Any enterprise is built by wise planning, becomes strong through common sense, and profits wonderfully by keeping abreast of the facts.
—Proverbs 24:3–4 (LB)
Strategic thinking is the conscious, comprehensive, and coordinated decision making of a church to create a future that is significantly different from the present. A conscious process is one that forms a vision of the future in the mind that is then created in reality. A comprehensive process is one that embraces every element of the church and requires its participation. A coordinated effort is one that synchronizes the actions of the elements and capitalizes upon the synergy created by diverse players in common cause so that all ministries achieve a higher level of effectiveness. The elements of this definition are important. Many churches experience significant changes that can be attributed to positive or negative shifts in their environment. We know that the strongest factor in church growth is numerical growth in the surrounding community. Churches that are well positioned in expanding communities tend to grow without conscious planning. Other churches may have a strong program area that develops under a gifted leader and becomes central to the self-identity of the church. However the effort is neither comprehensive across the entire church nor coordinated. By a combination of the right (serendipitous) circumstances, a church can develop growing and effective ministries without being strategic.
Resistance to Planning Strategically
Many churches resist strategic planning and rely on this serendipity because it seems to exhibit a high level of spirituality. Unfortunately, the results are like the nursery rhyme, “When it is good, it is very, very good. But when it is bad, it is horrid.” Cities are littered with closed or closing churches that did not take stock of changes in an environment that eventually proved to be their demise. There is nothing spiritually inferior about a church that discerns a future through the leading of God and moves deliberately toward that future. In fact, one might assume that the ability to discern a future is spiritually preferable. Many churches have learned the painful lesson that to the blind, all is sudden.
A second reason churches may resist strategic thinking is that they understand themselves primarily from a maintenance perspective. The cyclic nature of church life, with repeating weekly experiences encompassed in a larger annual cycle of repeating holidays and seasons, fosters a sense of continuity and order in life. In a world where the rate of change is ratcheting up to ever higher levels, maintenance of continuity and order may be an adequate mission for many churches. Also, when it is perceived that the environment is moving backward spiritually or ethically, an institution that can hold its ground understands itself as successful. In such an organization, those who can effectively operate the ecclesiastical machine and maintain important traditions will be honored above those who catalyze resources to move strategically to a different future. Indeed, catalysts may be pressured to leave.
Maintaining What Is
The first decision before a church is whether to think of itself primarily from a strategic or a maintenance perspective. This requires fearless and honest self-reflection on behalf of leaders and members alike. Maintenance cultures dictate both the kind of pastor who can be successful and the nature of the transition that will be effective. Churches that understand themselves from a maintenance perspective need to have a pastoral transition plan with certain elements:
• Specifications for a candidate who values continuity over innovation, security over risk, and past over future
• Identification of critical maintenance functions and programs that are essential to the success of the church
• A bridging resource that maintains familiar functions and programs
• An orientation process that minimizes change by transferring critical information regarding traditions from the previous pastor to the candidate
Organizational culture may be invisible to the people who live in it, just as air is invisible to us. However, it is the set of ideas, words, values, rewards, and penalties that members of the community breathe every day. Churches need to assess their culture as a way of determining which strategies are effective and which are not.
The community in which I live is ringed with rapidly growing suburban populations. However, many of the mainline denominational churches in these communities are small and plateaued. One does not have to search far for the reasons. These congregations are maintenance cultures, generally of the family type. As we saw in Chapter Five, the values of a family culture tend to penalize (or are passive toward) an emphasis on effectiveness, strategic thinking, discontinuous change, methods, formal processes, experts, credentials, measuring, benchmarking, and outsiders. They do not grow because the culture penalizes activities that may lead to growth. This is not a criticism of any particular church culture; it is a call to radical self-awareness of one’s organizational culture, of the power of that culture, and the impact the culture has on pastoral transition.
Charting the Right Course
Almost all the suburban churches just mentioned have gone through a pastoral transition in the last ten years, several more than once. In each case, the new pastor had a limited impact because it is extremely difficult to change organizational cultures. In fact, it is much more likely that a culture will change the leader than that the leader will change the culture. Again, a church must have an accurate understanding of its organizational culture if it is going to be successful in any strategic planning process and pastoral transition. If the strategic plan runs counter to the organizational culture, the culture will win every time regardless of what the plan says. This is the reason this book has gone to such great lengths to define churches in terms of cultures and the kind of transition they require.
Here is an analogy. When we plan a trip to visit a certain location by car, we can only arrive if roads have been built that go there. Roads reward people who drive their cars on them. They offer a smooth ride, fuel stops along the way, and signs indicating direction. On the other hand, if you try to travel to a location that has no roads you receive numerous and severe penalties for the attempt. Sharp stones puncture your tires, rough terrain destroys your suspension and exhaust system, trees appear in your way and make forward progress impossible, and your wheels spin uselessly in streams and ponds. You may have a clearly articulated plan to visit a beautiful section of Montana by car, but without roads you will be punished every foot of the way in your attempt.
A strategic plan defines where a church believes it is called to go; a culture is the set of roads (or lack of them) required to go there. Culture defines whether you will be rewarded or punished if you try to get there. Pastoral candidates who are given strategic plans emphasizing the need for growth in a congregation must also discover whether the culture will allow the church to really move in a growth direction.
One church had fifty members when it called a new pastor with the strategic marching orders to grow the church. Fortunately, the church grew. However, many people began leaving the church as it grew. They no longer knew everyone in the church. They believed that people should not be driving a long distance to attend their church when there were other churches closer to home. Multiple worship services split the family and some members stopped coming because they missed seeing everyone at one time. The strategic plan ran counter to the culture.
Using a more technical analogy, culture is like the operating system of a computer—PC or Mac, for example. The operating system defines the kinds of programs you can actually run on the computer. You can have a shelf full of crackerjack computer programs, but they are useless if they are not compatible with the basic operating system of the computer. If you try to run a good program on a poorly matched operating system, you will be penalized ev...
