pat loughery

This is Part 3 in the Strategic Planning for Missional Churches series. You can find the whole series by viewing this tag.

In Gazelles‘ thinking, John D. Rockefeller identified four areas in which decisions must be made, and also three habits which allowed Standard Oil to thrive under his leadership.

The success of a company is the sum total of all decisions being made. A Vision is a dream with a plan.

There are four areas in which decisions must be made. They are:

• People: Studies show that 1 great employee is more productive than 3 good ones. Recruit, train, compensate to greatness. Upgrade employees, make the hard decisions to release those who do not fit the vision and culture you are pursuing. Decide to aggressively pursue great people.
• Strategy: These are the decisions that are made in constantly changing environment which allow the corporation to pursue its overarching purpose.
• Execution: These are the decisions about goals and priorities, drawing the team onto the same page, getting into a rhythm of communication.
• Cash: Cash, the result of a profitable past and present, fuels expansion and growth for the future. Make wise decisions about how to invest your resources in order to balance short-term and long-term needs.

Gazelles’ pithy abstraction of this is, “Right People, Doing the Right Things Right“.

Rockefeller’s carved a well-engrained set of habits into his own leadership team and his corporation.

Those three habits are:

• Priorities: Ruthlessly prioritize the work at hand. Don’t get caught in busywork; understand how you spend your time and resources.
• Metrics: Pick three numbers that you can track, daily – weekly – monthly – yearly. Be creative.
• Meeting Rhythm: Gazelles suggest rhythms of yearly – monthly – weekly – and daily meetings (dailys being stand-up, 5-7 min huddles, max). The idea is to quickly and crisply communicate what needs to be communicated up and down the organizational structure. They emphasized heavily two of Rockefeller’s daily routines: in the early days of the company, he walked to work with several of his top executives (who were close neighbors), and he ate lunch with his executive staff daily. He found out more about the company and their lives in those out-of-work times than in the regular times.

Applying the Three Decisions and Three Habits in Missional Churches
This is where application to our context gets a bit more difficult, perhaps.

If decision-making is a key activity of leadership, then decisions around people, strategy, execution and (resources) seem to be viable playing fields.

People decisions for us are questions about who to invest time and energy into; who to disciple or train more directly and who not to; who to woo and who to stay away from.

Strategy decisions – here’s where things get interesting for us. There are two layers to this puzzle, it seems to me. At the top layer, the missional church at its heart does its best to follow the mission of God in its world, and tries to form itself to meet the current cultural needs. We have to be wise in our flexibility, and we have to be wise in our listening to the leading of God’s voice. At a layer underneath that, we have an understanding of the more-or-less unchanging principles that we are implementing, and we can and should make longer-term strategic decisions based on those core values. For example, we’re scheduling our next relationship communication workshop that we offer in our community – 10 weeks of pretty intense relationship-building skills, suitable for marrieds, almost-divorceds, pre-marital hopefuls and just-plugging aways. We know that relationship and cultural engagement are core values for us, and this fits well with what we like to do – even though it’s a bit difficult to post flyers for something and not know what name to put on it, or what website to point people to. Offering marriage workshops, and continuing to serve our neighbors via partnerships with community service groups – these things are continuing for us as we’re navigating the rest of the major decisions we’re undertaking. They are strategies to fulfill our Kingdom pursuit, and our specific values.

Meeting Rhythm – How frequently does the church need to gather for corporate worship? Weekly? Monthly? House church collectives frequently find themselves gathering as single house churches weekly, and multiple churches together less frequently. Rhythm for us also includes celebrating the Christian calendar (not just Easter and Christmas, but at least Lent and Advent, and likely more of the major feast days). There’s a wonderful rhythm in the Christian calendar. Some churches also use the lectionary to help them with rhythm; we haven’t done that. We do, however, use the contemporary collects as corporate prayers, often as call-to-worship prayers (instead of an uptempo song to open a gathering). I would LOVE to mature to a point at which we as a body could practice praying the hours, corporately, daily. In our suburban environment, this is a long way from happening, but the rhythm of praying the daily hours is incredibly helpful to me individually, and must be that much better corporately.

Resources – Huh. OK, our church actively gathers tithes and offerings. We do it as an expression of our dependance upon God in the most difficult area of our lives to give up (our ATM cards). We also do it so that collectively we can fuel mission. We also know that our skills and expertise, and our people, all can be viewed as resources. One of my personal dreams is that we find a way to de-emphasize and simplify the Sunday corporate gathering such that it doesn’t require so much of our resources that it becomes paralyzing. As we grow and are able to make decisions about real estate, I pray that we find leasable space that can be redeemed from a broken environment; that primarily serves the community by acting as a Third Place and proximity space, and that secondarily can be used be the church for corporate worship. I’d rather start a youth hangout or coffeeshop than a corporate office. Of course, this takes resources: time, people, cash.

Enough rambling for tonight. Comments?