture, and strategy it takes to have the knowledge. The Obstacles were the reasons why they might not have the necessary resources, education, focus, learning posture, or strategy.
   • Now you can complete the red Obstacles section. In each red box, enter a Requirement for that column’s Condition. In bullet form for each Requirement, list the Obstacles that would prevent that Requirement from being in place.
   • The Obstacles might or might not be the actual ones your beneficiaries are facing, so it is a good idea to test your assumptions for accuracy.
4. Solutions (Second blue column of the template)
   • In these blue boxes, enter the high-level strategies you’ve determined will help correct or remove the Obstacles for your beneficiaries and bring about the Conditions needed to achieve your ministry’s Desired Impact.
     • For CCCC, the Solutions column is a high-level list of what we think would help ministries overcome their obstacles. This includes education, consulting, and facilitating peer-to-peer sharing.
5. Assets (Top half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Assets (the top half of the column), enter the assets you assume your beneficiaries have so they can use your ministry’s services. These are likely to be unstated assumptions you’ve made; assets you take for granted that everyone has but that aren’t necessarily available to all potential beneficiaries. For instance, if you work in English only, you need to realize that part of the population will not be reached by your ministry.
     • You may go deeper in this column by adding thoughts about what your beneficiaries could do if they do not have the Assets needed. What could you do to help them? Are there alternative ways to design your programs so the Assets are not needed? Could your ministry somehow provide its beneficiaries with the Assets or find a way to accommodate them?
6. Other Needs (Bottom half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Other Needs (the bottom half of the column), enter general needs your beneficiaries might have that don’t necessarily relate to your ministry’s services. This information could come from empathy maps, your knowledge from personal interactions with beneficiaries, or surveys.
     • For example, CCCC identified that people working in ministry need to be affirmed and appreciated for the sacrificial way they serve, something they do not always experience. That need aligns well with one of our brand pillars, to be a caring organization. They are also likely to have work-life balance issues, something to keep in mind as we design how we will engage with them.
7. Initiatives (Third blue column of the template)
   • In the language used in Theory of Change models, an Initiative is an action your ministry takes to implement the Solutions and make the Desired Impact. In Christian ministry, initiatives are programs and services. Be creative and, using the research you have already done to create a Theory of Change, list the programs that your Theory of Change indicates are needed and enter them into the blue boxes. In the CCCC Theory of Change, the Initiatives column is a very high level ‘basket’ that will hold all the specific programs we offer. For example, shared learning includes:
     • members learning from us,
     • us learning from our members,
     • members learning from each other.
     • The shared learning basket also holds most of our current programs:
       • the knowledge base
       • the Bulletin
       • the Member Service Team
       • the Green
       • This blog, and so on
8. Short-Term Outcomes and Long-Term Outcomes (Purple column of the template)
   • In the purple boxes under Short-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries to experience in their immediate future.
     • This column is significant because it forms the basis for measuring your mission success on your journey towards mission fulfilment. It is also evidence you can give to your donors that assures them their gifts are being well used.
   • In the purple boxes under Long-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries will experience over time as they use your services.
     • As with the Short-Term Outcomes, the Long-Term Outcomes will be used eventually to measure mission success and to give evidence of success to your donors.
9. Check that the logic of your Theory of Change leads to fulfillment of your Impact Statement (Second green column of the template)
   • In the green boxes of this final column, copy over from the first green column both your Impact Statement and any commentary regarding it Review the entire Theory of Change and ensure there is a logical flow to it that leads to your Desired Impact. Is it comprehensive? Has anything been left out?
     • The final column is a repeat of the first column because if everything in between is done, the mission from the first column will be fulfilled.

Conclusion

Developing a Theory of Change is invaluable, as it will provide a clear understanding of the obstacles and corrections your programs must address to accomplish your ministry’s mission and guide your program development work. Being able to reference your ministry’s Theory of Change will make a significant difference in efficient stewardship of your ministry and will provide the perfect tool on which to base future strategic reviews. CCCC has enjoyed great success by using its Theory of Change, and I pray that this will be your experience too.

Key Takeaway: Developing your Theory of Change is really about providing a clear, customized plan for how your ministry will move forward in accomplishing its mission, as well as a way to evaluate your ministry to ensure that it does.

The post Theory of Change: A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Customized Plan for Your Ministry appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Mission Statements Are Packed with Benefits

As a senior leader, you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in crafting your ministry’s top-level mission statement, but are you getting the maximum value from it? A top-level mission statement can do so much more than simply define what you aim to achieve. It can enhance every aspect of your organization and transform it into a finely tuned ministry that is perfectly designed to be exactly what your mission needs it to be.

I’d like to share how you can unpack your ministry’s top-level mission statement and tap into its power for the benefit of your ministry. By unpacking, I mean plumbing the depths of the statement and exploring its implications, nuances, and the subcomponents that are necessary to make the end goal a reality. Understanding your mission at such a deep level is immensely helpful when doing a strategic review of your ministry

Since June 2012, our End Statement has been CCCC members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. This statement has guided us well over the years. As the senior leader, I have reflected long and hard on what it means. It has been a roadmap as I’ve written my blog Christian Leadership Reflections and as I’ve laid out ideas for program development.

But when I began to formally document what our End Statement means, I realized its true potential went well beyond our programs and services. As I unpacked its meaning, it became more and more exciting, inspiring, and even beautiful to me.

It was like a two-dimensional black-and-white photograph had suddenly become a three-dimensional full-colour sculpture!

Our End Statement grabbed hold of me and the CCCC staff in a new way as we engaged with it. We experienced a burst of creativity that resulted in the renewed organization we are today. New staff positions were created. Our infrastructure is being overhauled. Our branding changed, and so did our name. The changes were all shaped by our reflections on our End Statement. You can download our presentation CCCC End Statement Unpacked (below) to see what we did. Please note: as of May 2023 we are still working on refining how we define the meaning of our End Statement, so this isn’t the final version.

The Power of Mission Statements

Your ministry’s top-level strategic statement is a rich resource, and unleashing its potential by unpacking it is really a matter of good stewardship. Here’s what your super-charged mission statement can do for your ministry.

Give Direction

The primary purpose of a strategic statement is to give overall direction to the work of your ministry. You have almost certainly used your strategic statement quite well for this purpose. It helps you make choices about what to do or not to do, and it defines what you are responsible for (that is, what you need to do to claim progress towards vision fulfillment).

For example, CCCC’s End Statement reminds us that we are not just a purveyor of information. Our responsibility does not end when we publish an article. Our responsibility extends to how members use what we publish. The onus is on us to produce content that is relevant, persuasive, and actionable. It’s our fault if members choose not to use our information. If that were the case, we would need to fix what we produce to make it more relevant, persuasive, and actionable so our members will decide to act on it.

Add Clarity

Perhaps your strategic statement says you will disciple Christians to become mature believers. But what exactly does discipling look like, and how can you tell when someone has a mature faith? A single statement cannot capture everything that is meant by it, so unpacking the statement will add clarity by defining its breadth and depth. The statement should be thought of as a shorthand way of expressing a much more complex description of the ministry’s purpose.

CCCC’s unpacked End Statement is a treasure trove of ideas for new content and new program development. Because it is so specific at a detailed level, it is easily actionable. It makes abstract words, such as exemplary, concrete. Having a full definition means we don’t start with a blank canvas on which to paint a picture of how we help Christian ministries. With the unpacked End Statement, the canvas already has a sketch on it. We can immediately grab a brush and some paint and get to work filling in the sketch.

Foster Unity

The clearer, more detailed, your strategic statement is, the more unity your staff and volunteers can have because everyone is being drawn to a shared understanding of the ministry’s high-level purpose and its detailed workings. Before you unpack the statement, your staff may be aligned at the 50,000-foot level on the overall goal to be achieved and yet not be aligned on lower-level details. Unpacking your strategic statement should bring alignment right down to ground level.

Allow For Better Delegation

When all ministry personnel have a deep understanding of the strategic statement’s goal and its nuances, you can delegate responsibility with more confidence because they understand how their work fits in with everything else being done, and they can make better decisions than they could if they didn’t have that awareness.

Increase Motivation

All strategic statements should be motivational, especially in mission-driven organizations such as Christian ministries. But the statements will be far more motivational as people come to understand the details of the change your ministry wants to accomplish and how all the parts of your ministry work together to fulfill the ministry’s purpose. Sometimes people read the strategic statement but don’t recognize its implications and the magnitude or significance of what is to be accomplished. Unpacking the statement may impress people with benefits attached to fulfilling the strategic goal they had not thought of.

Protect from Mission Creep

When the words in your top-level strategic statement are not clearly defined, there is a good possibility that people may interpret them differently. Some interpretations may be quite narrow while others may be quite broad and expansive. Over time, the ministry’s understanding of its purpose may begin to move away from its original focus. Changing your purpose in response to changing times or circumstances is fine because it is an intentional change. But mission creep is unintentional. At some point, the ministry will end up with a hodgepodge of programs, a loss of focus, and a dilution of resources.

A clearly defined strategic statement will make it easy to determine how a new program idea does or does not fit the ministry’s purpose. However, when you change a strategic statement you must remember to stay within the parameters of your ministry’s charitable purpose and objects that the Charities Directorate has approved.

Set the Stage for Branding

Your strategic statement connects with your brand because both are closely connected with your ministry’s identity. As you understand more about the change you want to make in the world outside your organization, you will need to think about how you want outsiders to experience your ministry. What brand persona would be most helpful to your mission? Based on your mission, what is your brand story?

A deep dive into CCCC’s End Statement crystallized for us the relationship we want to have with our members. We had previously seen ourselves as supporters of our members, but now we see ourselves more specifically as a guide and ally in a caring relationship with them. “Caring” became one of our brand persona pillars, and our brand story features our supportive role as a guide. The detailed, written brand story was converted into a short video called How We Fit into Your Story, which you can view here.

Clarify Messaging

The deeper knowledge you gain about your purpose will be very useful in your marketing and fundraising messaging. It will help you tell a compelling story about the impactful work your ministry does.

CCCC took its deeper understanding of its End Statement and used it to make a short video to help our members and prospective members understand that our programs and services are not just a collection of independent resources but are connected to something much bigger, helping them develop a thriving organization that is a great platform for their ministry to operate from. We have a clear logic to everything we do that will help our members become an ever more successful ministry. We want our members to think big about their organizations. You can view the video Our Journey Together here.

I must add that developing the content and courses that will help our members become ever more exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries is a process that we are just beginning to develop. Over time, members will find resources being released that will help them on their journey.

Identify Topics to Research

When you have defined the core attributes related to each of your mission statement elements (see below for how to do this), you will have a list of topics to research so your ministry can become expert in how best to pursue these aspects of its mission.

An example from CCCC’s End Statement is that a healthy Christian ministry needs great Christian leadership, which means that its leaders must model Christian spirituality in the workplace. CCCC, therefore, researched and reflected on Christian spirituality in the context of both leadership and organizational life so we could help ministry leaders develop their spirituality in the workplace.

Save Time

When you document what you’ve discovered about your purpose, you can more easily and quickly orient new staff and directors to the richness of your work. This documentation can help staff identify opportunities to fill gaps between what the mission needs and what the ministry is currently doing.

CCCC has worked our unpacked End Statement into both our board and staff orientation programs.

Redesign the Organization and Its Infrastructure

Every part of your organization can take the unpacked mission statement and determine what changes, if any, should be made to better support the mission.

Some of the changes made by CCCC related to our unpacked End Statement were mentioned above.

Do-It-Yourself

For detailed guidance with examples for how to unpack your mission statement, see the post How To Release Your Mission Statement’s Power.

CCCC members can discuss this post here.

The post The Untapped Power of Your “Mission” Statement appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Now we will take the output of the theory of change and apply it to a strategy map to determine everything the ministry must do internally in order to put the theory of change into action. A strategy map ensures there is an alignment of the ministry’s resources and activities and its mission goals. Once the map is completed, in addition to showing the strategies in place, it can also be used to identify:

1. activities and resources that are not related to the ministry’s current goals by examining activities and resources that are not shown on the map. You might want to continue with those or you might want to reallocate them to your goals.
2. goals that do not have sufficient support
3. processes that need improvement

Introduction to Strategy Maps

Kaplan and Norton (the inventors of strategy maps) suggest nonprofits put customer needs (for charities, the term is beneficiary needs) at the top of the strategy map, but Paul Niven in Balanced Scorecard: Step-by-Step for Government and Nonprofit Agencies says you can add an extra line above that and label it Mission. The mission activities that go on the top of the strategy map were identified by the theory of change as Initiatives.

The theory of change takes you from your vision for the future you want to help create through to the initiatives you will take (your programs and services). The strategy map takes the initiatives and inserts them at the mission level, then drills down into the organization to see what kind of organization and infrastructure you need to build to support the initiatives. The rest of this post will show you how to develop a strategy map for your ministry.

Strategy Maps: Step-by-Step How-To

Click on the image of the CCCC strategy map below to open it in a new window, and then open our theory of change in a third window. That way you can follow along the steps as I describe them.

NOTE: For brevity, neither the CCCC Theory of Change or Strategy Map show all of our programs and services. We’ve included only those that are new or expanded initiatives.

1. Set the Boundaries of the Strategy Map

• Our strategy map starts with our End Statement (our vision) at the top. Everything we do is done to make this vision for the future a reality. The point of all strategy and work at CCCC is to help our members be exemplary, healthy and effective Christian ministries. We spaced the key words across the top of the strategy map so we could later link all strategies to at least one of these words.
• We also put our value proposition at the top, as a reminder that these are the reasons why our members value us. Everything we do needs to reflect our value proposition. Our value proposition influenced some of the strategy map content because we wanted to be sure we deliver the expected value!
• Our corporate values were added at the bottom of the page where they represent the foundation of our way of organizational life. Regardless of what we do, we must always be true to these values.

2. Create the Rows of the Map

The left-hand column holds the name of each of the rows. Each row examines your organization from a different perspective. You may want to give a different name to a perspective if that makes more sense in your context, but regardless of the name the perspective should be the same. For example, we don’t think of beneficiaries. Our beneficiaries are our members, so we called the beneficiary perspective the member perspective. It means the same thing but uses our terminology.

• The mission perspective answers the question, “What are the essential things that we must do to fulfill our vision?”
• The beneficiary perspective addresses the question, “What must we do well to satisfy our beneficiaries?”
• The operational perspective examines the question, “At which processes must we excel if we are to meet our beneficiaries’ needs?”
• The assets perspective asks, “Do we have what we need in terms of people, technology and organizational climate?” Includes the human capital (skill, talent, & know-how), information capital (information systems and infrastructure) and organizational capital (the culture, leadership, internal alignment with goals, and teamwork) necessary to support the strategies
• The financial perspective addresses the reality that none of the foregoing will happen if you don’t have any money. Money, or the lack of it, is the constraining factor for nonprofits. This perspective has two components, recognizing that to improve your financial position you must do at least one of two things: grow revenue or improve efficiency.

Both Niven’s book and Kaplan and Norton’s guide you through the more detailed mapping within each perspective.

3. Work from the Top Row Down

The key to developing a strategy map is to realize that it does not document everything that you do, but only those things that are most critical to achieving your vision. So there will be lots of ongoing things that are good and necessary that will not appear on the strategy map. The idea is to reduce the clutter so you can easily focus on the essentials. These will be either new things you need to start doing, or things you are already doing that need significant improvement.

And remember, an organization’s strategies are a unified set of goals, including objectives and actions, that move us towards fulfilling the vision. The strategy map shows how a strategic initiative flows through the organization aligning all parts to support the initiative.

Mission Perspective

We took the Initiatives column from the theory of change which is our perspective of what we need to provide, and turned it around in the strategy map so that it was from the perspective of what our members needed in order for our End statement to be fulfilled.

For example, we identified faith and practice guidance as an initiative. We can provide guidance, but what our members need are faith-infused practices if they are to be exemplary Christian ministries. The theory of change identified what they need, and the strategy map created the category the need fits within. For example, providing guidance is a specific thing we can do, but if we think of members having faith-infused practices, we have created a category in which guidance is but one possibility. The category could stimulate other program and service ideas, making the strategy map a dynamic document. In fact, this led to another new program — our God’s Workplace staff devotions.

The benefit using both a theory of change and a strategy map is that the theory of change produces an explanation of why we think a given action will work and it allows us to test the explanation for reasonableness. And by stating it from the beneficiary’s perspective in the strategy map, it means we take responsibility for the end result. In other words, if our guidance on faith and practice is ignored, then we can’t say “We’ve done our part” and be satisfied. Because we take responsibility for the external change, it means that if no external change happens, we have to ask why our guidance wasn’t accepted and acted upon. Was it relevant? Realistic? Persuasive? Affordable? If external change isn’t taking place, we must make the necessary internal changes that will produce a different external result.

Other Perspectives

Once you’ve got the mission perspective, the rest will flow out from it. We drew lines to connect each individual initiative to all the other initiatives that it supports, so we could see the linkages. Then we found which initiatives end up supporting three or four of our key words from the End statement at the top. Those boxes we highlighted for special attention. Although we want to do everything on the strategy map, if we have to set priorities (which unfortunately time and money require us to do) then we will work first on the highlighted boxes because they provide the biggest bang for the buck.

Outcomes

The board approved our strategy map at the February board meeting, and since then we have drilled the map down to the departmental level so we now have operational maps as well as the strategy map. Allocation of resources, priorities, and other decisions will now all be based on our maps.

The post Strategy Maps Adapted for Charities appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

However, if what you actually do does not align with what you aspire to do, then your identity will be defined by what you really did. And people will remember what you did a lot longer than they will remember what you said!

I surveyed 350 pastors for my church-agency relationship research and was surprised that of the 46% of pastors who had had at least one bad experience with an agency, 84% were able to remember the name of the ministry and/or person involved! (My book, The Church At Work, uses this research to help churches and Christian agencies work better together.)

But there is one other important, strategic statement you should have that tells donors and beneficiaries what they can expect from you. It also tells your staff and volunteers what you expect from them — a value proposition.

Why a Value Proposition?

You may have heard of a value proposition under one of its other names: Unique Selling Proposition, Brand Promise, Customer Value Proposition and similar variants. I like value proposition because it is modest. It doesn’t claim to be unique, so it doesn’t imply that you are better than anyone else. As you know from a previous post, I don’t think Christian ministries should have a competitive stance towards each other. They should be devoted to their missions, doing the very best they can at program delivery and fundraising, and depending on God to provide the necessary resources.

A value proposition is simply a definition of the contribution your organization makes to Christian ministry that others value.

It isn’t what you value, because that by itself will not help you achieve your mission. It’s about what your supporters and beneficiaries value.

When others value your contribution, then you are on your way to mission fulfillment! Of course, it greatly helps if you are passionate about the same value that others are, because it will become core to everything your ministry does, and you and your staff need to eat, sleep and breathe it so that everything you do is infused with that value.

When you know your value proposition, you will:

• know what to keep in mind when planning
• be more committed to aspects of your work that you may formerly have under-appreciated
• change your messaging to donors and beneficiaries to highlight what they value about your ministry
• not accidentally lose something of real value because you will pay attention to ensuring the value proposition permeates everything!

Developing a Value Proposition

Even without a value proposition you probably have a pretty good idea what it is. I know we did at CCCC. For the first nine years I was here, these words were used many times in our management discussions. We knew they were important, so when we started thinking afresh about strategy, four words jumped off the page as the four critical words to describe our value proposition to our members. We confirmed them when we looked over our theory of change and asked ourselves what our members really need from us, because the same four words came to mind. So while none of them were new to us at the time, our commitment to them over and above the many other good and valuable things we do, is new.

Our value proposition is only four words (the brief definitions are for internal use):

• Credible: What we produce is correct and no member should feel the need to get a second opinion
• Theological: Wherever appropriate, members expect a Christian perspective as part of our commentary
• Practical: Anything we produce must include how to apply the knowledge in real-life ministry situations
• Affordable: Our pricing philosophy is based on the premise that any Christian ministry that wants to use our services can do so in an affordable way

To test whether or not our members agree that this is our value proposition, we reviewed what they have said to us over the years through:

• member surveys
• “thank you” emails we’ve received
• our visits to member ministries
• stakeholder consultations held by the board
• program evaluations by us
• event evaluations by our members
• comments made in response to communications received from us

If you don’t know what your value proposition is, start asking outsiders. Use the bullet list immediately above this paragraph as a starting point. It may be you could provide better value than you currently are, so be sure to ask the people you serve what they value about your ministry and its services and also what they would value that you don’t yet provide. You can also have an internal discussion, because some of your staff and volunteers likely have a good idea of what your value proposition is.

Using a Value Proposition

Once you have a value proposition, it becomes one of the lenses through which you assess the quality of any proposals you develop, programs you evaluate, training that would help staff and volunteers provide the value, and the way you promote your ministry to external audiences. It may also help you identify areas that need development.

The post Value Propositions for Ministries appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

A road to the Honduran town of Choluteca needed to cross a river, so a bridge was built that fulfilled its purpose for many years. But in 1998 Hurricane Mitch dropped 36 inches of rain on Choluteca (18 inches in one day alone!), swelling the river to six times its normal width, destroying the road and moving the river. When the storm was over, the bridge was standing in perfect condition, but with no reason to exist because it connected no roads and spanned only dry land.

The bridge didn’t change, but everything around it did!

As leaders, we must be ever vigilant that we don’t allow our ministries to remain impervious to the constant changes taking place around us. If we do, this picture could easily be a picture of our ministry a few years down the road. One of the reasons why we might not adapt to circumstances is the hold that history sometimes has on us. It is precisely for this reason that Christ gave us his Spirit to guide us after he ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit enables us to faithfully adapt to an ever-changing world.

Change Is Constant

Heraclitus wrote 2,500 years ago that nothing endures but change. As long as there is life and creativity, there will be no steady state for our society to achieve. We can never think we have found the immutable formula for ministry success that will endure for the rest of our careers. Many people say “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got,” but that’s not true. Because the world is constantly changing, the truth is “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get less than what you’ve always got.”  I’m sure your ministry was perfectly designed for its purpose years ago, but that is no guarantee that it is still perfectly designed for its purpose today. The world changes, and so must your ministry.

I think most ministry leaders recognize this, because when Don Simmonds gave his plenary speech on organizational change at a CCCC conference, he asked the audience “How many think their ministries need to change?” and it appeared that every hand in the room shot up!

Also, my job gives me the opportunity to talk with ministry leaders all across the country, and many ministries are either in the process of innovation, re-invention, and/or experimentation, or they want to find out how to do it. There is a groundswell of desire for fresh strategic thinking about our missions and the means of fulfilling them.

Getting Comfortable with Change

But some ministries seem uncomfortable with change, which is understandable for two reasons.

The first is that when results are tolerable or even good, the risk of fiddling with proven strategies is pretty high. The solution is to be in continual renewal and make change a way of life for the ministry, not a special event. Always be evaluating your programs, scanning for new ideas, watching trends, and challenging your assumptions. Anything that is coasting will sooner or later come to a grinding halt. I’ve written a post that addresses this issue by asking the question, Is your ministry near its ‘Best Before’ date? My wife’s email signature file contains a great quote from Walt Disney, “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” You can’t reach your destination if you are only looking in the rear-view mirror!

The second reason why ministries might be uncomfortable with change is that the weight of ‘corporate culture’ and stories of iconic leaders from the ministry’s past can dampen enthusiasm for doing something new and fresh today. The weight of your predecessors and the history of their deeds can be crushing, but it doesn’t have to be. You can let it go, as I wrote about in this post.

I have a high regard for my elders and predecessors, so I share the reluctance of others who are attached to their organizational history and don’t want to abandon what a respected former generation created. But there is a difference between respecting and honouring your predecessors and fulfilling your leadership responsibilities today. I find it helpful to remember two things:

1. Mission is fixed, strategy is not.
2. History is fixed, the future is not.

I doubt that the people who gave life to your ministry by being innovative and entrepreneurial would be any less so if they were around today. They made wise decisions years ago, and if they were here today, they’d still make wise decisions, although not likely the same decisions as they made back then. That’s because they would examine today’s situation and make decisions accordingly, just as you should. They would look at today’s situation, not yesterday’s.

When you think of the leaders who led your ministry in previous years, the question shouldn’t be “What did they do?” but “How did they think?” Don’t try to imitate your predecessors; be yourself and, with an awareness of the reasons for their success, invite the Spirit to guide you forward using your gifts and talents. R.W. Southern once wrote, “Without the renewing of the Holy Spirit, the incrustations of time come to be valued as the most distinctive feature of the organization and the organization fossilizes.” ¹ When tradition is higher priority than function or purpose, it’s time to scrape the barnacles off your ministry.

Use History to Move Forward, Not Backward!

History is great for inspiration but don’t let it become a limiting constraint. John G. Stackhouse Jr. used his plenary speech at a CCCC Conference titled Renewed and Ever Renewing to mine church history and show the adaptable and evolving nature and methods of the church. Stackhouse quickly ran through 2,000 years of church history, not once but six times! Each time he followed a different track: denominational splits, higher education, spiritual renewal and so on, driving home the point that the church is anything but a static institution.

John told me that too rarely do we draw the inspiration and wisdom we can from history, and the CCCC’s conference was one of the very few times he’s been asked specifically for that perspective. It is a shame to waste the rich resources left by our predecessors in the stories of their lives and deeds. I’ve written about how CCCC has mined its own history to find inspiration for new ideas and also to hold on to the parts of our history that still benefit us today.

A Harvard Business Review article entitled Your Company’s History as a Leadership Tool, says history has four useful functions:

1. To unite and inspire people by instilling a sense of identity and purpose [and, I would add, values], and suggest goals that will resonate.
   • I mined CCCC’s history to discern our sense of call, to define our values, and to express our mission in a fresh way that remained faithful with the past and documented how I did that in this post.
2. To put adversity in context and to help heal rifts.
   • I wouldn’t limit this point to contextualizing adversity. History helps contextualize whatever circumstances we are in.
3. Looking back to plan forward.
4. A leader’s well-developed, long-range perspective on his or her company may be the only antidote to the pressures of quarterly earnings reporting.
   • Even in the charitable sector, we can fall prey to a focus on short-term results. When this happens we focus on outputs of our programs instead of mission-related outcomes. The programs are a means to an end. The mission is the end and we need to interpret our program results based not on how well the program works or how busy it is, but on how much it moved us forward in accomplishing our mission.

The New Testament writers certainly modeled how to use history to contextualize the present and find a new way forward. The Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation is a very scholarly examination of the interpretive techniques that governed their use of Old Testament texts.

The one big takeaway for me from the Handbook is that the New Testament authors did not limit themselves to examining direct prophecies from the Old Testament that they thought applied to their times, but broadened their use of the Hebrew Bible to include “the redemptive-historical relationship of the new, climatic revelation of God in Christ to the preparatory, incomplete revelation to and through Israel.” ²

In other words, they looked at the big picture of the overarching meta-narrative of God’s Word to understand his intent and his heart and then applied that to their times. Peter did exactly this when spoke to his fellow Jews and interpreted recent events in light of their own history in order to bring them to Christ.

A final thought about using history as a resource: History provides both positive and negative examples for us to learn from. Think of history as a laboratory where you can observe experiments and their outcomes, assess the conditions that led to success or failure, and figure out what you think will hold true today and what might have different results because of different circumstances.

“The Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post Corporate History – Resource or Constraint? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I recently read  The Measure of Our Success: An Impassioned Plea to Pastors by Shawn Lovejoy. His urgent cause is to get pastors away from the three Cs of unhealthy measurement: comparing, copying, and condemning, because they are based on the wrong definition of success. We’re not trying to prove ourselves better than another church, or to copy and become another church or to put down another church by, say, attributing their success to a watering down of the Gospel. We are all trying to be faithful to the way God wants us to live and work and to the  mission he has given us. Given that noble calling, Lovejoy quickly knocks down the idols of bigness, numbers, fame and so forth that many pastors unintentionally serve.

The starting place for measuring mission success is theological reflection on your ministry’s mission. What is God’s heart for your mission? What does he have to say about it? What is his ultimate goal that he wants your mission to achieve? The answers to these questions will define what mission success is for your ministry.

Measurements Must Measure Mission, Values, and Strategy

One of the best questions I’ve come up with to help me decide what to measure is, How will the answer matter? What will we do differently depending on the answer? If the answer is nothing, or nothing significant, then find something better to measure. Did people enjoy the sermon or the worship? Good, but does that really matter? The real issue based on the mission of the church is, Did they change an attitude, have a new insight, or make a decision as a result of the sermon or worship? Will anything change in their life?

So don’t measure the unimportant things. Look for the important things, things that will cause you to make significant changes based on the answer. Important things are directly related to your:

• Mission: The purpose you are trying to fulfill
• Values: The non-negotiable values you will abide by while operating your ministry
• Strategies: The key initiatives for accomplishing the mission

Mission, values and strategy are important. Focus on them and measure how you are doing in each of them. That is what will move your church forward.

Numbers Don’t Count, Percentages Do!

The Great Commission is all about conversion and discipleship. One measurement that Lovejoy promotes is the number of baptisms in a year compared to the average number of worship attendees. That gives a percentage, so big churches and small churches are on a level playing field. As Lovejoy says, “You don’t have to be big to be successful.” He’s not interested in the size of the congregation but in the rate of conversion growth.

He does the same thing for discipleship. He measures the percentage of worship attendees who are “active in biblical community, meaning small groups of people who are connecting together with God, doing life with and serving each other, and reaching out to people outside the community of believers.” Small groups are a key component of discipleship.

 Self-Worth

The bulk of Lovejoy’s book is actually aimed at helping pastors find their self-worth and security in who they are, rather than in the churches they lead. Pastors would do well to consider his advice relating to their own personal vitality, their relationship with their ministry team, and how to keep going when you feel like quitting.

Other Metrics for Churches

Lovejoy says that we need to take the Great Commandment seriously, to love one another, and to focus on the fruit of our ministries. He doesn’t actually develop a metric in this area, but since pastors are given to the church for the equipping of the saints for the work of service (Eph 4:12), then another measurement would be the percentage of worship attendees who are involved in volunteer service in the church or elsewhere, or who have an active, personal ministry of showing love to other people. Here, I’m thinking of a widow in my church who for thirty years has made it her personal ministry to serve other widows in our church. It’s not a program, it is a purely personal effort on her part to be Christ to her widow ‘neighbours’. The point of this metric is, are people doing something with their faith (James 2:14-18)?

If you want conversion growth, you must have people involved with your church who don’t yet know Christ. They could be attending worship, a small group, or a regular participant in one of your ministries. Find out how many people your church has a relationship with who aren’t yet believers. The higher the percentage of total people your church touches to your worship attendance, the more opportunities you have for conversion growth.

If your church is going to grow and multiply, you need lay leaders for small groups and other needs. What percentage of your worship attendance are either currently ministry leaders or being developed to become a ministry leader?

In the end, it is not about numbers, but about results. Paul put it quite well when he wrote to Timothy, “As for you…fulfill your ministry” (2 Tim 4:5 – ESV)

“Book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post The Measure of Our Success appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

End Statements

I’ve already provided the traditional definitions of vision and mission: vision explains why the organization exists (what it wants to accomplish) and mission is its overarching strategy for accomplishing the vision. Now let’s remind ourselves what an End Statement is.  According to John Carver (the developer of policy governance), End Statements:

• define which human needs are to be met (usually shortened to “what good”), for whom, and at what cost. Written with a long term perspective, these mission-related policies embody the board’s long-range vision.¹
• are developed in terms of the mission to be accomplished, its outcomes.²
  • Ends are not about intentions. Carver criticizes a statement that says the commitment is that the organization will “seek to bring” its good works to people. Good intentions are insufficient because you don’t actually have to do anything to fulfill the mission.
  • Ends are not about what the organization does or what it values. Another statement that Carver criticizes says the association will provide “support…in an effective and caring manner.” It doesn’t say what difference it will make.
  • Ends are not about activity. Carver says to be wary of any prominent verbs in the End Statement. Ensure Ends refer only to outcomes.

Although Carver used to describe the End Statement as a specific type of mission statement, he rarely uses the word mission anymore because it can lead the board astray from policy governance into less rigorous, less theory-based practice. He says if the staff wants to have a mission statement, it can have one because having a mission statement is a means (the organization’s strategy), not an end. It might be good for public relations or inspiring staff, for example, so if it is helpful you can have one, but it is not a part of policy governance.[1, Boards That Make A Difference p 84.]

The examples he gives for “at what cost” are “at a competitive cost”, “at a reasonable cost”, and at a cost “no greater than comparable associations.” Carver approves of one example that does not mention cost but says he does not recommend it. He says cost can be left out because the Executive Limitation against imprudence imposes a ceiling on costs in relation to benefits anyway, but he fears that the cost element may get lost among the Limitations[1, Boards That Make A Difference p 92-93.] to which I say, “Surely not!”

Ditch the Cost Factor!

Strategic statements need to be succinct and powerful. They need to motivate board, staff, donors and other stakeholders. Statements of the obvious are not powerful and just add unnecessary verbiage. They sap energy and are completely uninspiring. So here are my reasons why (in most cases) you should leave cost out of the End Statement:

• The sample Carver-approved End Statements all have what I would call ‘motherhood’ cost statements. Would anyone say they will produce their good at an “uncompetitive cost,” at an “unreasonable cost,” or “at a cost greater than comparable associations?” I don’t think so. What ‘value’ does the value component of the End Statement contribute? The only time a motherhood statement is useful is when it hasn’t been true for a particular organization. So if a ministry has been woefully inefficient in its operations and wildly overspending on programs with no commensurate benefits, then the board may want to bump the cost factor up to the End Statement and limit spending to what is reasonable or comparable to other ministries. Otherwise such a statement adds no value.
• The issue of costs can be quite adequately dealt with through three mechanisms other than the End Statement:
  1. Executive Limitations and budget: The board can say that the CEO shall not allow programs to operate at an unreasonable cost relative to other providers. It can set whatever limitations it wants around how the budget is developed. Then it can do a direct inspection of the budget by asking management to explain how decisions were made about allocating resources to the various programs, administration and fundraising. It can then check that those decisions comply with the Executive Limitations.
  2. Corporate values: The board can also insert into the corporate values a statement about being good stewards of the ministry’s resources. One of the tests to run before approving any organizational decision, at the board or staff level, is to assess the recommended decision against the corporate values to see if it aligns.
  3. Organizational and program evaluations: The board can require that program evaluations be done to ensure they are effective and efficient. Cost/benefit analysis will ensure that costs are reasonable. An organizational evaluation examines the bigger picture, looking at how well the ministry is accomplishing its End Statement. This corporate-wide evaluation examines spending on administration and fundraising, thus ensuring that all costs are tested for reasonableness.

My recommendation is to leave cost out of the End Statement unless management has demonstrated poor judgment in this area and needs to have costs highlighted at this level. Otherwise, the shorter the End Statement, the better. The big benefit of leaving cost out of the End Statement is that the statement is focused solely on mission and that makes it much punchier and highly motivational.

A Case Study

A vision statement is a picture of the final condition an organization wishes to see. The draft that we were working with in 2012 at CCCC was: A vibrant community of exemplary Christian ministries working together to effectively fulfill their missions.

A mission statement describes the overarching strategy to accomplish the vision. Our draft mission statement at the time was We are the Canadian Council of Christian Charities and we are privileged to develop Christian ministries into strong, healthy organizations that serve Jesus Christ with integrity. This is written in the format of a Statement Zero, which I find highly motivational. The strategy for seeing exemplary ministries is to help them serve Christ with integrity, while the strategy for helping them effectively fulfill their missions is to help them be strong and healthy organizations. Each of those key words can be unpacked as to what we mean by them.

If you have to choose only one statement as the basis for crafting an End Statement, start with the vision because it depicts the external change that you want to cause. Here are the steps we went through as a staff at CCCC to come up with a draft End Statement for the board to consider:

1. It didn’t take long to decide for whom the good will be done — our members. We recognize that our influence goes far beyond our members, mostly through the 127 denominational offices that are members, but we can only commit ourselves to doing good for our members.
2. The longest and most difficult conversation the board and staff have had has been about our claim — our stake in the ground — against which we will measure our success. The stake has to be outside our organizational boundary. The outcomes belong to our members not us. The change that we make is outside of ourselves. We were stuck on our role in creating the change. Do we build? Develop? Assist? We finally decided the strongest claim we could make is that our members will be something as a result of using our services. So instead of saying “CCCC develops…”, we now say “CCCC members will be…” The stake in the ground is still there. If we determine that our members are not what we want to see, then we have to take ownership of our failure to achieve the expected outcomes by asking:
   • Were we not persuasive enough?
   • Did we show them step-by-step how to do it?
   • Were we not relevant?
   • Did we communicate in an understandable way?
   • Did we understand the real issues faced by our members?
   • What are we missing?
3. The good that we want to do for our members is whatever it takes for them to become a vibrant community of exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries.
4. We finally dropped reference to the vibrant community because that is a secondary goal that we have but it is not our primary focus.

The final version of the End Statement approved by the board is short but powerful:

CCCC members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries.

We then developed a two-sentence commentary on what we mean by the End Statement:

Within the CCCC community, ministries find practical, expert resources to help fulfill their missions and demonstrate a compelling Christian witness. They choose to access our services to heighten their performance, enhance their sustainability, and stimulate their creativity.

These statements reflect our hopes for Christian ministries and outline the work that CCCC needs to do:

• We want them to share best practices with each other, so we must prepare a way for them to receive resources from CCCC and each other. Our online community, The Green, facilitates sharing.
• How they operate will be a powerful witness of applied Christian faith, so we need to talk about theology in action. We include a theological perspective wherever appropriate in our knowledge resources and created God’s Workplace that contains devotionals that applies faith to the operations of a ministry.
• They will be high-performing organizations with sufficient resources of money and people to endure until their mission is accomplished, so we need to help them attract people and money. We have many programs that address these needs.
• With the inflow of new ideas they will be always looking for better ways of operating, so we need to highlight what’s new in organizational leadership and operations.

May the Spirit guide you as you consider developing an End Statement.

The post Converting Mission & Vision into an End Statement appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Your strategic planning process must ensure there are plenty of opportunities for you, the leader, to be surprised. If you forge ahead based on what you already know, or what your research plan discovers, the strat plan will simply reflect what you thought you should research and think about. Simply put, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you need to check regularly for blind spots.

To get really fresh, daring, out-of-the-box ideas, to get completely new approaches to pursuing your mission, you need to enter terra incognita, the unknown land. You need a planning process that deliberately introduces the unpredictable, the unforeseeable; the jarring, non sequitur idea that makes you say, “Oh yeah! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Self-Help Is of Limited Value

You likely can’t do this on your own. Your staff and board likely can’t do it either, because they are too close to the way you think and you probably have a common understanding of “the way things are.” Unless you have some very new staff or directors, you all share the same organizational lore, mindset and assumptions. However, there is no harm in asking the board and staff to suggest blind spots.

The best people who can take you into uncharted territory are people who are on the periphery or even completely right off your map. This is “edge-centric” strategy development. People on the edges are not tainted by your organizational history or its aspirations. If you assure them you are open to hearing some hard truths and want their honest thoughts, they will say what they think and they will do that from a variety of perspectives and assumptions that are vastly different from your own. Their ideas are worth their weight in gold!

Outsource Your Planning

One of the ways to introduce unpredictability into the planning process is to outsource part of it by engaging people on the periphery. Here are some ideas for how you can do that:

• Non-users
  • Find people who don’t support your ministry as donors or volunteers or who don’t use its services and ask them about their needs and wants. Whatever service you are providing, ask what they are doing instead. For example, we used our database to find members who have not attended a conference in the past five years, and we surveyed them to find out why they don’t come. We discovered they like to get their information from books and the Internet, don’t like to travel and don’t value the networking that occurs at a conference. They still want the information provided by the conference, but in a different format. Non-users probably will not know you well and, if they do, they may have misconceptions. Don’t discount what they tell you because whether their perceptions are true or not, they do represent what non-users think and you have to deal with that. As a result of what we learned we prioritized webinar development (and ultimately dropped the annual conference from our programs).
  • Using CRA’s database, we can identify Christian charities that are not members of CCCC.  In the strategic review we will be surveying them to find out how they get by without us. We just don’t understand that!! Seriously, we want to know how they satisfy the needs that we think we fulfill. Is there anything we can help them with? If they know about us, why have they chosen not to take out a membership?
  • Who is a non-user for you? One would be a Christian who does not financially support your ministry. You can be pretty sure they are giving to at least a few ministries. Why not yours? Some ministries have causes that are hard to raise support for. Why not dig into how people perceive your cause and see if there is a better angle you could use to raise support? If people are not using your devotional material, find out what they do use. Do they have any formal way of doing their daily devotions? Maybe they will give you an idea for a new product. Ask friends, staff and supporters to recommend people to you to participate in a focus group or a survey. I think for most ministries that will be the easiest way to identify non-users. Focus groups are good for this type of inquiry.
• Non-traditional voices
  • Whose voice is not usually heard in your ministry? Go seek it out. As part of a strategic review, we wanted to hear from up and coming ministry leaders, so we brainstormed how to get a number of them to give us a few days of their precious time to work on our strategic plan for us. We developed a win-win-win. We offered a free (yes free!) three-day strategic planning course. We asked members and non-members to suggest the names of young, creative leaders interested in Christian ministry and invited them to come. They got some professional development that will help them with their careers, they shared a meal with our board, and they had the experience of making a board presentation. Their employers got some training done at no cost. And since we used CCCC as the case study, they applied their new strategic planning/thinking skills to our ministry. What a deal! We ran it in Langley, BC and Etobicoke, ON. Thanks to Focus on the Family and Opportunity International who let us use their boardrooms.  Many of the students had virtually no knowledge of CCCC except that they knew something called CCCC existed, so they also qualified as non-users. They were full of ideas that we will be considering during the strategic review, and I’m sure many of their ideas will be used.
  • How could you do this? Why not gather potential donors or users of your services and give them a day or so of training in your core ministry. Help them evangelise better. Give them a greater understanding of the root causes of poverty. And ask them to help you design a better way of conducting your ministry.
• Unexpected users
  • Have you ever discovered a user you didn’t expect? I have. Some time ago I was in a French class and my seatmate said he was a CCCC member. I asked what his ministry was, and he said it wasn’t a ministry. It was a completely secular agency. “Why would you want to belong to a Christian organization?” I asked. (We do allow secular members — they can’t be Certified, but they can receive our materials.) He said we do very good work that applies to all charities and they can put up with the prayer requests we send out and the occasional theologically-based article. “We can skip the articles if we want, and I guess prayer never hurts,” he said. It was an interesting perspective and it says that much of our material has application beyond Christian charities. We are not changing our mission in order to serve all charities, but it was a confidence booster to know that we can explicitly be Christian and not worry about our few secular members being turned off by Christian content. After all, they know who we are when they join us.
  • Maybe you’ve had an unexpected large donation from a new donor. Why? How did the donor find you? Why you and not someone else? What did they see and value about your ministry?
  • Perhaps a program has suddenly had great success with a group you never thought would be interested. Again, why? What’s going on? You just might have a new initiative!
• Unexpected uses
  • For-profit companies often send staff out to watch customers use their products and services. Some even have people live in a home for a day or two to observe. They are looking to see how the product is used. They are especially interested in seeing someone use it in a way they never expected. When they find that, they often have a new use to include in their advertising.
  • Maybe someone isn’t using your material as expected for personal devotions, but is using it as a neighbourhood outreach. Maybe a leader’s guide would be helpful.
  • Perhaps someone is downloading your sermons, but you discover they are being translated and sent to another country. Maybe you have a ministry somewhere you don’t even know about. If it is bearing fruit, then maybe you should make it a program and ramp it up.
• Non-competitors
  • Most for-profits watch their competition closely, and copy anything that looks successful. In the ministry world, we do the same thing. Maybe you should stop copying someone else and look outside of your sector, outside of the nonprofit sector entirely, and see how things are being done elsewhere. Ask how that might apply in your context. That’s how leadership in innovation is achieved. It’s not by copying others but by creating new strategies, often by taking something from one market and applying it in another.
• Foreign Lands
  • Most of our members operate in Canada and maybe a few other countries. Get out beyond that and see how things are done in different cultures around the world. This was the real benefit of my sabbatical trip — seeing how things are done in other countries and realizing that the way we do it in Canada is not the only way it can be done. There are similarities, but there are many differences, and it may be that in the differences you will find something new to bring back to Canada with you.

These are all sources that are likely to supply you with ideas you could never have come up with on your own. They all take planning to set up, but once you’ve engaged with these people you will not be able to predict what great ideas will be offered to you.

Happy planning!

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