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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Celebrating Wins in Transition

I have to confess that celebration is not my strong suit.  For one reason or another, my greatest challenge in leadership is consistently enjoying and celebrating the work that the Lord has accomplished in and through my team.  This post is one that I need to read and re-read myself, but I pray it serves you well despite my own flaws.

While the Gospel, the Spirit and the Word are the bedrock of any motivation, urgency and vision are certainly powerful motivators in leadership when it comes to starting something new.

Celebration, on the other hand, is probably the single greatest sustainer for the work of ministry.  Without celebration of what God has done, over the course of time, your team implementing the transition will likely succumb to joyless, mechanical leadership, or worse yet, burnout.  So how can we foster a culture of celebration?

How Should We Celebrate?

I’ve already confessed my weakness in this area, and early in ministry I thought celebration just meant I had to acknowledge past work, and then would simultaneously cast vision for the future and plow forward into the next task.  It turns out that can pretty demoralizing!

I’ve learned that you need to do two things to celebrate effectively:

• Take special moments and events to ONLY celebrate
• Celebrate small victories every time you gather

With respect to creating special moments dedicated solely to celebration, I realized my weakness in this area when we hosted an event to do only that with our MC leaders, and people had a hard time figuring out how they should respond.  Some wondered why we should gather if we weren’t talking about “business”, and others just kept waiting for us to do a bait and switch, casting some kind of vision.  They were somewhat surprised when all we did was have a great meal together, and enjoy some quality fun!

After that event, I knew that I had failed to cultivate a culture of celebration simply because the people I was leading found it unfamiliar.  Our team still struggles somewhat in this area, but by God’s grace and through active repentance, we are changing into a more celebratory people.

Part of that repentance is taking the opportunity in every environment – team meetings, leader gatherings, coaching meetings, pastoral appointments – to encourage one another and celebrate the grace of God in our lives, our church, and our city.  I’ve been asking God to give me and our team a spirit of encouragement, which means that we are seeking every opportunity to identify and rejoice in the work of Christ and verbalizing it.  Creating a culture of celebration means making it a discipline, not just throwing an occasional party.

Celebrate in Two Things

I once had a friend say to me “metrics motivate your thinking and stories stir the soul”.  I’ve taken this thinking to heart, and it is the primary grid that I use to encourage celebration.  Especially with respect to a transition, you need to establish some short-term, observable wins for your team.  Simply “transition your groups” is not an accomplishable goal.  Think through something like “have individual conversations with 90% of leaders and cast a vision for transition” as a good short term metric.

For medium term goals, you can see how we assess missional communities over time in the series on “Assessment“, and the trends over time in a transition in “Data and Conclusions“.  While metrics are important, they cannot be the only way you celebrate.

I cannot emphasize enough the need to share stories – they bring life to metrics.  If you simply report out percentages without stories attached, it is far to easy to forget that you are leading and discipling real people with real problems and the real Jesus is actually moving in your midst.  Stories inspire the heart to persevere, so find a way to celebrate them!

On a practical note, take time in every meeting to ask for and share stories of what God is doing in the transition.  I would also recommend that you share stories not just of radical success, but also attempts that have produced failure.  When you share where people are trying and struggling, you will both encourage those who aren’t seeing amazing fruit in leadership, as well as identify potential barriers that you probably weren’t aware of.

Stories are a powerful way to celebrate, so continue telling them!

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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Empowering Others to Act

If you follow these steps and reach this point in the change process, you’ve been talking about your vision and building buy-in from all levels of the organization. Hopefully, your church wants to get to work! Often times this stage in the change is when you discover barriers to the transition.  Certain people may have verbally agreed to the vision, but when it comes time to make sacrifices or “kill sacred cows”, people can become resistant.  You also will inevitably find systems and structures that create barriers to the vision being fully lived out.

Empower with the Gospel

For most leaders who are architecting change, the temptation is to grow frustrated and impatient when barriers are encountered.  As one of those kind of leaders, I want to encourage you to remember the gospel in these moments.  Thanks be to God that Jesus never threw in the towel on me, even when I was resistant to change and being disobedient!  I consistently rehearse Romans 5:8 in seasons of transition “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  Jesus was patient with me, and by the power of the Spirit I can sacrifice my preferences and timeline to love and serve others well.

Keeping the gospel front and center as you encounter obstacles to the vision for your church will empower you and others to act out of proper motivations.  Regardless of the barriers you may face, they are never an excuse to cease loving a brother or sister in Christ.

If you find pockets of resistance or structures that need to be rebuilt (which you will!), patiently work towards change over time, rather than immediately firing someone or blowing up an entire structure.  There might come a time when you need to shut something down, but err on the side of patience and bear with one another in love.

You Need a Playbook

Part of empowering people to act is casting compelling vision and keeping the gospel at the foundation, but the people you are leading also need a playbook.  You can tell a football team to score lots of touchdowns, but without a clear game plan and set of plays, chances are good you won’t score many points at all.  One of the greatest barriers to the vision becoming reality is leaders not providing a simple, understandable way to live out the vision for missional communities.

In my experience, church leaders tend to be excited about ideas – philosophies of ministry, theology and vision – but tend to be very careless when it comes down to living those things out in the context of daily life.  The single greatest error we made in our transition was not clarifying exactly what we wanted our communities to do, and how we wanted them to do it.  Over time we have corrected that error.

Simple, Reproducible, Transferrable

After you have completed a campaign, I would strongly urge you to focus on cultivating simple, reproducible and transferrable practices that reinforce missional community life.  In my experience, most of the people at The Austin Stone were bought into the vision, but needed some simple things to do.  

For us, we want our missional communities to be committed to God’s Word, to be faithful in Prayer, to Demonstrate the Kingdom tangibly and Declare the Gospel creatively to a pocket of people.  That’s the “what”.  

The “how” is by gathering in Life Transformation Groups, gathering in a Family Meal, and gathering in a Third Place.

We’ve stuck with these practices and values for five years now, and they have become the predominant way in which our church practices community together.  It’s taken time and a lot of different training, but focusing on a few things that are understandable and you can do really well will help people act the vision of being a church that makes a dent in the Great Commission.

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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Communicating the Vision for Missional Communities

After working hard to craft a vision for missional communities, you’ve got to start thinking about how you’re going to communicate it well to people.  Hopefully you’ve gotten some practice as you’ve cast vision to your strategic team, and now you are thinking about communicating the vision more broadly.  In my experience, communication consists of three things:

• The message
• The medium
• The audience

We covered most of the “message” component in the crafting a vision post, so I’ll spend most of my time focusing on the medium and the audience in this post.

What you do with your vision after you create it will determine your success in the transition.  You can create the most compelling vision and the most airtight strategic plan, but they remain ideas until you actually communicate them to other people.

Communicate to Leaders

Your first audience ought to be leaders within your church.  Make sure you communicate a vision to leadership before you roll it out to a broader audience!  It’s crucial for long term success that your current leaders have a sense of ownership and buy-in to the vision.

The vision you are communicating will probably have competition from other communications within your church as well.  Communicate the vision frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything you do with leaders for a season.  Also, consider a time with leaders when you can have their undivided attention. There are often “slow” seasons in the overall life of the church – make use of them!  Whenever you have a captive audience or a free communication channel, use it.  Focus on repetitive messaging, rather than only communicating to the largest possible audience.

Finally, don’t solely do a “vision meeting” or something of the sort to communicate your vision. Instead, talk about it every chance you get. Use the vision daily to make decisions and solve problems. When you keep it fresh on everyone’s minds, they’ll remember it and respond to it.  The single greatest reason change fails is that vision isn’t communicated repeatedly over time!

When considering mediums to utilize, I would aim for in person communication to groups of leaders, and specifically doing it in a way that invites feedback and questions.  Without your leaders having a way to contribute to the vision, it will be very difficult for them to have a sense of ownership of it.

Communicate to the Church

After you’ve communicated the vision to your leaders, now it’s time to start communicating to the entire church community.  With respect to mediums, you should use whatever you have at your disposal.  Particularly, you will want to consider:

• Preaching the vision from the pulpit
• Communicating the vision through live testimonies or short films
• Cultivating the vision through small group curriculum
• Creating written resources to share with your community
• Focusing all informational communication around the vision
• Utilizing all ministries leadership channels to communicate the vision contextually to other ministries

Running a Campaign or Alignment Series

Perhaps the most effective strategy for communicating your vision to your church is a church-wide campaign or an alignment series.  The basic idea is utilizing every channel of communication and every place people are gathered for ministry over a prolonged season to communicate the same message – from children’s ministry all the way to the pulpit.  These kinds of series take an extraordinary amount of planning to execute, and clarity in everything we have addressed in this series so far.

Below is the basic communication plan for our most recent campaign to redefine missional community and launch a significant number of new missional communities at The Austin Stone:

As you can see, we spent 5 months communicating the vision in different ways to different groups of people, and this was only to reinforce an existing vision!

Conclusion

I probably can’t do justice to the entire process of communicating a vision to the various groups of people inside your church, but here are a few things to takeaway if you’re considering a transition:

• Talk often about your vision
• Openly and honestly address peoples’ concerns and anxieties
• Apply your vision to all aspects of your church
• Lead by example and live out the vision you want to see

If you’d like more information on a campaign strategy, contact me and I can send you details on how we approach campaigns.  Also, my friend Mark Howell has written extensively on effective campaigns here.

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!

—–

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!

—–

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!