Christian artist Brad Sherk created this beautiful artwork which is a perfect visual representation of our desire to see Evangelical ministry leaders working together in community for the welfare of our faith in Canada. Because he lives locally (to us), Brad was able to come to a staff meeting and describe how he created this drawing. I’d like to share why this image is important to CCCC and to the community of ministry leaders across Canada.

Leaders & Starlings

The  image is of a starling murmuration, something which was featured in my post Leaders in Community. No single bird leads the flock, and yet every day at roosting time hundreds and even thousands of starlings fly together in dazzling formations which constantly shift in shape and direction of flight, all in perfect coordination!

That’s what informal Christian community leadership should be like: Leaders getting together to reflect on our mission and our mission results, and then developing ideas and initiatives that we could act on together for the benefit of our shared mission.

Brad Sherk

Those who attended The Pursuit conference have seen Brad’s exquisite art on exhibit. We at CCCC celebrate Christian artists of all types who inspire, challenge, and encourage us by showing us the world through their eyes.

Thank you Brad for using your artistic gift. May God bless each of your works and use them for his purposes.

The post Leaders in Community: A Visual Image! appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

A table set for dinner is a table set for family, friends and guests to sit down together to enjoy an evening of good food and friendship. It is a place for people to share what they’re thinking about and exchange ideas. The table represents community.

I’m inviting you to come and take your place at a metaphorical table set for the Evangelical ministry community. Set aside your own ministry for a while and talk with your peers about the community as a whole. How healthy is it? How is it doing from a mission perspective? What are your suggestions? What might you and your table mates do together for the good of the whole community? Will you take your place at the table?

I read a book this summer that was so encouraging I was beside myself with excitement about the possibilities. This post is drawn from that book: Awakening the Evangelical Mind: An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement

The Evangelical church needs ministry leaders who will work together to provide collegial, informal leadership to the community of ministries. We need people who will think about the welfare and mission success of the Evangelical community as a whole, the same way they do about their own individual ministries. Without any centralized leadership to do for the community what we do for our ministries, it’s up to us — ministry leaders, academics, thought leaders and practitioners — to volunteer to perform that function for the community.

Invitation to Community

You’ll enjoy your time at the table and make a great contribution to the community if you can put the church overall first and your own ministry second. Your ministry, as important as it is, is just one of the thousands of churches and specialized ministries in Canada supporting the church’s mission and as Christians, the church’s mission takes priority and provides context for the specialized parts of the mission which our individual ministries may work at.

Adopting such a perspective may be challenging for some leaders given that ministry leaders are hired to lead specific organizations, and their longevity depends on their organization’s success. They have to think about their own organization’s welfare and achievements, and that makes it more difficult to think bigger than just their ministry’s interests.

But it gets even more challenging when a scarcity mentality is thrown into the mix. Then you get a spirit of competition. It comes down to money. Doesn’t it always! If we get caught in the trap of needing to take credit or control of a community project to support our fundraising efforts, we’ll lose the spirit of being together in one body, one community. Every Christian leader needs to deal with this fundamental issue of God’s ability to provide. Answer the question, Regardless of what we say we believe, do we act as though God will provide for all our needs? As I wrote in my book, The Church At Work:

[Some ministry leaders believe] there is only so much money to go around….If your share of pie is bigger than average, then theirs must be smaller than average.

Others believe that God will provide as much as is needed, and will expand the provision to encompass the range of activity undertaken by his people….God will simply bake another pie.

In my leadership at CCCC, I figure that as long as we do what God has called us to do, and we do it in a godly way, God will provide our ministry’s needs. Once you get past the fear of loss or the need for gain, and place your ministry in God’s care, then you can accept the invitation to dinner and start thinking about us and how we can better accomplish our shared mission.

Inspiration from the Past

So what got me so excited while reading that book? It was the BIG thinking of a small group of ministry leaders and scholars who got together informally in the 1940s to talk about the health and mission of the new Evangelical movement, and the HUGE impact they made which we still benefit from today.

I got a glimpse reading that book of how God could use you and me to do something like that in our time. We don’t want to copy what they did, that’s already been done, but we do want to take the principles they followed and see where they might lead us today. Could you imagine what it would be like to shape a movement for the next fifty years because we generously shared ourselves, our experiences, wisdom, insights, and perspectives, to give the community fresh vision for our times? Wow!

I don’t have any projects or particular processes to promote. I don’t know where we would end up or how we would get there. But I do know God has given us places of influence and that it is only good stewardship to use that influence for the benefit of the entire movement. Things will happen when we do that!

So here are just a few principles I gleaned from the collaboration between Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, Charles Fuller, Carl Henry, and others.

They Developed People for the Future Community

In the early 1900s, a student of Princeton Theological Seminary, Gresham Machen, had his doubts about Christianity, but the faculty saw his potential and after a lot of wooing, hired him in 1906 to teach New Testament. He later resolved his doubts and, in turn, looked for other young people of promise. It’s been said that if Machen took an interest in a young scholar or future pastor, he had the ability to launch his career and give it a high trajectory. Note that he had to be very well-connected with ministry leaders to be able to do this.

One very successful career he helped launch was that of Harold Ockenga. In 1934 Machen was a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, and he and others saw the potential in Ockenga, who was studying to be a pastor. They knew that Ockenga’s gifts called for a very special church that would allow him to make the most of his gifts, and they made sure he was offered a position at a prominent church that gave him the prestigious platform he needed. But Ockenga went far beyond their expectations to become not simply a leading pastor, but the premier builder of Evangelical institutions of his era.¹

In turn, Ockenga kept his eye out for promising young people to promote just as he had been. He found a young man he thought could provide the intellectual foundation for the Evangelical movement, Edward Carnell, and promoted his career. Carnell eventually followed Ockenga as president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

So today, you can think about our community’s future human resource needs. Think about building the next generation (or two) of leaders, thought leaders, academics, and so on. Keep your eyes open for promising young people who have the capacity to become significant contributors to our cause. Get behind them, open doors for them, give them training and development opportunities. Do everything you can to promote their careers. Hire them if possible, or introduce them to people who can hire them. Mentor them (regardless of who employs them), and help them navigate through their careers.

And there are many individuals, many bloggers and scholars, who are writing or speaking about our movement’s health and mission, and they could use our help to amplify their message so that more people in the community hear their contributions. Look for opportunities to lend them your audience.

This is not the “old boys’ network” come back to life because this career help is based on merit and potential, rather than personal connections and quid pro quo.

They Brought People Together

The best example of bringing people together is the one I’ve mentioned, Billy Graham and his cohort, which developed both vision and infrastructure for the community. But there’s another great example of bringing a small group of people together for a different purpose — to develop its younger members and advance their careers. This group was initiated by Harold Ockenga. He assembled academics at a small conference he designed – the Plymouth Scholars’ Conferences. He wanted to stimulate the development of Evangelical scholarship. Ockenga invited young scholars such as George Eldon Ladd, Edward Carnell, Carl Henry, Merrill Tenney, and Terrelle Crum to attend. Each of these doctoral students came and gave papers for a prestigious group of Christian theologians.

The goal, Ockenga recalled was “to discuss the need for the writing of a new evangelical literature.”² That’s a big goal – a whole new literature! And you probably recognized at least some of those students’ names because you’ve read one of their books. They did indeed go on to become major Evangelical scholars and theologians. So in one stroke, Ockenga both encouraged creativity and furthered their careers.

Imagine the creative ideas that could be sparked when people from different fields get together to share their wisdom, knowledge, dreams and ideas. When the small group of Evangelical leaders met in the 1940s, they cross-fertilized their ideas and out of that came the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, Fuller Theological Seminary, Billy Graham’s crusades, many Christian agencies that are still well known today, graduate schools, publishers, and on and on.

So today, we need to develop our networks and create opportunities for pastors, scholars, agency leaders, and other thought leaders to come together to think big thoughts in today’s ministry environment. Who knows who might develop a bold vision which will carry us forward for maybe another fifty to seventy years?

We need to use our networks to bring people together for their own professional development so they can do even greater things in the future. What can we do to help each other become better leaders, pastors, scholars and thought leaders?

Newsflash 9/14/16: I just read about the Network of Christian Scholars. Bravo! We need more networks like this.

They Volunteered Themselves

Charles Fuller was a radio evangelist whose 1940s radio show was the most popular radio show of any kind in that era. With his broadcast airing on 650 radio stations and a mailing list of more than 300,000 people, he had a platform which made him one of the key statesmen of the Neo-Evangelical movement.

Although he was a preacher and not a scholar, he caught the vision promoted by Ockenga, Graham, and the others for a new Evangelicalism in distinction to Fundamentalism. He badly wanted a new seminary with the ability to defend the faith and add intellectual horsepower to the still fledgling Evangelical movement. It’s important that this had nothing to do with his ministry! It was just something he thought had to be done.

He put time into developing the seminary idea. There was no benefit to himself or his ministry for giving his time. And he didn’t just invest time. He was extremely wealthy from his family business (“filthy rich” is how one author puts it) and could basically make something happen all by himself if he wanted to do it. He recruited Ockenga to be the first president and together they founded Fuller Theological Seminary.

So today, wouldn’t it be great if a group of leaders could structure their organizations such that maybe 10% of their time could be spent volunteering with other ministry leaders as informal community leaders helping make things happen? Some businesses allow their staff to spend up to 10% of their paid work time volunteering in the community as a way of being a good corporate citizen. What a great idea! Could we dedicate some time to working for the welfare of the entire church in Canada? Think of the benefit to the community to have such capable people caring for its welfare.

They Thought Big

I’ve already mentioned about thinking big, but it bears repeating because it was so crucial to the success of the Neo-Evangelicals of the 1940s. They had a well thought out comprehensive strategy that included creating schools and writing books that inspired future generations of scholars and leaders. The strategy led them to emerge from fundamentalism and re-engage culture. They spoke prophetically to their times in terms of ethics and philosophy.

So today, we need to do the same sort of thing to re-engage with our culture. Can we create or reinvigorate institutions that will strengthen the Evangelical church’s intellectual life, engagement with our culture, and shared witness as a community?

Failure Is Okay

Some people may wonder if what I’m suggesting is too pie in the sky to be pursued seriously. Well, sometimes the group from the 1940s was successful and sometimes not. They never did get a research university going in spite of a huge investment in developing a proposal. They wanted a Christian university that would be up to the standards of the secular Ivy-League research universities. It never happened. But the point is, they aimed high and got a lot more done than most people would have imagined possible. They had a big vision and a lot of faith, and that is what mattered.

 RSVP

You are invited to lead beyond your ministry for the good of the whole Evangelical community. I’d like to see ministry leaders across Canada connect with each other and seed our community with great proposals. Who knows what great initiatives will arise for wider adoption? Small groups are fine. What counts is that the groups are action-oriented.

Will you accept the invitation and come to the table?

The post Building Community Leadership appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

And yet a study of evangelicalism will show that one of our assumptions is that to change people is to change culture. We just need to change enough people. Our default strategy for culture change is evangelism, winning the world one-by-one, hoping that a tipping point will be reached where democracy reigns and our culture shifts to become what God designed it to be. The goal of this strategy is to change culture from the bottom-up.

Will Our Strategy Work?

James Davison Hunter, in his book To Change the World gives two examples which clearly show that shaping contemporary culture is not a democratic, bottom-up process. In Hunter’s words:

1. “Jews have never comprised more than 3.5 percent of the American population…Yet the contribution of the Jewish community to science, literature, art, music, letters, film, and architecture is both brilliant and unrivaled.”¹
2. “A similar story of influence can be told of the gay community. At most 3 percent of the American population, their influence has become enormous, again disproportionate to their size.”²

In contrast to these two communities, evangelicals make up about 12% of the Canadian population and 25% of the American population, but the two smaller groups have been able to effect much greater cultural change. Obviously the tools of democracy won’t make the changes we want to see.

How Culture Changes

Cultural Elites

Culture change is initiated by cultural elites. They are philosophers, academics, and high concept artists who have the intellectual capacity and the social capital to initiate and sustain cultural change. They use their platforms and networks to set their agenda in motion.

Initiating Cultural Change

Cultural elites think at the most abstract, theoretical, high-brow level. They are largely unknown to the general public because their audience isn’t the general public, but instead other cultural elites and people who can use their positions of power or influence to convert the output of the elites into something more accessible to the public.

Disseminating Cultural Change

The output from the cultural elites is then disseminated through people who can interpret it and pass it along to the leaders and opinion-setters in society. Professors spread the new ideas in universities and publish peer-reviewed articles in law journals. Advocates pick up the ideas and publicize them to politicians and the public. Writers create screenplays based on their ideas and movie producers bring them to the masses.

Implementing Cultural Change

Finally, the public experiences the new culture as it is realized. The theoretical becomes practical and we start living the new culture. The high brow becomes low brow and the rest of the creative arts and literature communities jump in producing their interpretations of the new culture. Abstract morality is given legs, for example, in terms of what we choose for our own lives, what we promote in the public school system, and the type of volunteer work we do for our communities. When all this is happening, we can say that culture has been changed.

The following chart summarizes the components of culture change.

Scaling

Changing culture is never a task for loners and it can’t be accomplished with just one or two tactics alone. Culture change demands a multi-pronged holistic approach. It needs the whole package described above, every element working together, to make real, lasting change. Advocacy alone, for example, isn’t enough because it is not supported by the intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic components of enduring culture change.

The matrix of people and institutions working together which Hunter describes is a very powerful strategy called scaling. Cause-related secular organizations take scaling very seriously because it works!

In the face of such a concerted effort by elites from different sectors all coalesced around a common goal, one-off legal and political victories won through advocacy don’t mean very much. Those wins just aren’t sustainable against a holistic campaign by the cultural elites that seems to come at the general public from all sides.

Looking through history, Hunter finds that:

“At every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize and propagate an alternative culture. Often enough, alongside these elites are artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision. New institutions are created that give form to that culture, enact it, and, in so doing, give tangible expression to it….They do not gain traction in the larger social world until they challenge, penetrate, and redefine the status structure at the center of cultural life. Invariably, as we have seen, this process results in conflict.”

Christians and the Elites

Christians are noticeably absent from the ranks of the cultural elite in contemporary society, unlike in the days of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect,” when they themselves were among the cultural elites. Today’s cultural elites likely have no religious background at all and, as Eric Metaxas writes in his essay “Cultural Elites: The next unreached people group,” they are people who need to know Jesus.

We also don’t have much in the way of institutional or other support for abstract, theoretical, thought leadership.

• Evangelicals, for example, have lots of institutions, but they were created to fulfill our own needs, not to influence culture.
• What institutions we have are on the periphery of cultural production.
  • Our books, for example, aren’t reviewed by the major reviewers.
• Physically, Hunter notes that Christian institutions are not located in the cultural power-house cities of New York and Los Angeles, but in smaller cities away from the limelight. The situation is the same in Canada. Lorna Dueck’s show Context, is an exception, being located right in the CBC’s Broadcasting Centre on Front Street in downtown Toronto. Lorna is located literally in the very centre of cultural production, and her show presents a thoughtful Christian perspective on issues of the day that everyone is thinking about. Her ministry deserves our support!
• Our Christian cultural output (art, books, etc.) is for the popular market, not the conceptual or intellectual market.

Culture shaping at the abstract, theoretical, high-brow level currently just isn’t a priority for Christians, so it doesn’t look like the situation will get any better soon.

• Hunter found that, in 2004, four secular foundations alone provided over $200 million in grants to secular arts and culture. The largest Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave a total of $10 million.
• On top of that, one secular foundation alone gave $12 million for individuals (called ‘geniuses’) working in scholarship, invention, and social innovation. The Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave nothing to support our promising people.

The only Christian think-tank in Canada that I can readily think of is Cardus. They are doing a lot not only in thought leadership on big picture societal issues, but also in promoting the value of religion to the Canadian public. They also deserve our support!

Imago Arts Canada is another ministry worthy of support. It promotes Christian art, advocates for the arts, has addressed social issues, and promoted science/religion dialogue.

Solutions

So, what’s the way forward?

Theological

Jeremy Begbie writes in For The Beauty Of The Church that when the New Testament writers write about a vision for the future, they move from the future to the present. They start with what “God will finally do,” and then “dare to claim that this future can start now.” The Holy Spirit invites us to share in his work of re-creating the present in light of that future. This is what Jesus did when he announced the in-breaking of God’s kingdom. Right where he was, he lived life the way it should be lived.

Begbie notes five aspects of the future described in Revelation 21 which we should reflect on and see what we can do to introduce them into the present:

• The Spirit unites the unlike – there is a diversity of peoples and nations in heaven all united under God.
• The Spirit generates excess – God’s provision is more than enough to meet the needs of the nations.
• The Spirit inverts – the rewards of heaven are not based upon the way we earn rewards in this present life.
• The Spirit exposes the depths – sin is exposed for what it is, and the reality of suffering is acknowledged, and then tears are wiped away and replaced with joy.
• The Spirit recreates – the world is liberated from all that isn’t right.

Let these five observations about God’s future become a matter of prayer and reflection, and see where the Spirit guides you.

Faithful Presence

Hunter Baker, in The System Has a Soul, and James Davison Hunter in his book, both call for us to have a faithful presence in our society. Baker describes what that looks like, saying:

“A faithful presence involves offering critical resistance to those things that do not lead to human flourishing, and making an extended effort to retrieve social goods that have been lost or are in danger of being lost. But all of this should be done without any real effort to impose….Faithful presence means that we pursue, identify with, and labor toward the good of others.”

Again, make this a matter of prayer and reflection. How could you and your ministry have a faithful presence where God has planted you?

Engage & Join the Cultural Elites

If we want to join the cultural elite and contribute our own ideas to the mix, we need a three-pronged strategy:

1. First, we should treat the cultural elites as an identifiable people group who have not yet heard the Gospel, and engage them. They need Jesus as much as anyone.
2. Then we should get behind and help advance the careers of Christians who have the potential to be among the cultural elite. Mentoring and scholarships would be key components of this strategy.
3. Finally, we should build our institutional capacity in the fields of education, philosophy, and the arts to support our cultural elites.

This last point is brief, but it holds within it a huge, complex project similar in scale to the one developed by Billy Graham and his cohort in the 1940s. Have you a heart to do something similar today? What can you do to make it happen?

Key Thought: Christians need to build the full mix of cultural resources if we want to participate in the development of our culture.

The post How Culture Changes appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

I have no idea how these birds coordinate their individual movements, but they are a great illustration of collegial leadership in action, leaders acting in community. With no obvious central control, the entire community acts in concert and does something amazing as a group. What a beautiful concept for the church to adopt for itself. I’d love to see the church dazzle the world with “Christian murmuration” and the resulting good it would accomplish!

The Trinity’s Example

Like every other senior leader, I was hired by a board to provide leadership to a specific ministry. My job security depends upon the performance of the ministry I lead, as does yours. So naturally we must pay attention to our own organizations. However, as Christian leaders we would be very poor examples of living the Christian life well if we ran our ministries in isolation from each other. Here’s why:

The church should be the human version of the perfect community of love that exists within the Godhead. That perfect community has each of the three persons of the Trinity in full relationship with the others, honouring them, respecting their different roles, and acting in perfect harmony. Until God’s kingdom is fully established on earth, the church and its organizations are (or at least, have the potential to be) the best representation on earth of what perfect love looks like….The Trinity is a helpful relationship model for the church, as it suggests that we could think of the work of the church’s various structures as complementary to each other and contributing to a common goal.
John Pellowe in The Church at Work.

It’s really important that we see ourselves as more than the senior leaders of our own ministries. We are also members of a community of ministry leaders, and we would do well on several levels to think bigger than our own organizations. Let’s see what this broader concept of leadership looks like in practice.

Lead Beyond Your Organization

Leading beyond your own organization means that you take into account more than just the factors that matter to your ministry. You also consider the welfare of others. You and your ministry should be modeling love and care for other ministries. It’s the same as we tell individual Christians: Don’t be me-centred, be other-centred. Remember that we work for the same Lord with the same overall mission. Part of the definition of success for a ministry should be that it is a good corporate citizen within the people of God.

I know a very successful Christian fundraiser who doesn’t hesitate to refer potential donors to other ministries if there is a better match between the ministry’s mission and the donor’s passion. This fundraiser doesn’t worry about lost donations, but figures it all comes around in the end.

Here’s an example from my own recent experience of what leading beyond your own organization can look like:

When the Holy Spirit directed me to give the CCCC conference away and merge it with other conferences, I found two partners who had their own conferences which were a good fit with ours. We talked about our goals and how we would define success for this new conference. We thought about the benefits to the ministry community of a larger conference. We discussed the potential risks to our own organizations in a forthright, respectful manner. We were transparent and vulnerable with each other.

I also thought about others who didn’t have a conference to merge, but who might not want to be left out. What arrangement would be perfect for them? Four denominations and eleven ministry associations said “Yes” to an opportunity to endorse the conference as theirs.

This kind of community leadership is informal. Each leader just thinks about what more could be done for the good of our cause and our community by sharing and collaboration. They ask, “What have I got to share with others? Know-how? Connections? Staff expertise? Assets?” They also are willing to give something for the sake of making something bigger happen.

For example, giving away our conference meant that CCCC would share the spotlight with other ministries. We had spent a year designing a bold new CCCC conference and now we are just one of the partners. We gave up control of the most significant face-to-face interaction we have with our members for the sake of demonstrating Christian unity and creating a better conference for everyone.

Other ministries have given up the spotlight entirely. In The Church at Work I tell the stories of Child Evangelism Fellowship Ontario and Power to Change who both gave up public branding of a program so that local churches could promote the programs under their own banners. The programs had greater success than ever because of this change and both ministries saw their missions advance more than they otherwise would have.

Relationship for the Sake of Relationship

Leading in community means you are not just partnering with other ministries for a specific program or initiative, but that you are actually living in community with them in an enduring relationship.

In The Church at Work, I tell the story of the evangelical churches and agencies of Peterborough, Ontario, who sign a covenant of love and fellowship with one another each year. Their mutual love and ability to work together caught the attention of the mayor, and they were given the chance to start a city-wide after-school program that the city wanted.

The Peterborough group has seen tangible expressions of love between ministries. Some churches helped another church out financially when it got into some cashflow problems, and Youth for Christ and the local Free Methodist Church jointly planted a new church that drew on the expertise of YFC and the ecclesial support of the local church.

The way the Peterborough churches and agencies work together today developed over a long period of time during which they regularly met to worship, pray, and build relationships.

One thing that I did a few years ago, and am in the midst of doing again, was to invite local ministry leaders to give devotionals at CCCC staff meetings and tell our staff about their ministries. We each get to know the other a little better and we can continue the interaction by adding their ministries to our weekly staff prayers.

One of the benefits of being in relationship with other leaders is that it proves that it doesn’t have to be “lonely at the top.”

Collegial Community Leadership

The way the starlings fly in formation comes to mind when I think of acting collegially with other leaders and their ministries. Collegial leadership means thinking not just of your own ministry, and not just of other ministries individually, but thinking of the community of ministries as a whole.

The most inspiring story I came across over the past year of reflection on the church came up in several history books. In the 1940s, a small group of Christian leaders who understood the times and who saw the big picture, got together to create the modern evangelical church. They were looking for a third way between Protestant liberalism on the one hand, and fundamentalism on the other.

Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, Charles Fuller, Carl Henry, and seven others were committed to evangelism, but without factionalism, separation, and judgmentalism. They believed the church should bring a distinctive and respectable Christian voice to the intellectual debates of the day, and they thought Christians should be socially and politically active. “They were fully committed to maintaining and promoting confidently traditional, orthodox Protestant theology and belief, while at the same time becoming confidently and proactively engaged in the intellectual, cultural, social, and political life of the nation.”¹

Out of this group came the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, Fuller Theological Seminary, Billy Graham’s crusades, most of the major Christians agencies that are so well known today, graduate schools, publishers, and on and on.

It took a group of ministry leaders who could think much bigger than just their own ministries to set the evangelical church on a course that carried us forward for seventy years. They had to think of the entire movement and what it needed. These eleven leaders provided the intellectual capacity to strategize at the macro level and then they used their networks to the fullest to set the strategy in motion. What I really like about their thinking is that it was holistic, unselfish, and bold. They didn’t screen out ideas as too far-fetched. If they made sense strategically, they were worth pursuing. They did all this with no formal organization or specific leader. They just made it happen!

Today, their basic strategy is still correct but cultural influences, especially individualism (which is encouraged by our emphasis on personal salvation), have sapped the evangelical church of the vitality it once had.²

The leadership that Billy Graham et al provided in the 1940s is the kind of leadership we need today. We need leaders who once again will be sector thought-leaders, providing the evangelical church with a fresh, bold, radical vision for strategy, and then lead us in the hard work of building the infrastructure to make it happen.

Three practical things you can do are:

1. Educate yourself on the nature of the evangelical church today and the issues it faces in the current environment. Find other leaders to discuss the issues with.
2. Rather than thinking of associations within our sector as service providers to you, with membership to be justified as a business transaction, think of them as coalition builders who support your cause. They could use your help. Your membership dues are not an expense! They are an investment in the welfare of your ministry’s sub-sector and they can potentially give your cause a much higher profile than you could achieve on your own. I especially recommend the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada for its role in representing the entire evangelical sector to the public.They represent us so well and are highly respected for the quality of their research and proposals. EFC deserves the support of all evangelical ministries. So, participate in the life of the associations you belong to, and help them promote your cause.
3. Look for great Christian thought leaders who have ideas of consequence for the church. Spread the word about them. Share their posts and tweets. Do what you can to get their message out. Most ministry leaders are so busy leading their ministries that they don’t have a whole lot of time to give to reflective thought and critical analysis of the big picture. Thought leaders have done this work, so make use of their ideas in your own ministry. Pass their ideas on to your own staff and let your team develop ways to implement them.

You Can Be a Leader in Community

It’s easy to become a leader in community. Just be friendly! Reach out to other Christian leaders. Share a meal. Visit their office. Invite other ministry leaders to dream with you. Explore how you could accomplish more together for the sake of the entire ministry sector and the cause of Christ.

If you are one of the leaders who can potentially provide informal leadership to the sector, then step up and find your like-minded colleagues. If you don’t think you are that person, then find those people who are, and give them your support.

Key Thought – Christian ministries are a community and need to act as a community.

The post Leaders in Community appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

When an intruder invades your body—like a cold virus or bacteria on a thorn that pricks your skin—your immune system protects you. It tries to identify, kill and eliminate the invaders that might hurt you. But sometimes problems with your immune system cause it to mistake your body’s own healthy cells as invaders and then repeatedly attacks them. This is called an autoimmune disease.¹

It’s been decades since I heard a joke about another denomination from the pulpit. That’s good. These days it seems we are getting along much better together as the body of Christ. That’s also good. But there are differences between us, and that creates the potential for conflict. The purpose of this post is to present a couple of models to forestall potential conflict and help us co-exist peacefully in spite of our differences.

Protection from Danger

If someone introduces a belief or position that is not compatible with Christian faith, the body of Christ needs to address it, We have an immune system to protect us, which is our theology and doctrine, This protection is absolutely necessary because we must be able to tell what is, and is not, Christian belief.

For example, a belief that Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity is orthodox (meaning right belief), while a belief that denies Jesus’ position in the Trinity is heterodox (meaning other belief). The core beliefs of Christian faith have been well documented in the church’s ancient creeds, so they are pretty clear.

The problem arises when there are sincerely held differences between Christians about non-core beliefs, where both sides can appeal to the Bible for support. That’s an important caveat, by the way. I’m talking about when both sides have biblical support. What then?

Teaching why your own interpretation of scripture is correct (and why another isn’t) is fine. Debating a point is also fine. A good example of such a debate is a book titled Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism. But viciously attacking people who hold different interpretations is something else. If we allow our immune system to go on the attack against a fellow believer on a matter which truly is debatable, then we are suffering from autoimmune disease and attacking our own body.

For example, I believe the charismatic gifts are still operative today and perhaps you don’t. Does that mean we can’t be friends? Is this something we have to duke it out over until we have a clear winner? Do we really need to go on the attack? It’s been a hundred years since G. Campbell Morgan described pentecostal experiences as the “last vomit from hell,” but we still have websites today saying things like “Pentecostalism is of the Devil.”

Theology and doctrine are both very important. That’s why I chose to specialize my MDiv in Biblical Studies. There are beliefs that are crucial for agreement and then there are those that we can graciously accept as a reasonable Scripture-based belief, even if we don’t agree with it. I may think the other person is wrong, but that doesn’t make them non-believers or an enemy. If these beliefs were important enough to determine whether one is or is not a Christian, I’m sure the Bible would have been crystal clear about them. The fact that the Bible can support conflicting beliefs on secondary matters tells me that these are indeed secondary, or as they are usually called, disputable matters. You may be pre-, post-, or a-millenial, but is that something that should cause division between us? Dispensational or covenantal? It goes on and on.

Arguing over secondary matters (or personal preferences) can lead to division, factionalism and other unseemly behaviour within the body of Christ and it distracts us from our mission.

Fortunately, there is a great spirit of unity and collegiality between churches these days. We’re finally learning to demonstrate Christian unity. But there are some groups and individual Christians who still go on the attack. If Christians have sincerely held differences about eschatology, church polity, charismatic gifts, predestination or free will, we should be able to note the differences and disagree while still being in fellowship.

A great article appeared in ChristianWeek while I was writing this post that has some good suggestions for stopping the in-fighting. I want to give three additional tips that will help you live with the differences and not get worked up over them.

Differences Are Gifts

On July 2, 2001 I attended my very first class at Tyndale Seminary. Dr. Andrew Lau was teaching New Testament Theology & History and he said something that night that has stuck with me ever since. There were seven students in the class and we came from all different denominations. Dr. Lau made note of our various church backgrounds and told us he was born in China to Chinese Lutheran parents, and he has attended or served as pastor in Lutheran, Mennonite Brethren, Christian & Missionary Alliance, Brethren, and independent churches.

He said we would all get along fine with each other if we remembered three concentric circles:

1. The centre circle is devoted to Jesus Christ and what we absolutely must believe about him to be a Christian. This includes essentials such as his divinity and the purpose of his death and resurrection.
2. The next circle, surrounding the centre circle, is made up of denominational distinctives. Sincere “Bible-believing” Christians can see grounds in the Bible for different forms of church structure and governance, opposing doctrines such as predestination and free-will or the cessation or continuance of charismatic gifts, and different eschatologies. Each distinctive should be considered as a gift to the body of Christ. Each reminds the body of different aspects of our faith.
3. The outermost circle is where our personal preferences lie. Do I like to sing hymns or choruses? Pews or chairs? Is my priority compassionate service or prayer ministry? My church home is a Pentecostal church and I thoroughly enjoy worshiping there. But I also deeply appreciate the Anglican liturgy, and I attend the Eucharist once in a while. These two widely different worship experiences appeal to different aspects of my spirituality.

Dr. Lau said that if we keep the content of the circles in this priority order with Christ at the centre, respect for the denominational distinctives next, and humility over our personal preferences last, we would have great discussions in class. The problem comes when I take a denominational distinctive and swap places with Jesus Christ, so that the distinctive is at the centre and becomes the test for orthodoxy. Or worse, switching Christ at the centre for one of my personal preferences. No one would knowingly do that, of course, but it can easily happen without thinking.

So when you encounter a different idea, assign it to one of the circles. Unless it goes counter to the inner-most circle and affects our core beliefs about Jesus Christ, you should be able to live with the differences. As someone who believes that Christ died for all people and that whosoever will can be saved, I can still get along with someone who believes in predestination. Either way, we are both following Christ, so we can work together. And I can enrich my own spirituality by appreciating the implications of predestination – that I’m personally known and loved by God who truly wants me in relationship with him. Those thoughts don’t depend on predestination, but they are a prominent feature of that belief.

Differences Make Us Whole

John G. Stackhouse Jr. makes the point² that perhaps one group can’t live out the full counsel of God on a particular issue. In his words, “in some cases no single stance says and does all that must be said and done, and therefore more than one posture might be necessary to cumulatively bear witness to the broad scope of God’s word and will in a complex matter…Christians of obvious good sense and good faith have disagreed about lots of things, and it’s not clear to me, at least, that one side or the other was always just wrong.”

For example, war is not the ideal, but it is necessary at times. God may call most of his people to wage war in order to maximize the resources available for the struggle against evil,  but then call some of his people to be pacifists, to be a witness for radical peacemaking and a prophetic voice against the evils of war.

Rather than attacking the other position, why not see what can be learned from it?

Differences Can Be Accommodated

Finally, churches by design are for the broad spectrum of believers. They must accommodate a wide range of people, each with their own priorities and beliefs about what the church should be doing and how to do it. It’s impossible to please everybody. Missiologist Ralph Winter wrote that God may provide specialized ministries outside the local church to allow for legitimate diversity of opinion as to methodology or priority.³ Instead of arguing over what position the church should take, its members can fan out and find specialized ministries that align with their perspective.

Here’s an example of how this works (taken from my book The Church At Work). Evangelicals can be found in virtually all political camps, so they may have very different proposals for solving society’s problems.  “Trickle down” economic policies are one way to address poverty, while income redistribution through the tax system is another.  Christians may legitimately disagree on these points.  If opinion is divided, the local church or denomination may not be able to address the issue directly because their open membership covers all demographics and political opinions.  However, its members could address the controversial issue through a number of independent ministries, each member choosing one with which he or she can agree.

And so,

Let’s agree on the essentials and agree to disagree on secondary matters. This is what living a faithful life of grace looks like.

Key Thought: Differences between non-core beliefs can be a gift

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Day two started with a great presentation from Lisa Kay Solomon of Innovation Studio. She says that scaling is about leading the design of better futures. Scaling includes designing the conditions within the organization that are needed for change.

Start the scaling process by defining the response you want to trigger in other people that will lead to mission success.

When it comes to your own staff, the people whom you want to be successful in their work every day, Lisa says that people who believe they’ve had a good day are more successful than those who don’t. And the most significant factor in judging whether or not you’ve had a good day is whether or not you feel you made progress that day. So leaders, design your organization and its work so that staff and volunteers can know they made progress every day. Her book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change describes how to do this.

The key points are:

1. Create conditions for discovery. Exploring always involves risk of failure, but the key is to fail productively. Others have said that when you fall, “Fall forward.” Encourage curiosity, zest and optimism among your staff. Have strong ideas to give clear direction, but hold them loosely to encourage creative thinking. Have fun exploring. If everything has been reduced to a Powerpoint presentation, she says little can go wrong, but then little can go right too. Risk exploration.
2. Be an ‘otherish’ giver. Collaborate and set your partner up for success. Engage others outside the organization to think and imagine with you.
3. Think visually. This really helps you to break away from linear thinking and it is much more creative. Dan Roam has two great goods about thinking visually: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Blah Blah Blah: What to Do when Words Don’t Work. She also recommends Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers because you can’t scale anything if your don’t know its business model. I have this book and it is outstanding! And yes, charities have business models just as much as for profits do!
4. Act like a television or movie producer. They are the people who steward the vision for the show and make sure that it gets produced. You need to ensure that everyone is creatively working on the vision. Don’t let the organization drift away from what you are trying to achieve!! Sometimes we get bogged down in process and perfectionism and lose “the fire”. We lose urgency. Keep the organization stoked, active and committed.
5. Create a culture of hope. This will help everyone get through the tough work of scaling up.
6. Move beyond the “Yeah, but” people. They need to develop a more adaptive way of thinking. They are stuck in a rigid perspective and can’t see past their reservations. So when you hear “Yeah but”, ask “So how can…?”

Some Lessons on Scaling That Were Shared

Michael Smith of the Social Innovation Fund shared some lessons he’s learned over the years about scaling up.

• One in eight American NFPs (Not for Profits) spend no money on evaluation, and more than 50% have no theory of change. Their typical success measures are either simply a story about a person who was a success for one of their programs (was that person the only one?) or a statistic about the number of people served (yes, but did anything actually change for them?). Evaluate results! A template for how to do evaluations (a step-by-step guide) is available for free.
• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.
• The three ingredients for scaling are: 1) collaboration, 2) a fierce sense of urgency, and 3) plans for sustainability.
• A really hard, demanding mission. A mission that is hard to figure out how to do is better than an easy mission you already know how to do. Aim high, think big!
• You must know what the system is that you are working within. What are all the parts? How do they relate to each other? You must bring all parts into alignment with your desired end result. A great book to help you define systems is The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. This is another one I have and it is well worth reading for several reasons.

Collective Impact

Lalitha Vaidyanathan of FSG spoke about getting results at scale. She defined collective impact as having the commitment of actors from different system subsectors holding a common agenda to solve a problem at scale. To build collective impact, you must first know within what system(s) you are working. If you were to work with others across this system, who would be involved and what work would you be doing together?

Here are the elements for effective collective impact:

• Five conditions for collective impact
  • A common agenda
  • Shared measurements (for learning and accountability)
  • Mutually reinforcing activities (no duplicate effort)
  • Continuous communication
  • Backbone support. The backbone is the people who are dedicated to making the group work effectively.
• The mindset and disposition for collective impact
  • Shift from technical solutions to adaptive solutions.
  • Shift from focus on evidence to focus on evidence and relationships
  • Shift from looking for the silver bullet to using silver buckshot
  • Shift from taking credit to sharing credit. Ask “Who can we blame the good results on?”
  • Be willing to take risks. Nothing happens by staying safe.
• Structure everything for collective impact
  • The old way of structuring has predetermined solutions to implement.
  • The new way of structuring has predetermined rules of interaction from which the solution will emerge.
  • Be intentional about impact and uncertain about solution

Conclusion

This two-day conference really was all about working with others in a spirit of open-handed generosity to get a common mission accomplished. The key concept woven through everything was creativity. I really liked something that was said at the end of the day:

Imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions!

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And that raises an interesting question: Which is more important – growing your ministry or growing your impact? The first is internally focused while the second is externally focused. If your goal is to grow a large ministry because you want to lead a large ministry, I’d suggest you take a hard look at your motivation.

• If you could achieve much greater mission impact but with no growth and even less visibility than you have today, would you do it?
• Is leadership driving you or is your mission driving you?

Here’s what I learned on Day One.

Achieving Transformative Scale

Jeff Bradach of The Bridgespan Group gave us nine pathways to scaling up for impact.

1. Distribute through existing platforms. You don’t have to build everything yourself. Many other organizations have developed assets you can use to get your messages and programs out in public. Think about cooperation and collaboration. Or at least think about using them as a supplier.
2. Recruit and train other organizations. This goes beyond simply using someone else’s platform. Here you actually give them a packaged program that they can then run (and even adapt) themselves.
3. Unbundle and scale for impact. Perhaps it is too challenging to think about scaling up everything you do. Why not take a complex program and break it down into pieces that are easier to scale? Scaling a small thing is better than not scaling at all.
4. Leverage technology. Research shows that for profit companies spend double the amount on technology than what nonprofits do. Social media, apps and other technologies can greatly broaden your audience.
5. Strengthen the field. Find ways to lift the performance of all the players in your field. What can you do that would enable others who are working on the same mission (or closely related aspects of it) to do better? For example, could you develop shared measurements of mission performance? That way, everyone can try their own methods, but have a basis for comparing results and seeing what works best.
6. Examine the ‘system’ you are all working within. Could you change a critical part of it so that everyone wins? Jeff said that bad systems trump good programs every time! Change the system and maybe your programs will work better.
7. Influence policy change and you’ll change the playing field.
8. Consider for profit models. If you can, minimize your reliance on donations and grants. A good example is the micro-credit sector that has become a viable, standalone business.
9. Change the attitudes, behaviours and norms that work against mission success. Are there negative communal habits that should be changed? Smoking and drunk driving are two examples where bad habits became socially unacceptable.

Jeff reminded us of a few important strategies not to forget while scaling up:

• Keep replicating what’s working. Don’t just do new things.
• Cost matters. Innovate to drive costs down (but not at the cost of effectiveness)
• Money matters. You need large capital for new capabilities, so rethink your funding model and see where you could generate additional revenue
• Constituent engagement matters. Sometimes we rely on experts instead of grassroots wisdom. Instead of either/or, think both/and

 Building networks and movements for social impact

Heather McLeod Grant of Open Impact said that the best nonprofits work outside of themselves, engaging business, government and other nonprofits with their cause. Here’s her definition of scaling:

Scaling is a leader building an organization that can build a network to grow a movement.

NFPs (Not For Profits) often stifle movements by saying “Here’s all that could go wrong.” If we don’t support movements of creativity, we will be sidelined as irrelevant organizations.

Design Thinking and Rapid Innovation

David Viotti, CEO of Smallify, talked about how to attack a really big goal. To smallify something is to get to the root cause of a challenge and then take quick action. It is to break something down to a small piece that can be worked on.

To smallify is to make small bets with relatively low risk and an affordable loss if it doesn’t work out. The attitude needs to be, “What can we do this Monday?” Do something, anything, NOW!!

Viotti gave five tools for rapid innovation:

1. Experiment more and fear less. Don’t wait for the perfect idea, just start testing and don’t be afraid it might go wrong. You’ll learn something and move forward.
2. Empathize and show up. Approach the challenge from other perspectives. Talk to people and discover what they think about. Be an actor – do something – and not just an observer.
3. Generate and say “Yes”. Be creative and be open to trying new things out. Think of options. “How could we…” is a great question.
4. When you are up against constraints, take them as gifts. They force you to be more creative, and that’s always good.
5. Your mindset is a choice. Do you believe that intelligence is fixed? If you do, then you will give up more easily and achieve less. If you believe that intelligence grows, then you will embrace challenge and achieve more. Choose to believe that intelligence grows. Every time you try something, you learn something, and then you are closer to achieving your goal.

Viotti taught us “the innovator’s bow.” Say “I am [name] and I have failed.” Then take a bow. Well done! You did something even if it didn’t work. That’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.

He also warned us that people who say, “Let me play the Devil’s advocate” are really saying, “Let me kill your idea!” Turn the “Yes but” answers to “Yes and”. Ask “So how can we do it?”

Scaling up Excellence

Bob Sutton of Stanford University said that when you have a pocket of excellence, the challenge is how to spread excellence from the few to the many without “screwing it up.”

Scaling isn’t just about the numbers, numerical growth and so forth. It really is about spreading a mindset – getting people to get on board with a new way of getting real world impact. Organizations that spread excellence have people who feel they own the organization, and the organization owns them. They share a mutual accountability for each person living up to the ideal and getting the job done well.

Scaling isn’t about getting more resources to do more. It’s about doing more with less. You start by cutting out all the ineffective things – those things you do only because everyone else does them.

Scaling is about getting others to help you accomplish your mission. That means that you will have to address the issue of whether you will enforce a cookie-cutter approach or allow for local variation on a theme. Allowing variation may encourage better employee engagement or it might lead to delusions of uniqueness. Some people want to change a program just so that they have exercised some control over it. Variation because of real variations in the local areas are quite okay, but don’t let people reinvent what doesn’t need to be reinvented.

How to Spread Excellence

• Start by firing up contagious emotions first. Trying to enlist people by making a rational case for their work just doesn’t work. Get their emotions in high gear over your cause!
• Then guide people to do the desired tangible behaviours. Get them active, doing what needs to be done right away. Research shows that strong beliefs are created and maintained based on what we do, not what we are told or what we say. Action builds commitment to the mission. Leaders need to live the mindset they want staff and volunteers to have, not just talk about it. Excessive talk and thinking keeps us from doing what we know and believe we should do.
• As organizations get larger, you need more structure and process. Many people think this means having a bureaucracy, but the purpose of hierarchy is to defeat bureaucracy and organize people to work together effectively.
• Keep teams small. Once a team gets to about six people, it starts to have problems. If it has more than ten members, the system gets clogged.
• Cascade excellence by putting people with the right mindset in positions to influence those who don’t.
• Start with a small team of diverse people, so when they go back to their own diverse groups, ideas will spread faster.
• When it comes to attitudes and performance, bad is stronger than good. Bob says “one jerk cuts performance by 40%,” so get rid of the bad fast!
• When you can say “We don’t have time to do it the way we should,” you are doing great scaling. The point isn’t to wait for perfect conditions and processes, but to do something now and make progress. However, balance this by remembering that sometimes the best advice is just to stand there and do nothing but think about it. You’ll have to decide when stopping to reflect is the right thing to do.
• There will be times when scaling will not be enjoyable. The staff may start to lose their happiness about working on the mission. Disney knows that its guests are least happy when they are actually in the park. Anticipating and remembering the park experience are when they are happiest. That’s why Disney makes sure you know where the best places are to take pictures and why they provide photo ops with their characters. When your staff is unhappy, talk up both the past and the future. We are going from somewhere to somewhere. Let’s remember the progress already made and anticipate achieving the vision.
• Scaling up is a manageable mess. It isn’t neat and tidy. So clean up the best you can and keep muddling forward!

I highly recommend Bob’s book: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling For Less.

That’s it for the first day.

God bless!

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Nine Problems with Collaboration

I believe that collaboration is very helpful both for achieving maximum mission success and for Christian witness, but if you collaborate with others, then here are the issues you will have to deal with in order to do it successfully:

1. Collaboration weakens brand and identity.
2. Collaboration takes a lot of time.
3. A single voice is not as effective as a thousand voices.
4. We’re after the same money.
5. Mantra is “Focus, focus, focus!” but collaboration is “Abandon focus and join us.”
6. Collaboration blunts nuances.
7. If knowledge is your capital, collaboration weakens your uniqueness.
8. Collaboration is a top down process.
9. Collaboration forces you to middle ground which is not usually the best position.

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I remember that as the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony orchestra¹ took their seats in the pit, my wife expressed surprise at how small it was (about 30 people I think, a lot fewer than the number in the YouTube performance I linked to above). She imagined that unmic’d orchestras must have a lot more people to get the rich sound that was on the record. And then, only a few bars into the overture, she whispered in amazement “That sounds just like the record!!!”  Yes, a small group of people produced a very large sound. In fact, they sounded just like a ‘real’ orchestra!

Size and Impact

It’s amazing what a small group can do that is out of all proportion to its size. Think about the dozen apostles. About Paul and his missionary team. A small group can change the world! One of my staff members said that at CCCC “we are a small team doing big things.” I love that thought!

The dream of many small ministries, while often not stated, is to become a big ministry. At CCCC, we have close to 10% of all Christian ministries as members, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be 100%! Thinking like this, though, focuses your attention on how small you are now. And then you run the risk of wondering if you are really accomplishing anything as a small ministry. This angst could become an impediment to your current success. I’d like to say a few encouraging words to the smaller ministries of Canada (next post I’ll say something to the larger ministries). What I’m going to say could apply to larger ministries too, but they have to work a lot harder than smaller ministries to get these advantages.

The fact is that Christian ministries in Canada are very small. Based on the 22,000 T3010’s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC (and assuming they are correctly filled out):

• 80% have less than $300,000 in total revenue, and about half have less than $100,000.
• 80% have four or fewer employees, and about half have exactly one staff member.
  • 105 report no employees at all (just volunteers).
  • 16% say they have two employees.
  • 93.5% have nine or fewer paid staff.

Encouragement for Small Ministries

Given our small size, here are some things to remember:

• God delights in working through the unlikely, which means he likes to work with the small group that the world might not pay attention to. In Deut. 7:7-8 Moses says to Israel, “The LORD did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you….” God did not take the larger nations of Egypt, Assyria or Babylon as his people; he took a people and made them his people, not because of their might, their size, or their importance in the world, but just because he loved them. You don’t have to be big for God to work through you. Work at your ministry with all you’ve got, knowing that God works through underdogs like a young shepherd boy, a group of country-bumpkin Galileans (at least according to the priests of Jerusalem), and a timid young pastor named Timothy.
• God likes to work in ways that make it clear it is him who is the source of success, not humans. The best example of this is in Judges 7, where the LORD says to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands, for Israel would become boastful, saying, ‘My own power has delivered me.'” The group of 22,000 men gets whittled down to 300, an appropriately small number to prove that they are fighting under the power of God and not under their own strength. Although a small ministry, and maybe because you are a small ministry, God may use you to demonstrate his activity in our world. When the job is so big that you can’t do it, then you know that your accomplishments are God’s. So work hard, knowing that God is working beside you and around you in ways you may not even know, but be assured he will accomplish his purposes for calling you into ministry.
• Being a small ministry, you are much more likely to think carefully about which programs and services to continue offering. You can’t afford to carry anything forward just because it’s part of your routine. You can’t throw money or people at your opportunities, since you don’t have the capacity to do that, so you must choose carefully how to use the precious resources you have, pruning old programs to make way for new programs. By always focusing on the best use of your limited resources, you will likely have a very effective and efficient ministry.
• You are more likely to find creative ways to stretch your influence, by partnering with others or drawing on volunteers, because you have to. My first boss, Richard Adair, believed the secret to success as a small entrepreneur is to ride the coat-tails of a larger company. They do the heavy work of acquiring the customer, for example, and you simply provide the add-on to the sale. As a small ministry, your calling might be to serve specialized, small niches that the larger organizations have missed while focusing on the more general and broader needs. You might be a specialty add-on to the services provided by larger organizations.
• Small ministries don’t have the resources to develop a bureaucracy, so it is easier to have a creative entrepreneurial environment. Small ministries can be the ‘skunk works’ of Christian ministry, the testing ground for new ideas. Encourage innovation.
• As a small organization, you will probably be able to respond quicker to issues or changes in the environment. You can be fast on your feet and quick to exploit new opportunities. Create an organizational culture that supports change.
• In a flat organization, you can communicate more easily with your staff than a large organization can, and you can also involve them in decisions and planning that they might not experience in a large ministry. Staff will likely have greater variety in their work because the jobs have to be broader in scope to make up for the limited number of employees. In addition, you will likely empower your team more and delegate more to them (out of necessity), thus giving you an advantage in hiring people because they will be able to use more of their talents and have more influence over their work than elsewhere.
• The environment of a small ministry is very motivational in and of itself for your team members because all of them are very close to the ministry’s results and they can see the fruit of their labour for themselves. There is nothing like appreciative feedback to spur you on. It is astonishing how many compliments the CCCC gets, and I make sure that all the staff share the compliments with the team so that we can all be encouraged by them.

As with any ministry, don’t measure your success in terms of growth or size, but in terms of how well you are fulfilling your mission. God created your ministry to assist with his mission, so progressively fulfilling the specific part of his mission that you are called to serve is the way you should assess your success.

Finally, when you feel you are small and struggling along by yourself, remember God’s promise that is so important that it appears not once, but four times in scripture (Deut 31:6, 31:8, Josh 1:5 and Heb 13:5): “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

May God richly bless your ministry!

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