Accelerating the Dynamic Church : Leadership

Change or Die?

jhook — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:35:00 GMT

We have seen over and over that the biggest hurdle to embracing the real value of better information systems in churches is change management, or should I say the lack thereof? Amongst us church management software vendors, it is even a point of occasional conversation at industry conferences. “If only churches would learn better how to change.” Improvements require change! It is said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

I titled this blog entry Change or Die? But adopting new systems and processes in churches is not really a physical life or death situation, is it? So why change? There is not even a profit motive involved to motivate change. What’s the urgency? Why the importance? A better question might be, “If we know we need to change, can we?”

In a recent book called Change or Die, the author, Alan Deutschman, points out that research shows even when change is a life or death matter, change only occurs about 10% of the time! So that is the human state, for every 10 times we need to change, we only accomplish it 1 time! How do we know this? What do we base this on?

In Mr. Deutschman’s book, he refers to the following statistics: about 600,000 individuals have heart bypass surgery every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties – costing our society billions of dollars. These procedures temporarily relieve chest pains, but around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. Why? According to Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at John Hopkins University, “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyles.” So even in a life or death matter, people refuse to do the work to change.

The church is an institution that asks people to change their lifestyles as well. Not for physical reasons, but for spiritual, emotional and relational reasons. We know this can be hard to accomplish, yet all things are possible through Christ. But, as an industry, I am not sure we understand change well enough to do so because we in fact have difficulty changing ourselves.

Dynamic churches take change seriously. They understand that it will not happen by itself. They understand that it takes leadership, planning and continuous improvements. They know that momentum can be sustained by creating a sense of urgency, by focusing on short-term wins and then communicating and celebrating the positive effects of change. They also know that there are bumps along the way that must be managed through instead of allowing the small setbacks to bog down the ultimate goal. Effective change requires everyone looking forward, focusing on the future, and not allowing people to relish the past and desire to, as one of our customer puts it, “go back to Egypt to make bricks.” Remember, that’s what some of the Israelites wanted to do once they were out in the wilderness heading to the Promise Land. For some of them, the change was simply too hard!

Change management cannot be delegated like some administrative process! To make ministry work, the leadership and ministers must provide firm direction to the staff, not delegate it to their administrative assistants like many other things they tend to do.

Change or Die? Progress or Die? Perhaps it is our flesh and sinful nature that avoids change. But if we don’t learn to change, if we do not learn to embrace better ways of caring for and growing people, the church will become irrelevant and perhaps even die itself. Even more critical, people will die – spiritually.

Grace to you,

jhook

One church or a loose confederation of ministries?

Jeff Hook — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 23:43:00 GMT

We get to know a lot of churches in conjunction with our implementation of Fellowship One; currently we have sold over 500 churches. Plus we have talked to a whole lot more through the selling process. Clearly there are two different kinds of churches; those that act as “one church” and those that simply act as a loose confederation of ministries.

So how are they different? The “one church” church is concerned about the overall brand of the church and desires to have the overall brand’s “fingerprint” on everything that is done concerning that church. This should not necessarily be stifling to the ministries. It should provide some level of support concerning the overall level of excellence that is required when that brand is associated with an event, a mailing or a website? You might look at the different ministries as different “product lines” which are being used to attract and serve a different type of audience based on age, demographics, etc.

The “one church” also is more concerned about the coordination of the information flow as well as the information contained within the church database. They believe that the chances are if a parent’s phone number changed in the children’s ministry, perhaps that family would be better served if the general church database also reflected that change. The “one church” also helps people move from one ministry to the next as their life stage or circumstances change.

The “one church” is concerned about the overall workload of a volunteer across ministries, not allowing a person to get overworked and overcommitted. The “one church” does not allow a “problem” volunteer to move from one ministry to the next passing on a person who could be creating issues that are detrimental to the overall church, having the attitude, “as long as it is not in my ministry!”

We have also run into churches of the other sort, where the staffs do not have a process of on-going information sharing that allows them to all get on the same page as far as how ministry will be accomplished, what the common goals might be, or even how ministry is to be measured. Each ministry is an island; perhaps each ministry has a different formal database. If not, then at least a different informal database. You know the one that the staff and volunteers really rely on. And instead of taking the energy to fix the real issue of people allowing bad information to get into and stay in the system, they just create a database or spreadsheet that they can control. In other words, they go around the problem.

To me, the church that is a confederation of ministries is shortchanging the congregation. Within it, certain ministries will thrive; but others will flouder or even fail. Not because the congregation does not see a need or want to participate, but because the island of people will not feel connected to the church. This uneven experience that people feel will break the congregation into parts, and parts are not as strong as a whole. However, it takes strong leadership to get all ministries on the same page. Leadership that is willing to stand up to the different forces that want to do “their own thing.”

Grace to you as you go out to be one,

Jhook

It takes LEADERSHIP to change . . .

Jeff Hook — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:56:00 GMT

In my last couple of blogs, I have been writing about how to make change happen. One of the essential elements of organizational change is leadership. I am convinced that in order for a church to thrive it requires leadership. But just like there are different types of intelligence, leadership takes on different forms as well. Churches that want to maximize their efforts need all forms of leadership.

For example, within a thriving church there are probably one or more people who are spiritual leaders. These are people who are mature Christians who are prayerful and can provide a discerning spirit to issues that might arise within the congregation or staff. Spiritual leaders help move people towards where God wants them to be. Then there are the ministry leaders. These are people with a true calling to help others and can establish programs that reach out into the community to reach souls for Christ.

Although both of these groups of individuals play important roles during the implementation of a new church management system, the thing that is so often missing is someone who can drive process change and understands enough about how technology can be leveraged to make the right decisions to encourage change within the organization. These administrative leaders are good decision-makers when it comes to organizational issues, help prioritize conflicting ministry objectives, can design business processes and establish metrics to help track progress.

We have found that the best Fellowship One implementations are by churches that are firing on all these leadership cylinders. When a church attempts to change and grow by better caring for its congregation, the evil one will attempt to throw the church into chaos because he of course wants that effort to fail and for the church to continue like it always has. As Paul says, we are in a spiritual battle. Spiritual leadership will help guide the church through the onslaught of trials brought on to discourage church improvement. Ministry leadership is required to create the vision for how the new system can help address the needs of the congregation. Better information about the congregation can help deepen the intimacy of the relationships within the church and can help target more directed communication. And finally, administrative leadership can establish the framework for the change to occur and helps guide the project through the rough waters of changing processes and technologies.

Grace to you as you go out to lead,

Jhook