The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

• Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
• Two Ways to Transition
• Creating a Sense of Urgency
• Forming a Strategic Team
• Crafting a Vision
• Communicating the Vision
• Empowering Others to Act
• Celebrating Wins
• Building on the Change
• Institutionalizing the Change

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Create a Vision for the Preferred Future

After you’ve created a sense of urgency, and while you’re rallying a team, you need to be crafting a vision for missional communities in the life of your local church.  Specifically, there are three areas that you need to focus on:

• Answering the question “why?”
• Providing a theological, philosophical and practical foundation for a missional community
• Crafting a short narrative for the vision

Answering “Why?”

When you first start thinking about change with your leadership team, there will probably be many great ideas and solutions floating around.  I’m the kind of guy that wants to move immediately into problem-solving and execution mode. I crave action!

Before you move into execution though, you need to spend time crafting a vision, and specifically answering the question “why are we transitioning?”  This is often tied to the same threads you utilized to create a sense of urgency and the need for change.

The answer to that question needs to be something that resonates with your general population of people, rather than just a group of bought in leaders.  While every Christian in your church should care that there are lots of people who haven’t heard the gospel, for most of them statistics on the lostness of a city aren’t terribly compelling.  Why should a person who has served faithfully in your children’s ministry for years care about the shift you are making?  What would resonate deeply with someone who has been marginally connected to your church?  To be effective here, consider the things that your most often communicate from your pulpit that has resonated with your people and tie into this thread.  If you have built your church on the foundation of being a safe place for the family, then a good “why?” would be “To become more like God’s family”.  If you’ve built on a foundation of good Bible teaching, then a good “why?” would be “To do what the Bible says”.

At The Stone, we didn’t actually begin our transition by talking about missional communities at all.  We by focusing  on the question: “Why do churches die?”  To this day, it remains one of our most popular sermon series, and was a watershed series for our church body.

Thoroughly Understanding Your Vision

At The Stone, we tend to build almost any vision for ministry through the grid of:

• Theology – what is true from Scripture?
• Philsophy – how do I apply what is true into this culture?
• Practice – what am I going to do based on my theology and philosophy?

We didn’t do this very well when we transitioned to missional communities, but over time our vision solidified into this grid.  Over time we realized that missional community is a “what”…it’s a vehicle for living out the mission of God in the context of community.  Missional community for us is a collection of practices that foster obedience to Jesus as a community.

Cultivating obedience to Jesus is a “how” or a philosophy.  This is a guiding principle that informs what we do – we preach a certain way because we want people to obey Jesus.  We have certain ministries that help us foster obedience to the Word in different ways. We want to help consumeristic, materialistic, individualistic people in our culture see what it means to follow Jesus, because the gospel changes everything.

The gospel changes everything is a “why”. Jesus, who came to earth in the flesh, lived a perfect life, died an atoning death on the cross, and was resurrected from the dead is the fulcrum of human history.  He changes everything – our identity, our community, our purpose, our affections, our ultimate destiny.  

Linking your practice to a philosophy that is driven from a theology integrates multiple concepts to an overall vision that people can grasp over time.  Practically speaking, this is what drove us to our Missional Community Roadmap:

Utilizing Narrative to Communicate Vision

The final thing you need to consider is answering the question “why transition?” is to make sure the answer captures the heart, not just the head.  Facts are great for informing the mind, but stories are most effective at stirring the heart.  

Answering the question with something like “we’re going to transition to missional communities because we’ll be much more effective in making disciples in our city” may be right, but it’s not something that people can really grab hold of.  To build on the examples above, consider something like “our families are becoming like God’s family” or “we’re putting the Bible into action”.  More important though, is communicating your vision through a story.  Two great examples of how we have done this at The Austin Stone are our vision for 100 People and a few stories of missional community life (here, here and here).

Stories will powerfully communicate the vision for your transition, so find ways you can tell them compellingly!

Conclusion

A clear vision can help everyone understand why you’re asking them to do something. When people see for themselves what you’re trying to achieve, then the directives they’re given tend to make more sense.  It isn’t just about having a catchy phrase and some branding, but having a fully-formed understanding of why you are making a transition and communicating it in a variety of different ways over time.

On a real practical note, here are some things you can do:

• Determine the values that are central to the change, and then answer the question “why?”
• Develop a short summary (one or two sentences) that captures what you “see” as the future of your church
• Ensure that your team can describe the vision in five minutes or less in their own words
• Create some visual aids and stories that you can use in different environments to facilitate communication

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

• Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
• Two Ways to Transition
• Creating a Sense of Urgency
• Forming a Strategic Team
• Crafting a Vision
• Communicating the Vision
• Empowering Others to Act
• Celebrating Wins
• Building on the Change
• Institutionalizing the Change

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Form a Strategic Team to Lead Through Transition

After you have created a sense of urgency and convinced people that change is necessary, the next step is to cultivate a team to guide the transition. This often takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn’t enough – you have to lead it!

To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition of influential people whose influence comes from a variety of sources, not just those with formally recognized roles.  These kinds of people can be found from your pulpit to the children’s ministry to a greeter who knows everyone’s name.

Particularly, I would focus on a few groups of people:

• The primary communicators in your church
• The leaders who allocate resources for the church
• Point leaders for existing ministries
• Individuals who seem adaptable, entrepreneurial, or generally attracted to change

Often times it can be relatively easy to get a visionary or preacher excited about change, but the real hard work often comes with those tasked with the implementation of the existing vision.  You will want to involve these kinds of people in your guiding coalition or task force, allowing them buy in to the process of change, not jus the vision.  The Austin Stone spent a good solid year in vision-casting, strategic planning, and piloting with this particular team.  It was critical that our stakeholders didn’t just hear a vision, but contributed to the development of the process of change.

This often will be the best way to turn those who are reluctant at first into the most committed to the change.  Once formed, your “change coalition” needs to work as a team building momentum and strategy for a wider-scale launch of this new vision and practice.

In this stage, it is important that you:

• Identify the true leaders and stakeholders in your church
• Obtain conviction about the transition from these key leaders
• Create collaborative environments where leaders can contribute to the vision and strategy
• Identify weakness in your team, or expertise you may be lacking

Transition at The Austin Stone didn’t happen overnight, but rather over the course of years.  Honestly, we expected it to go much faster than it did!  If we had built our team for the transition solely based on execution, not conviction, I am certain that we would not be pursuing missional communities today.  This team you build needs to be more captivated that your church would become something, rather than simply excited about implementing a new strategy!

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

• Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
• Two Ways to Transition
• Creating a Sense of Urgency
• Forming a Strategic Team
• Crafting a Vision
• Communicating the Vision
• Empowering Others to Act
• Celebrating Wins
• Building on the Change
• Institutionalizing the Change

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

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Creating a Sense of Urgency

For change to happen, it helps if the whole church really wants it, and a sense of unction or urgency is crucial to driving a transition.  Cultivating this sense of need can come in many different ways – identifying opportunities in your city, pointing out weaknesses of the current model, showing statistics of lostness, and a variety of other methods.  We have used these tools and more.

At The Austin Stone, we have found that for the believer, a sense of urgency must first and foremost be grounded in conviction from God’s Word.  We can certainly have a sense of necessity of change in our minds, but deeply-rooted conviction begins with the heart.  Specifically, a heart that desires to be conformed to the image of Christ through obedience to the Word of God.

This isn’t simply a matter of showing people statistics about lostness or talking about a stagnant church, although those tactics can be helpful.  Urgency born of conviction from God’s Word will lead to repentance, which is the single most necessary step in transition.

What Convictions Do I Need?

Practically speaking, if you are considering a transition to missional communities, you need to be convinced and convince others from the Scripture that:

• The purpose of Christian community is to be an apologetic for the gospel
• If a believer and community are not seeking to make disciples of Jesus, they are being disobedient
• The church is far more than simple attendance at events

The single largest challenge we faced in the transition was helping our leadership and people see how our actions as communities did not actually match our beliefs.  Very few people were coming to faith, very few of our old groups could state a sense of purpose beyond themselves, very few were intentionally seeking to invite neighbors, and most of our people were content to simply gather at our functions.

Surely there had to be more to church than that! Missional community became rooted in conviction, but also practically applied into action.

What Can I Do?

In order to help foster these convictions in your leadership and your wider community, you can:

• Tell stories of other communities who are living a different way
• Provide a case for why this strategy is more fully biblical than the previous one
• Start honest discussions about the health of disciples in your church relative to God’s word, specifically in Acts

The Importance of Leadership

Finally, urgency must exist primarily in your leadership.  In order for wholesale change to be successful, I think you’ll need ~75% of your leadership team to buy into the change. If you want to transition your church and be effective in the long haul, spend a considerable amount of time and energy building urgency and conviction in your core leadership before moving onto the next steps. Without this sense of conviction from your leadership, a transition to missional communities is doomed to be simply another program in the church.

The Austin Stone didn’t begin as a church committed to missional communities.  Through several years, we have transitioned our church from a traditional community/small group model to our current model of missional communities.  This series of posts will help you understand how we made that transition over time:

• Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities
• Two Ways to Transition
• Creating a Sense of Urgency
• Forming a Strategic Team
• Crafting a Vision
• Communicating the Vision
• Empowering Others to Act
• Celebrating Wins
• Building on the Change
• Institutionalizing the Change

Much of this framework is adapted from John Kotter’s model for leading organizational change.  I pray this series will help many of you that are leading churches through a season of transition!

—–

Transitioning Your Church to Missional Communities

The vision of The Austin Stone has always been “to be a New Testament Church, existing for the supremacy of the name and purpose of Jesus Christ.”  Early on as a church, we were committed to the authority of the Bible and the supremacy of Christ.  Additionally, one of the things that made us unique as a church was a willingness to try new things and a strong commitment to necessary change.

At the outset of the church, preaching and worship were definitively our core competencies – it’s hard not to be when you’ve got a guy like Matt Carter filling the pulpit and Chris Tomlin leading worship!  We continue to pursue excellence in these areas as a church, but also early on began to feel a sense of dissatisfaction with simply doing church on Sundays.

Several different things over time led us to consider missional communities.  From the outset, we had a desire to be a church that led people to Jesus and changed our city, but we began to analyze our strategy and structure in light of that desire.

Asking Tough Questions

In 2006, our lead team was reading through Transformation by Bob Roberts, and the book posed the question “What if the church was the missionary?” and that’s when some light bulbs started going off.  Rather than simply operate as usual, we began to examine everything we did in light of adopting the posture of a missionary.  As we processed that question, we realized that when we aimed at community, we got neither community nor mission.  But when we aimed at mission, community almost always resulted.

Also, we started surveying church planting movements around the world and there were some very clear patterns that emerged. We realized that very few of them were characteristic of our existing communities.  

Finally, we began to see mission as central to the new testament church as we studied Acts together. In many ways the mission to make disciples was the organizing principle of every facet of that church. We just couldn’t keep doing church the way we have been doing it after we considered all these things.

A Learning Journey

Those early years were filled with many questions, several challenges, and a lot of learning along the way.  One of the things I continue to be grateful for is the leadership of Matt Carter and Kevin Peck, as they are men who embrace change and are willing to lead through it.  Convinced that we HAD to change, our church began the process of transition to missional communities late in 2006.

We made several mistakes in our transition, adopting more of a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach, but God was faithful and our people were forgiving.  We learned how powerful stories are in shaping vision, and how necessary structure and practices are in persevering in mission.

Although the process has been long and difficult, it has brought more joy in Christ, obedience to the Spirit and God’s Word, and greater fruitfulness in disciple making in our city.  We have learned a ton about leading people through change, about leading a rapidly growing church, and about leading people into everyday rhythms of community and mission.

Take Your Time

Perhaps the single greatest lesson we have learned in the process is that it takes time for churches, communities, and individuals to change.  In fact, a transition from start to finish takes the better part of a decade!  The process is long, but in my opinion, the outcome is worth it.  We see more and more people pursuing God’s mission to glorify Himself through making disciples in a community on mission.  Austin may not look extremely different now, but in the years ahead, by the grace of God, this city will change.

What has led you to consider a transition in strategy?