The key is progress, not perfection.
—Kennon Callahan
One congregation I visited recently was scared and scarred by events of the past. Although they had no explicit objectives, it was clear their main purpose was what I call “protecting their place on the face of the cliff.”
In mountain climbing, sometimes climbers find themselves on the face of a cliff where they can’t find a handhold or foothold ahead or behind. In that predicament many people freeze. They cling for dear life. They fear any move could mean the abyss below.
This church was frozen on the face of the cliff. They couldn’t find anything in their history that would save them. They couldn’t see anything hopeful ahead. They became preoccupied with maintenance, membership, and money.
To help a church like that, the one thing I do not do is shout instructions from the safety of the ledge above. I join them on the face of the cliff and gently coach them: “We’re going to start with the left hand, and we’re going to move it four inches up and one inch over, and we’re going to hold there. Now we’re going to try the left foot.” You coach a congregation in that predicament gently and wisely forward, one step at a time.
Most churches are not frozen on the cliff, but they do suffer from an uncertainty about what to do next. About half the churches I help are stable and growing churches that want to improve their mission and outreach. The other half are churches in some form of crisis—stable and declining, or dying. Usually some event has precipitated the call, and they want someone to share some wisdom and research, to help them gain a sense of direction.
What these churches have in common is that they sense the challenge of planning for both the short- and long-term. There are many things churches ought to do, many problems with which to deal, many needs in the world. How do we choose which to address? How do we plan for the future?
Finding do-ables
The art of organizational planning is to match the plays and the players. The wise coach never sends in plays the players cannot run. I try to help churches match their objectives and their team.
Consultants, pastors, and key leaders are tempted sometimes to ask congregations to achieve some imposed goal. A given church’s gifts, strengths, and competencies may be to deliver corporate, dynamic worship. But some leader may insist, “What we should be doing is starting new small groups.”
Small groups may be created eventually, but the art of helping a church move ahead is to build the key major objectives on the strengths a congregation presently has. The church that denies its strengths denies God’s gifts. The church that claims its strengths claims God’s gifts. I urge congregations to discover the strengths God has given them, so they can build on those. That, in turn, leads them to discover and nurture yet new strengths.
As leaders plan, I think it’s better to use the term objectives, rather than priorities. Priorities can be vague. Objectives are specific and measurable, concrete and achievable. We can know and celebrate when we have achieved them, and we can confess when we have not.
Every church has objectives. The key questions are: Do they know what their objectives are? And do these objectives help them do what God calls them to do?
Many churches I meet with don’t have explicit objectives—at least not at the beginning. But as I look closer, I discover they have implicit and informal objectives, usually the result of a variety of elements: congregational values, customs, habits, and traditions; the decisionmaking process; the communication system. Implicit objectives guide a church just as surely as explicit ones do.
But having explicit objectives doesn’t solve all of a church’s problems. One church I consulted had excellent leaders and an excellent pastor. The pastor’s strengths lay in developing and maintaining competent programs and activities. In every church he had served, he had built strong programs.
Yet this church longed for a pastor who would be a good shepherd, practice pastoral care, and train laypeople to visit. They also wanted more dynamic worship and preaching. The pastor kept saying, “What we should be emphasizing are our church’s programs and activities.” The congregation kept saying, “We do that well enough. What we want is a good shepherd and a good preacher.”
Churches get themselves into such predicaments in three primary ways.
First, the pastor and key leaders get caught up in the “should syndrome.” They decide the congregation should, must, ought to do this or that. They pursue objectives without considering whether they match the congregation’s strengths.
Second, pastors and key leaders are tempted to universalize programs: if an idea worked well in one church, they assume it will work in theirs. When they try to transplant the idea, though, it often creates a mismatch, because their church doesn’t have the gifts or strengths to effectively use the idea.
Third, people sometimes grasp for a straw in the wind, some idea or program that will transform the church, what I call “a short-term, quick-closure, highly visible, immediate-satisfaction achievement.” Whether this fits the strengths of the congregation is hardly considered in the hurry to find a quick fix.
When I find a church whose objectives don’t match their competencies, I approach them like I did the young player on one of the baseball teams I once coached. He had pleaded all season, “Let me pitch, let me pitch.” So near the end of the season, I started him as pitcher. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was walk to the mound in the first inning. We were nine runs behind, with the bases loaded and no outs.
“Good friend, this is my fault,” I began. “You are our best shortstop. Please, now, play shortstop. Sam is coming in as our pitcher, and between your fielding, the rest of the team’s fielding, and Sam’s pitching, we’ll get out of this inning and beyond this game.”
The temptation in working with churches is to think that someone—the pastor, the board, or the church itself—is simply incompetent. I begin with the assumption that there’s no such thing as an incompetent person or church; there is sometimes a mismatch of competencies. I try to help the pastor and church work in areas in which they’re competent and to “build forward” on these strengths.
Progress not perfection
More often than not, churches have too many objectives. Ironically, such churches accomplish little. It works like this:
Generally, leaders and pastors have a deep desire to please. In addition, somewhere along the way they begin to think they have to have something for everyone. Many people feel the church should be like a supermarket.
On top of that, and more problematic, they bring to planning a latent “compulsion toward perfectionism.” Combined with a desire to please, that compulsion drives them to suggest ideas, goals, programs, and activities that the church “should” be committed to. On a Saturday retreat, a planning group will wallpaper three walls with newsprint of all the things everybody can think of to do. A ninety-seven page document of the priorities and objectives is created. They end up with too many goals, set too high, to be accomplished too soon.
That creates the desire to postpone. They sense that with these expectations, they’re likely to fail. So they postpone action in order to postpone failure. That, in turn, creates depression. And that leads to dependency: “If only the denomination … If only the culture … If only the pastor … If only the members … then we would be a great church.” I sometimes say to churches, tongue-in-cheek, that it takes considerable ingenuity, creativity, imagination, drive, energy, and determination to create a stable and declining congregation.
But I have seen churches break that pattern many, many times. The key is progress, not perfection. The three good friends are progress, pace, and prayer. It sometimes takes a church twenty years to get itself into a predicament. It may take more than two years to move beyond it! It can take a professional football organization five years to build a winning team. If it takes five years in something as simple as professional football, it may take at least five years in the complex matter of God’s mission for a church.
When a church focuses on progress, not perfection, it sets a few objectives that are realistic and achievable. That creates action, not postponement: “Yes, we can achieve that.” That action creates satisfaction not depression: “Our lives do count for God’s mission.” And satisfaction creates not dependency but growth and development, not in numbers in the church but in the congregation’s sense that they are maturing in God’s mission.
Front-line care
It’s also helpful to think more clearly about some of the analogies we propose for the church. For instance, supermarkets, even the largest of them, don’t offer something for everybody. They don’t sell cars or manufacture parachutes. They don’t even sell every kind of food available. The best supermarkets have specific objectives.
A better analogy is this: a local congregation is like a M.A.S.H. tent, delivering competent “missional care” at the front lines of peoples’ hurts and hopes. It has a specific purpose. It doesn’t try to do everything.
Four principles help churches focus their objectives.
Find the objectives that build the competence and confidence of the congregation. Coaching basketball years ago, I learned one key to success is to help each player find his best shot. In practice I encouraged each player to work on that shot, so that seven out of ten times as the ball left his hand, he would have both the confidence and the competence that the ball would go in. That created a spillover effect. When the player got the ball in another part of the court, he brought with him the confidence that the ball would go in from there, too. That confidence often produced a new competence.
Each congregation can find the areas in which they are already competent. I suggest they study the following twelve central characteristics of church life, and identify their best strengths:
Relational Characteristics
1. Specific, Concrete Missional Objectives
2. Pastoral/Lay Visitation in Community
3. Corporate, Dynamic Worship
4. Significant Relational Groups
5. Strong Leadership Resources
6. Solid, Participatory Decision-Making
Functional Characteristics
7. Several Competent Programs and Activities
8. Open Accessibility
9. High Visibility
10. Adequate Parking, Land, and Landscaping
11. Adequate Space and Facilities
12. Solid Financial Resources
Expand a strength first. Take a current strength that is, on a scale of one to ten, an eight. Advance and improve that to a nine or a ten. Build on your strengths. Do better what you do best.
That means, naturally, you will want to be at peace about some weaknesses, at least for the time being. One church I was helping concluded after an evaluation, “Our pastoral and lay visitation in the community is, on a scale of one to ten, a low two.”
“It’s an excellent two!” I said. They were a little puzzled. I continued. “Good friends, it’s among your best weaknesses.” By that I meant they could be up front about not investing immediate resources in a current weakness.
We can refuse to let our compulsive perfectionism sidetrack us. With honesty and candor we can say, “A-ha! This is an excellent two. That’s where it ought to remain.”
De-emphasize the negative. The four questions I encourage churches to give up for Lent are
- What are our problems?
- What are our needs?
- What are our concerns?
- What are our weaknesses and shortcomings?
Those four questions I call “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” or “The Four Assassins of Hope.”
I help lots of churches with their problems and concerns, but when you begin with your weaknesses, you’re in the weakest position to tackle them. When you first improve your strengths, you are then in the strongest position to work effectively on your weaknesses.
Add complementary objectives. One church I was helping said, “We have two objectives. We plan to become the church in the county known for using only classical music in worship; that will make us distinctive. Second, we plan to reach young couples with small children.”
“You have two excellent objectives,” I replied. “One of them heads you in one direction, and the other heads you in almost the opposite direction. I happen to know the results of radio marketing surveys of this community. Young couples here listen to two kinds of music: soft fm and country western.
“Now if you had told me, ‘We plan to launch the best preschool program in the community, and we plan to reach young couples with small children,’ you’d have complementary objectives. They reinforce and help each other. If you had told me, ‘We plan to sing only classical music in our worship services, and we plan to have the best preaching in the country,’ you would have complementary objectives.”
I also said to them, “If you plan to sing only classical music, be sure to have the best preaching in the country. It will help greatly.” (I say that as one raised on classical music. I also know the world is a mission field.)
As they begin the planning process, churches ought to think of themselves as a mission. The purpose of planning is action in mission. We live on one of the richest mission fields on the planet. I encourage churches to determine their future based on mission rather than growth, based on strengths rather than size. We do mission for the sake of mission, not for the sake of gaining more members. The ultimate goal of planning is to help people with their lives and destinies, whether or not they ever join this particular congregation. We’re not trying to grow an institution; we’re trying to grow a mission, no matter our size.
Even a small congregation—a small mission outpost—can decide to be an excellent small congregation. The key is to discover the central characteristics and a few key objectives that God calls this congregation to achieve.
Better-planning principles
The biggest misconception people have about long-range planning is that the job is to figure out what the congregation should be doing three years from now. No. We plan long range to know what to achieve today, this week, this month. The reason we look three years ahead is to know what to accomplish now.
It’s like planning a wedding. People set the date for the wedding, and then they work backward. Once they have the long-term objective in place, they can determine when to order invitations, hire a photographer, rent a reception hall. Once they set the date, they know what to do this week, this month, next month, and the next month. People who set the date tend to get married. Those who never set the date for the wedding hardly ever get married.
I encourage churches to look at least three years ahead, and to do so developmentally.
An ineffective way to plan is in three-year blocks. In the fall of 1991, the church looks at 1992, 1993, and 1994 and determines a three-year plan. Then with a sort of driven determination, it sticks to that plan for three years. Then at the end of 1994, it creates another three-year plan.
In a developmental approach, long-range planning advances continually over three years. In the fall of 1991, for example, a church would determine objectives for 1992, 1993, and 1994. Toward the end of 1992, it would do two things. First, advance and improve the objectives for 1993 and 1994. They might delete some things, improve others. Second, add the new third year, incorporating objectives for 1995. Thus, they always look three years ahead—flexibly and dynamically.
Developmental planning looks more like a fast break down the basketball court than a neat, tidy plan where every detail is in place and stationary. A church shouldn’t take much time at it each year. Planning is more like a time-out in a basketball game. The Callahan principle of planning is that “Planning expands to fill the time available. Therefore, limit the amount of time you invest in planning.”
Churches invest best in six planning sessions totaling nine to twelve hours to discover their long-range plan. It takes even less time to keep it moving. The art is wisdom more than time.
Churches can accomplish much in a short time by following a few planning principles.
One is the twenty/eighty principle. Twenty percent of what a group does delivers 80 percent of its results. Eighty percent of what a group does delivers 20 percent of its results. We’re not trying to create a ninety-seven page long-range planning document. The best long-range plans are three pages long, five pages long, or even one page long! It takes no wisdom to list many, many goals. What takes wisdom, and what makes a difference, is finding the 20 percent that produces 80 percent of the results.
A second planning principle: Work smarter, not harder. The myth in the church is “If we were only more committed and worked harder, things would get better.” The truth is that when people work harder they get “tireder,” but things don’t automatically get better. When a church headed in the wrong direction works harder, it gets there quicker and faster.
A third planning principle: Plan less to achieve more; plan more and you will achieve less. That relates closely to another principle: The purpose of planning is action, not planning.
The importance of both these principles is illustrated by a church I visited some time ago. As I stepped off the plane, the pastor and the chairman of the long-range planning committee met me. As we were waiting on my luggage, they gave me three notebooks thick with data, which they had invested two years in gathering. They asked me if I would look at them before the 7:30 breakfast the next morning.
Data and I are old friends. By 2:30 a.m.I had worked my way through the three notebooks. When the pastor and committee chairman joined me for breakfast, they asked, “What do you think?”
“Good friends,” I said, “the day for analysis is over. The day for action has arrived. The day for data is done. The day for decision has come.”
They were facing a tough decision. If they had a bar graph to determine the level of certainty for a decision, it would have read 65 percent in this case. They’d spent two years and gathered three notebooks of data because they believed the more data they gathered the more they could raise the level of certainty—perhaps to 85 or 90 percent. There are a lot of decisions we have to make in life that have a 65-percent level of certainty.
I said to them, “I can show you how to gather four more notebooks of data that you haven’t even thought of. It will take two years. Then you will have spent four years and gathered seven excellent notebooks of data. But the day for decision will have passed you by. And even with seven notebooks of data, the level of certainty for the decision is still going to be about 65 percent. So let us decide.”
A church should involve as many people as possible in its longrange planning. The classic mistake is to appoint a fifteen-person planning committee to spend two years developing a plan. Then they have the problem of convincing the congregation of the committee’s conclusions. That top-down approach does not work.
I encourage churches to create a five- to eight-person steering committee for long-range planning. Their task is to lead as many people as possible in the congregation through the planning process so that planning comes from the grassroots. The rule of thumb is to involve at least 20 percent of the average worship attendance. That figure might be higher in a small, rural parish and lower in a large parish. The point is to achieve a critical mass. Involve enough people so that members know the plan is theirs.
In putting together the steering committee, you invite people who have the capacity to look at the whole not the parts, the long range not the annual, who prefer to plan less, not more. You look for people who have the capacity to share leadership. Members of this steering committee serve as study, planning, and action leaders. They lead as many people in the congregation as possible through a study, looking at the twelve central characteristics of effective churches.
After the study comes the planning. The planning sessions are done in teams of two. If you have forty people participating, they are grouped into twenty teams of two. The point is, no person works alone; each person has a chance to check his or her ideas with another person. These teams are charged with coming up with one or two excellent suggestions they know will help the whole. Then these teams report back to the larger group.
Then, perhaps, fifteen possible key objectives are offered in total. Each team picks eight out of the fifteen that they feel the church could most likely achieve, given the church’s strengths, gifts, and competencies. What I often find is that the group quickly forms a consensus on two to four key objectives. So they choose these objectives. The other eleven were excellent ideas, but these four are the “20 percenters.”
I encourage churches to develop a mission budget, organized around the central characteristics and key objectives the church plans to expand and add in the coming one to three years. You might have a section on “corporate, dynamic worship” and another on “pastoral/ lay visitation in the community.” Staff salaries are allocated to the various central characteristics in proportion to the time invested there.
Regrettably, organizational budgets are often structured in terms of the committees in the church. They focus more on which committee controls what money than on the key objectives to be accomplished in the coming year. In a mission budget, the focus is on the specific key objectives decisive for the year ahead. The important point: the budget is based on mission objectives to help people with their lives, not on committees and control.
The pastor’s role in long-range planning is not to be the prime keeper of the vision; nor is his or her role to be the enabler of the congregation with regard to its vision. The task is to discover together the mission to which God is calling a particular group. Were a pastor to think that he or she is the prime keeper of the vision, that would deny the priesthood of all believers. Nor is it helpful for the pastor simply to enable the congregation to develop its goals. Enablers tend to focus on the process but tend not to share with the group their best wisdom.
For me, the pastor is leader and coach. As leader, the pastor leads, sharing his or her own best wisdom and judgment. Thus the congregation is not bereft of the pastor’s best thinking. In addition, the pastor coaches the congregation’s best wisdom forward, so that they together discover excellent ideas and new suggestions. The long-range planning steering committee also serves with the pastor as leaders and coaches. The pastor should not have to carry the leader and coach roles alone.
Motivational bridge
As a leisure activity, long-range planning probably isn’t the activity of choice for most church members. To motivate the congregation to participate in planning, we need to understand the five motivational resources that draw people to a church, encourage them to be workers and leaders, and help them to contribute their time and money. The five resources are compassion, community, challenge, reasonability, and commitment.
All five are present in every person; and two of the five are generally predominant at a given point in a person’s life. Among the key leaders, challenge and commitment are the strongest motivators. They’re committed to the church, and they rise to the challenge of seeing it thrive. Among grassroots members, the best motivators are compassion and community. They want to help people, and they want to belong.
What we have in many churches, then, is a motivational gap. Often the same few people do everything in a church because the key leaders, motivated by commitment and challenge, send out messages on the radio frequencies of commitment and challenge. But the grassroots listen on the radio frequencies of compassion and community. That’s a motivational gap.
I help a lot of dying churches in which the only people left are key leaders committed to the challenge of keeping the doors open. When I ask those key leaders what drew them to the church in the first place, they usually talk about a compassionate pastor and the sense of family and community. But in the thirty years that have come and gone, weighted down by the institutional baggage of trying to keep the venture afloat, they have “nurtured forward” the motivations of commitment and challenge. They say to me, “Dr. Callahan, what we need in this church is people with more commitment.”
“You just told me that compassion and community are what drew you to this church,” I reply. “Now if compassion and community drew you who knew church culture to the church, how do you expect to draw unchurched people by means of commitment and challenge?”
Then I gently add, “It was not said of the early Christians, ‘Look how committed they are to one another’ but ‘Look how they love one another.’ What we need is people with more compassion, not more commitment.”
I’ll often invite the key leaders to a “bridging” challenge: “From today forward, I invite you to commit yourselves to the challenge of doing whatever you do out of what drew you here in those early years, namely compassion and community.” You’d be amazed at how many key leaders rise to the challenge and make that commitment. Consequently, we create a motivational match between key leaders and grassroots, pastor and unchurched.
Pastors can reflect this in their preaching by centering less on commitment and challenge and more on compassion and community. Note I said “more.” All five motivators are present in each individual, so it’s appropriate to address each of the five from time to time. But the bulk of preaching is best not focused on “The Challenge of Our Future,” filled with scoldings like “If we will only deepen our commitment …”
Nor is it wise for preaching to center on institutional objectives: “We need more teachers, money, members.” People cannot be scolded into Christian service. They can be won with compassion and community.
I’m talking, of course, about a compassion that is rich, full, tough, and helpful; not a syrupy, sentimental understanding of compassion. People are not interested in superficial forms of community. They can find those lots of places. They’re looking for roots, place, and belonging.
Effective leadership begins with the confidence that hope is stronger than memory: the open tomb is stronger than the bloodied cross. Easter is stronger than Good Friday because resurrection is stronger than crucifixion. Effective church leadership is built on the confidence that we are the Easter people.
Confidence is crucial. If we plan and organize our churches in a way that builds confidence, we will find that the results are strength and fruitfulness.
Copyright © 1997
