Value versus waste. They may sound easy to distinguish, but if you have ever planned a garage sale with your spouse, then you understand that the distinction may not be simple.

Although some forms of waste are easy to recognize in organizations—people sitting around doing nothing, products ruined by damage or spoilage, scrapped parts, and so on—other forms of waste are not so obvious. They are silent killers of value that simply consume resources, absorb our mental energies, and block the flow of real value. These types of waste, which we'll discuss below, are found not only in poorly managed, inefficient organizations; they have infected, to a greater or lesser extent, the activities of every organization.

But American industry is discovering that a fundamental key to competitiveness is distinguishing real customer value from waste. In fact, researchers have even coined a term—"lean"—to refer to the idea of reducing waste and making value flow. And what's true for successful businesses is true for successful churches as well: "lean" churches are more effective at achieving their ministry goals than are other churches. How so? Let's look first at what "lean" is all about and then demonstrate its potential for maximum ministry.

The Story of Lean
In their highly-acclaimed book, The Machine that Changed the World, MIT researchers Womack, Jones, and Roos demonstrated that the key to the success of the Japanese automobile industry was not cheap labor or robot technology; rather, it was lean—the term the MIT team used to describe a manufacturing system that rigorously identified and eliminated waste. When the researchers looked at automotive factories around the world, they found similar problems in most of them: large inventories of parts that needed to be stored and maintained, long delays in the manufacturing process because parts were worked in large batches, a "hidden factory" of workers fixing defective parts, and machines that broke down frequently or required a long time to be changed over from one part to the next. At the best factories, though, they found small inventories and small production batch quantities, minimal delays, first-time quality, reliable machines, and quick changeovers. Under the leadership of the Toyota Production System, the Japanese had surpassed the rest of the world because they focused on providing customer value and eliminating all "muda" (waste)—everything that consumed time and resources, but did not add value to the customer.

Building on his foundational research in the automotive industry, Womack extended the lean concept to the broader functions of any organization. In Lean Thinking, Womack and his colleagues defined five basic steps that characterize the lean approach to improvement. These are as follows:

• Specify Value: The fundamental starting point for lean thinking is to define what's valuable from the customer's viewpoint. Ignore assets, technologies, and traditions, and rethink the entire process along customer-driven dimensions. Moreover, define value in terms of the entire customer need, not just in terms of the value that one organization provides.



• Identify the Value Stream and Eliminate Waste: How do you provide value to the customer? Flowchart your "value streams"—those process steps required to provide a specific product or service to a customer. Eliminate or reduce, as much as possible, those activities or assets that do not directly contribute to customer value.



• Make Value Flow: Make the value-generating steps flow. While traditional mass-production focuses on perceived efficiencies of large-batch volumes of work filling oversized plants and equipment, lean focuses on providing value as simply and quickly as possible, in quantities as small as one.



• Respond to "Customer Pull": Let the customer pull value from you when and where the customer needs it, instead of pushing products and services, often unwanted, onto the customer.



• Seek Perfection: Finally, pursue continuous improvement. Organizations that are in direct conversation with customers always find ways to specify value more accurately, and they often learn ways to enhance flow and pull.

A Lean Church?
It would probably be easy to convince you that applying lean to the airline industry or to a government bureaucracy would bear significant fruit. What may be harder to see is how lean can improve your church. But think about it. There are traditional, "mass production" churches and "lean" churches. A traditional church owns large and expensive assets; a lean church utilizes existing leased or borrowed facilities, as required, and may also have a network of family homes or apartments for meetings. A traditional church is event-driven, with weekly services or scheduled lectureships, located primarily in the large, central facility; a lean church centers on routine interactions at varied locations. A traditional church has centralized leadership and administration; in a lean church, leadership is decentralized to equip and counsel more people, better and faster. Most strikingly, in a traditional church, results are measured primarily by activity level and budget performance; in a lean church, results are measured by customer needs being met.

The question is not "can lean apply to the church to improve ministry?" The question is simply "how can churches adopt this system to be better stewards and disciplers?" Here's how to do it using Womack's five-step framework:

Step 1: Specify Value
To specify value from a Christian perspective, start by identifying the core needs of people and the processes that meet those needs. Be prepared, though, to question assumptions about what matters and how it's delivered.

We might begin by considering three deep human needs: the need for God Himself, the need for purpose, and the need for community. Clearly, it is "valuable" to meet those needs, so a church could "specify" meeting these needs in its core values.

Next, we would inquire into the processes by which our church could meet these needs (that is, the processes by which it could produce value). For example, many churches would say that they have processes that address core value issues such as "teach the Word of God as revealed in Scripture," "train up the children in the way they should go," or "care for widows." However, a closer examination of the effectiveness of these processes, from the customer viewpoint, might reveal some uncomfortable surprises. Ask the average church member to summarize the storyline of the Bible, drawing a timeline of the major characters and events. Ask the children "who is God?" Or pick two or three widows in the congregation and ask them how many times they have been visited by non-relatives from your church. The answers to these questions may demonstrate that a high level of activity and attendance is not synonymous with process effectiveness.

Note that in all of this, the church is specifying value as "value to God," not to man. Large, expensive, ornate facilities are not intrinsic to any of the basic spiritual purposes or processes, although they seem to have great value to man. Such things tend to be enormous consumers of budget and mindshare in the church, but may contribute relatively little to what God actually values.

Also note that value does not include attracting numbers for numbers' sake (for example, drawing customers by providing entertaining communication that is impotent to change hearts). In his book, Selling Jesus, Douglas Webster reminds us of Jesus' own approach when large, spiritually-shallow crowds began to form. Jesus put on no show, but spoke with startling frankness about the demands of genuine faith (e.g., John 6).

Step 2: Identify the Value Stream and Eliminate Waste
After specifying value (from God's perspective) and the processes for pursuing value, list what is involved and essential in performing these basic processes without waste. One way to begin here is to identify the activities and assets that require most of your time, budget, and other resources, and then to examine that list for the items that are not directly related to creating value for your "customer" (e.g., church members, the community at large, etc.). An honest appraisal may unearth a lot of things that are part of the fabric of church tradition, but, in the interest of good stewardship, need to be re-focused or phased-out altogether. Some examples might be:

• Too many committee meetings, too much committee control/oversight, or excessive required approvals



• Things that are done because "we've always done that"



• Evangelistic events attended almost exclusively by believers



• Sermons that don't address the congregation's needs (i.e., sermons that don't connect with people or exhort, encourage, and educate them in their Christian walk)



• Members referring needy individuals to one of the staff members, because the members don't know how to help or what the church process involves



• Anything done strictly to maintain, operate, and pay for a large facility and property

Step 3: Make Value Flow
We inhibit the flow of value in our churches when we try to "batch-process" everything once a week "at church." Significant needs fall through the cracks. Instead, consider supplementing your efforts to meet needs by tapping into the free services of others in the community, for instance local government and non-profit agencies. In doing so, you can actually help a family struggling with drug and alcohol abuse, a family being crushed by debt, and women and children suffering from mistreatment at home.

The church has unique expertise in many areas, but its limited resources mandate that it partner with those who have the expertise or funds that it does not. As a result, the church will minimize the poor use of its resources and the delays in creating "value" for its members. Assistance to needy families must flow across organizational boundaries.

One example of a not-for-profit agency's effective use of this strategy is the People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) organization in Los Angeles. In 2002, PATH opened the PATHmall, a drop-in facility for homeless people in which nineteen different social service agencies are co-located and collaborate closely. The time in responding to people's needs (the value stream) was reduced from weeks of wandering from agency to agency to a matter of days or hours. Your church could do something similar by making available a network of help resources to people. This is lean. This is 'efficient' from the customer standpoint. And overall, this is a more effective way to meet needs.

Step 4: Respond to Customer Pull
To understand the pull idea, imagine you are a "customer" of your church—a member family having serious problems with a teenage daughter, a non-member wanting to learn more about the Bible, a missionary seeking support, an elderly church member needing help with utility bills. How would that person seek help from your church? Is it obvious where they should go or with whom they should speak? If your church is like most, chances are that it's less obvious than it should be.

To respond in a timely way to the sundry customer "pulls" that exist, why not establish a "Help Line" for those in your church or community to use when requiring assistance? Create a team of church members to man the help line—people who are trained and gifted in responding to these kinds of customer pulls—and then regularly publicize the help line, both internally and externally.

One organization that acts as a subcontractor of this help line approach is WINN Ministries in Denver, Colorado. WINN assists churches in responding to the material needs of its congregation and community by collecting and distributing according to people's requests for food, clothing, furniture, and the like. In this way churches are able to respond to customer pulls when they are expressed, and they themselves don't have to store the wide variety of goods required to meet those needs.

Step 5: Pursue Perfection
Once you have established value-generating processes that flow, there needs to be an ongoing mechanism to monitor the value streams and to continuously improve them. Consider designating a team (or at least a person) to strive for small, ongoing upgrades in service. The team should establish performance measurements for each process, assess actual results, and recommend adjustments to the system. Since the customer value created by churches can be difficult to quantify, the team could develop surveys for your church members and surrounding community to track to what extent you are providing real value. Be prepared to believe the results of the surveys and be responsive to issues that are identified.

A Call to Stewardship
Many church leaders have at their disposal a treasure trove of physical assets, budget, staff and member expertise, volunteer time, and Christian goodwill in the hearts of their membership. The responsibilities of stewardship demand a serious fresh look at how these resources are being used for the kingdom. Are time, talents, and money being used to operate a traditional mass-production church with high levels of perceived activity, or are they focused at the everyday hearts and lives of the people we are trying to reach? Lean principles can help any organization, including a church, eliminate hidden waste that inhibits mission achievement, generating instead "an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24) of value that maximizes the impact of the ministry.

For more information about lean management, visit the Lean Enterprise Institute at www.lean.org.

Dr. Don Pope worked for twenty years as an industrial engineer in the aircraft industry and represented his company in the MIT Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI). He is currently Assistant Professor of Management at Abilene Christian University. You can reach him at don.pope@coba.acu.edu

Dr. Andrew Parris earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 1996 as part of the Lean Aerospace Initiative. In 1997, he earned a Certificate of Christian Education at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He currently works for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, planning, coordinating, and implementing Lean and Six Sigma improvements on the Atlas (Rocket) Program. You can reach him at andrew.n.parris@lmco.com

Dr. Kent Smith worked in ministry for eleven years before joining Abilene Christian University in 1991. His doctoral work at the University of Dubuque focused on Spiritual Nurture Systems. For the past thirteen years he has taught and coached church planters as ACU's Missions Coordinator for North America. You can reach him at smithpk@acu.edu

A quick illustration will clarify the problem of traditional mass-production and the promise of "lean." Womack points to the airline industry. The customer's need is simply to travel from one mid-sized U.S. city to another in a manner that is safe, fast, low-cost, and hassle-free. However, the dominant air travel system (and one that is losing money) is organized around the principle of moving large batches of people through oversized airport hubs using large aircraft, so that the airlines can utilize their expensive assets. This seldom gets individuals from point A to point B in a manner that is quick, simple, and hassle-free. The flow is bottlenecked at multiple points in the process as people wait for tickets and luggage check-in, and as flights get routed through congested hubs where the aircraft wait for takeoff and landing.

Lean systems tolerate none of this. They facilitate smoother passage more cost-effectively, and all of us are the beneficiaries. For example, Southwest Airlines and a few other recent start-ups use a leaner approach. They fly smaller aircraft on more frequent schedules directly between more points of origination and destination, using smaller, less expensive airport facilities that are closer to the heart of the cities served. And the results are phenomenal. Just ask their customers and owners.

Mission Arlington (www.missionarlington.org): Begun in 1986 by veteran missionary Tillie Burgin, their goal from the outset has been to make spiritual life and family available to the vast numbers of apartment dwellers who do not easily fit more conventional churches. Now, on any given Sunday, 3,700 people meet in some 250 small gatherings, mostly in apartments in and around Arlington, Texas. For the people of Mission Arlington, these are gatherings of their church, their spiritual family.

Over the years the church has developed an impressive array of services for people in its reach, from medical and dental care and counseling, to help with food, clothing and furniture. A simple request can lead to wide range of help becoming available. These services are seen supporting the core task of welcoming people into a true spiritual family. Mission Arlington is widely studied, and similar efforts are underway in other American cities.

Duncan Compassion Center: When the Northside and Westside churches in Duncan, Oklahoma merged to form the Chisholm Trail Church, the former Northside facility was left vacant and was seemingly useless. However, God launched a new ministry by using this old facility and some Christian physicians who had been involved in medical missions in Nicaragua. Dr. Kent King, who had been a leader in the Nicaragua mission, observed: "when we came back (to Oklahoma), we realized how great the need was here. We saw a lot of poverty in Nicaragua, but looking around Duncan, we saw a lot of poverty here as well. I am still so amazed at how God opened this door for us."

The former worship facility was renovated, and the physicians opened a multifaceted "Compassion," providing healthcare exams, a pharmacy, a food pantry, a clothes closet, optometry, and legal counsel to the needy. All services, including medications, are provided free to local people who lack adequate private or government health insurance. Through this Center, the gospel message is being lived-out daily and it's reaching people who would have never heard it otherwise. (Summarized from "Missions from the Third World Come Home" by Joy McMillan, The Christian Chronicle, January, 2004).

Awakening Chapels (www.cmaresources.org): In the past five years, Awakening Chapels has planted more than 300 "organic" churches—house churches—with the number now doubling each year. These churches focus on simple, reproducible structures and target unreached "pockets of people," mostly in America's southwest. Founding leader Neil Cole explains:

"Most churches today are trying to figure out how to get lost people to come to church. The key to starting churches that reproduce spontaneously is to bring the church to the lost people. We're not interested in starting a regional church, but rather in churching a whole region.

"The house church, more than any other model, is best prepared to do just that because it is informal, relational, and mobile, not financially-encumbered with overhead costs, and it's easily planted in a variety of settings. It also reproduces faster and spreads farther because it can be a decentralized approach." (House2House Magazine, 2002 Special Edition, p. 24)

Simple and reproducible also defines Cole's approach to training new believers and leaders. In his book, Raising Leaders for the Harvest, he outlines principles that are now being taught across the country in an intensive training event, The Organic Church Planter's Greenhouse.

Copyright © 2004 Regent Business Review, Issue 10. Used by permission.