What I like most about Good to Great<\/i> and Good to Great and the Social Sectors<\/i> is the call for a new way to evaluate churches and schools. It is a breath of fresh air to have someone as respected as Jim Collins essentially say that measuring churches is not about Sunday attendance and budgets. Instead, Collins states that greatness means answering the question, \u201cHow effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?\u201d (Monograph 5). This is fantastic to me because evaluating success in the two worlds that I work in, church and school, is really difficult. In fact, measuring education and disciple-making can feel so out of reach that Collins says that those who say we can\u2019t measure schools and churches the same way we measure businesses are simply being lazy. I don\u2019t want to be lazy. Last year in my research with this program, I discovered that most churches in America still function under what is known as the Church Growth Model. This is a model, not of Good to Great, but a system where the most important things are the number of Sunday attenders and the size of the budget. Unfortunately, this has created a lot of churches in the States that are good at attracting a crowd, but not so many who are good at growing disciples. One reason why this is true is what Collins teaches us, that measuring success and greatness is not about creating the perfect indicator, but \u201csettling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor\u201d (Monograph 8).<\/p>\n
In this widely popular book and adjoining monograph, Collins approaches businesses as social sectors with the belief that humans can become great. What is missing is what I call, the grace or blessing factor. What makes this book wonderful, and slightly non-Christian, is the assumption that humans can do certain things to achieve greatness without God\u2019s help. However, one could argue that following the principals in this book will put a pastor and teacher in the best position to receive God\u2019s grace, much in the same way Richard Foster talks about the function of the spiritual disciplines in his famous work, Celebration of Discipline<\/i>. It is with that spirit that I choose to learn from this book.<\/p>\n
Focussing on the pastoral take-aways from this book and not the teaching ones, here is a plan to apply the Good to Great process to the Hub, A Vineyard Church.<\/p>\n
1. Level 5 Leadership\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
Personally humble, possessing a professional will filled with workhorse diligence and ambition for the Hub is who I want to be. I love that Collins says I don\u2019t have to be a celebrity. In this day and age of social media pastoral stardom, I feel a weight come off my neck knowing that I don\u2019t need to have the perfect Tweet, or Instagram graphic to make the Hub a great church. Humility can be a tricky thing though because to be humble, a person must be humiliated. No one I know, including myself enjoys going through humiliation. Instead of letting hard and sometimes really embarrassing times get me down, I will set my mind to learn the lesson God is teaching me and move forward.<\/p>\n
2. Who First, What Second<\/i><\/p>\n
This year I read some books on vision and vision casting for churches. Collins turns most of what I read up-side-down by demanding that I first focus on who is in the Hub bus and then determine where the bus is going to go. This is the most difficult principal in the book. As a church planter I recruited some great people, no, I recruited the right people to plant the Hub. Now as we turn 13 years old this month, I need to get the right people on board (and on the executive and elder boards) who will take this church to the next level. What is the most difficult task for me personally? It is inviting the wrong people off the Hub bus.<\/p>\n
3. Facts & Faith<\/i><\/p>\n
One difficult task for pastors is to hold reality and faith in tension together. For me, this is hard because facts are facts and mostly indisputable. However, who can really define what faith actually is? There is a fine line between faith and stupidity. As I move forward I want to lead conversations with questions, create a culture where truth can be spoken safely, and I want to quit trying to motivate (I really mean manipulate here) people so much.<\/p>\n
4. Hedging my Bets on Hedgehogs<\/i><\/p>\n
After 13 years of pastoring I am learning that I cannot make people feel the passion that I feel. I have learned that the Hub cannot be great at everything. I have learned that it is difficult to raise funds when ministering in a middle-lower-class-blue-collar town. Consequently, I am going to lead discussions with Hub members and determine as a group 1)what we can be the best at in Sunland, 2)what we are most passionate about, and 3)let\u2019s create an economic engine to resource our dreams. I think it\u2019s time for the Hub to go back to the basics and simplify who we are and what we do; and then be really consistent.<\/p>\n
5. Discipline<\/i><\/p>\n
Once the Hub has our three circles I will lead the Hub into the new territory of saying \u201cNo.\u201d Saying No to things is a foreign concept to many people in Southern California. It\u2019s not part of our native tongue. Many of us never learned this simple yet powerful two-lettered word. However, if it\u2019s not part of our passion, who we are at our best, or helping us resource our dreams, then we will politely pass, thank you.<\/p>\n
6. Techies\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
Using technology to accelerate our move toward greatness as I lead a local church is a bit of a mystery to me still. Some very practical steps we\u2019ve done with technology is buy a new sound board to improve the quality of our music and install flat screens and Apple TV platforms in our children\u2019s rooms. I believe it is time for the Hub to create a usable website.<\/p>\n
7. Baby Steps\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
There is no killer app for churches! I confess I have fallen prey to the \u201cdoom loop\u201d pattern of seeking that grand church campaign to somehow miraculously transform the Hub into the best church in town. I\u2019m over that now. I embrace baby-steps. It takes a lot of confidence to slow down and patiently proactively pursue sustainable transformation by following the predictable patterns of buildup and breakthrough. I will develop the steps to build momentum.<\/p>\n
Good to Great<\/em> and the accompanying monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors<\/em> provides me with hope and strategy toward fulfilling my purpose with this doctoral program of becoming a better teacher and pastor. Thank you Jim Collins!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I like most about Good to Great and Good to Great and the Social Sectors is the call for a new way to evaluate churches and schools. It is a breath of fresh air to have someone as respected as Jim Collins essentially say that measuring churches is not about Sunday attendance and budgets. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[815,882],"class_list":["post-9158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp-6","tag-jim-collins","cohort-lgp6"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}