The Launch

Any endeavor that works seems to require a leader.
—Don Cousins

As a whole, ministers are rarely accused of not working hard. But I want to make sure I’m also working smart.

When I look at the marketplace, which I often do as a strategist, I see leaders who are forced to work smart because there’s a bottom line telling them if their strategies are working. But in the ministry, the bottom line remains more intangible. It’s difficult to evaluate how well we’re doing, so we tend to work hard and pray hard and trust God that the “bottom line” will turn out to his liking.

I try to work hard, pray diligently, and trust God. But I don’t want to spin my wheels using unproductive strategies. So I’ve learned to be specific about what it is we’re trying to accomplish.

For example, I was once part of a fine church youth group. The Bible was taught week by week. The group served at a state hospital and a children’s home. We sponsored activities on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. There was Wednesday night Bible study and Sunday morning Sunday school. But we averaged the same number of kids year after year. We had no end of activity, but it wasn’t focused.

Then, through improving the program a little, our attendance shot from thirty to seventy. We began to wonder, What would happen if we designed the program to meet the needs of the outsiders?

So we built a program around outreach. The first night 150 showed up. The Christian kids all brought friends whom they’d been afraid to invite to our earlier activities designed for Christians. I brought three myself, and they came back the following week because it had been such a positive experience. Many such friends became believers. I’ve continued to be impressed with the way the Son City ministry impacted high schoolers.

What happened? Did we work harder than other youth ministries? Not necessarily. We employed a strategy.

Since that time I’ve had a part in developing and refining various ministries at Willow Creek Community Church. The following five steps, we’ve found, are central to successfully launching a ministry.

1. Build on leadership, not need

Ask most leaders, “On what basis do you start a ministry?” and the reply is, “We see a need, and we try to meet it.”

According to our experience, that’s a good answer, but not the best. We’ve found need is an insufficient foundation. We start with leadership. Any endeavor that works seems to require a leader.

It’s easy to cite examples. Industry: Where would Chrysler be without Lee Iacocca? Or IBM had it not been for Tom Watson? Athletics: Mike Ditka and the Chicago Bears. Peter Ueberroth and the Los Angeles Olympics. Or, better yet, religion: When God decided to start a nation, he went to Abraham. When God wanted to reach out to the Gentile world, he knocked Saul off a horse. Everything starts with a leader.

And yet too often in our churches, what do we do? Well, we have a need, so let’s round up a committee and …

Traditionally, as pastors we feel we have three options when confronted with a need. Let’s say there’s rumbling about the lack of a junior high program. What can we do?

First, the pastor can run a program personally. In most cases, that adds an eleventh hat to a person struggling under the weight of ten. And maybe the pastor has few qualifications or little interest in junior high ministry.

Second, some pastors can ask a staff member to take on the ministry. But often the ce director ends up doing children’s ministry, junior high, high school, college, and singles, and none of them well. Why? Because it’s not humanly possible to do a great job in five different ministries.

A third option is to turn to some well-intentioned parents. That creates problems of capability and continuity. Are the parents trained? Well-intentioned parents often just don’t know how to direct a program that builds the kids’ Christian maturity, and I’ve found a poor youth program is often worse than none. Also, when their kids graduate, it’s amazing how suddenly parents’ motivation is gone!

Since none of these traditional options looked promising, we searched for a different approach. In one sense, everything does start with a need, because we wouldn’t look for leadership if there weren’t a need. But we’ve made the difficult decision of putting any need on hold until we find qualified leaders who can make that ministry their specialty.

At Willow Creek we went four years without a junior high ministry—no youth meetings, no Sunday school, nothing. Parents came to us asking what we were doing for junior high kids, and we had to gulp and say, “Right now we can’t meet your needs, although we’re working on it.”

We took a lot of heat from parents when there was nothing for their kids, but to do something first-rate takes specialized leaders.

Most people don’t do ten things well. They do one or two things well, maybe three if they’re extremely gifted. So when we get the right kind of person, gifted in the right areas, doing what he or she does best—and only that—we can expect great results.

We looked high and low for qualified leaders—volunteers or paid staff—who would specialize in junior high ministry. The man who eventually became our key leader had another occupation and at first questioned his call to junior high ministry. But we were confident about his abilities. So we said, “Scott, we know you don’t feel led right now to make this change, but would you be willing to put together some one-day events? It would be a good exploration for you, and the parents would like it.” He agreed to organize some scattered events.

We could have begun with three or four untried volunteers, but it’s a lot harder to undo a weak program than to build a quality program from scratch.

As it turned out, Scott gained a zeal for our junior highers and eventually joined the staff. His ministry with the kids is tremendous. We’re convinced it was worth the wait to find the right person and build the ministry properly.

2. Settle on one purpose

Once we’ve found the key leader, we assemble a think tank—five or six individuals who begin to brainstorm about the ministry. The group typically consists of the person who will lead the ministry, two or three other people who have a passion and a corresponding giftedness for that ministry, and one or two staff members or strategicthinking elders. We aim for a mix of people, though each should be adept at thinking analytically about purpose and philosophy.

This think tank may gather once for a day or regularly for several months. As we planned Willow Creek’s missions ministry, eight or nine of us met several hours a month for a year, and between meetings participants pursued intensive research.

Our evangelism think tank, on the other hand, met only twice before we began to implement some of the ideas. It all depends on the scope of the ministry.

Our first consideration is determining the primary purpose of the ministry. Just as we like to give our leaders only one responsibility, every program or meeting needs to have only one declared purpose. If we accomplish anything else, we consider it whipped cream.

Take Sunday morning. What are many churches attempting? To equip the believer, to bring the nonbeliever to receive Christ, to encourage fellowship, to foster communication, to worship faithfully, and on and on. Can one gathering accomplish all those tasks? Not really. Why? Because it’s difficult to edify believers and evangelize lost people at the same time; they’re two different audiences.

So at Willow Creek we decided our single purpose for our Sunday morning service was to reach the unchurched. We make no apology for not doing anything else as long as we accomplish our primary objective. People visit our church and say, “It’s not a worship service. As a believer I couldn’t live on this.”

We say, “You’re right, because that’s not our purpose. Wednesday night is the service for you.”

So the think tank’s job is to identify one objective for a ministry. We want each ministry to do one thing well, to meet one need through the leadership of one key person.

We’ve noticed that when we meet one need thoroughly, we attract the people and resources that enable us to move on and meet another need. For instance, if we do a great job of evangelism, people come to know Christ, they’re thankful for what’s going on in their lives, and they are willing to give to start other ministries. But if we never do step one right, we won’t accumulate the people or resources necessary to go to step two.

A single focus also benefits the workers, because it allows them to gauge their effectiveness. Take our food pantry, whose one purpose is to get food and clothing to people who need them. If we do nothing else but provide those necessities, that’s success.

It happens that as a result of our distribution of food, people have heard the gospel and become Christians. We’ve discovered financial needs and marriages falling apart, and sent people to appropriate counseling. But these are side benefits.

The volunteers measure their effectiveness by one goal: getting food and clothing to people with needs. And since they get thankyou notes and hear people saying, “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” the fulfillment level skyrockets.

But suppose the workers sensed the unspoken goal of the pantry was to distribute food so that people would become Christians. Then frustration would increase unless many people were coming to Christ. We wouldn’t attach that purpose to the pantry without making it clearly the primary purpose and then training the workers so they could be effective witnesses.

3. Determine a philosophy of ministry

The next job for the think tank is to establish a philosophy of ministry. And that’s a tough task.

People nearly always want to skip the “why” questions and go on to the “how-to’s”. But here’s where working smart comes in. We first must decide why we choose to accomplish our single task in a particular way. We start with two questions: What do we know about the target group? What do we know about doing this ministry effectively?

In thinking through evangelism for Willow Creek, we began by asking, “What do we know about ‘Nonchurched Harry’?” Those in the think tank started writing on the board: “Probably will not change his life and worldview in an hour; doesn’t know who God is; thinks God is out of it, a rule maker, a killjoy, no fun; is fully occupied without church” and so on.

Then we asked ourselves, “What do we know about effective evangelism?” We decided it doesn’t put pressure on people to change quickly, because that’s unrealistic. It usually isn’t as effective in a single event as through a continuing process. Effective evangelism helps people systematically process the truth over time, so that they can make a rational decision to which they will want to stay committed. And so on.

Now we were circling in on how evangelism could be most effective at Willow Creek. Suppose I said to you: “I’ve got a friend I want you to meet. But before you meet him, I ought to tell you he’s difficult to get along with. He’s very selfish. He tends to talk a lot about himself, and he’s a little moody. And, oh yes, bring your wallet, because he probably won’t have his, and he may ask you for money to cover his expenses.” Would you want to meet him? Probably not.

But suppose I said, “You’ve got to meet my friend. He’s been a true friend for more than ten years and would give me the shirt off his back. He’s the most gracious, giving, thoughtful person I’ve ever met. I could trust this guy with anything. If I were in a jam, I could turn to him, and he’d drop everything to come to my side.” Would you like to meet that person? The way you picture my friend makes all the difference.

So what is Nonchurched Harry thinking about God—that he’s gracious, loving, kind, forgiving, all-powerful, all-knowing? If he thought that, he’d never refuse God. Nonchurched Harry, however, probably thinks God is a backward, restrictive killjoy. That’s why he has chosen to refuse or ignore him.

So as we brainstormed our philosophy of evangelism, we realized we had to design something to change people’s concept of God, because if we change their understanding of him, chances are we’ll change their response to him. Therefore, in everything we do as a church, every statement we make—whether through a clean, welldesigned building or through the music we use on Sunday or the written material we make available—we want to state that God and his followers are not backward or second-rate or dull. We designed a Sunday morning service that’s fun, that talks about the identity of God, because we believe once people understand who God is, they’d be crazy to refuse him.

All that came from thinking through a philosophy of ministry. People don’t do that naturally. We have to sit down and talk through the right questions: What’s true about the people we want to reach? What motivates them? What turns them off? What works? What doesn’t work? Are we arranging our ministry to be most effective?

If we come out of that think tank with a clear picture of our target audience and an understanding of what works in ministering to that group, we’ve accomplished our purpose.

4. Establish a strategy

When we’ve determined the philosophy of ministry, often we have a long list of ideas and concepts. The next step is to synthesize them into a strategic plan, to set priorities, to think how we’re going to make this work.

Again using our evangelism example, we gathered the information we’d brainstormed and came up with four groups of people—two groups of unbelievers and two of believers:

Nonchurched Harrys. Nonchurched Harry doesn’t even come to Willow Creek. On Sunday mornings he’s popping open a beer in anticipation of the Bears game. He isn’t interested in God or church at all.

The seekers. These sensitive people are looking for something, and sometimes they come to church. But they haven’t crossed the line yet to become Christians.

The average believers. The word evangelism scares this group to death. They know they ought to evangelize, but they have neither the will nor the training to attempt it.

The zealots. These folks have the gift of evangelism. They want to do evangelism. The trick is to use their gift effectively, without turning people off.

If we want to involve all of these people in evangelism, how do we do it? Obviously it will require four different responses. So we began to formulate a purpose for each group:

To get Nonchurched Harry seeking.
To turn the seeker into a believer.
To take the fear out of evangelism for the average believer and to make witnessing a natural part of life.
To organize the zealots so they aren’t randomly alienating people but are wisely deployed for concerted evangelism.

Then we outlined our philosophy for each group: What’s true about this guy drinking beer on Sunday morning? What’s true about the seeker? And on down the list. Once we knew what these groups needed, we had to find a way to divide the task into manageable parts.

As we considered our overall strategy, however, one question dominated: Where can we make the greatest impact with what we can invest initially? We had to set priorities, because we couldn’t attack on all fronts simultaneously. We realized our zealots were vastly outnumbered by our average believers. But if we could turn loose these average masses, we’d make a major impact. So we decided the average believers would be our first target group.

Our strategy to get them involved in evangelism was to take away their fears, build their confidence, and give them the tools to be evangelists. We put together a four-week evangelism seminar on consecutive Monday nights. We gave people help with giving their testimony, answering the ten toughest questions, and presenting the gospel in a clear, concise way. In the last year we’ve guided about a fourth of our committed people through these seminars.

We experienced a wide spectrum of responses. If zero is complete fear and ten is sharing one’s faith, one couple in my small group went from zero to one because of the seminar—not much progress, but some. Others zoomed up to ten. I know of one man who led two people to Christ in two months following his seminar.

Now that we’ve got the seminars rolling, we’re moving on to the zealots. Our strategy is to equip them and put them into organized groups to do evangelism. For example, we’ve started a class called Foundations that meets each week to handle the tough issues that come up when we confront our culture with the gospel.

This week’s issue is reincarnation—will I ever be around again? And we’ve handled the topics of biblical authority, damnation, suffering, and others. These are subjects we probably won’t touch on a Sunday morning, but a solid five to eight percent of our people come out early on Wednesday evenings to discuss them.

We’ve already begun to reach the seekers through our Sunday morning service designed especially with them in mind. Where we feel the weakest is in our response to Nonchurched Harry. But we decided before doing anything for him we needed to get the other three groups rolling, because those groups are the keys to reaching him.

We do aim our newspaper advertising at the guy who’s not coming. We ask ourselves, What section of the paper is be reading? The church section? No. He’s reading the weekend entertainment edition. And what kind of ad appeals to him? A picture of a steeple? No, something more like a movie advertisement, something that looks interesting and addresses his needs. So we put an enticing, need-oriented ad in among the movie notices. People tell us they first came to Willow Creek because of these ads. So that’s one strategy for Nonchurched Harry.

We’re also building a sports ministry. We live in a sports-crazed society, but evangelism can happen through sports. If we can intermingle evangelist/athletes with Nonchurched Harrys in our softball or basketball leagues, build relationships, and expose outsiders to the church, we’re on our way toward evangelism. They say, This isn’t so bad. Wonder what their church service is like?

The point is that these are all strategies, ways to wisely deploy our leaders and implement our single purposes and philosophies of ministry.

5. Direct the resources

From this point on, it’s a matter of allocating the finances, setting the times, and deploying the people. This is the fun part—actually making ministry happen.

One of the groups we’re just beginning to unleash is called “the Defenders.” This group contains the hard-core apologists, men and women who have a heart for the intellectual issues and tough questions of faith. They like nothing better than researching thorny issues such as the problem of pain or creation versus evolution. With the mental stimulation of fellow Defenders, the synergism in this group is tremendous.

So now when anyone gets stuck on a difficult question, there is someone to turn to. Our staff directs both questions and questioners to them. People witnessing to their friends have someone to help them with challenging arguments. In fact, the Defenders not only research a problem, they’re also quite happy to meet with the questioners.

What a resource we’ve deployed—a group of Defenders dedicated to leading skeptics to Christ. It’s their passion.

It’s my passion, too. And as a pastor, working through others, I know it’s going to take five steps to reach that goal.