This post documents the theory of change and the logic model that are the rationale for the program we are reviewing, which is the CCCC Annual Conference. These models will make fundraising easier, particularly if your mission does not produce short-term observable results. If donors understand the theory and logic of what you are doing, they will more readily fund programs that make sense to them.

Theory of Change

The theory of change is all about ensuring that you are doing the right things. It is mostly about effectiveness.

It’s important that you know why you provide a certain program and understand all of the assumptions you have made about it. The theory of change is how you document why you believe this program will result in changes that will help you fulfill your mission. It also helps you find assumptions you may not even be aware that you have made. Here is the theory of change for the CCCC conference. If you click on the picture of the model it will open up large enough that you can read  it.

How to Develop a Theory of Change

You can find detailed instructions for how to develop a theory of change and a template you can use in the post Theory of Change: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing a Customized Plan For Your Ministry.

Logic Model

The logic model is all about ensuring that you are doing things right. It is mostly about efficiency.

Once you have a theory of change, you can do a logic model. The interventions column from the theory of change comes over to the logic model. The columns are essentially the same between the two models, although I reworded one of the boxes for the logic model.

Inputs

First you document all of the inputs that make the program work. The general categories of inputs are physical assets (buildings), time and money. I’ve been a bit more detailed on this logic model because as I created the model I realized that not only were there benefits for our members, but there were benefits in the program for CCCC too. Since the goal is to ultimately compare inputs against outputs, I thought it only fair to allocate the time that benefits CCCC separately from the time that benefits our members. This simply recognizes that the content created by staff for their workshops can be used in multiple ways beyond the conference itself.

Interventions

As already mentioned, this is the list of program activities and is the same as the list in the theory of change.

Outputs

Outputs represent the completion of the program. When the outputs are done, you can say “We did our part, now the beneficiaries have to do their part.” Outputs could be the number of presentations of the Gospel, or it might be the number of people given glasses. They could be the number of Bibles handed out or the number of Sunday School classes and attendees. Whatever the outputs are, they are what you used the inputs for and did the activities for.

The outputs tell you how busy you’ve been.

Outcomes and Impact

These are the same as in the theory of change model. The outcomes and impact will tell you how effective you’ve been.

Where to from Here?

Now that you have your theory of change and logic model, go over them very carefully and think hard about any assumptions you are making. You will want to check all the assumptions. Of course, at least some of your assumptions have turned up in the models themselves. For example, I made assumptions in coming up with the causes of the problem and with the attendees needs which I included in the models, but there are many, many more that I have listed and which form the basis for the research questions, which I’ll be blogging about later.

You now have two models that, put together, will help you check that you are doing the right things right. The next time I post on this program review, I’ll discuss reviewing the literature as a key part the review process.

The post Program Evaluation 2 – Program Rationale appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• If the strategic limitation is our circumstances, then the environmental scan (particularly the SWOT analysis) will be done very early in the process and will set the parameters for what will and will not be considered for inclusion in the strategic plan. Since our focus is first and foremost on the possibilities that are open and closed to our ministry, we could easily accept limitations that God might want us to challenge and overcome (with his help).
• If the strategic limitation is our mission, then we are constrained only by what the mission requires for it to be fulfilled. We will start by exploring our mission and developing plans to achieve it by doing whatever is necessary. Our focus will be first and foremost on our mission. If there are obstacles, they will be obstacles to overcome rather than obstacles to accept as insurmountable blockages. Knowing that God supports our mission, we will make obstacles a matter of prayer with the confidence that God is not limited by circumstances, weaknesses, or threats. I call this a mission-first mindset.

A kingdom perspective on strategy development supported by human wisdom acknowledges that while we live in a world with realities we must take into account, there are far stronger spiritual realities that help us as members of the kingdom of God. We must approach our work in this world with ‘kingdom eyesight’, such as Elisha’s servant experienced when Elisha said to him:

“Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O LORD, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.” And the LORD opened the servant’s eyes and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
2 Kings 6:16-17

It should be obvious – traditional strategic planning tools based only on human wisdom do not allow for kingdom eyesight and therefore, on their own, limit God’s ability to lead our ministries. If those tools are all we use, then we will not see what God wants us to see. We will not do what God wants us to do. The practical difference that planning with kingdom eyesight makes is that we know that the conditions and obstacles we face in this world are not the final reality. There is more to be seen. And the spiritual reality is what spurs us on to persevere in our mission. This was the point Jesus made when he challenged his followers:

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. Already he who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for life eternal; so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.”

John 4:34-36

We must keep our focus on our mission or we risk being overwhelmed by the scope of work and the challenges the world throws at us and lose heart. For example, Jesus did say that the poor would always be with us,¹ but that reality is no reason to give up fighting poverty.

The Deficiencies of Traditional Strategic Planning

From a Christian perspective, traditional strategic planning tools are out of alignment with the way God works when they are given primacy in strategy development for Christian ministries. A plan for harvesting would have waited four more months, but Jesus, who knows the true situation, says “Look up!!” His urgent message is that the fields are ripe for harvesting at this very moment! And while we are waiting for circumstances to dictate the right time to get to work, others are already earning their wages, like – right now! Get a move on!

Without kingdom eyesight, we may lose out on the best that God wants to do through us. What strategic plan would ever have led the Israelites into the desert without planning for food and water? What strategic plan would have ever conceived of reducing an army of 32,000 soldiers to 300? What strategic plan would have brought salvation to the world through a peasant born in a cave in what most people at the time thought was a backwater, no-account country? While these are very dramatic and unsual examples of how God works, they inspire us to test our own self-imposed limits based on what we see with human eyes.

The Bible declares that God is on a mission and is unstoppable as he works to fulfil it. His strategic options are bounded only by his mission. Circumstances are acknowledged and then blown away by a God who can do miracles. We can’t expect God to always rescue our human plans with a miracle, but if a ministry’s board and leadership have discerned God’s direction to take a step of faith, then it can reasonably expect his support in some way (not always miraculous, but through his provision nonetheless). As his earthly representatives, as God’s agents in mission, we can do no less than Paul who steadfastly pursued his call and relied on God to work things out however he would.

I love Paul’s attitude, his fixation on what God had called him to do against all odds. While he’s writing about his personal growth in this passage from Philippians, I think we should all emulate his attitude when it comes to planning for our ministries with the firm belief that we will not let circumstances stop us from pursuing our goal. At the end of his life, I’m sure Paul had no “I shoulda” or “I coulda” regrets. Not when he had the commitment seen in this passage!

Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:12-14

The Primacy of Our Call

Traditional planning tools can be very helpful, but they should not be the primary drivers of Christian ministry strategy. Businesses can change their missions if they want to get more profits, but Christian ministries have been called to a particular purpose and must work at that purpose until it has been fulfilled.

A ministry’s strategy has one purpose: to help the ministry fulfill its mission.

A Suggested Strategic Planning Process for Christian Ministries

While there is room for multiple ways to do strategic planning from a biblical-theological perspective, here are the steps of one faith-friendly approach:

• A group discernment process to be clear on what people understand God’s call to a ministry is. The output will be a set of strategic statements.
• A theory of change to make explicit what your ministry believes about how the mission can be accomplished. For example, sociologists have studied how people change their worldview and religion. Evangelism ministries will want to know about this. Others have studied how people escape poverty. Inner city ministries will find lots of good program ideas in this research. The goal of developing a theory of change is to understand the factors that must be considered for your ministry to be able to make the changes it wants to make.
• A theory of change is also a specific form of a logic model that “connects the dots” and shows how and why your ministry’s activities (its programs) will ultimately result in fulfilling the ministry’s mission. The initiatives column in the theory of change will be the broad strategic initiatives that will lead to mission progress (and maybe even mission fulfillment).
• Development of the strategic initiatives leads naturally into determining the programs that will best fulfill a strategic initiative, and from there the annual action plan converts intentions into actions. There are some good faith-friendly strategic planning tools that are helpful in this part of strategy development.
• Check that you have a business model that will deliver on your plans. This includes organizational structure, revenue model, and other operational aspects of making mission activity happen.

Where do the traditional planning tools fit in? They can play an important but secondary role throughout the planning process. Think of them as “filling in and rounding out.”

• The environmental scan (also called a landscape scan) is helpful to more fully understand the mission and to ensure that the theory of change is comprehensive, so it should be done as a step in developing the theory of change. The scan can also help with the development of the strategic initiatives. The scan may indicate the tasks of fulfilling the mission will be more or less difficult, but it shouldn’t deter anyone from doing what must be done to fulfil their mission. The environmental scan will likely surface a list of things to ask God for his help. Doing the environmental scan ahead of or during the early stages of the strategy development process is helpful as it provides the context in which your ministry is working.
• The SWOT analysis should be done in stages:
  • Opportunities are best considered after the mission-related strategic initiatives have been identified. The initiatives are based on what the mission requires and the opportunities show where the ministry can leverage the fruit of its work within those initiatives in terms of programs or advocacy.
  • The SW part (Strengths/Weaknesses) is useful when you are checking organizational readiness to implement your strategic plan, so they are best considered once the detailed mission-related tactics (e.g., programs) have been identified. This way, there is a context in which to decide what is a strength and what is a weakness. For example, is being tall a strength or a weakness? It depends on whether a person is playing basketball or riding a race horse. However, don’t allow a weakness to stop you! New strategies will always involve areas of weakness precisely because they are new.
  • Threats are particularly important as matters of prayer. We should be wise about threats (as Paul was in Damascus)² but the mission continues, just as Paul continued his mission after being stoned and left for dead in Lystra³

But remember, God works through our weaknesses and God is our defender, so weaknesses and threats should not be deterrents! I admire Paul’s pluck; he got up and marched right back into the city (Lystra) that had just thrown him out, stoned him, and left him for dead. Wow!

Be Wise

To repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, Jesus commended people who used their brains and the best of human wisdom (for example, the unrighteous steward in Luke 16) and he challenged his followers to do for him what they would do for themselves (eg., think ahead and count the cost before following him just as they would when building a tower or going to war – Luke 14:27-33), so we shouldn’t be derelict and switch off our minds when planning for our ministries.

But if you reduce your plans to what you think you can do with human wisdom and strength, you’ve left no room for God to do what only he can do, and I suspect that when you can do it yourself, God lets you do it yourself! But if you want to partner with God, then make a plan big enough that God has room to manoeuvre and do his thing.

The post A Kingdom Perspective: Strategic Planning for Christian Ministries appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Challenging Assumptions

What I am thrilled by is that he is challenging his assumptions. Many people never do that because they aren’t even aware what their assumptions are. They confuse the way they see the world with reality, a monumental assumption! If you don’t challenge your assumptions, then the status quo reigns and the most a program review will do is help you tinker with it to make  it just a little more efficient or a little more effective. Without challenging the way you think, you likely will never question the program’s existence or do anything radical with it.

Start with the Program’s Purpose

Tinkering with a program to modify it for better performance is a legitimate outcome of a program evaluation, but there are actually three possible outcomes:

1. Keep the program as is,
2. Modify the program, or
3. Kill the program and do something else.

This pastor was starting from a good place—what is the purpose of the program? From that he built a logic model. And then he started to really think:

• What are my assumptions and how do I test them?
• What other ways could the church fulfill the purpose of youth ministry?
• What are the criteria that would indicate a successful program?

As you reflect on the mission of the ministry you lead, think as broadly as possible by starting with the basic premise behind your existence. Then think about broad initiatives to fulfill the mission. You don’t want to get bogged down or hemmed in by existing programs until you have the big picture in focus.

Here’s the simple way I always explain it: I am committed to my ministry’s mission, not its programs and not its plans. Otherwise programs and plans take on a life of their own and become sacred cows (or worse, leeches sucking the life out of the ministry’s energy and creativity).

Mission Takes Priority over Program

Remember, you were called for a purpose: to engage in a mission. Mission always comes first and how you do it comes second. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions like this pastor is. You just might end up with a far better way of pursuing your mission!

The post Mission First, Then Program appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

“If I as a pastor want to help believers and inquirers to relate science and faith coherently, I must read the works of scientists, exegetes, philosophers, and theologians and then interpret them for my people. Someone might counter that this is too great a burden to put on pastors, that instead they should simply refer their laypeople to the works of scholars. But if pastors are not ‘up to the job’ of distilling and understanding the writings of scholars in various disciplines, how will our laypeople do it? This is one of the things that parishioners want from their pastors.”

Develop and Equip

These sentences point to a key leadership responsibility which is to develop whoever we are leading. We know from Ephesians 4:11-12 that the reason Christ gave his church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers is for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ. The principle of equipping people to build up the body of Christ applies to all Christian leaders. We equip people to fulfill the Christian mission.

Whatever your field of ministry is, you should read the deep thinkers in your field. You are likely already doing this so that you can write your sermons and speeches, and better design your logic model, strategic plan, program evaluations and your case for support. Keeping up with the thought-leaders contributes to your own personal development too, and their ideas are the sparks that ignite your creativity to generate new ideas for your ministry.

Make Good Scholarship Accessible

I’m suggesting you take the extra step of interpreting the experts in your field for your staff and supporters by repackaging their ideas into an easily understood, user-friendly format. The people you lead will better understand what your ministry is doing and advocating, appreciate that you are being responsible in how you do it, and will be better equipped to tell others why what you are doing is so important. You will have contributed to their personal development and will raise future leaders and champions for your ministry.

Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through the ‘heavy’ writing of deep thinkers in your field. If you’ve done the reading, you’ve done the bulk of the work already. Follow through and leverage the value of the time you have already invested.

So, if you are:

• a pastor, read great Christian theologians and help your parishioners develop a richer theology;
• a seminary or Bible college president, read educational theorists and show your supporters how your school excels;
• an inner-city mission leader, read experts on poverty, addiction, and the systemic conditions that create the problems in the first place and let your supporters know how you not only are responding to the fallout of these problems, but are working to prevent them from happening at all;
• an executive director of an evangelism ministry, read missiologists and let your people know about the nuances and sensitivities of working cross-culturally and how you are being responsible in creating self-sustaining churches around the globe;
• and, well, you get the idea.

The post Leaders – Bridging the Worlds of Scholarship and the Street appeared first on CCCC Blogs.