As a companion to Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, theLeader's Guide provides ideas and suggestions on how to lead usingthe Twelve Keys model, how to handle congregational dynamics, plusguidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreat to prepare forthe future.
* Shows how to use the Twelve Keys model within acongregation
* Offers helpful resources and suggestions for encouragingaction, implementation, and momentum
* Includes guidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreatto prepare for the future
* Written by Kennon L. Callahan, the pastor who developed theTwelve Keys method
This book will help church leaders implement the Twelve Keysmodel and handle the many other factors that make a churcheffective and successful.
As a companion to Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, theLeader's Guide provides ideas and suggestions on how to lead usingthe Twelve Keys model, how to handle congregational dynamics, plusguidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreat to prepare forthe future.
* Shows how to use the Twelve Keys model within acongregation
* Offers helpful resources and suggestions for encouragingaction, implementation, and momentum
* Includes guidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreatto prepare for the future
* Written by Kennon L. Callahan, the pastor who developed theTwelve Keys method
This book will help church leaders implement the Twelve Keysmodel and handle the many other factors that make a churcheffective and successful.
Hardcover(1ST JOSSEY)
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Overview
As a companion to Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, theLeader's Guide provides ideas and suggestions on how to lead usingthe Twelve Keys model, how to handle congregational dynamics, plusguidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreat to prepare forthe future.
* Shows how to use the Twelve Keys model within acongregation
* Offers helpful resources and suggestions for encouragingaction, implementation, and momentum
* Includes guidelines on leading a Twelve Keys Planning Retreatto prepare for the future
* Written by Kennon L. Callahan, the pastor who developed theTwelve Keys method
This book will help church leaders implement the Twelve Keysmodel and handle the many other factors that make a churcheffective and successful.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780787938703 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 08/25/1997 |
| Edition description: | 1ST JOSSEY |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.59(w) x 8.44(h) x 0.59(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Specific, Concrete Missional
Objectives
Human Hurts and Hopes
A successful church delivers effective missional outreach, shepherding of its families and friends through life's pilgrimage, primary groups of sharing and caring, corporate and prayerful worship, and a thoughtful, streamlined organizational structure—all toward developing the congregation's mission in the world, growth in grace, and understanding of everyday life in the light of the Christian faith. Decisive to the genuine success of any congregation is its capacity to share substantive mission in the world.
Indeed, the first and most central characteristic of an effective, successful church is its specific, concrete, missional objectives.
"Specific" refers to the fact that the local congregation has focused its missional outreach on a particular human hurt and hope—for example, by being in mission with alcoholics and their families, with homebound elderly, or with epileptics and their families. Missional outreach is not best accomplished by developing a purpose statement or some generalized approach to a given age group in the surrounding area. Nor is mission best accomplished by the church seeking to engage in helping everyone with everything. The church that does that ends up helping no one with anything.
Missional Objectives
Those churches that have been effective in missional outreach have tended to identify very specific human hurts and hopes with which they have sharedtheir principal leadership and financial resources. It is important that a church not try to attain too many specific, concrete missional objectives. Indeed, it would be advisable to focus on only one, two, or three such objectives.
"Concrete" refers to the local church's delivering of effective help, hope, and new life in a competent, compassionate, committed, and courageous manner. Developing a statement of purpose is not delivering effective mission; it is simply developing a statement of purpose. Neither does preaching a series of sermons about the compelling value of being engaged in missional outreach mean that a church has been doing missional outreach. The scriptural references speak of very concrete forms of help, like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter. That is to say, mission happens only when effective help has been delivered—until that consequential sharing of effective help has occurred, no mission has taken place.
"Missional" refers to the fact that in doing effective mission, the local congregation focuses on both individual as well as institutional hurts and hopes. Some congregations limit their missional concern to helping only individuals. Other congregations limit their missional concern by focusing on institutional and corporate issues in society, and on the policies and programs persistent in the culture. Limitation of mission either to self or to societal issues is inappropriate. It is not possible to help individuals genuinely and effectively without also taking seriously societal dynamics that impinge upon the plight of the individual. Likewise, it is not possible to wrestle with the grave societal issues of the culture without delivering effective help to the individuals/groups comprising that culture.
"Objectives" refers to missional direction stated in a sufficiently clear fashion that it is possible to know when they have been achieved. Those missional objectives may be stated in informal or formal ways. The local congregation that is effective in mission is the congregation that has a compelling passion for the achievement and accomplishment of mission and has moved forward toward the substantial accomplishment and achievement of very clear, intentional goals. The effective congregation is not engaged in wishful thinking with a generalized purpose or goal statement that lists just its sentiments to do something noble, worthwhile, and helpful.
The five M's of the Christian church are Mission, Management, Members, Money, and Maintenance. That is their appropriate and rightful order. Mission comes before all else. Management is the wise and courageous development and deployment of the Members and the Money—that is, the leadership and the financial resources—toward effective Mission. The fifth M—Maintenance—is what we do when we have worn ourselves out in Mission. Indeed, the more effective a congregation is in mission, the easier it is for that congregation to deal with issues of maintenance. Conversely, the more preoccupied a congregation is with maintenance, the less likely it is to have the strength and resources to deal effectively with maintenance—let alone be responsibly and creatively engaged in mission.
Regrettably, in many of the churches of our country there is a preoccupation with membership. A simple illustration will suffice: Two ministers meet at a conference. The one minister is in the process of moving to a new pastorate. The other minister, in an almost automatic way, asks, "How many members does your new church have?" The more important question would be, "How many people is your new church serving in mission?"
Mission leads us beyond ourselves. Whenever a local congregation is effectively engaged in missional outreach, that congregation is a group of people living beyond their preoccupation with themselves. Precisely because they live beyond themselves, their strengths are commensurately developed, their vision is substantially lifted, and their energies are vitalized to new levels of living.
Some people think that large churches are great churches. Some people think that the more members a church has, the greater that church is. Pastors are frequently heard to speak of a given church as being one of the greatest churches in the country; more often than not, they're describing essentially a large church. But the great churches in Christendom are those that have learned the art of accepting "unacceptable persons."
In the eyes of God no person is unacceptable; with our dimmer vision, we frequently think of persons and groups around us as unacceptable. One reason I stand so strongly against the principle of homogeneity as the primary source of church growth is that it invites the attitude that the art of church growth is that of reaching out to people who are essentially acceptable. We are called of Christ to accept those who are acceptable and we are called of Christ to accept those whom we—with our limited vision—imagine are unacceptable.
One way of breaking down a local church's preoccupation with homogeneity is for two or three of the leaders in that congregation to learn the art of loving the "black sheep" in their own families. Even in the most homogeneous of families, there are those who have been labeled as black sheep. As we learn the art of accepting those whom we think are unacceptable, we learn the art of being—in the best sense—a great church.
Generally, an effective local church has one, two, or three major objectives in the local community. That is, the congregation delivers concrete help to one, two, or three specific hurts and hopes. If a church has five to eight major missional objectives it probably has too many. An excellent exercise for leaders of a congregation is to do the following:
1. List up to three present major missional objectives that your local church is accomplishing in your community.
2. List up to three major missional objectives that are planned for the coming five years by key leaders and groups in your church as they seek to reach out in the community.
3. List any possible major missional objectives that are being given future consideration.
The church that, on a scale of 1 to 10, is an 8, 9, or 10 is the church that is able to list one or two present major missional objectives, one major missional objective that is already planned for implementation in the coming five years, and perhaps one additional major missional objective that is being given consideration for the future.
Two points are important to note. First, I am not suggesting that people who have specific human hurts and hopes be turned away simply because a local congregation does not have that specific hurt or hope as a part of their present or proposed or possible missional objectives. Major missional objectives are those present, proposed, and possible objectives for which we are investing or plan to invest substantial leadership and financial resources. Certainly, we would have a range of minor missional accomplishments during the course of a given year. But it is important for a congregation to creatively and constructively channel its leadership and financial resources toward a few specific missional objectives.
Secondly, there is the spillover effect. When a local congregation is effective in delivering concrete help to a specific hurt or hope, it is likely to be sought out by people in the community who have other hurts and hopes. The spillover effect occurs when the community grapevine spreads the word that a church effectively helped someone, for example, with alcoholism. Hearing this, some people might hope that they can be helped with their struggles with dealing with chronic illness or with developing career objectives or with developing a solid values system. The more a local church diversifies, trying to help everybody with everything, the more it gets the reputation through the community grapevine of helping nobody with anything, because that's precisely what it will end up doing. Its human and financial resources will be so fragmented and scattered that it will not finally deliver substantial, effective help for any one major human hurt or hope.
Another dimension of the spillover effect is important to note: The more a congregation strengthens its competency and capacity to help with a specific human hurt and hope, the more its capacities are developed to share help with other specific human hurts and hopes. The more people there are in the congregation who have learned the art of helping in relation to a specific hurt and hope, the more likely those people are to have the competence and confidence to share help as others seek them out or, indeed, as they intentionally and caringly seek others out.
Growing Mission Up
In many local churches, the most effective way to develop mission is to "grow it up from within." By inviting members of a congregation to look within themselves at their own longings and strengths to help, it becomes possible to grow the church's mission forward from within.
The theological perspective out of which this approach of growing a mission up from within develops is based upon these convictions: First, I am convinced that God places specific longings to help in each human heart. That is, within each person are specific affinities to share help toward given human hurts and hopes to which they are attracted because of their deep longings toward them. Secondly, God shares concrete strengths and resources to enable the helper to be reasonably effective in mission. That is, God is the provider of the competencies and capacities that enable a person to share help with those individuals who have a human hurt and hope commensurate with the helper's own specific longings. Thirdly, God helps us discover persons with similiar longings and strengths. Fourthly, God's action in the world helps us to see that a specific missional outreach is timely and important. Lastly, God calls us to invest our longings and strengths in this life's pilgrimage in competent, compassionate, committed, and courageous ways.
Unfortunately, a number of churches try to develop mission by looking "out there" for societal problems and then planning to do mission "from the top down." This approach is both unproductive and frustrating. Further, the lack of success tends to create a sense of self-righteousness, in that people within that congregation say, "Well, at least we tried, and we can't help it if it didn't work out." Looking first at what is out there in society in the way of problems is looking first in the wrong direction.
It is worth noting that effective missional outreach does not normally come forth from planning retreats, board meetings, or long-range planning committees. More often than not, mission simply grows itself up because a small number of people—three to five—have discovered similar longings to help with a specific human hurt and hope. Growing from their longings, that missional outreach blossoms and develops into a full-range mission in the community.
This is not to deny the planning capabilities of boards or retreats or long-range planning committees. These groups do possess the strengths and capabilities required for developing missional objectives, but they are often focused on generalized mission statements or on looking at the problems in the community. These efforts often become stagnant and unproductive when they emerge out of an artificial attempt to construct mission. People do not often develop missional objectives in the vacuum of purpose statements, or in looking at "what's out there in the community."
Perhaps you've been on a committee that was taught, and rightly so, from the pulpit that the church must be in mission. You and your fellow committee members then felt pressed to become more "mission-minded." As a result, there was an effort to force missional goals into being. "Well, we need to be in mission. That's what the church ought to be about. Let's see what we can come up with." To prevent this, both the pastor and the committee need a fuller understanding of how mission has grown itself up historically in the Christian church.
Generally speaking, mission has grown itself up when three factors have converged:
1. One or more persons have discovered their longings—their compelling compassion—to share help with a given hurt and hope.
2. They have discovered their strength and the caring strength of three to five others who have similar longings.
3. Events within the community have occurred that make the sharing of those strengths and longings imperative now.
Consider your own responses to the five invitational questions that are important as you think through the mission to which God is calling you. The first, central question is, What specific human hurts and hopes do you have longings to help with?
A useful way to discover your own longings to help is to think through what specific hurt and hope keeps you awake at night upon occasion. That is, in those moments when you are seeking to fall asleep but can't quite do so because you are preoccupied with some person and their hurt and hope, what is the shape of that hurt and hope and who is the person you long to help? That will give you a clue as to where your longings are. A further clue can be discovered as you think about those occasions when you were driving down the road or waiting somewhere and your mind drifted to a given person and their hurt and hope. Think through the distinctive character of that hurt and hope. These are clues as to where your own interests and longings might be.
The principle is clear and forthright: Missional objectives start with a longing to help, and people sometimes discover that longing to help as they lie awake at night, restless and disturbed. Mission starts with people like you and me. When a human hurt and hope becomes compelling for three to five people who have discovered common longings and strengths, a missional objective has come into being.
The second invitational question related to mission is, What concrete strengths do you have with which to share effective help for these specific human hurts and hopes? Missional objectives are nurtured by the strengths, compassion, and caring of a small group in a congregation, who respond to hurts and hopes out of their own God-given longings to help. Some persons are able to empathize with the problems of a young single parent family more readily than with the problems of a homebound older adult. You understand and have compassion toward certain specific dilemmas in life; your own pilgrimage of life has brought on given hurts and hopes that enable you to share and care more effectively in similiar kinds of situations.
Sometimes a given person, group of people, or congregation will have longings to help with a number of hurts and hopes. Whenever that is the case, the wise thing to do is to choose those longings for which you have commensurate strengths to deliver effective help. Now, this is not to discount our being in mission out of our weaknesses. Sometimes God calls us to deliver effective help in relation to longings for which we have no commensurate competency and strength. We are simply called to share even out of our weaknesses. But the basic conviction that we should match our strengths and longings is to affirm that strength-based mission is an important first step toward developing one's competency and capacity to do effective mission. As we develop the experience of having accomplished effective mission growing out of our longings and our strengths, we are in a better position to share effective mission even as it grows out of our weaknesses.
The third invitational question concerning effective mission is, What three to five persons do you know who have similiar longings and strengths in your church or in your community? Isolated and individualistic approaches to mission are unproductive. It is important that the person who has discovered longings and strengths look around and discover others with similiar longings and strengths. We are called to be in mission corporately, not individually. There are too many pastors who see themselves as "Lone Rangers." Indeed, it is worth pointing out that even the Lone Ranger had Tonto and a score of friends scattered across the terrain. The heroic, individualistic style of mission that some pastors seek to do is, finally, foolish. That is, it teaches people to live life in isolated and individualistic ways, whereas God calls us to live life in corporate community ways, in which, as we live out life's pilgrimage together, we do so with considerable sharing and caring, one with another.
The fourth invitational question about mission is, What events in the community would make this mission effort timely? It is interesting to me that a good many long-range planning committees do a sociological analysis of the community but fail to do a mission analysis of the community. Others have done more effective work in developing missions analysis. That is, rather than focusing on demographic data, they have focused thoughtfully on a study of the congregation, the groups within the congregation, the community, and the socioeconomic groupings within the community with a view to discovering (1) those major societal issues that are timely and pressing in the community, (2) those emerging groups likely to develop specific human hurts and hopes, and (3) the sense of the longings within given individuals and groups within the community at large to share concrete help.
To put that another way, events that occur in the church and community are among the final ingredients in developing missional objectives. The congregation or individuals within the congregation have sensed and been compelled by their own longings toward certain hurts and hopes. They have discovered strengths with which to respond. They have discovered one another as "mission teams." They have discovered that what they do now is timely. Events within the community have precipitated the kinds of quiet or dramatic crises that foster and nurture the congregation's compassionate response. This precipitating movement of community action, commensurate with the longings and strengths of given persons, invites the kind of dedicated and intentional missional outreach that has been effective throughout the history of the church.
The fifth invitational question is, In what specific ways is this emerging missional outreach one in which God is calling you to invest your life? Congregations and people who discover the joy of sharing effective mission do so because they commit their lives to a specific missional objective. They are not people who flit from one interest to another. To be sure, they share help as appropriate with whatever hurts and hopes come their way, but there is a kind of lifelong commitment to sharing effective help in a given area, one in which they feel God has called them to invest their lives.
I know of some congregations across this country who have invested years of courageous and effective help with alcoholics and their families. I know other congregations who have shared help with epileptics and their families. Others help those in the community who have experienced the death of a loved one or who have struggled with cancer. This list could go on and on. There is a sense in which congregations as well as individuals commit themselves to delivering effective help in a kind of lifelong pilgrimage to one or more specific, concrete, missional objectives to which they genuinely and authentically feel God has called them. The source of our longings to help is, finally, not our own petty interests or particular preferences. The longings to help have been placed within us by God, and, indeed, God uses his actions in the world to create precipitating events that call forth from us timely directions of effective help.
Living Legends of Help
Churches that share effective missional outreach with one or more specific human hurts or hopes become legends on the community grapevine. They become, in that community, the church that helps people with a given hurt and hope. They become the church that helped John and Mary. They become the church that helped Susie. They become a legend because they become participants in effective mission.
Regrettably, too many churches have developed the grapevine reputation of being interested in getting more members and more money so that they can do the maintenance things that need to be done with their buildings and programs. Regrettably, too many churches have become merry-go-rounds of programs and activities that focus on simplistic and petty understandings of life.
A church that genuinely and authentically becomes a church of the Good Shepherd develops, much to its surprise, a legendary character on the community grapevine. It becomes a church that is more interested in helping than being helped. It becomes a church that is more interested in loving than being loved. It becomes a church that is more interested in giving than in getting. It becomes one of the distinctive churches in the community—a church that gives itself away in effective missional service.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TWELVE KEYS TO AN EFFECTIVE CHURCH by KENNON L. CALLAHAN. Copyright © 1983 by Kennon L. Callahan. Excerpted by permission.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Leaders and Long-range Planning.Part One: Resources for Long-range Planning.
1. The Four Stages and Six Sessions.
2. Timelines, Objectives, and Long-range Planning.
3. The Major Qualitative Resources for Long-range Planning.
4. The Four Invitational Questions.
5. What to Listen For and Look For.
6. Principles for Participation.
Part Two: Resources for Action, Implementation, and Momentum.
7. An Effective Long-range Plan.
8. Leaders and Key Objectives.
9. Motivational Resources.
10. Leadership Development: Focusing on the Middle Third.
11. Excellent Mistakes and Objectives Worth Not Doing.
12. Prayer: Vision and Hope.
Part Three: Four Dynamics to Consider.
13. Memory, Change, Conflict, and Hope.