Advanced Strategic Planning: A 21st-Century Model for Church and Ministry Leaders ($14.74 for the Kindle edition on Amazon) is a complete and detailed planning guide for helping a church adjust to the opportunities and realities of today’s post-modern world and to become a turnaround church. One current reality is that the vast majority of American churches are plateaued or in decline. Therefore, the overall goal is to interrupt the natural organizational life cycle of the church through a strategic planning and “re-visioning” process and help the church return to health and growth. In other words, the objective is to enable the church to begin a new life cycle.
Ministry Rises and Falls on Turnaround Leadership:
Part one involves preparation for the strategic planning process. Here, the reader is hit with a stark and immediate reality check: “If the senior or lead pastor is not the kind of leader whose leadership results in seeing a plateaued or declining church begin to grow numerically, then you need go no further.” Malphurs, like many others, believes that “ministry rises or falls on leadership.” Therefore, the leader must first determine whether he is, or has the ability to become, a “turnaround pastor.” In addition, it is vitally important that the pastor, governing board, ministry team, and the church’s key influencers (patriarchs and/or matriarchs) see the need for change and become committed to and supportive of the strategic planning effort.
The Wisdom AND Necessity of Teams:
Malphurs advises the pastor to recruit fifteen to twenty-five leaders for the strategic planning team and to plan on spending “six months to a year to work through the initial envisioning process.” He defines the strategic planning process as follows:
Strategic planning is the fourfold process that a point leader, such as a pastor, works through regularly with a team of leaders to envision or re-envision and revitalize his church by developing a biblical mission and a compelling vision, discovering its core values, and crafting a strategy that implements a unique, authentic church model.
It IS broke, We Must Fix It!
Malphurs suggests our guiding paradigm must shift from, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” to today’s new reality, “It’s broke, so fix it!” Malphurs states “for strategic planning purposes, you must decide what is open for change . . . only the core values, mission, vision, and purpose of the church are timeless. Thus everything else— the church’s strategy, structures, systems, policies, and procedures— are subject to change and should regularly change.”
The Four-Part Strategic Planning Process:
The bulk of the book is devoted to the actual four-part strategic planning process. Expert guidance is offered for both the creation of a guiding mission statement as well as the crafting of what Andy Stanley calls a “God-honoring, mouthwatering, unambiguously clear vision.” The over-all church strategy is supported by five intentional and practical “mini-strategies.” Each of these supporting strategies must have a leader or “champion” and a team charged with execution and implementation. The “mini-strategies” include:
- A community outreach strategy
- A strategic process for developing disciples
- A strategy for building a ministry “dream team”
- A strategy for addressing facilities and location issues
- A strategy for raising the needed finances to fund ministry needs and operations
Consistent Implementation Makes The Difference:
The final section of the book highlights a number of important challenges including implementation, communication, motivation, and monitoring progress. Malphurs observes,
Most experts on planning and strategic thinking have identified implementation as the greatest problem in the strategizing process. Leaders as strategists may develop good strategic plans, but . . . turning it into action is quite another (matter). Having developed a good organizational strategy, we must take action; we must make it happen.
Malphurs laments the fact that “if we do not practice consistent implementation, then even with the aid of a knowledgeable consultant, approximately one year later, the church begins to return to its old self.” This frequent return to old practices is sometimes called “the rubber band effect.” Malphurs advises that the typical church can initially implement perhaps four or five goals at one time. To select which goals to pursue first, Malphurs suggests the following guidelines:
- You must bathe your situation in prayer. Ask God to show you the priorities, remembering that he may have already done this, and they are obvious.
- Determine what goals will have the greatest impact on the church’s ability to accomplish its mission and implement its strategy.
- Determine which of these will have the most immediate impact. Ask, which will bring quick but significant and enduring results?
An Additional Resource: Church Leadership Coaching
I spent the better part of a year writing a “Church Leadership Coaching” process for use in Assemblies of God churches in the Potomac Ministry Network (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia). For more than a decade I have served as a church consultant for our denomination. Until recently, I used other people’s materials. However, my district superintendent challenged me to put what I have learned down on paper. The result is a new one-hundred-page workbook and a year-long “Church Leadership Coaching” strategic planning process. I have about twenty-five other “coaches” (some in each region of our network) who have been trained to use my materials. Contact me or read the “Church Leadership Coaching“ portion of this blog for more information.