1339 words … about 5 minutes … a little longer but work the extra time
Beginning back in November, I have been struck by the notion that we may be asking the wrong question. Everyone seems to be asking, “What is the new normal and when will we arrive there? ” But, perhaps we are focusing on the wrong things as we reengage in this new time and place in our culture.
This hunch led me to write a couple of posts that you can read here and here. And it also led me to host a 90-minute conversation earlier this week that I called “When Normal Isn’t Normal Anymore.” During that session, we heard from three church practitioners as they shared about their pandemic shifts and learnings related to groups, kids and students, and online. We also heard from one of the leading voices on church leadership today, Kadi Cole.
The conversations were rich and the tactical insights were strong and doable, but what struck me most were the postures that each leader had acquired in their pursuit of what’s next. In today’s post, I will focus on 5 “Rs” that frame this new posture and in the next post, I will share with you 5 trends that should be shaping your conversations about the now and future of your church.
Relearning
Ashley Anderson is the groups pastor at Church of the City, New York. Ashley shared about her trip to her first in-person meeting with a leader, six months into the pandemic. She got on the wrong subway on her way to the meeting and after three missed connections she accidentally ended up in Queens 30 minutes late. A little embarrassing yes, but the insight gained was powerful. She did not get lost because she was new to New York. She didn't get lost because she didn't know how to use the trains. She got lost because she had just forgotten how to do it. It was something that used to be muscle memory, something that used to be second nature but now, after 6 months of staying at home, required some refocused attention to once again master.
Enter relaunch of in-person groups. What was once muscle memory for many had to be relearned. And the role of the team was to guide people back to the experience. She noted that it has required significant training with group leaders as well as many folks had forgotten how to “be in a group” after so many months of being online only. And the pastoral care load for group leaders was immense.
So in what ministry area do you need to help your people relearn?
Radical inefficiency
Our second guest, Jon Torres is Director of Ministries at Timberlake Church in the Seattle area. Jon led kids and student ministries through the pandemic and shared a few ideas about what they did to engage these groups … many of the things that many of you did … video-driven content, online games, hangouts, etc. Jon also shared about their student ministry quest to “break Youversion!” Most of you know that the Youversion app allows you to invite friends to do one of their online studies as a group. For pandemic fun, the students decided they would attempt to invite so many people to join the same study that it would cause Youversion to shut down. Did it work? Well, yes it did cause some delays along the way but the real story was that it ended up engaging thousands of students locally and around the world in life-giving bible study.
But as the video fun and games began to wane in effectiveness, Jon and his team realized they had become too reliant on impersonal forms of invitations and communications, and ministry. These tools were incredibly efficient but were having increasingly decreasing effectiveness. As they gathered as a team to discern their next moves, God reminded them of the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22 where Jesus said, “Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” God was calling them to “go and find and invite.” Go and find people and invite them into what it looks like to be engaged in the church, especially with kids and with students. They replaced the efficiency of mass communications with the radically inefficient but absolutely effective posture of meeting and inviting individuals to be engaged in the body of Christ.
Where might you need to exercise a little radical inefficiency to be absolutely effective?
The next 3 Rs after this commercial break.
There are seasons in every organization where a team must lean in and solve a pressing problem or maximize an opportunity. Perhaps you feel a bit stuck in your quest for what’s next for you and your church. For all of us, the “stuckness” has been amplified over the last couple of years of ever-shifting realities. It’s not surprising. It’s normal. We are living in the messy middle.
If you are at this place, I would welcome the opportunity to help.
My process helps you uncover solutions for the season you’re in and execute these strategies with speed and effectiveness. I help you leverage change for positive impact.
One Day Assessment
The one-day assessment takes you and your team through a focused and results-oriented on-site session that drives to a diagnosis of what is and an exploration of what could be.
Comprehensive Consult
This multi-stage team-oriented process will lead you and your team to strategic outcomes and measurable results.
Areas of focus include multisite reimagined, organization change strategy, and leadership succession.
If you are interested in getting unstuck, email me here or select a time to talk that works for you here.
Relentless personal care
One of the “sit up straight and take notice moments” was when Jon stated that they had grown their volunteer base during the pandemic more rapidly than at any other season of their church. Don’t know about you, but this is the first time that I have heard growth in the same sentence as volunteer reengagement. What was their secret? Relentless personal care. Once again, adopting a relatively inefficient tool of manually capturing everything they could possibly know about each of their volunteers, they were able to exercise relentless personal care. Staff moved out of the role of filling slots and providing the traditional “we love you volunteers mass communications and recognition” to pastoring their volunteers.
What does your team know about their volunteers?
Rethink Church and Redefine Neighbors
David Grant, community pastor for 12Stone|Home shared some of the nuts and bolts of the microsite ministry that was born during Covid. As you would expect, if you know David and 12Stone, their model is very well thought out and incredibly strategic. But what struck me most about David’s explanation of their effective church with two expressions approach was the heart and passion that I think is really the secret sauce.
Their model is driven by the willingness to rethink church and redefine neighbors. People long to belong. They long to be known. And though they may not express it in these words, they long to be transformed. Hearing truth doesn’t change anybody, it’s only when it is put into practice.
And the small community setting of a 12Stone|Home group is the perfect space for each of these things to happen … with your neighbors. Though David noted that the 12Stone|Home group that he leads and meets in his apartment is primarily made up of people that he has met in the surrounding apartment communities, other 12Stone|Home neighborhoods look very different and meet in very different places. Neighbors are no longer just “next door.” They may be your colleagues from work, a group of people drawn together through life stage connections, or as is the case with one of the newest groups, your Crossfit community.
Where do you need to rethink and redefine?
Email me your innovation experiments and stories at greg.ligong@generis.com.