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The Mission Always Wins
Almost every leader I know will tell you that among the first leadership books they ever read was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. For most, the book was recommended to them right after they led a project or engaged in an initiative that wasn’t effective. Sometimes they read it after a big flop. And for many, this book was a career saver.
All it takes is a glance at the table of contents to see why it has sold tens of millions of copies and is lauded by everyone from business leader Tom Peters to personal growth guru Tony Robbins; from Senator Mitt Romney to Olympic Champion Michael Phelps and poet laureate Maya Angelou. The chapter titles are now maxims that are embraced by leaders around the world:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
“Put first things first.”
And especially “think win-win.”
A “win-win” mentality is perhaps one of the most treasured pieces of advice for the new leader. It reminds us that whenever possible—for the good of the team, in order to foster collegiality and collaboration—we should look for solutions to the problems that keep everybody engaged in and invested in the outcome. In a world that often feels so competitive (even among colleagues!), “win-win” solutions are like a ray of light in the darkness. They offer both hope and a way forward.
But what if that ray of light is actually blinding you from seeing and facing a difficult but necessary way ahead? What if instead of a win-win solution that pleases everyone, the moment calls for a hard decision that requires stakeholders to let go of something that has been important or dear to them? What if the only way forward really requires one of the teammates to take a back seat, play second chair, or let go of one of the personally motivating factors behind even taking on the challenge?
Win-win solutions often mask the deeper organizational problem of a lack of missional alignment among various stakeholders. I was in a trustees meeting at the seminary where I served as a senior administrator when one of the trustees, himself a retired president of a university, shared the struggle of trying to bring a unified vision to an academic institution.
“That university,” he said, “was 28,000 faculty, students, and staff all unified together around a common parking problem.”
That line got a huge roar from the other trustees and the executive team in the room. He was reminding us that it didn’t matter if we were a mid-size seminary or a large, nationally ranked university, the same mental model often existed in academic institutions. They weren’t created because of a unified strategy, but for uniting multiple constituent “schools” or “colleges” into one larger entity.[1] Because of that, different constituents of faculty, staff, administrators, parents, and even students often had vastly different agendas, with different motivations, that had never been reconciled in one shared mission.
At those times, the desire to find a win-win solution was not actually a solution to a real problem but a way that leaders unconsciously tried to lower the conflict of the moment. The result was that the different factions came to feel better about the decision, but often didn’t actually make progress.
Because many of us are people pleasers, often a win-win solution can simply be a way of pleasing those stakeholders that a leader can’t stomach disappointing. And in the worst scenario, the compromises of win-win solutions that make everyone happy momentarily further the actual conditions for continued decline.
Leadership, then, isn’t so much skillfully helping a group accomplish what they want to do (that is management). Leadership is taking people where they need to go and yet resist going. It’s challenging, encouraging, and equipping people to be transformed more and more into the kind of community that can accomplish the mission set before them. And very often the very people who called us to lead them are disappointed when we do.
Transformational leadership, then, is always a two-front battle: On one side is the challenge of a changing world, unfamiliar terrain and the test of finding new interventions that will enable the mission to move forward in a fruitful and faithful way. On the other side are the stakeholders who resist the very change that is necessary for the mission’s survival. If adaptive leadership is “enabling a people to grow so they can face their greatest challenges and thrive,” then it is crucial to acknowledge that a significant part of the “greatest challenge” is internal. Deftly handling resistance and the disappointment that comes along with it so that a community of people can accomplish a goal for the greater good is the core capacity of adaptive leadership.
So, if win-win doesn’t work in the face of adaptive challenges, what does?
A simple-to-understand but difficult-to-implement mantra: The mission always wins.
Always.
Every. Time. In every conflict.
Not the leader.
Not the donors who pay the bills.
Not the most loyal and long-suffering teammates.
Not the new people who have been recruited and uprooted their lives to join the cause.
Not those who scream the loudest or who are most in pain.
In a healthy organization, the mission wins every argument. The focused, shared, missional purpose of the organization wins over every other competing value.
It’s more important than my preferences or personal desire.
It’s more critical than my leadership style, experience, or past success.
It’s the grid by which we evaluate every other element in organization.
It’s the criterion for determining how we will spend our money, who we will hire and fire, which programs we will start and which ones we will shut down.
It’s the tiebreaker in every argument and it is the principle by which we evaluate every partnership.
Every time, in every decision, the key question is: Does it further our mission?
[1] “In the United States, the designation [university] is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school.” Wikipedia, “University,” https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/University.
Taken from The Mission Always Wins by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Tod Bolsinger is the founder and principal at AE Sloan Leadership Inc., the executive director of the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute, and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience. Tod and his wife, Beth, split their time between Pasadena, California, and Ketchum, Idaho.
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Invest in Transformation
Writing in the wake of the 9/11 bombings, leadership expert and author Margaret Wheatley responded to the question of how leaders and teams could learn to plan ahead when the world was so volatile. How might leaders get better at predicting what the future will bring?
She waved the question aside.
You can’t predict the future, Wheatley wrote, but “it is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.”[1]
If that answer leaves you with a heaviness in your heart, you are not alone. Trust in organizations, institutions—even trust in neighbors—has been declining at a rate that many previously thought unthinkable.[2] Even more, the lack of trust in leaders, either political, institutional, corporate, even religious—led one author to write about “the scandal of leadership.”[3]
When the books don’t balance, the public and private messages don’t align, the decisions made seem more for personal gain than for the organizational good, trust evaporates quickly. Psychologist and executive coach Jim Osterhaus explains that while trust increases from the congruence of leaders repeatedly doing what they say, the trust level goes down when the words and actions don’t match. According to Osterhaus, “Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.” A leader builds trust slowly over time by constantly monitoring the conditions and actions that create the “climate” of trust in the room. But even one action, if perceived as incongruent, can make the levels of trust plummet into darkness.[4]
When trust has fallen to the place where leading anywhere is impossible, there is nothing else to do except restore it. For example, when an institution wants to embark on a building renovation project, if there is no money in the bank, then the renovation work must stop. The bank account of trust needs to be replenished.
To restore the trust account, a leader needs both technical competence and relational congruence.[5] Technical competence is the sense that leaders are doing everything within their power and their job description to be as effective as possible. Before they can call a group to change and grow, leaders must demonstrate that they have the ability to serve the needs of their charges right where they are. Before they call people to take on the challenges of the uncharted territory in front of them, they must demonstrate that they can ably navigate the most basic expectations they have been authorized to accomplish. Before an organization will even consider undergoing costly change, there must be a sense that the leadership is doing its job. Because change is so potentially painful, therefore, transformational leadership then does not begin with transformation.
It begins in competence.
Now, certainly, if technical competence is the only criteria for leadership, it can lead to significant problems (numerous scandals led by “the smartest people in the room” immediately come to mind), so genuine trust in leadership is more than just credibility that comes from technical competence; it also requires relational congruence.
Relational congruence is the way that leaders show up for the people “entrusted to their care.”[6] Relational congruence is the personal capacity—the emotional intelligence, the moral character, the ability to listen and communicate—to uphold values and protect the relationships, the integrity, and the culture of the organization. When leaders function with relational congruence, they strengthen the bonds, deepen the affection, and create the wellspring of trust needed to face the unknown challenges of a changing and disrupted world.[7]
When leaders have high credibility and high trust, they themselves tend to feel secure, are able to give direction easily, and find less friction inhibiting them from accomplishing their goals. In the words of Stephen M. R. Covey, “Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust,” and “once you create trust—genuine character-based and competence-based trust—almost everything else falls into place.”[8]
[1] Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Our Control,” published in Human Resources in the 21st Century (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003), accessed July 31, 2023, www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whenchangeisout ofcontrol.html.
[2] See David Brooks, “America is Having a Moral Convulsion,” Atlantic, October 5, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing -levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/. Compare to Lee Rainie, Scott Keeter, and Andrew Perrin, “Trust and Distrust in America,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22 /trust-and-distrust-in-america/.
[3] J. R. Woodward, The Scandal of Leadership: Unmasking the Powers of Domination in the Church (Cody, WY: 100 Movements Publishing, 2023).
[4] From a phone interview conducted by the author with Jim Osterhaus in June 2011. Originally printed in Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Leading in Uncharted Territory (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 69.
[5] Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, 42-44.
[6] With thanks to my colleague Scott Cormode for this memorable and inspiring reframe of the people who have often just been called “followers.” Scott Cormode, “A People Entrusted to Your Care,” Fuller Magazine 10, n.d., accessed September 1, 2023, https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu /a-people-entrusted-to-your-care/.
[7] I first wrote about this in some depth in Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, chapters 3–5.
[8] Stephen M. R. Covey with Rebecca Merrill, The Speed of Trust (New York: Free Press, 2006), loc. 527-28, Kindle.
Taken from Invest in Transformation by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Tod Bolsinger is the founder and principal at AE Sloan Leadership Inc., the executive director of the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute, and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience. Tod and his wife, Beth, split their time between Pasadena, California, and Ketchum, Idaho.
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Leading Through Resistance
Andrew Zolli has made a life of studying the impact of disruption and change on a global scale. Having worked on, studied, and written about initiatives on climate change, human rights, and disaster response, he and his coauthor Ann Marie Healy observed different cultures and conditions “from the coral reefs of Palau to the back streets of Palestine, exploring the dynamics of resilience in many contexts.”[1] In a time when there are many discussions and definitions of resilience, I find Zolli and Healy’s definition compelling. Resilience is the “capacity . . . to maintain . . . core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.”[2]
Zolli and Healy help us understand that the real challenge of dramatically changed circumstances is how something of genuine value comes under threat. Crisis doesn’t just cause disruption to preferences and peripheral things, but to the very reason for being—our core purpose and integrity. Therefore, to be resilient and to respond to “dramatically changed circumstances,” good leaders first determine what is worth preserving no matter the circumstances.
Because of this, whenever my team begins working with an organization on change, we often start in an unexpected place: What should never change. For many of these most energetic and eager change-leaders, this is a disappointment. They want to jump right in with new ideas. They want to “think outside the box,” “upset the apple cart,” and “make the future.” They are stymied by the suggestion that the place to start is by conserving the core purpose and core values of the sometimes-distant past. I like to paraphrase of a statement made famous by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras: “Once you are clear on what will never change, you then must be prepared to change everything else.”[3]
To do this we must start with a dual conviction: a preservation conviction and a change conviction.
- The preservation conviction is that all change efforts will protect and maintain what is central to the organizational mission (“core purpose”) and the values that make it unique (“integrity”).
- The change conviction is that change is necessary in order to protect the core purpose and integrity of our organization and that everyone must be prepared to adapt that purpose and integrity in a new strategic direction.
For Zolli and Healy, the key to resilience that maintains “core purpose and integrity” in a disruptive world is adaptive capacity (the same quality that Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow teach is necessary for intentionally leading change to respond to that world). As they explain, “preserving adaptive capacity—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one’s core purpose—[is] an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility.”[4] Or in the words of Marty Linsky, “Adaptive work is as much about deciding what is essential and what needs to be brought forward as it is about what needs to be left behind.”[5]
Leading change, then, does not begin in change, but in what will not change. Then, when we begin to initiate a necessary change process, it should be framed as something that is not only consistent with our core purpose and the integrity of our values, but necessary to preserve them and see them flourish.
Here are some examples:
➜ A restaurant known for its delicious food and welcoming environment in a close-knit neighborhood figures out how to offer takeout and delivery during a pandemic because of their commitment to the community and their value of being a positive source of encouragement in it.
➜ A church that is committed to truly loving its neighbors as an expression of Christian values begins to teach Spanish language classes so that the longtime members can strike up friendships with the growing immigrant population in the neighborhood.
➜ A nonprofit focused on helping kids learn to read begins to utilize technological tools in an effort to both connect to kids who are otherwise playing video games and communicating via smart phone and allow more adults to create relationships with students who may be uncomfortable at first to meet in-person with a stranger.
The strategies might change, but the dual conviction for bringing that change is that every new initiative will be both 1) consistent with the organizational purpose and values and 2) necessary for ensuring that the organizational purpose and values continue in a challenging and disruptive world.
[1] Andrew Zolli, “About Me,” andrewzolli.com, n.d., https://andrewzolli.com /about-me/.
[2] Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New York: Free Press, 2021), 7 (italics original).
[3] “Contrary to popular wisdom, the proper first response to a changing world is not to ask, ‘How should we change?’ but rather to ask, ‘What do we stand for and why do we exist?’ This should never change. And then feel free to change everything else.” Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last, 3rd ed., Good to Great book 2 (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011), loc. 79, Kindle.
[4] Zolli and Healy, Resilience, 8.
[5] Marty Linsky, “Pushing Against the Wind,” Faith & Leadership, September 27, 2010, www.faithandleadership.com/marty-linsky-pushing-against-wind.
Taken from Leading Through Resistance by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Tod Bolsinger is the founder and principal at AE Sloan Leadership Inc., the executive director of the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute, and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience. Tod and his wife, Beth, split their time between Pasadena, California, and Ketchum, Idaho.
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How Not to Waste a Crisis
For many leaders, especially the kinds of leaders who are asked to take on challenging companies, organizations, or congregations that are in the middle of change or weathering a crisis, it can be daunting to realize that the very same experience that makes people trust you at the helm may have reinforced some habits that will keep you from being able to take on the challenges of the moment.
This is what many of us in church leadership have been learning for the past twenty years as the culture around us has changed and as one crisis after another has tested the mettle of our leadership skills.
In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, I heard a whisper for the first time. It was from a pastor who was deeply discouraged and trying to make sense of why so much effort and faithfulness seemed to bear such little fruit. Over the years I would hear it over and over again: “Seminary didn’t train me for this, Tod.”
In 2015 I published Canoeing the Mountains, a book that uses the metaphor of Lewis and Clark’s expedition as a way of describing the kind of adaptive leadership that is needed when you go “off the map” and face challenges for which you have no expertise. Adaptive leadership teaches us to build trust through forming relational “holding environments,” to expect to experience loss when we let go of deeply held behaviors and expectations, and to become people who can learn as we go. It teaches us that we have to learn to manage competing values and to deal with sabotage and resistance—by the very people we are called to lead.
Many leaders have begun to question their assumptions about leadership being defined by position, platforms, popularity, and personality. We have grown skeptical of leaders who seem more focused on their own control or charisma, their own “brands” and ideas, than on actually serving people, but we are unsure how the values and teachings of faith translate into vibrant, enduring communities and institutions.
Our old leadership practices are no longer working, and we don’t know what to do.
As it turns out, we are in good company.
In the biblical story, Jehoshaphat the ancient king of Judah gets word that an immense army made up of three enemy foes is massing against him. He gathers the families of Judah together in assembly and they cry out to God for help. The story of God’s miraculous display of power in giving Judah victory is often and rightly told to assure the faithful that the biggest battles of life are “not yours but God’s.” But what is most instructive for us is what Jehoshaphat did before the battle, when the news was so frightening and the future so daunting. What Jehoshaphat does at that moment is breathtaking for its bold vulnerability.
He stands before his people and admits that he doesn’t know what to do.
And this is a significant shift for both leaders and their people alike. So, the new mindset for leading through a world of “permanent crisis” is not how to bring your expertise, education, and mastery to bear on the challenges before you, but training differently in how to learn to lead all over again—in real time—in the midst of the crisis.
Whether you are facing a worldwide crisis or just the next challenge to come across your desk, re-learning to lead—in the middle of that moment when your old ways don’t work—is the only way forward.
And it is hard and humbling.
Adapted from How Not to Waste a Crisis by Tod Bolsinger. ©2024 by Tod Bolsinger. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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Engaging the Curious: Journeying Together to Jesus
When my team and I set out to plant a church in the Pacific Northwest, we started with several months of prayer, planning, and training. Most people think that was our first step. But what most people don’t know is that for 2 years before our training and planning ever started, my wife and I spent most of our free time praying, enlisting prayer partners, and consuming every church planting resource that we could get our hands on.
I remember running across this one guy who called himself the “Church Planting Ninja.” And I’m really not sure if this was a quote from one of the books he wrote, or something he said on a podcast somewhere, but this is something he said that seven years later, I STILL can’t get out of my head:
“There’s a big difference between ‘Starting a church’ and ‘Planting a church.’ You can start a church with a chunk of money, a sexy logo, a cool website, a bunch of existing believers, bypass the hard work of evangelism and discipleship and still be ‘successful’ without ever seeing any Kingdom fruit…but that’s not what the Apostles did.”
“The Apostles didn’t start churches, they planted churches. And planting churches requires getting your hands dirty with the hard work of evangelism and discipleship.”
(Mr. Ninja, I’m sorry I butchered this quote…I’m just typing this from memory!)
So when we gathered the group of people that would become the core team for River City Church, I presented this idea to them and I asked them bluntly: “Are we more interested in starting a church, or do we want to actually get our hands dirty and plant a church?”
It was unanimous – nobody on our team was interested in bypassing the hard, dirty work of evangelism and discipleship. So together, we started praying about what it would look like to truly reach the people in our community that nobody else was reaching.
In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we are introduced to one of the Apostles that doesn’t get a mention by the other Synoptic Gospels– Philip the Apostle (not the same guy as Philip the Evangelist, who we meet in the book of Acts). Philip had a friend who was on a journey to discover Truth; his name was Nathanael.
Here is our introduction to them both:
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Come, follow me.” Philip was from Bethsaida, Andrew and Peter’s hometown. Philip went to look for Nathanael and told him, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about! His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.” John 1:43-45
All indications point to the fact that Philip and Nathanael were probably childhood friends– they grew up in the same neighborhood. I like to imagine Philip and Nathanael staying up late around the campfire as young kids, discussing their curiosity about the things that the prophets of old had written.
And now that Philip has finally encountered the One who had been prophesied about, his first instinct was to go and tell his curious friend about Who he had found!
Philip travels the 1.5 or so miles from Galilee to Bethsaida just to go find Nathanael, and to tell him about Jesus. And Nathanael’s reaction?
“Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathanael. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” John 1:46a
Now…here’s where things get interesting. I know many people who, unlike Philip, would look up to heaven after this response, shrug and say, “I tried!” Philip would even have been justified in saying, “I did my part, I told my friend about Jesus, he said ‘no thank you,’ and now my conscience is clear!”
But that’s not what Philip does!
Even though Philip was faithful in telling Nathanael about Jesus, Philip’s testimony was not enough to convince Nathanael, because there was something else at play. Nathanael had some assumptions that were deeply ingrained into his way of thinking (probably by what he’d heard about Nazareth in the news).
But instead of moving on, Philip takes it a step further:
“Come and see for yourself,” Philip replied. John 1:46b
Now, I don’t want you to miss this. Instead of taking the easy way out, Philip chose to do the hard work of evangelism and actually journey together with Nathanael.
Philip had already told Nathanael about Jesus, but that wasn’t enough. Instead, Nathanael needed to experience Jesus for himself in order to believe.
And check out what happens when Nathanael is able to actually experience Jesus for himself (rather than rely on what he had heard about Jesus combined with the assumptions that had been ingrained into his way of thinking):
As they approached, Jesus said, “Now here is a genuine son of Israel—a man of complete integrity.” “How do you know about me?” Nathanael asked. Jesus replied, “I could see you under the fig tree before Philip found you.” Then Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God— the King of Israel!” John 1:47-49
When Philip takes the time and effort to actually journey together with Nathanael to get him to Jesus, Jesus does the work of wiping away all the presumptions that Nathanael had. Then Nathanael immediately chooses to believe and to start following Jesus!
Now…that’s a lot to unpack. So let’s jump straight to it, ninja style!
When working towards applying this passage while planting a church, a few questions come to my mind: “How can we find individuals who are curious about spiritual things?” And, “How am I going to get them to Jesus?”
Philip and Nathanael grew up together…but when I moved to a new city in order to do the hard work of evangelism and discipleship, the chances of somebody that I grew up with visiting my church plant were pretty slim.
Because we wanted to do this in an authentic way while avoiding any “bait & switch” tactics, we decided to do something bold on our guest connection cards: A short spiritual survey.
Because we are straightforward and honest with people about our intentions, we’ve found that more individuals are willing to be straightforward and honest about where they think they are. One metric that we follow and that we get really excited about is that we get an approximate 85% return rate on guest connection cards! And of the cards that are returned, approximately 25% of our guests indicate that they are “curious about spiritual things & trying to find some answers!”
This is really exciting for us to see, as this means that these individuals are actually open to a journey to discovering Truth. But I have to be honest with you and say that I was not prepared for that many people to circle “Curious!”
In order to be intentional about not skipping the hard and dirty work of evangelism, we had stumbled onto these truths:
It is important to try and find out where people are on their spiritual journey. If you honestly ask, many people will honestly tell you!
So this left us with the burning question: “What now?”
I found myself holding dozens of guest connection cards from people who indicated that they are “curious about spiritual things & trying to find some answers”! And not only that, but these cards also had names, phone numbers, email addresses…
We felt as if we had struck church planting gold!
So after spending more time in prayer, I set out to write the book Curious?: Everything you need to make an informed decision about Jesus. But in order for this book to achieve the results we were seeking, we knew that it had to be different from a typical book.
We wanted this to be relational! We want to journey together with our friends and neighbors who are curious.
Because of that, Curious? is intended to be read together, by a Jesus-follower and their curious friend(s). Just like a devotional, this book is separated into days instead of chapters. Each day is four pages long, and the idea is to meet after a week’s worth of reading in order to discuss thoughts on what has been read so far (regardless of if those thoughts are pro-Christian or not).
This entire journey is intended to last ten weeks. Every single day begins with Scripture (mostly from the Gospel of John), followed by a simple “cookies on the bottom shelf” explanation of the Scripture (because let’s face it…if you didn’t grow up in church, even the NLT can sometimes be hard to understand).
This opportunity to journey together with someone who is engaging with the Curious? book is my team’s attempt to do the hard, relational work of evangelism…because we feel that simply expecting the Sunday sermon to land in the right place in a curious person’s heart is the same as looking up to heaven, shrugging, and saying “we tried!”
And yes, we may have tried…but we live in a world where assumptions are deeply ingrained into many people’s way of thinking. So instead of us simply sharing our own testimony of how Jesus has changed our lives, maybe what our community needs is to actually experience Jesus for themselves!
So we take it a step further, and we actually journey together with them. We give them an opportunity to experience Jesus for themselves in a way that many never have– through His own words.
And what we find is that when people come face to face with the real Jesus (not the Jesus they’ve probably heard about in the news), that is when we see Jesus wipe away their presumptions!
I can’t tell you how exciting it is to watch dozens of guest connection cards marked “Curious” transform into dozens of new believers! And then, to watch as these new believers get excited to share about the Jesus they’ve just encountered with their curious friends!
Please allow me to end with this question: What are you more interested in doing – Are you more interested in starting a church with a stack of money, a sexy logo, a slick website, and a bunch of existing believers? Or do you want to actually get your hands dirty and plant a church?
If you answered this question the same way that we did, then I challenge you to think through this: How can you find individuals in your context who are curious about spiritual things? And how do you plan on getting them to Jesus?
Ryan Sidhom is the church planter and pastor of River City Church in Vancouver, Washington, where he leads a vibrant community dedicated to service, fellowship, and spiritual growth. With a vision inspired by the early church in Acts, Ryan has guided River City Church in becoming a hub for community support and engagement. Under his leadership, the church has initiated numerous service projects, including monthly days of service, hygiene facilities for the homeless, and extensive volunteer work totaling over 45,000 volunteer hours in just 5 years. Passionate about church planting, Ryan started Multiply Vancouver to support the goal of Gospel saturation in Vancouver, WA. He pioneered the “Metaverse Mission Trip” in 2022, and he is the author of Curious?: Everything you need to make an informed decision about Jesus, as well as Changed By Love: Living a Spirit-filled life in a self-centered world, two parts of a five-book series aimed at raising up future church planters. Ryan lives in Vancouver with his wife, Clarissa, and their two boys.
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Three Benefits of Smaller Churches
“I guess it’s alright on the mission field, but not here…” The guy was trying to justify his fear of microchurch.
His reaction reflects a misunderstanding of three things. How size has little to do with quality. That opportunities do not depend on numbers. And the built-in strengths of smaller congregations.
One: The relationship between size and quality.
A friend once told me that the optimum size for a congregation (really, for its pastor) is 350 people. He believed that a church of that size could pay its bills and afford to reward its pastor handsomely. He would also know most people by name, making it easier for him to do his job.
Selfish, you might say, but I like the thought that in a smaller congregation, everyone knows everyone else’s hurts and victories—let alone the fact that everyone wants to belong in a place where “everybody knows your name.” There is a reason why people flock to pubs and places of familiarity.
Smaller churches benefit from relationships that nearly always trump programs. A friend of mine recently joined the church which I attend. He is a legal asylum seeker taking all the steps toward citizenship in our country. While our congregation of 800 people had little to offer regarding programs, two men went to work helping him secure a job. However, that occurred after several weeks of my friend feeling like an outsider; he would have met those helpful men in a smaller congregation on his first day there.
Two: The opportunities that surround us.
Having filled two Sunday morning services, I started a third service on a Friday night. We placed just 12 chairs in a corner, recruited one man with a guitar, and I taught the Sunday message as a Bible study while sitting down.
It was intimate and effective. We attracted people who served during the other two services and recruited help from those who showed up. This was in the first church I planted back in Hermosa Beach. BTW, it grew into our largest service and became a dating place for single adults—many weddings came from that gathering.
At the other end of my life, we started an early morning service with just eight people at the last church I planted. One guy could no longer make it to our 10 AM service due to a work change, so we started another at 8 AM. In a church of fewer than 200 people, that group of eight grew to 50, or one-fourth of our attendance.
You don’t add services because of packed rooms—you add them because you can meet needs that would otherwise go unmet (we’ll explore this further in the next blog).
Three: The benefits of smaller churches that cause angst in larger congregations.
I pastored three churches. Two grew to 2,000+ in attendance, while the third (in my old age) topped around 300. So what was our biggest problem?
Even at 300, we discussed the issue of strengthening fellowship nearly every staff meeting.
Three hundred people come to a church as mostly strangers—and they remain that way unless we work hard to overcome the “strangeness” that goes with flitting conversations in a hallway or around a cup of coffee.
Three hundred is also a large church if you pastor 40 people. What comes naturally is difficult as numbers grow. Again, you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name. That which comes naturally in a small setting grows more difficult as numbers pile up.
We focused on free food (potluck if you can get it) before and after services. What we called MiniChurch made a larger church function as a gathering of small ones. The point was an understanding that Jesus chose twelve as an optimum size, and we should contrive ways to do the same.
A church of 2,000 or 300 must work hard to get folks into small circles, which comes naturally in a smaller congregation.
I’m not saying small is best. However, I strongly disagree with the guy who thinks seven or eight people in a microchurch misses the point of a church being about love, acceptance and forgiveness. What works so well on the mission field should be a lesson to all of us. You are never too small!
Ralph Moore is the Founding Pastor of three churches which grew into the Hope Chapel ‘movement’ now numbering more than 2,300 churches, worldwide. These are the offspring of the 70+ congregations launched from Ralph’s hands-on disciplemaking efforts.
He travels the globe, teaching church multiplication to pastors in startup movements. He’s authored several books, including Let Go Of the Ring: The Hope Chapel Story, Making Disciples, How to Multiply Your Church, Starting a New Church, and Defeating Anxiety.
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Recovering the Mission
Recovery group might be a curious analogy to the kingdom of God. However, just like addiction doesn’t discriminate, all are welcome to experience faith in community and the present availability of the kingdom of Heaven on earth. Like salvation, recovery begins with a not-so-easy confession that there’s a problem and a person is powerless to overcome it on their own. The genius of recovery isn’t its inclusivity. Nor is it in working the Steps. Those are vital elements of the process of finding new life. The genius of recovery is Step 12: Sponsorship. Even though a person completes the Steps, there’s still room to grow. There’s still temptation, trials, and triggers to face. You learn a need for community. But the way one works out their sobriety is by sponsoring another.
If every Christian approached faith this way, it would transform our faith experience and revolutionize the Church! If salvation is a Christian’s sobriety, we need a vision to be similarly invested in one another’s spiritual growth for their sake as much as our own! The good news isn’t merely God offering forgiveness. God seeks to restore and redeem a creation as the dwelling place. Disciple-making is the means in which we work out our salvation as citizens of heaven on earth.
Have you ever noticed how every relational environment has an organizing identity?
In a family, we might carry the identity as son, daughter, sibling or parent where we negotiate responsibilities, respect, sacrificial love and loyalty depending on our role.
In education, we identify as a student needing to learn or a teacher responsible for development.
In business, we operate as an employee, manager, or owner that each comes with expectations of effort and achievement.
In each role, our identity informs how we act. When it comes to the Church (which can be argued as it’s greatest dilemma) is that Christian identity is too often reduced to titles like believer, member, small group leader, children’s volunteer, board member, or even pastor. We can be any of these things and still never make a disciple. The reality is we live/think/act whatever identity we take on! We’re not simply sinners saved by grace. God already sees us as righteous in Christ. Belonging means we bear His likeness regardless of vocation and reproducing the life of Christ in the most relational and intentional ways. We’re not called to be just to be Christ-like. That quickly can devolve into a performative Christianity. The incarnation implies that we are to be little Christs. And Jesus’ entire mission was given to making disciples. Jesus invites us to uncover latent potential of our salvation saying, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20).
David Sunde’s book, Small-Batch Disciplemaking, helps you identify the people who God has already prepared in advance. Disciple-making is not arriving at the point of knowing enough, being holy enough, or endured enough to still feel loved by God. It’s reframing our identity as children of God to reproduce the image of God. Our identity as sons and daughters animates Jesus, knowing full well we still have further to grow. It provides practical diagnostics to identify the Spirit’s work in your own heart while also finding the words and qualitative means to sponsor faith in others.
For a taste of Small-Batch Disciplemaking, check out David’s three free downloads:
- Finding Your Light in the Light of God’s Story
- Discerning the Difference Christ is Making
- Uncovering Your Apprenticing Community
The blog post originally appeared on DavidSunde.com. Used with permission.
David Sunde has been involved in professional non-profit and spiritual and developmental leadership for over twenty years. He’s a native of San Francisco, California, with a bachelor’s in public administration from San Diego State University and a master’s in pastoral studies from Azusa Pacific University. He is currently working on his doctorate in semiotics, culture, and the church through George Fox University. David and his wife, Laurel, have two kids, Bjorn and Annika, and live in Austin, TX.
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Are You Struggling to Lead a Small Church?
If leading your small church seems more difficult each week, you may need to consider some new options.
I’ve watched too many people leave pastoral ministry because a church seemed unable to grow. Some faced obstructive leaders in their congregations, and some fell from favor with denominational officials.
Whatever the reason, when a leader abandons their calling, their action wounds the body of Christ and often leads to a life lived under a shadow of perceived personal failure. So, let’s look at some options to bring hope instead of failure.
Option One: Close a Small Church
There is a lot of handwringing in denominational offices about smaller churches. One (often too tempting) option is to close the church, grab the money and re-invest in a church plant.
That seems wrong for one huge reason—those remaining saints will lose contact with each other. Sure, they may attend other churches, but without the support and love of lifelong friends, they will not be able to stay in touch.
So, to me, that option is off the table.
Option Two: Grow the Church Without Major Change
Option two would be to develop a plan to grow the church into greater significance. However, one of the aforementioned “saints” may oppose any and all plans that could work. Often, you may find a small but well-organized cadre standing in your way.
Option Three: Plant a Separate Church In Your Building
Option three might be to plant a separate church in your existing building. We did this several times by adding another service with an entirely different flavor. The goal was to reach single adults above college age—the most neglected segment of Christ-followers by churches. This was not a “contemporary” service where you cop a few songs from more prominent churches but an all-out new thing beginning with less than a dozen people and growing into whatever shape it took. Some would call it contemporary, and others would call it crazy, but our “Friday night, Sunday morning” services produced a lot of marriages and young families.
Option Four: Go Bivocational
Option four is to go bivocational. This adds hours to an already overburdened leader, but it can also relieve some of the burden. For starters, you can recruit more easily…”I know you’re busy, but so am I. I put in 40 hours and do this, so I’m asking you to do the same.” Another sense of relief comes from less dependence on a church salary, which removes a burden from church finances. It frees you from those who obstruct new ideas by using lack of funds as a tool or, worse, holding you hostage to your salary. One pastor I know told me that any month his congregation didn’t make budget they took the shortfall from his salary. He went bivo and stripped them of a measure of power.
Option Five: A Combination of the Above
Option five is to help your church grow healthier so it can grow in numbers. Adding a service, going bivo, and anything else that brings hope to a leader’s heart will filter through sermons, leadership at board meetings, etc.
Remember that the failing of most very large churches is a lack of intimacy. Big churches that succeed are usually those that generate intimate circles within massive crowds—cell groups, etc. My point is that smaller churches reek of intimacy. It can even be a tool for resisting change. However, a smart leader will build spiritual health into those relationships, leading to greater significance.
Trailheads Toward Significance
So, let’s summarize. All but option one are trailheads toward the kind of health that can allow a smaller congregation to grow and begin influencing its surrounding community. They will also help take option one off the table.
Ralph Moore is the Founding Pastor of three churches which grew into the Hope Chapel ‘movement’ now numbering more than 2,300 churches, worldwide. These are the offspring of the 70+ congregations launched from Ralph’s hands-on disciplemaking efforts.
He travels the globe, teaching church multiplication to pastors in startup movements. He’s authored several books, including Let Go Of the Ring: The Hope Chapel Story, Making Disciples, How to Multiply Your Church, Starting a New Church, and Defeating Anxiety.
NewBreed’s resources are provided at no cost to church planters around the world because of the generous partnership of our donors. If you would like to give to support the mission, click the link below.
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Mission: Doing What People Like to Do
In case you didn’t know, I’m planting again.
That’s right. The church planting ninja strikes again.
This one is different though. Of course, I’m different post-covid. Aren’t you?
Anyone who tells me they were unaffected is lying. Andrea jokes that I was probably the most unaffected person by the lockdowns simply because I’d holed myself away writing a textbook. But still, I was affected like everyone else.
And because people were affected, mission was affected.
The mission of God in a pre-Covid world felt different. I was gung-ho to mobilize mere church goers into missionaries by radical means, like a Mama-bird pushing them out of the next. I wrote about the “theology of risk” subversively placed into the New Testament. So much so, that when I heard people talk about soul-care, I judged it as somewhat selfish in its orientation.
Yet in a post-Covid world, I’ve begun to see that soul-care is not juxtaposed against mission, but that the mission is soul-care.
It feels wrong in the current cultural moment to demand more bricks with less straw.
People are tired. They are spent. They are still recovering. They’re still helpless and harassed, like sheep without a shepherd. Much like they were in Jesus’s day.
Perhaps that’s why our new plant is called “The Abbey,” a term which invokes the idea of safety and security. An abbey was a place where the church provided for what was lacking in the community, and often provided community itself.
I’m afraid that pre-Covid Peyton might judge post-Covid Peyton a little harshly.
In fact, my new baseline question for missional engagement is to ask people like I used to in Wales, “What do you like to do?”
Recently, we asked our strike team what they liked to do. We concluded that we all like to throw parties. We like to host. We are hospitable.
Therefore, our mission involves rotating parties at each of our houses.
For that reason, this year, rather than traveling to family for the Fourth of July, we’ve decided to hang back on our street and celebrate with our neighbors. This is our time to party. It’s a time for us to simply open up our house and yard, and enter into the traditions, new and old, on our street. It’s time for us to simply be with our neighbors and talk.
It’s the TIME component of the discipleship circles that Jesus engaged on his discipology process.
This is how we reach our Jerusalem. It’s how Jesus reached his after all. John, the writer of the gospel points out that every time Jesus visits Jerusalem, it’s to celebrate a party or observe a feast. Jesus entered the rhythms of his own community to reach the unreached.
And so…so shall the Joneses.
Oh…and by the way, you’ve probably gathered by now…I’m writing another textbook. Who says you need a lockdown to write a textbook?
This topic was first raised as part of NewBreed’s Scattering Disciples course. To join in, click here.
Peyton Jones is a serial church planter, author, speaker, outreach consultant, and founder of NewBreed Training. Born in Washington, D.C. but raised in Huntington Beach, CA (Surf City), he married the girl he fell in love with at 17. He is the adoptive father of two awesome young ladies, Liberty and Eden.
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