The Milestone 360 Can Transform Your Ministry

In the years leading up to its 50th anniversary milestone, CCCC reflected on its past, assessed its present state, and planned its desired future. Let’s call this analysis a Milestone 360. A comparison of CCCC in 2010 to what it is today reveals an organization reinvigorated with new life and creativity—it is refreshed with new programs, platforms, strategies, and an expanded vision for what it wants to achieve.

Our founder and his ministry friends accomplished their dreams of what they could do with the resources they had. My predecessor did the same. And, after focusing on membership growth and organizational development, in 2011 it was time for the team and me to dream as well. Our founder had told me he was amazed that we had surpassed his vision for CCCC, so it felt like a new beginning for us. A well-timed sabbatical in 2011 led straight into the discovery process that I’m now calling the Milestone 360. We used the process to dream about how CCCC could make a much greater contribution to the success of Christian ministries. Our 50th anniversary was within a reasonable planning horizon and our goal was to set CCCC up for success over the next 50 years. A looming milestone, such as a 50th anniversary or completion of a major project, is a great reason to pause and prepare the ministry for what comes next. However, since this analysis can be done at any time, there’s no reason to not do it now. How might your ministry be transformed by the Milestone 360 analysis?

The first two posts in this Milestone 360 series looked back over a ministry’s history to determine what to preserve, what to revive, and what to leave behind. This post shifts to the present to look around and assess the ministry as it is today, starting with its corporate values.

Corporate Values are Corporate Decisions in Advance

Corporate values are all about the choices that confront ministries every day. Will you go this way or that way, do this or that? When you define your corporate values, you are at the same time deciding in advance the criteria that will be used to assess the many choices the ministry will face in the future. Of the hundreds of values that could be your corporate values, which ones will you feature as the most significant for your ministry for the foreseeable future?

Selecting your ministry’s corporate values is not a forever decision. Over time, you may find that other values should be featured as corporate values. The previous values will still be good and worthy to be held by the organization, but the issues facing you then may benefit from a different set of featured values. Every so often you need to answer the question, Are your corporate values still the ones to feature today? This post will help you answer that question. And, if you have not yet identified your corporate values, this post will help you choose the ones that will best serve your ministry.

Types of Corporate Values

There are several different starting places for finding values that could become your ministry’s corporate values. I’ve found it helpful to label those starting points because the labels provide an organized approach to developing a well-rounded set of corporate values.

You will note that I have not included cultural or team values in the list below. These values are often called corporate values, but they are inward looking rather than outward looking and they deal with individuals rather than the organization and its needs. CCCC has formally documented its cultural aspirations and its team values, but we don’t call them corporate values. Our corporate values are reserved for what the organization as a whole needs to accomplish its mission.

Christian Values

Christian values apply all the time to all Christians and apply to your ministry whether or not they are your corporate values. A particular Christian value becomes a corporate value when it is deemed so vital to mission success for the ministry that it is worthy of receiving special attention.

Because CCCC is an umbrella organization with members from across the Christian spectrum, we feel we have a duty to model Christian unity. So, we have a top-level corporate value of “Evangelical in identity, ecumenical in service.”

And because we are involved in the “business” side of ministry, we believe it is important that we remind everyone, including ourselves, of the spiritual and faith-based aspects of our work with a corporate value to “Present a strong Christian witness at all times.”

Guardrail Values

Guardrail values keep the ministry safe by preventing it from suffering again from past failures or unwanted experiences. Completing the phrase “Never again will we…” will help you discern these values.

For example, for a number of years people perceived CCCC as being a “watchdog” or “police officer” enforcing the rules within the Christian ministry sector. This was neither the reputation nor the role we wanted. (Accredited CCCC members voluntarily make themselves accountable for complying with our standards, which we do “enforce,” but we do so from the perspective of helping them come back into compliance with the standards they’ve chosen to meet.) We have a guardrail value to prevent CCCC being seen as a “watchdog” or “police officer” again: “We aspire to…serve our peers with the integrity and servant’s heart that are expected of a representative of Jesus Christ.” For a season, we had a tagline that positioned us as among our members, not over them: Advancing Ministry Together. Having fulfilled its purpose, we no longer use this tagline, but the value continues as a guardrail for us.

Both CCCC examples of Christian corporate values, “Evangelical in identity” and “A strong Christian witness,” also serve as guardrail values. They protect us from mission drift.

Brand Values

Brand values are those values that tell people “We’re different and here’s how.” They set the expectations of those who engage with your ministry as supporters, staff, or beneficiaries about what they will experience. Review your brand guide to find what is particularly distinctive about your ministry and consider making that a corporate value because it is central to your ministry’s identity and reputation.

For example, a pillar of the CCCC brand is Caring, which we’ve defined as encompassing empathy, compassion, Christian spirituality, listening, encouraging, kindness, and being supportive. This pillar captured what we had been doing for years that built tremendous loyalty from our members. Our related corporate value is that we “serve all Christian ministries in Christian love and harmony.” We believe this is what makes membership in CCCC a relational rather than a transactional experience.

Strategic Values

Strategic values are values that your strategy requires. What values must your ministry hold fast to in order to successfully execute its strategy? Make each of those a corporate value.

For instance, CCCC provides information to its members about how to operate a charity so that it is an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry. We need to show our members how to apply our information by using that same information ourselves to be an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry. One of our corporate values is to be an “Exemplary model of a Christian ministry” because we aspire to practise what we preach.

Compass Values

Compass values are high-level values that don’t fit under the other value types. Compass values define who or what the ministry is and what it stands for. They keep the ministry on course with its identity and ethos.

CCCC wants to be a good citizen within the community of Christian ministries, so one of our corporate values is to “Demonstrate Christian unity by…always thinking of [other ministries’] welfare, being open to correction, and being ready to find a way forward that honours God.”

We also have a compass value to preserve our Christian identity: “We are Christ-centred and Spirit-led, helping ministries think theologically about all aspects of operating a Christian organization.”

Platitude Values

Platitude values are those that few, if any, people would disagree with. It’s what we mean when we say something is like “motherhood and apple pie.” Who can argue against it? Platitude values are worthy but uncontroversial values that your ministry has no trouble adhering to.

If your ministry has never had to struggle with honesty or integrity, don’t make them corporate values. Most people will assume honesty and integrity are a given, so stating them will make some wonder why you felt it necessary to highlight them. If, however, your ministry has had an experience with dishonesty or lack of integrity, then these are not platitude values for you; they are meaningful corporate values, at least for a time.

Platitudes often become corporate values when people don’t use the starting points listed above to discern a ministry’s corporate values. Instead, they consider in a general way what the corporate values should be rather than analysing what they need to be. One way to tell that you have a platitude for a corporate value is if you never refer to the value when making a decision.

Personal Values

Individuals associated with your ministry may personally hold strongly to some values they want to see adopted as corporate values. This is most likely to happen at the founding of the ministry, but personal preferences for particular values could be suggested at any time. There’s no reason to reject them out-of-hand as they no doubt are good values, but they should not become corporate values if they would be platitudes. Make sure suggested personal values fit one of the other types of values: Christian, Guardrail, Brand, Strategic, or Compass.

Updating Corporate Values

If your ministry already has corporate values, reflect on whether they are still the right values for today. Before you change them, though, consider this: previous leaders set them as corporate values for a reason. You need to understand why. Did they document how the values were chosen? What did your research about the ministry’s history reveal was going on when the values were adopted?

Current leadership can always change decisions made by previous leaders based on current circumstances, but since values are enduring, give serious consideration about what you are losing by deemphasizing the values you want to remove. To be clear, you are not disavowing the values your remove from your corporate values; you are just removing the emphasis on them. In doing so, what would you be walking away from that previous leaders thought was important? Why was it important? Why did they choose to feature that value and not another? Make sure you understand the history before you change a corporate value.

Though we don’t know when CCCC adopted its first corporate values, the 2002 strategic plan listed eight corporate values that had been in place for some years. In 2012, we updated the language for five of the values, and those values are still with us today because they are still relevant. The three values we dropped had all become platitudes since they are part of the very essence of CCCC today, in our strategy, programs, or way of life.

At the same time, we added two new values. One is about the place of the local church in the life of a believer. This was important as it is a key recommendation in my book, The Church at Work, and it was important that CCCC model it. The other new value was about continuous improvement. This was important at the time because we hadn’t kept up with changes in technology and how people use it. We also had a lot of infrastructure that needed updating. We’re doing much better now, but the value is still useful.

If you create or update corporate values, do a favour for future leadership by documenting why you chose to feature each value. This will help future leadership appreciate the reasons for the value and know if it is time to drop the value and replace it with another.

CCCC’s Corporate Values

1. Evangelical in identity, ecumenical in service

• We demonstrate Christian unity by serving all Christian ministries in Christian love and harmony, always
  • thinking of their welfare.
  • being open to correction.
  • being ready to find a way forward that honours God in keeping with the direction of the Holy Spirit as discerned by all parties involved.
• We are Christ-centred and Spirit-led, helping ministries think theologically about all aspects of operating a Christian organization.
• We recognize the biblically mandated special place of the local church in the life of the believer. We respect it as the primary gathering place of Christ’s followers, and we respect its denomination’s oversight.
• We present a strong Christian witness at all times.

2. Excellence in our work

• We aspire to excellence in all that we do, serving our peers with the integrity and servant’s heart that are expected of a representative of Jesus Christ.
• We commit to continuous improvement by
  • building our knowledge and expertise.
  • being an innovative provider of leading-edge services.
  • helping our staff become thought-leaders in their respective fields.

3. Exemplary model for Christian ministries

• The board and staff aspire to model faithfulness and excellence as a witness and an encouragement to other ministries.

You can read about the historical review we did and the consultation process we used to develop these corporate values here.

The post Looking Around: Corporate Values appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

CCCC will celebrate its 50th anniversary on October 12, 2022. Milestones like this provide moments to step out of the day-to-day to look back and reflect on the past.

In the first post of this series, we looked at how to do a historical review and decide what you would like to preserve or revive from your ministry’s past.

In this post, I’ll present another use of the historical review: to crystallize what you don’t want to carry forward from your past.

Through our own historical review, CCCC has left behind or radically changed some longstanding programs that are part of our origin story (which I’ll share below).

Leaving Legacies Behind

Your ministry may have been founded with a particular program, culture, or way of operating that was perfectly appropriate for its time but that isn’t the best option for today. The leaders who followed the founders also left you with the results of their time in leadership. Your ministry today has accumulated lots of legacies from its earlier years and bringing those legacies to an end can seem like a rejection of your predecessors. It is even more difficult to do away with their legacies if staff and supporters are attached to them. Such attachments prevent us from moving forward today as we should.

It’s easier for everyone to break from the past when we acknowledge that our predecessors did what was right given what they knew and their circumstances at the time. If they were present with us today, they might make different decisions given current knowledge and circumstances, decisions that might look a lot like the ones we’re wanting to make. We can still respect and honour them even while letting go of parts of their legacy.

If you serve long enough in leadership at the same ministry, some day you will find yourself overturning one of your own decisions. Having done this makes it easier to lead your organization in breaking from the past because you yourself have broken from your own past, which shows you are not treating your predecessors any differently than you treat yourself.

For example, in 2006 CCCC introduced a new brand with the tagline “Advancing Ministry Together.” This was the perfect positioning statement at the time and I was thrilled to approve it. However, in 2020 we replaced that tagline, and I was thrilled to approve the new one: “Supporting Ministries in a Complex World.”

It wasn’t that the previous tagline was bad. Not at all. It did its job positioning CCCC as advancing the mission of the Church alongside our members, striving for the same overall goal within a peer relationship. But by 2020, that point had been made. Now, we want to highlight how, by helping members address the complexities of operating a charity, we free them up to devote more of their time and attention to fulfilling their missions. This supports our End Statement which says we want our members to be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. There is no shame in overturning earlier decisions because you need to make the best decision for your ministry at its current place in time.

Focus On the Ends, Not the Means

If your ministry’s core identity is based on anything other than your vision and values, you leave your ministry vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time. Supporters and others who identify your ministry with anything that is secondary to your true purpose will have a hard time staying connected with your ministry as it adapts and changes its programs or its way of being over time because they are preoccupied with mourning the loss of what once was.

Put first things first, front and centre. Achieving the vision is the reason your ministry exists. Your mission is to make the vision a reality or as close to reality as we can get before Christ returns. Corporate values also need to be front and centre because they are the screen you use to guide corporate behaviour and evaluate the choices the ministry must make,

Origin stories are very powerful, so their focus should be on the vision and values that led to the ministry’s creation. In your origin story, present the ministry’s initial programs, culture, and way of being as representative of how the vision and values were applied at that time, leaving it open for you to show how changes today are the result of the same vision and values being applied in current circumstances.

If you’d like additional help for dealing with the legacies of the past, read my post, Corporate History: Resource or Constraint? 

What to Leave Behind

Deciding what to leave behind starts with evaluating the programs and support functions that you have questions about. Sometimes you just know in your heart that a legacy needs to go, but you should still do an evaluation to verify that what you believe is true. The point is to have a factual understanding of the results they produce and to test your assumptions about what is working and what isn’t. Once the evaluations are done, you are ready to consider what needs to be left behind to make room for something better.

Here are some ways to help you make that decision. They can be used together or separately. The more difficult the decision, the more helpful it is to come at the decision from different angles.

A Strategic Process

Imagine you are creating a new ministry with the same purpose as your current ministry. With no legacies from the past and no constraints imposed by people or resources, what programs would the new ministry have? How would it be structured? How would it be funded? What would you do in-house and what would you outsource? What assets would you need? What values would guide your decisions? What corporate culture would support the way you want the ministry to work?

Now, what do you want to incorporate from the hypothetical new ministry into your current ministry?

And finally, the key point, What from your current ministry has to go to make room for the new?

An “Accounting” Process

This process makes use of an accounting concept, zero-based budgeting. It is most obviously applicable to decisions about which programs to offer, but it can also be used for values and culture. Applying values such as excellence has a cost (quality management, equipment, etc.) as does building and maintaining a corporate culture (training, branding, etc.). And it can be used to assess fundraising and other support functions.

When budgets are created, the typical starting point is the previous year’s budget or the projected year-end actual results. Zero-based budgeting starts with no budget at all, and every expense must be justified as a new expense. Nothing is taken for granted. The old will compete against the new and the best use of resources gets included in the budget. This approach is similar to the strategic approach above in that it forces you to start fresh.

A Stewardship Process

A basic responsibility of ministry leaders is to provide good stewardship of the ministry’s resources. A simple question to ask about how well time and money are being used is, Given the evaluation of results, is this a good use of our time and money? If not, is there a way to improve what we are doing to get better results? If not, then let it go and put the resources to better use.

“But, but, but…”

You might be concerned that time and money already invested in something that is then cancelled will be wasted. The way to look at sunk costs is to accept that nothing can be done about them because they have already been spent. You might be able to recoup some of them, but the real question is, Given that yesterday’s investments can’t be undone, what is the best use of the resources you have to invest today? If you continue to fund an inferior option, then good money is going after bad. The best thing to do is to invest now in the superior option.

Some Examples from CCCC

All of the following programs were considered flagship programs for CCCC and all of them have either been terminated or radically transformed. The Bulletin and the Conference were the two programs we started in our first year, and the Charities Handbook and Regional Seminars were two very long-running programs.

The Bulletin

When CCCC started, it did not have members. Instead, it had subscribers because the very first program was the CCCC Educator newsletter, the precursor to the CCCC Bulletin. Based on an interview our first executive director gave to the KW Record, they were still called subscribers as late as November 1984.

CCCC started with 45 subscribers who received a print edition of the Educator by mail. Over time, the newsletter developed into a glossy magazine format and then into a digital publication. Content creation was determined by the publishing schedule and the printed newsletters/magazines formed our knowledge base.

When the Internet became available, CCCC created a website and, in time, Bulletin articles were reproduced on the site. Later, a full digital copy of the Bulletin was included.

The problem was that the only way to get information into the website’s knowledge base was to write an article for the Bulletin, so the production of new knowledge was limited to what could be published in five print edition Bulletins per year. This was an economic decision because the number of issues and their page counts had budget implications. The bigger consideration was that knowledge on the same topic could be spread over many articles written over many years, making it difficult for members to know when they had fully covered a topic.

Today, CCCC has a completely different way of informing our members. Content is created directly for the CCCC Knowledge Base in real-time and the Bulletin is no longer a newsletter or magazine but an e-blast that is sent 11 times per year to advise members of the Knowledge Base’s new content. In addition, we are in the process of consolidating all the different articles into booklets. Members will be able to start reading an overview of a topic and then go deeper if they like.

By choosing to no longer produce the print edition of the Bulletin, we were able to reallocate the related costs of about $60,000 per year to developing and maintaining a far superior knowledge base.

The Charities Handbook

The Charities Handbook evolved from a seminar handout for church treasurers. The 2006 edition marked a significant step in its development when CCCC began justifying every statement with legal and regulatory citations and those that could not be supported were removed. This process took a few editions to complete, but it transformed the Charities Handbook into an authoritative publication that was valued not only by our members but also by lawyers and accountants who served charities. It also was used by the Charities Directorate as a reference book.

By the 2010s, however, the cost of printing and mailing the Charities Handbook was over $100,000 per edition, which made it a very expensive member benefit. That cost could no longer be justified given that publishing a digital book was now an option. Today, it is still available as a digital publication but it has also been divided into smaller topical units housed in our Knowledge Base.

The printing and mailing budget was reallocated to salaries, which we used to hire additional staff with capabilities that were new to CCCC and we used those capabilities to develop new programs.

The Conference and Regional Seminars

The first conference was held within a year of CCCC’s founding and it continued until 2016. A highlight was the awards ceremony in 2004 for the Best Christian Workplaces in Canada.

We became aware of the Best Christian Workplace Institute from attending a Christian Management Association conference in the spring of that year and wanted to bring the employee engagement survey to Canada and have the first celebration of Canadian Best Christian Workplaces only four months later! It was a very tight deadline, but we made it. We even adapted it for Canada. In the US, charities were ranked by their results and the top ten got recognition for being #5 or #1 as the case may be. In Canada, CCCC wants every Christian workplace to be a winner, so we said every charity that scored 4.0 or higher (out of 5) would be recognized as a Best Christian Workplace without regard to the ranking of their individual scores.

The conferences took an extremely large amount of staff time throughout the year as plenary and workshop topics were defined, speakers recruited, handout material produced, and logistics of the venues worked out. We always covered our out-of-pocket expenses but never covered our salary expense of $100,000. The same held true for the regional seminars, which cost us about $45,000 per year in staff time.

The purpose of these programs was to inform our members and give them access to experts who augmented the internal expertise that CCCC had. However, the impact was limited in terms of the number of participants at each one-time event and we felt it simply was not good stewardship to put such a large part of our resources into programs that benefited only a small percentage of our membership.

The most significant benefit of cancelling these two legacy programs was the amount of staff time that was freed up to pursue more impactful programs: the Knowledge Base, The Learning Table (online courses), The Green (online community), and Webinars (often with external experts). These programs convey the content of the former programs but in a format that reaches many more people and that can be accessed when users want as opposed to waiting for live events delivered on our schedule. Members can still interact with and learn from each other through The Green and they still have access to experts through recorded webinars.

The Savings

By leaving these programs behind, CCCC freed up over $300,000 of its budget to invest heavily in new programs to benefit our members. We put an end to bootstrapping our way forward by hiring new staff with the new capabilities we needed to shape our future in just the way that we want it to be.

Key Point: Leave legacies behind when there are better options today.

The post Looking Back: Leaving a Legacy Behind appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

On October 12, 2022, the Canadian Centre for Christian Charities (CCCC) turns 50 years old! It’s time to celebrate! As we celebrate CCCC, we’re celebrating you, our members, because you are the reason we reached our 50th anniversary.

CCCC would like to show its gratitude by giving our members (and those considering membership) an anniversary gift in the form of this series of posts to help you reflect on your ministry’s past, assess its present state, and plan its desired future. Our goal for this series is to provide a curated package of supportive information in the following areas:

• Generating ideas for strategic thinking
• Freeing up resources to focus on new initiatives
• Keeping corporate values meaningful day-to-day
• Telling your story with impact
• Attuning your ministry to the Spirit’s leadership
• Keeping your ministry in its prime of life
• Readily making corrections
• Discerning your strategic trajectory
• Developing a change-ready team

As the staff of CCCC mark the passage of time with our anniversary, we are thinking of how the value of a 360º reflection (past, present, and future) can be applied at any time to create a significant moment in a ministry’s history. You don’t have to wait for a milestone anniversary to get the benefit of stepping out of the day-to-day of ministry life to look back, look around, and look ahead. We invite you to walk with us through this series to explore the possibilities for your ministry.

Let’s start by looking back through your ministry’s history. This post will highlight two aspects of your ministry’s past that could provide source material for strategic planning today. There will be four more posts in the series that will also draw from this historical review, so the review is well worth doing.

Organizational Benefits of Reviewing Corporate History

There are several significant benefits that arise from a historical review:

• The review gives you a unique and authentic story to tell because it is your story. It will provide lots of source material for telling your story and draw attention to the “why” of your organization’s existence, which in turn will motivate your staff and supporters.
  • As a company that documents corporate histories says, “Your company’s history is a humanizing force for your brand, as it tells the stories of the people and communities that have worked together to build its successful legacy.“
• A sense of history provides context for the work being done today by placing it within a journey from one place to another. Knowledge of corporate history gives staff a springboard for thinking about the present with a bigger mindset as they build on the work of those who came before while being aware that they are laying the foundation for others who will come after them. The current staff will enjoy knowing they have their place in the ministry’s history in the same way their predecessors have.
• The review will broaden your team discussions by adding the voices of previous leaders into the mix. They might make different decisions in today’s circumstances than they did back then, but they would apply the same values. Add their voices by incorporating their values into your corporate statements.
  • For example, CCCC’s first corporate value is “Evangelical in Identity; Ecumenical in Service.” The idea behind that value was expressed by the directors in the very first board meeting. The first executive director, Frank Luellau, also stressed that value in a 1984 interview with the KW Record. When we developed corporate values in the late 2000s, we looked back to that meeting and accepted their decision as one we wanted to keep front and centre as one of our values.
• If the ministry has changed its mission, values, or identity, the review provides an opportunity to pause and discuss whether the changes have been good ones or if the ministry would be better off reconsidering the changes.
• If your current corporate culture has any problematic aspects, the corporate history might provide some clues as to how it originated and give you insight into how to correct it.

Personal Benefits of Reviewing Corporate History

Aside from the organizational benefits of reviewing your ministry’s history, there are also benefits for the person who does the review. The review takes work, but it isn’t hard work. I found it quite pleasant, and, through it, I gained in several ways:

• It added depth to my understanding of who CCCC is and what it is about.
• Lots of fascinating details emerged that add colour to our story and sparked new creative thoughts about CCCC.
• Similar to the point above about being on a journey, the historical review made me feel that my time in leadership is but a link in a chain of leaders that is anchored in a specific creative act on October 12th, 1972 at the one end and which extends to some undetermined point long after my time at CCCC at the other end. This idea fosters a sense of humility.
• The review reinforced my sense of being a steward rather than a leader.
• I enjoyed meeting people whom I had previously only known as names on a list.
• I developed a stronger sense of gratitude and appreciation for what former staff had accomplished.
• It turned my mind to my own legacy. When my successors celebrate our 75th or 100th anniversaries, what will they remember as my contribution to CCCC?

What to Review

Here’s a list that comes to mind for what you could include in your review:

• Corporate histories that have already been written or drafted
• Annual reports (CCCC didn’t have any public annual reports, but we did have annual reports to the board from the executive director.)
• AGM reports (These usually include a review of strategy and plans for the future, as well as a recap of significant events throughout the year.)
• Board minutes (Rather than reading every set of minutes, just scan the agendas first to see if there was anything of historical interest discussed at the meeting. That will save a lot of time! I was glad that CCCC has only three board meetings per year!)
• Management meeting minutes (This part of the review could easily be overwhelming because of the number of meetings. It would be best to start this review by zeroing in on some key times when significant decisions were made. As an alternative, interviewing managers from the time may be quicker.)
• Interview key people:
  • The founder(s) (I interviewed our founder, Ian Stanley, about the origin of CCCC.)

• Other significant people included:
  • The only other surviving member of the group of six friends whom Ian brought together to launch CCCC, Lindsay Neilson. You can read about how CCCC came to be and its early history.)
  • Previous board chairs (I interviewed the two board chairs of the working board, one of whom was our founder.)
  • Previous directors (I did this by a survey.)
  • Former staff and long-serving current staff (I did this by survey.)
  • Previous senior pastors/executive directors (In my case, I had only one person to interview because, in 50 years, I am just the second executive director.)

• Strategic plans and source documents used in the process
• Survey results (such as marketing or donor surveys)
• Press coverage of the ministry
• Program evaluations
• Reports from consultants
• Documentation of changes to the mission and vision statements as well as corporate values

Ways to Interpret the Source Material

My approach to analyzing the source material included the following questions:

• Are there any signs of God’s activity and leading throughout the ministry’s history?
  • How did this ministry experience God’s blessing, and can you hypothesize why God blessed the ministry?
  • Were there any times when the ministry did not flourish or it appeared to be under God’s judgment? What were the circumstances?
• Did individuals have a personal sense of call that led them to this ministry? If so, what were their calls? How did they intersect with the ministry’s mission?
• What were the motivations behind what the history reveals? What were people trying to achieve?
• What were their values? Their priorities? Their vision? Are they still valid today?
• What options did they reject?
• What were their triumphs and successes?
• What challenges did they face and how did they overcome them? Or did they? What did they learn from failure?
• How did they make the decisions they did? Was spiritual discernment involved? Was it based on human wisdom (this can be a good thing)?
• Were the changes they made radical changes or incremental developments? Focus on the reasons for the radical changes. In our case, the board once made a radical change to the mission statement, only to reverse their decision soon afterwards. All the other mission statements made sense as natural developments. Retracting the outlier mission statement gave me insight into what was considered (on second thought) to be off-mission.
• What personal traits did the individuals tend to have? Are they different from the staff and volunteers today?
• What testimonials were given about the ministry?

What to Do With the Past

Once the history has been reviewed, there is a lot you can do with it (as will be addressed in four other posts of this series). But for now, let’s analyze your ministry’s history in terms of two questions:

1. Which aspects of your history are still with you that you want to preserve?
2. Which aspects of your history are no longer present that you would like to revive?

Preserve the Past

There might be programs, practices, values, culture, or other distinguishing attributes from your past that are still part of your ministry and that you want to be sure to preserve into the future. If so, document your decision and its rationale and include it as part of your ongoing historical narrative so people in future years will find it. You could also work the decisions and their rationales into the appropriate program rationales, corporate culture document, or team values as the case may be. Point out to staff that these elements of your ministry have a history and are a continuing, valuable part of your developing history. Of course, check if they have become stale in today’s environment and update them as appropriate.

CCCC did its historical review over a period of years from about 2006 to 2011. Two of the answers about what we wanted to keep were:

• Providing information was the first purpose of CCCC, and this is still our core service. We started in pre-Internet days when information was much harder to come by. Today, information is free on many websites, so we have found numerous ways to add value to our information and maintain the value proposition of membership.
• The human dimension became an important part of CCCC in its early years, starting in 1980 when members were able to write letters to ask questions and board members would write back with the answers. When staff was hired, members could phone and ask questions. Today, members contact us by phone, email, or via The Green. Our commitment to the human dimension of our ministry extends to having a real person answering our phones. We will preserve live interactions with our members while giving people the option to get their answers for themselves from our Knowledge Base.

Revive the Past

In the same way, some programs, practices, values, culture, or other distinguishing attributes from your past that are not part of your ministry today might be worth reviving.

Under current leadership, CCCC has made many changes to how it works and how it relates to its members. These changes came from several sources, including biblical-theological reflection, suggestions made by people, and strategic thinking. But if we had not had any of those sources, it is good to know that the historical review would have brought us to the same place as we are today.

Here are some examples of elements of the early CCCC that have been revived:

Playfulness

• Reading through old editions of CCCC’s original newsletter, one can find poetry including “The Story of Frederick R. Birch” with the subtitle “Do Your Givin’ While You’re Livin’ Then You’re Knowin’ Where It’s Goin’.” Another was a humorous poem for church treasurers.
• There were occasional standalone jokes, such as “It’s getting more and more difficult to support the government in the style to which it has become accustomed.”
• We even had the occasional recurring comic strip called “Pontius’ Puddle.”

Today, the CCCC Brand Voice (“Persona”) includes “being humorous, playful when appropriate:”

• We see playfulness in this blog, which has a tag for poetry. One post even has a poem I wrote for leaders called “Opportunity’s Genesis.” Christian Leadership Reflections is a serious topic for a blog but I have included some humour and self-deprecating stories in the posts.
• The last couple of annual conferences we held had some playfulness to them too. At one, we had a giant black-and-white puzzle showing the work of all kinds of Christian ministries. Attendees sat at a table to colour the individual pieces. It made quite a colourful picture when it was assembled. We also had a microphone inside something like a Nerf ball that people threw across the audience to the next person in line to speak.

• Our communications through social media have seen an uptick in playfulness over the past few years.
• Internally, we have introduced a Social Committee to regularly infuse fun into our workplace.

Spiritual

• Also in the historical documents were devotionals. One was titled “Powerful Prayer Principles,” another “Where God Lives,” and a third “Peace Is A Priceless Treasure.”
• There were Bible studies. Preston Manning wrote a four-page Bible study on “Christians and Politics” in 1982. You can read his concluding thoughts. Others wrote Bible studies about the Bible and psychology.
• There were prayers, such as “A Supervisor’s Prayer” that appeared in the May 1973 newsletter (the very first issue of what became the CCCC Bulletin, which was first called “CCCC Educator”).

Today, Christian spirituality is a core part of CCCC’s organization:

• We pray at all staff meetings for prayer requests submitted by our members.
• Where appropriate, we include theological reflection in our materials.
• We provide staff devotionals for our members in the God’s Workplace section of our website.

• We have prayers that can be said for all ministry staff positions in a free download called God’s Handiwork.

• In 2004, we produced paraphrased Scripture readings for some staff positions, such as this one based on 1 Corinthians 13 for ministry leaders and managers called “A Song of the Steward.”
• In the early 2010s, various staff members wrote a set of devotionals on stewardship for our Accredited Members to use in donor communications.

Key Point: Your corporate history can be a treasure trove of good ideas for your ministry today.

The post Looking Back: History’s Strategic Value appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Facing a pandemic is not a new experience for the Church and we can learn today from how the Church responded to previous pandemics and epidemics. CCCC members who would like to discuss this post may talk about it here in The Green.

The world has dealt with pandemics and plagues for thousands of years, and social distancing, quarantining, and even wearing masks have been ways humanity has responded  before. Even closing churches in Canada for in-person services is not new, as the following two pictures show.

If you like to go down rabbit trails, although it does not deal with churches, this 432 year old manual written during the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) includes many measures that we are still using today!

Here is a brief overview of how the Church responded in previous pandemics.

The Ancient Church Responds to Pandemics

The ancient Church grew significantly because of its actions during the Antonine (165-180 A.D.) and Cyprian (249-262 A.D.) plagues. The Church did not social distance in those pandemics, but their refusal wasn’t so they could hold worship services—it was so they could care for the sick and bury the dead. Because everyone who was healthy, other than Christians, fled, these pandemics showed the pagan world by the actions of the Christians who remained how the Christian faith was a powerful new way to live.

The Early Protestant Church Responds to Pandemics

Martin Luther and John Calvin both adjusted their ministry activities to be socially responsible and deal with the plagues of their times (Calvin had to deal with five plagues!).

The North American Church Responds to a Pandemic

Finally, during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, churches were closed all over the United States and Canada, yet they found creative ways to continue their work. Clergy of that time mostly supported public health measures that closed their churches and gave advice about what to do instead.

The link above about churches being closed includes this little nugget about the attitude of pastors to enforced church closings: the Washington DC Protestant ministerial recorded that, “An emergency meeting of ‘Protestant ministers’ on October 5, 1918, decided unanimously to ‘place ourselves on record as cheerfully complying with the request of the Commissioners.'” (I’ve added the italics for emphasis.) Dr. Mark Steinacher, church historian and an expert on the Canadian church, confirmed to me that “churches did indeed largely comply a century ago.”

There is very little documentation about legal challenges and civil disobedience during the Spanish Flu epidemic. One report refers to many legal challenges from the general public but that the judges were not sympathetic at all. Another report includes the following:

• In San Francisco, about 100 people were charged for not wearing masks. The Anti-Mask League of San Francisco only ever held one meeting but that meeting attracted 2,000 people in January 1919 to protest the requirement to wear a face mask, and it led to the mayor rescinding the order shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, with people tired of the flu, the relaxed regulations led to the second wave being many times worse than the first.
• The same report mentions that two Christian Scientist churches mounted legal challenges. The Portland, OR church said it believed they would not get sick and claimed “the police power of the state should not be used to prevent Christian worship in the churches.” They were unsuccessful, but the other church in Los Angeles won its case with the claim that religious groups were unfairly targeted by the restrictions.

Here are some excerpts from a sermon delivered by Rev. Francis J. Grimke on Sunday, November 3, 1918 at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C. after churches reopened. I will quote several passages because they speak directly to the issues of our day, but with the benefit of hindsight that we don’t yet have.

Our own beautiful city has suffered terribly from [the flu], making it necessary, as a precautionary measure, to close the schools, theaters, churches, and to forbid all public gathering within doors as well as outdoors. At last, however, the scourge has been stayed, and we are permitted again to resume the public worship of God, and to open again the schools of our city.

Rev. Grimke went on to reflect about the experience.

I have been asking myself the question, what is the meaning of it all? What ought it to mean to us? Is it to come and go and we be no wiser, or better for it? Surely God had a purpose in it, and it is our duty to find out, as far as we may, what that purpose is, and try to profit by it.

What a great question to ask! The Bible assures us that God will work to redeem all situations for good. So what can we see God doing in his church today? Why wait until it is all over to look for God’s purpose? Can we see God at work in the Church and in the world even while we are in the midst of the pandemic? If you are a CCCC’s member or are registered with The Green, let’s talk about it.

Here are three of Rev. Grimke’s reflections and his closing summary statement.

This epidemic…has brought out in a way that is very gratifying, the high estimation in which the Christian church is held in the community—the large place which it really occupies in the thought of the people. The fact that for several weeks we have been shut out from the privileges of the sanctuary has brought home to us as never before what the church has really meant to us. We hadn’t thought, perhaps, very much of the privilege while it lasted, but the moment it was taken away we saw at once how much it meant to us.

In his day, the community thought well of churches, something we cannot take for granted today. And it seems that churchgoers gained a fresh appreciation for public worship that made them appreciate their churches all the more. The Baptist Standard also found this benefit when it summarized what it learned from the historical records of Baptist churches and organizations. It reports, “It seems from evidence from churches around the country, one benefit of the brief loss of Sunday services was a new appreciation for the value of fellowship and Christian community.” This was a collateral benefit that at least partially redeemed the closings.

The following excerpt is the crucial one as far as the debate about civil disobedience is concerned.

Another thing that has impressed me, in connection with this epidemic, is the fact that conditions may arise in a community which justify the extraordinary exercise of powers that would not be tolerated under ordinary circumstances. This extraordinary exercise of power was resorted to by the Commissioners in closing up the theaters, schools, churches, in forbidding all gatherings of any considerable number of people indoors and outdoors, and in restricting the numbers who should be present even at funerals. The ground of the exercise of this extraordinary power was found in the imperative duty of the officials to safeguard, as far as possible, the health of the community by preventing the spread of the disease from which we were suffering.

And then, just as now, there were disagreements about closing churches. Here’s Rev. Grimke’s take on the closings.

There has been considerable grumbling, I know, on the part of some, particularly in regard to the closing of the churches. It seems to me, however, in a matter like this it is always wise to submit to such restrictions for the time being. If, as a matter of fact, it was dangerous to meet in theaters and in the schools, it certainly was no less dangerous to meet in churches. The fact that the churches were places of religious gathering, and the others not, would not affect in the least the health question involved. If avoiding crowds lessens the danger of being infected, it was wise to take the precaution and not needlessly run in danger, and expect God to protect us.

For a sample of some of that grumbling, and to see how the issues are just the same today, read this article, which also includes some comment about how churches thrived while closed.

Finally, just like many pastors today, Rev. Grimke was anxious to be back in the pulpit with his congregation before him, but he found a faithful way to think about the situation.

And so, anxious as I have been to resume work, I have waited patiently until the order was lifted. I started to worry at first, as it seemed to upset all of our plans for the fall work; but I soon recovered my composure. I said to myself, why worry? God knows what He is doing. His work is not going to suffer. It will rather be a help to it in the end. Out of it, I believe, great good is coming. All the churches, as well as the community at large, are going to be the stronger and better for this season of distress through which we have been passing.

I found it helpful, as I think you will too, to hear directly from a pastor from a century ago who went through what we are going through today and learn from how he responded to the same restrictions.

The public health measures and debates of 1918 were similar to ours today: they included “Stay at home; shop by phone (instead of shop online!) and “To mask or not to mask” (a headline in the L.A. Times). 

Since the Internet and other mass communication channels were not available then, newspapers ran sermons each week, often rotating between churches. Again, the same article linked to above about churches closing reports that pastors told their congregations to conduct their own services at home, read a sermon from the newspaper, and pray.

Throughout history, the church has been a great witness to the beauty of Christianity and its care for our neighbours and people remembered what Christians did when the crises were over. The church has endured temporary closings before and resumed services once it was safe.

With this historical perspective as context, pastors today are wrestling with how the Church should respond to pandemic-related restrictions in today’s world. My next post will cover the four main options that are available. We all need God’s wisdom to choose the option that will best help us be a faithful Church in 2021.

The post How the Church Responded to Previous Pandemics appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Paul & the Art of Rhetoric

It turns out that Paul was a master of rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking and writing. I’ve read somewhere that we have instruction manuals from Paul’s time period and that he follows them to a tee. He gets angry just when the manuals say to get angry. He appeals to his audience’s highest aspirations just when the manuals say he should. He appeals to example, to self-interest, to whatever the manuals say is needed, based on his purpose at the moment.

I always imagined Paul just sitting down to write and, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, pouring out his thoughts. When I learned at seminary how very carefully Paul constructed his letters, I was amazed at how sophisticated he was. He wrote with the Spirit’s inspiration, but he closely followed the best human advice of his day too. He was deliberate and careful, taking his letters quite seriously and investing the time and thought to do a good job.

Rhetoric & the Church Today

And that brings me to today and how we communicate to those outside the church. If we are communicating to the public hoping to persuade at least some to adopt our views, then we need to follow Paul’s example and invest just as heavily in our communications as he did with his.

Whether you are advocating for a new social policy, to change public opinion about your ministry’s cause, preaching a sermon, or even persuading donors to give, you need to craft your appeal to be so persuasive that people are convinced and adopt your position as their own. Good rhetoric is the tool you need. Without it, chances are high that you will not have an effective message.

• Purely emotional appeals may get short-term results, but their effect will quickly wear off and people will be sorry for the decisions they made while in an emotional state.
• Sloppy arguments won’t even get you that far. People will likely reject your message out of hand and your credibility will be damaged.

Fortunately, we have manuals to help us construct our messages just as Paul had. If we follow their advice, our positions won’t be easily shot down or discounted. Remember, “Because the Bible says so” may be persuasive to us, but it isn’t to anyone else. We need to make good arguments.

Good Arguments

I’ve just finished reading a book which will help you craft an effective case for your position. Good Arguments: Making Your Case in Writing and Public Speaking is an introduction to designing persuasive presentations using the art of rhetorical argument. In only 117 pages it covers everything from what makes a good argument to how to avoid logical fallacies. It shows how to effectively use analogies, reason, logic, belief, and fact. It contains many practical cautions and suggestions, such as being careful to define your terms, because so many words have different meanings to different audiences.

The book is co-written by an apologetics and theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a professor of Christian education at Liberty University.

An argument, according to the authors, is definitely not a battle to be fought and won, but a message to be communicated. This is a healthy reminder for Christians who might be too focused on crushing the opposition. The goal of a good argument is “to persuade someone to adopt the new belief because they believe it, not because they were mesmerized by rhetorical skill.” That’s how we can get long term changes in attitudes and beliefs. And if we aren’t successful at persuading our audience to adopt our viewpoint, the fallback goal is that our position would at least be accepted as a reasonable option among many choices.

Good Arguments will do what the title says, help you craft good arguments that will persuade people to do what you want them to do because they really believe it is the right thing to do.

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

The post Good Arguments: Learning How to Persuade appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• its founder was executed,
• it originated in a backwater corner of the empire,
• its initial leadership was a riffraff of nobodies or people held in low esteem.

It is astonishing that Christianity overcame a mighty empire without resorting to violence or political pressure. Instead, it had a powerful idea that proved irresistibly attractive as Christians lived it out and others experienced its blessings. Personal conversions by personal choice from both paganism and atheism to Christianity changed the Empire peacefully from within.

The history of ancient Christianity’s growth appeals to us because it gives hope that such growth could happen again—maybe even today! The growth was fueled by ordinary believers who were highly effective at sharing their faith.

Folks, we can do this!

Sociologist Rodney Stark’s¹ statistical regression analysis on the growth of Christianity shows the enormous impact that ordinary believers had. Because Paul takes up so much of the New Testament, it’s easy to believe that he single-handedly caused the growth of our faith. But that’s not true. Stark’s analysis shows that Paul’s missionary work as an evangelist had no significant, independent effect on Christianity’s growth, while those of the Hellenistic and Diaspora lay communities had strong, significant, independent effects on the growth of our faith. This is not to disparage the work of Paul—far from it—but it does show the power of the laity when they take the Great Commission seriously!

Again, folks, we can do this!

Ancient Church Growth

According to Stark’s analysis, Christianity grew from about 1,000 adherents² in AD 40 to 52% of the Roman Empire’s population in AD 350. That’s impressive!

Stark has done extensive analysis of the growth patterns and correlated church growth with many other factors such as urban/rural locations, trading routes, pre-existing religious beliefs in the area, social-economic status of adherents and so on. While God works in the hearts of people hearing the gospel and calls them to himself, Stark shows how the evangelism of ordinary believers brought the faith to them so that it permeated Roman society.

What this means is that God did not have to do anything miraculous to grow the church. He worked through human agency, blessing his people as they lived Christian lives. The growth rate they achieved from AD 40 to 350 was 3.4% per year, every year, for 310 consecutive years. Is that possible today? Could we hope to match what the ancient church experienced?

Yes!

The same God who was at work among the ancient Christians is still at work among us today. And while Christianity overall is currently growing at 1.2% per year, we know that 3.4% is quite doable. In fact, global Pentecostalism grew by 5.4% per year, every year from 1970 to 2014 (the most recent year we have statistics for), proving that growth can be sustained over several decades when people are passionately committed to living out their faith just as those of the ancient church were.

Church Growth Today

Evidence shows that only the Evangelical section of the church is growing as a percentage of the Canadian population, so let’s focus on it as the source of Christianity’s future growth. There are two key numbers:

1. In Canada, Evangelicals are currently estimated to be 12% of the population (including the Evangelically aligned in the Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches), which is about where the Christian population of the Roman Empire was at around 305.³ So it’s not like we’re starting back at square one today! That’s encouraging.
2. The Canadian population is expected to grow at 1% for the next several decades, which is the same growth rate the Roman Empire experienced between AD 14 and 168 (and presumably after as well), so we could see similar results in similar timeframes.

This is exciting information!! Considering what these two numbers are telling us, all we need to do to match the early church’s growth rate is to have every 29 Evangelicals bring one person to Christian faith every year, for the next 45 years. That’s not attracting someone from another branch of the Christian faith, or even from another church, to your church. That is every 29 Evangelicals bringing someone of no faith or a non-Christian faith to Christian faith every year.

That’s my vision for the church. Sustained incremental growth that exceeds the general population growth. Continuously. For the next 45 years at least, and preferably forever after until there’s no one left to convert. Forty-five years would get us to about half the population of Canada.

A Do-Over

I’m not suggesting that we want to reach 50% in order to gain political power or any other sort of power. In fact, if I had a chance for a do-over of the ancient church’s growth, I would want the church to reject to being made the state religion. When that happened, the church got off track. Having status as the official religion of Rome caused some people to convert to Christianity only to advance their careers, status, and wealth. Nominal converts started to fill some leadership roles. The weakening of true Christian faith within churches was the impetus for the Desert Fathers and Mothers to move out into the wildernesses in protest and to keep the faith pure.

State accommodation and support of religious activity in general is fine, but a state church or religion poses serious problems to the integrity of our faith and our churches.

Strategy for Growth

My intent isn’t for your church to set a goal to grow at 3.4% a year. You can if you want, but that statistic is really just an encouragement to engage in an activity which brings hugely significant results over time. It is also meant to spur you to look for evidence of fruitfulness from your congregational members. We shouldn’t settle for merely being busy with church programs and serving existing members. We can’t be satisfied with transfer growth. We must have a holy discontent if we aren’t seeing something like the Lord adding to our numbers every day.

If there’s no conversion growth in your church, that means your church is perfectly designed to not produce conversion growth! Something will have to change.

You might get some good ideas to stimulate church growth from the reasons Stark found for the ancient church’s success:

• Christianity offered the world monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. Everyone could worship the One True God while remaining people of all nations. This is great news for a multi-ethnic country like Canada. Encourage and support ethnic and multi-ethnic ministries.
• Conversion, Stark says, is primarily about bringing one’s religious behaviour into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Ancient Christians evangelized using their social networks of family, friends, and business acquaintances. These broad networks allowed for crossing social boundaries, just like LinkedIn does when someone you know knows someone in a different social strata from yours. So pastors, get your congregation engaged in mission within their own social networks.
• Conversion is more about being attracted to a way of living than a set of beliefs. Therefore, Christians need to live distinctly Christian lives which give evidence to faith at work in daily life. They need to seriously reflect on how their faith should affect how they live and the choices they make. If faith doesn’t result in a distinctly Christian lifestyle, it isn’t as deeply held as it should be.
• Doctrine becomes much more important after conversion. The better a person understands God as knowing and caring about them as an individual, the more the person is inspired to a life of commitment, devotion, and service to God. Pastors, make it a goal that every member of your church will have a life-giving theological and spiritual vitality. This is the foundation for effective mission work. There is no place for people to stay with a shallow or casual faith in the Christian church.
• Stark refers to people having religious capital, which is the amount of time, effort, and emotion invested into a religious belief. People attempt to conserve their religious capital, and so it is more difficult to convert a person from one religion to another because of the cost of giving up their religious beliefs. The closer their beliefs are to Christian beliefs, the easier it is for them to convert. For example, the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis (which flourished in the Empire from Julius Caesar’s time through to the fourth century AD) had concepts of resurrection and after-life which made its cult members more amenable to conversion to Christianity than members of other cults. They could lose the specifics of the Isis cult, while keeping their belief in the afterlife. The easiest conversions, though, are by those who have no religious beliefs. Stark says that today the people most likely to convert to Christianity are those who were raised in nonreligious homes. This is good news because in Canada we certainly have lots of these! The second easiest conversions are adherents of other monotheistic religions.

Okay, Let’s Go!

The church should be growing significantly if its adherents are acting on their faith and the Great Commission. If we’re not getting real conversions, from non-Christian belief to Christian belief, at a level above the population’s growth rate, then we need to ask ourselves “Why not?”

The ancient church was driven by passion to share their faith with unbelievers. They were willing to make significant personal sacrifices to demonstrate God’s love to a needy world. Let’s pick up the challenge they have left for us. I find this personally challenging, as you probably do too, but let’s trust God and take Christ’s mission for the church as our own personal mission!

Key Thought: Vibrant faith is expressed through evangelism

The post 3.4% Is All It Took appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

So let’s take a look at sin within the Evangelical community and what we need to do about it. We tend to think of sin mostly in terms of behaviours such as lying, stealing, and such. But if we think of sin from a biblical standpoint, which adds other dimensions that we might easily gloss over or excuse, well… let’s just say that I find the broader concept of sin pretty challenging, so I’m talking as much to myself as I am to you.

Personal Sins

Paul explicitly told the Corinthians to stop judging the people outside the church entirely. We should only judge those inside the church, who know better.

We should each start with a personal self-examination. We need to do this scrutiny because as individuals we can undermine the public witness of our churches and ministries. You don’t want people saying, “So THAT’S what people who go to that church are like!”

Authors Barr and Citlau raise the issue of public witness in their book, Compassion Without Compromise, and question why non-Christians should take Jesus seriously given that even Christians don’t seem to do so when it comes to personal morality and following Jesus’ commands. Ezekiel 16:49-50 lists some sins you and I might judge ourselves against:

• Pride
• Excess of food
• Prosperous ease
• Not aiding the poor and needy
• Haughtiness

Can you imagine checking out a church filled with people committing these sins? Who would want to come back a second time?

Who’s in Your Church?

Next, we should look to our local church communities and see if we are doing anything as a group that might drive people away from our church.

Andy Stanley writes about the messiness that happens as we engage our culture.¹ When we try to eliminate all the grey areas to make a very clear line of distinction between what is acceptable and what isn’t, we end up with a caricature of what Christ intended his church to be. My own thinking is that when we make decisions about what makes a person comfortable enough for us to sit beside in a worship service, we are being just as exclusive and judgmental as the Pharisees were, and Jesus had very harsh words for them!

Think about the people Jesus surrounded himself with. Matthew recorded the time Jesus came to his house to eat, and Jesus raised complaints from the Pharisees because he attracted the despised tax collectors and sinners to his house. Would today’s “tax collectors and sinners” (those who are despised or marginalized) be attracted to our churches the way they were to Jesus?

So look at your Sunday morning congregation and ask, “Are we attracting tax collectors and sinners like Jesus did? If we haven’t got people like that in our congregations, shouldn’t we wonder why not? Could it be that our public behaviour is turning people away from our churches before they even reach our doors? Is our public behaviour preventing them from hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ? For us to truly be witnesses to the ends of the earth, we must be witnesses to everybody whether we’re comfortable with them or not. In fact, we must make ourselves comfortable with them or they will see the gospel of reconciliation as just another insincere idea that doesn’t deliver on its promise.

The Plank in Our Eye

When we examine ourselves for sin, go beyond obvious sins and take a holistic view of what constitutes sin. Ron Sider, in The Future of Our Faith, writes that the Evangelical church usually defines sin in terms of personal misdeeds, while the liberal Mainline church usually defines it as unjust, racist social structures which oppress people. Both wings of Protestantism have an incomplete understanding of sin. I’ll focus on Evangelicals here because the Evangelical church is the focus of this series of posts.

Sider says Evangelicals have reduced the Good News to an individualistic forgiveness of sins, which doesn’t come close to doing justice to Jesus’ self-declared mission of announcing the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and all that the kingdom means in terms of justice for all. We need to pay more attention to the many passages about corporate sins, two of which are:

• Malachi 3:5, which mentions the sins of defrauding workers of their wages, oppressing widows and the fatherless, and depriving foreigners among us of justice.
• Ezekiel 22:29, which mentions oppressing the poor and needy.

By buying in to the prevailing North American ideology of personal responsibility we tend to blame people for their misfortunes, assuming that they are reaping the consequences of their own poor decisions and habits. “It’s their own fault,” we might say. “Why should I help them?” That simplistic analysis overlooks the fact that society is structured in such a way that it is very difficult for the poor and needy, the addicted, and others to get out of their downward spiral. And even if it is their own fault, does that mean we shouldn’t have compassion and help restore them to the life that God intended for them?

The Mainline church and the more liberal wing of the Evangelical church understand the broader social issues and call it social justice. But while many in the conservative wing of the church are okay with giving out meals and backpacks (let’s call that kind of help practical social justice for individuals), we are very reluctant to challenge social structures and practices that reinforce social inequity and injustice. It’s too left wing for conservative tastes. But we have to ask, what do we mean by conservative? Are we talking politics or theology? We must not ever fall into the trap of equating the two!

By avoiding the more abstract social justice issues (which we can refer to as systemic social justice for communities), we have in effect become callous towards the suffering of people whom God loves and wants to redeem.²

Uncovering Our Sins

Everyone has blind spots. Entire communities can have blind spots too, because everyone in them shares the same cultural perspective and norms. In particular, we Evangelicals have our blind spots. We understand individual greed but we overlook rampant consumerism because it is so pervasive and is simply the unquestioned way the world works. We don’t realize how much secular society has ingrained itself into our attitudes and beliefs.

In Return to Justice: Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience, authors Rah and Vanderpol suggest that the only way to discover our blind spots is:

to hear from believers from different cultural and class contexts because they notice things we don’t. We have often so habituated ourselves to our cultural environment and the compromises the church has made in regard to the status quo that we are like fish swimming in water without realizing that they are wet.

Any self-examination should include Christians from other parts of the world and from different strata in our own society.

When we find a blind spot in which we have compromised our faith, we need to call it for what it is and repent, which means we really must change our ways. In Return to Justice, the story is told of World Vision confronting its own way of defining the poor in terms of what they lack. They realized this definition did not live up to a biblical view of humanity. They repented of their way of defining poverty and developed one that is biblically-theologically correct: the poor are now defined as fully capable and worthy to be listened to and partnered with.

Rah and Vanderpol’s Return to Justice is an excellent prophetic word to the North American church. We can follow along and learn from the stories of six ministries and movements as they move from one understanding of how to promote justice and mercy to another. We see them mature in their understanding of the systemic issues which, if not addressed, will mean that the traditional handouts will always be necessary. It reminds me of the old aphorism “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Return to Justice covers topics such as:

• what individuals can do personally to promote social justice,
• what organizations and groups can do to speak prophetically to our society, and
• what we can do within the church locally and globally to model God’s justice within our own church communities.

Getting Past Our Sins

Some self-reflection among Evangelicals has already started in the United States, and could at least be a starting point for Canadian Evangelicals. An Evangelical Manifesto was issued in Washington in 2008. It isn’t perfect, and it has been critiqued by Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Roger Olson (part 1) and (part 2). Nevertheless, it is an important document to spark creative self-reflection.

The Evangelical Manifesto reports that some of the sins we need to repent of are:

• worldliness of our churches
• factionalism
• living as practical atheists
• racial and ethnic separation in our churches
• loss of our independence and dedication to Christ alone by serving as “useful idiots” for one political party or another
• engagement in culture wars that have incubated conflict, hatred, and lawsuits

Canadian Evangelicals need to examine ourselves and humbly confess our own sins and weaknesses to Christ and ask for his forgiveness. We also need to seek forgiveness from each other and from the outsider communities whom we’ve hurt by starting with some sincere apologies. We must:

• hold true to our biblical-theological truths
• speak prophetically to, and engage with, the outside world
• avoid attitudes and behaviours that hurt our ability to promote the cause of Christ beyond the church.

Going Forward

We’ve come through a sea of change since the mid-twentieth century and now that we have some distance from the traumatic changes, we should be able to objectively and dispassionately assess where we are, make things right, and then move on—unencumbered by the past and with God’s blessing.

Key Thought: We need to get our own house in order if we want credibility outside the church.

“The book, Return to Justice has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post The Plank in Our Own Eye appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Note: This post was written in 2016 as part of a series about the state of the church (particularly local churches) at that time. I believe that after the pandemic, churches are in a much better state today. I am leaving this post published because the point of researching and reflecting on the state of the church in our society is still valid, although the questions I would ask today are different from the ones below. I will be updating this post in due time.

It’s time for the church to do some R&R. Now, in case you think I’m sending you off to a resort for some rest and relaxation, you should know that I’m writing about another kind of R&R: research and reflection.

My hope is that ministry leaders will ask themselves:

• What does the new environment in Canada mean for our ministry?
• How can we ensure we will continue to advance our part of Christ’s mission for his church?
• How are we doing, really?
• How can we be more true to what the church is called to be?

I know that ministry leaders are already very good at strategic planning and thinking, but they are often doing so in terms of mission and vision, programs and services. This isn’t as deep an analysis as I am proposing here. For example, there are lots of books on different ways of growing your church, but if they all share the same assumptions (such as the goal being to attract people to your church to hear the Gospel preached) you could end up pursuing a strategy that is out-dated because underlying conditions have changed.

I’m suggesting that leaders go deeper and address the questions from an existential perspective.

Existential Questions

Here are some questions that get at your very being as a ministry:

• Who are we?
  • How strongly have secular presuppositions, norms and values conditioned the way we think and act in our ministry?
    • Have they compromised the distinctiveness of our faith?
    • Have they distracted us from the priorities of our faith?
    • How would your (hopefully hypothetical) critics answer these questions?
  • How mature in the faith are our members and staff?’
    • Does the way we live give evidence of the power of our faith to change lives?
• What is really driving us as a ministry?
  • Is our ministry to the world a core activity or is it an add-on to serving our members?
    • If you are a specialized ministry serving Christians, does the content of what you do include an outward focus (eg., devotionals, lyrics, posts)?
  • Have we become too comfortable or inward focused?
    • Have we lost the boldness of the ancient church? Remember Paul’s words, “Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold” (2 Cor 3:12).
  • Based on our recent past, why should God continue to bless our ministry?
    • Are we fulfilling the purpose for which we are called? The author of Hebrews wrote, “Now may the God of peace…equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him…” (Heb 13:20-21). We will be resourced by God as we keep his will as our guide.
• How do we fit within our society?
  • What is our posture towards those not like us? Our example should be Jesus, of whom his critics could say with justification that he was a friend of sinners, although they seemed to miss the point of his friendship, which was to tell them to “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
    • How conducive is our posture to fulfilling our mission?

These questions are intended to help you do some strategic thinking at a deeper level than normal. They are probing aspects of your ministry that may be taken for granted without even realizing how they are choices that have a great impact on your ability to get results.

R&R is all about:

• uncovering deep, underlying trends in the world around us
• placing the ministry in its secular social and cultural context
• determining our effectiveness in terms of changes in the external world
• checking the validity of our assumptions, models, and paradigms
• ensuring our ministry maintains its relevance

A Matter of Perspective

It takes time to do this foundational R&R well, and the reality of ministry leadership is that most leaders have operational responsibilities, such as program delivery or fundraising, and they don’t have time for R&R. They are immersed in the pressing and urgent daily needs of the ministry. I liken operational work to Google’s Street View — when doing operational work, leaders are working at street level, close up to the surrounding world right in the midst of all the busy action.

Research and reflection is also a responsibility, but it isn’t usually as pressing or urgent as operational responsibilities are. Over the short and medium term, people might not notice that the R&R work is not being done. But over the long term, its neglect could prove fatal to your ministry. I liken R&R to Google’s Earth View — when engaged in R&R work, leaders are soaring high above the street, enjoying a bird’s-eye view of the ministry and its surrounding territory. R&R gives you a different, more objective perspective on your ministry.

It’s the difference between working in the ministry and working on the ministry.

A Matter of Time

The challenge for leaders is to carve out enough time to do the research and reflection work well. Leaders simply must make R&R a priority, because this is where strategic leadership begins. R&R shows how well the ministry is doing, and how it must change to continue doing well in the future, given current and projected social and political environments.

It may mean hiring additional help to offload the leader from some of the operational work.

I resisted this for years because I saw having an assistant as increasing administrative overhead. The breakthrough came when I realized that hiring an assistant was not adding any overhead at all. Instead, it was transferring overhead from me to another person, freeing me up to do more of the essential R&R. So hiring an assistant was really an investment in additional strategic leadership capacity.

Depending on how you spend your time, you might find that you would gain time by hiring an assistant, a director of operations to manage the organization, or an additional program specialist.

The board can help with R&R as well. Like leaders, boards may be stretched for time. But they have the primary responsibility for the mission, so they too must carve out time at board meetings for R&R. Boards should review what they spend their time on and how much value that work adds to the ministry. Perhaps more decision authority could be delegated to staff. Perhaps committees could be more active outside of board meetings. Directors will be delighted to have the time to get into the interesting and important work of R&R. In fact, this is where they can and should add high value to the senior leader and the organization, since they broaden the perspectives held by the staff.

Finally, both senior leadership and the board must spend time as they do the research and reflection allowing the Holy Spirit to reflect with them on the research results. Stepping back and looking at the whole picture, ask God what he thinks about all this.

Getting Started

Look for thought leaders and evidence-based research that apply to the type of organization you are (local church, mission agency, school, etc.) and the type of mission your ministry has (relief & development, youth evangelism, local church, etc.).

For instance, CCCC is like an association in some ways, so I pay attention to thought leaders in the association industry. But our mission has a large educational component, so we also pay attention to thought leaders in the adult learning world. And, of course, because we are a Christian ministry, we pay attention to thought leaders writing about the church and its mission.

Research and reflection will help ministry leaders actually lead. They will think bigger thoughts, be more creative, develop more coherent strategies, and design more relevant ministry initiatives.

Key Thought: The church needs time for research and reflection

The post The Church Needs Some R&R appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The main resource for this post is a book called How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism by Tina Fetner. The author analyzed primary private and public documents, and conducted interviews with leading personalities from that time period.

Sadly, few evangelicals talked with the author, which was another mistake. The author admits the book is more sympathetic to the gay movement than the evangelicals partly because of her own leanings, but also because gay activists were quite willing to answer her questions and tell their story. The few evangelicals who gave an interview didn’t answer her questions, but instead tried to convince her that they were right. They were still fighting the battle. Their non-cooperation meant that Fetner’s own misconceptions about evangelicals were not corrected, and she had no access to what the evangelicals’ thinking was, which she did have from the gay activists. Because we didn’t participate, evangelicals come across as cardboard characters who do all these awful things against members of the gay community.

Mistake #1: The Great Withdrawal

By the 1970s, we had a very strong supportive network of Christian schools, Bible colleges, radio and television stations, magazines and books, retreat centres, and camps that supported our faith. Christians knew they were safe inside the bubble. The bubble reinforced what was taught in the churches, but it had some serious negative effects:

1. The evangelical withdrawal from society (I call it The Great Withdrawal) had been going on since the early 20th century when the mainline churches went liberal. We adopted a fortress under siege mentality. Evangelicals largely disappeared from society; and unfortunately, out of sight, out of mind!
2. Living in a bubble that never challenged our beliefs
   • dulled our critical thinking skills, and
   • minimized the chance for critical engagement with society.
     We decried and protested the world out there, but rarely reflected on how we should engage and operate in it.
3. Our exit from the political and social mainstream of society meant we became out of touch with it.
4. Evangelicals effectively created our own enclaves with few, if any, bridges to society. Aside from evangelism, we were virtually incommunicado, out of contact on all other matters.
5. Finally, withdrawal meant we could not be a light in the darkness, yeast in the bread, or salt preserving the meat. We had little witness and no influence outside our community. The significant exceptions—Billy Graham, the Salvation Army, and inner city missions—let us feel we were out in society, but our presence was mostly on the margins and the exceptions masked our isolationist spirit. We had missionaries all over the world, but we did not have a presence as evangelicals in the mainstream of our own country.

When gay rights became an issue, gay activists believed we had all the assets to fuel a formidable campaign. Unfortunately, these assets were designed to meet only our internal needs. We weren’t equipped to venture out of our fortress, and we had no goodwill outside the fortress even if we did venture out. When gay activists portrayed evangelicals in caricatures, the public had no reason to see how wrong the caricatures were.

Mistake #2: We Became Exhibit 1 to Prove Our Opposition’s Point

Gay activists tried unsuccessfully for a decade to get their agenda into the public arena. Prior to 1977, activists framed the gay issue as one of justice and equality. The tone was educational, and when referring to the gay and straight communities, they used ‘we’ language, trying to position people who are gay and straight as one society.

Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign against a municipal ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation changed everything. The gay rights issue was now framed as protecting a threatened minority. They used ‘us and them’ language. And the tone was angry. All the gay activists had to do to prove their case was point to the hostile evangelical campaign against them. Tina Fetner writes:

The emergence of the Christian anti-gay movement, far from defeating the lesbian and gay movement, actually reinvigorated social movement organizations’ calls to action, secured the national media attention lesbian and gay activists were unable to secure on their own, and provided the movement with a resonant and familiar symbol of oppression that they could use to capture the message of their claims.

Before Anita Bryant, the gay activist organizations were small, under-funded, disillusioned, and wondering if they should give up. Anita Bryant’s campaign single-handedly revitalized gay activism. A gay activist says “We were blessed to have the hateful, bigoted opponents we had, particularly in the early years before we alone had the clout to push our issues to a vote, let alone center stage.”

I’ve found no indication that the evangelical church ever thoughtfully addressed what its strategy should be from a sociological or biblical-theological perspective. Why do we treat one sin differently than another when all sins have the same consequence? They charged ahead with no more thought than that homosexual sex is sinful. Since we all thought alike in our bubble, we couldn’t imagine how our actions would be interpreted from another perspective and actually help the opposition.

I’m not sure if it could have been any different in 1977, given that for the previous 60 years our primary focus had been holiness and purity. Confronted by a lifestyle that we considered a choice that was so blatantly antithetical to God’s design, there was never really a chance for dialogue or for nuance. And once both sides resorted to caricatures and labelling, ratcheting down the hostility was almost impossible.

My question is, “Which hot issues of our day demand more theological reflection?” Given where we are today, can we do better going forward with topics such as human sexuality, without compromising our faith?

Our mistake was to charge into battle suffering from groupthink and thinking tactically, rather than strategically.

Mistake #3: We Made Assumptions

Both sides thought the other was better funded, better organized, and very dangerous. Gay activists thought we had unlimited volunteers and controlled politics. One gay activist complained, “The right always picks the fight. They always pick the issue.” A gay activist remembers, “When our efforts are evaluated against the sophistication and skill of our enemies, the gay movement must admit to a continuing failure. Our Fight the Right efforts are as weak as theirs are strong, as scattershot as theirs are coordinated, as insignificant as theirs are effective.” Notice how she refers to evangelicals as “our enemies.” Their terminology and ours distanced our communities. Everything the activists said about us is what we thought about them. We both assumed the other was more powerful and felt forced to escalate.

Even Tina Fetner, the author, makes assumptions about evangelicals. She writes that our financial resources dwarf those of the gay community by looking at the revenue of churches and agencies such as Focus on the Family, but she assumes all the revenues are dedicated to the anti-gay campaign, which isn’t true, then or now.

Gay activists used sarcasm against evangelicals, but because it played into our fears about them, we didn’t take it as sarcasm but assumed it was evidence that our concerns were valid. An example would be placards carried in gay parades that read “We’re here to recruit your children.”

Misunderstandings like these kept the war going. And in some ways, war was convenient, because it was a great fundraiser for both sides. We actually had a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship, but for the evangelicals, it was beneficial only in the short term!

Because we didn’t talk with each other, neither side knew the other. In future, the evangelical church would do well to talk with its adversaries.

For example, last spring, CCCC held a legal forum that attracted lawyers from around the world who are completely at odds with each other over the place of religion in society and its legal protection. Personally, I am in conversation with a gay activist and we are both learning from each other. Christians should build bridges rather than barricades.

Mistake #4: We Treated All LGBT People as a Single, United Group

If you paint everyone with the same brush, then the loudest, most extreme members of the other community come to represent the entire community. When both sides see the fringe as the whole, it’s hard to see how they will ever talk.

We need to understand our opposition and distinguish between the radical fringe and the moderate mainstream. Progress can likely be made if the opposing moderates talk. The radical fringe on both sides usually want to destroy the other side, but their position is considerably weakened when moderate people show something can be worked out. Even if it is not a completely satisfactory solution, it may be a solution both sides can live with without compromising their convictions. At least something positive is happening. A good example of this involves Ontario’s new sex-ed curriculum:

I was on Lorna Dueck’s Context show recently, and saw a taping of another episode on the new Ontario sex-ed guidelines. A Christian group has written a curriculum that meets the guidelines and that Christian parents are happy with. School principals like this Christian curriculum too, saying it is a positive contribution that is much more effective than protests. The protesters are unlikely to accomplish anything, while more moderate Christians have accomplished what they wanted.

Mistake #5: We Fought a Negative Campaign

The gay movement enjoyed great success as public opinion took a massive swing towards supporting gay rights. The evangelical community, despite its ability to raise money and mobilize volunteers, had little or no effect on public opinion. The difference was that gay activists waged a positive campaign, arguing for something, while evangelicals fought a negative campaign, standing against something.

The jury is out on whether negative campaign ads work or not. They are memorable, but it seems they do not sway people’s opinions to the negative side. In fact, the 2015 Canadian federal election would seem to indicate just the opposite—that voters realized the negativity conflicted with their sense of common decency towards others. This is exactly what happened in the gay rights debate, because the evangelical strategy played right into the “threatened minority” narrative put out by gay rights activists. In addition, the negative evangelical campaign worked in favour of the gay movement because the very things that we campaigned against suddenly became the centre of attention and caused people to think about them. Gay activists then swooped in on those issues with a positive gay rights campaign that led people to agree with them on the issues that we raised.

In future, we must frame issues positively and stand for, rather than against, something.

Mistake #6: All-or-Nothing Thinking

The final mistake is “all-or-nothing” thinking. As John Stackhouse notes in Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World, many of us see anything less than total victory as a sellout. Total victory, John reminds us, is only achieved when Christ returns. Until then, we must think incrementally. If we are moving closer to total victory, any forward movement is better than a loss.

The epic fail illustrating this mistake is that Canada today has no abortion law and no prospect of ever having one. Why? Because when a compromise abortion bill was introduced in 1988, it was defeated when Christians said they were against the early term abortions that would have been legal. We should have taken what we could get, and waited for a better time to improve on it.

Conclusion

Evangelicals today engage society on many issues: poverty, euthanasia, sexuality, environment, human trafficking, refugees, and reproductive technology among them. We can greatly improve our effectiveness by avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Key Point: We need to be much more strategic and thoughtful in how we address public issues.

The post Note to the Church: Mistakes Not to Make Again! appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

At a young age, I discovered one of my family’s values – order and tidiness! I obviously on that day was not displaying our family value, which up until that time Mom may have presumed I had simply absorbed through association with my family, osmosis-like. Well, in the midst of something that was out of place or generally unkempt, I was told point-blank that our family values proper order and tidiness. Everything has its place, so put it there! And then my mom told me a story to reinforce the point. Her father had a spacious three car garage, and in the basement beneath the garage was a huge workshop full of benches, tools, drawers, and storage bins. She remembers her father working on a car and asking her to get a particular nut and bolt from the workshop for him. He told her exactly which drawer of which bench she should look in, and then within the drawer, precisely which of the 16 little cubicles held the desired object. Everything, every nut and bolt, was in exactly the right spot!

That story has stayed with me all these many years. Wouldn’t I like to be so neat, tidy, and orderly that I could tell you with precision exactly where something is! In fact, my wife is amazed that I can go into the basement and, most but not all of the time, find exactly what I’m looking for and be back upstairs in less than two or three minutes.

Such is the power of a story to transmit a value so that it sticks!

Corporate Values

If you did a spot check of all your staff, how many could recite your ministry’s values? They should be able to tell you exactly what they are without much thought, because they should be consciously thinking about them, making choices based on them, and generally living them out day-by-day.

Ensuring the corporate values are a part of daily life in a Christian ministry is one of the crucial strategies to prevent mission drift. As a ministry leader, it is your job to transmit your ministry’s values to your staff, volunteers, and supporters.

But if you are going to have corporate values (which of course you should), make sure they are your real values, the ones you are willing to suffer and sacrifice for because you believe so strongly in them. Don’t settle for motherhood values, the ones you think you should have.

The values you want are the ones that really matter. Your corporate values will either come out of your fundamental corporate identity or strategy, or they will be a response to a time in your ministry’s history when their absence caused a significant problem. Unless honesty has been a problem or is so integral to your ministry’s identity that it has to be a real focus, it is not a corporate value, it’s just a good value. Choose just the few crucial values that deeply matter to your ministry.

Transmitting Corporate Values

The two best ways to transmit your values are to model them yourself, and to tell stories about them. The two go together. Modelling values alone assumes people will pick up on the values osmosis-like, which may or may not happen (as I know from personal experience!). Telling stories alone will not have power unless the leader personally exemplifies them. Otherwise, they are just stories about someone else, usually long ago in corporate history. Telling stories (whether from history or current events) that are visibly supported by the leadership team’s actions today is a very powerful way to transmit your values.

A great resource for developing values-based stories is a book I’ve already told you about by Stephen Denning: The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative.

Crafting a Values Story

Denning has some very helpful tips for creating a powerful values-transmitting story:

• You can start with the corporate values and think about when someone did something that embodied those values, or you can think about crucial turning points in your ministry’s history and see what values were embodied in that moment.
• You can do the above either for the ministry as an organization, or if you want to connect the values to yourself to show how vital they are to you, you can do the above analysis using your own life.
• You don’t need a full-blown story. Review the parables that Jesus told. He told them in minimalist fashion. You don’t want to clutter up the story with so many details that people have to wait for you to tell them which details are important to your point. Only say what must be said to make your point.
  • My opening story contained just the  points that highlight the value of order and tidiness
    • a large space
    • someone who doesn’t know where something is being told by someone else exactly where it is with certainty from memory
    • a preamble connecting the reader with the story through me
    • evidence that the value has survived three generations, showing that Mom’s story was a powerful part of transmitting that value, thus validating the point of this post.
• A story with a twist will be much more powerful than a story that plays out as one would expect. Most, if not all, of the parables Jesus told had very unexpected twists. A Samaritan helping a Jew? A father demeaning his position (in that culture) by physically going towards his profligate son to welcome him?
  • Stories where the tables are turned are very memorable! If you can, build the unexpected in to your story. I told a true story up above, and it didn’t have a twist. But if you are creating a fictional story, such as Nathan did when he confronted David with his sin, you would certainly want to put a twist into it.
• You don’t have to spell everything out. It may be better not to even mention what the value is, but tell the story so that the audience is left thinking about it and then reasons out what the value is. Let them have the fun, and the reinforcing memory, of their own “Aha!” moment. So you could say, “Here’s what I’d like to hear about the service we provide. A person in need…” and then make up a story.
• You could tell a story about some other organization or person that exemplifies the value if you can’t find such a story in your own ministry.
• Finally, you could make up a story, as Jesus did with the Parables. “There was a woman who…” or something like that will start a great parable of your own.

So take your top few values, and try crafting some stories! Guaranteed they will make your staff meetings more interesting!

The post Transmitting Corporate Values appeared first on CCCC Blogs.