~Going Deeper~ Part 5

You Worship Your Past Success!

It’s easy to get caught in the trap when you stop seeing yourself as responsible or accountable for the ministry results you produce. I read a fascinating article from Forbes about how General Motors destroyed its Saturn division. Among other things, David Hanna, the author of the article, suggested:
Saturn, a GM company that had great promise in the early 1990s, ultimately failed because senior GM leaders couldn’t see the benefits of new ways of doing things and a new kind of organizational culture.
We’re all familiar with the demise of GM, so this is a very vivid image of what can happen when an organization becomes so stuck in its traditional approach of doing things that the world passes it by. Ultimately, when organizations stick to "the way we do it," the safe approach of avoiding innovation and change becomes the riskiest approach.
Hanna goes on to explain:
There were just two underlying forces behind Saturn’s demise: GM’s insistence on managing all its divisions centrally with a tight fist, and the demand by leadership at both GM and the UAW that Saturn get in line with traditional ways of doing things.
That highlights one of the biggest challenges in leadership. Leaders have to choose between control and innovation. You can’t have both. You can define the desired outcomes. You can create the boundaries, but you can’t expect your team to be creative, innovative, or artistic if you try to control every element of the execution. If you must have full control, you just need to know that you are also choosing to shut down new ideas and innovations in your organization.18
Unfortunately, the church is notorious for religiously keeping things the way they’ve always been but hoping we’ll somehow achieve different results. Avoiding new approaches. Top-down, centralized leadership. Preserving the traditional ways of doing things. Sound familiar?
It’s a great reminder that our past successes can be one of the greatest contributing factors to our future demise. GM used to have a winning formula. It worked in previous generations. Recently, though, it’s not been working so well.
They may be coming out with some new, innovative automobiles now, but it wasn’t too long ago that it seemed GM still wanted to make cars as though it were 1979 while expecting to get the same results. By sticking with that approach, they dropped from 45 percent of the market share thirty years ago to hovering around 20 percent today. In fact, back in 2008, Toyota ended GM’s seventy-seven–year reign as the world’s largest automaker.
It’s easy to look at churches that might still be "driving the Chevy Impala" and easily draw conclusions for why they are in decline. Before you do that, though, I think it’s good to remember that GM was once a very successful company. When you experience success, it’s tough to let go. You want to control the formula because it works. You are reticent to try new approaches. The only problem is that eventually the world around us is going to change.
In His Grip,
Pastor J

~Going Deeper~ Part 4

Your Structure Inhibits Growth!

It’s easy to get caught in the trap when your organizational structure and internal processes haven’t evolved and are largely the same as they were three or five years ago. Or sometimes you get stuck when your internal processes are too confusing to navigate and stifle new ideas rather than spur innovation.
One of my favorite blogs to monitor is Accidental Creative. Todd Henry wrote a brilliant article about the danger of implementing permanent solutions to temporary problems. This quote grabbed my attention:
The more structures we have to navigate in order to do our work, the more difficult it is to do our best work. When we are required to resolve the dissonance of complex systems, reporting relationships, and accountability structures just in order to get our objectives and check off our direction, we will begin to lose our drive to do brilliant work. Over time, this complexity only pulls entire organizations toward systematic mediocrity.
One of the attributes of a church in decline is a complex structure. The natural tendency of organizations is to add complexity to their structure and systems. The longer an organization exists, the more complex it typically gets. (Think government, big business, denominations . . . and older churches.)
One of the reasons I think new church plants are so effective reaching new people is because they are typically very lean. The structure is simple. The ministry strategy is very focused. The mission is clear. Then, as the church ages, the ministry strategy gets more complex as multiple new programs and events get layered on. Eventually growth slows or plateaus as the complexity increases. Ironically, then, our solution, oftentimes, is to create new structure or systems or rules to fix the problem.
• If there’s a problem, our natural tendency is never to do less—we always try something new.
• If there’s a problem, our natural tendency is to increase controls—we think people are the problem, and we implement rules and policies to make sure they get it right.
• What if the solution to the problem is fewer controls? What if the fix is less complexity?
Are you willing to get focused and lean again? Are you willing to attack complex structure and rules?

Hummmmm... Thinking....
In His Grip,
Pastor J

~Going Deeper~ Part 3

You Blame Outsiders and External Factors
We live in a culture where no one is responsible for anything that happens to them. If you don’t believe me, invest a couple of hours watching one of the multitude of judge shows on television.
It’s amazing that people instigate litigation as a result of something that happened because of a decision they made. On television, blaming others is entertainment. In the church, it’s tragedy.
There is a tendency among church leaders to blame their ineffectiveness on the changing community, the struggling economy, or the big church that obviously watered down its message in order to reach people who are interested only in being entertained. Staff meetings must look a lot like the talks that take place every fall in the locker room of the Chicago Cubs: "This was going to be our year, but the other teams got hot, our star player got hurt, and the wind was blowing in more than out." Maybe it’s time to man-up and say, "We didn’t get the job done, and we’ve got to figure out a new approach."
I’m amazed at the "new" ideas that come from some Christian organizations that experienced their best years in the ’60s and ’70s. If you look closely, those new ideas look a lot like old ideas with new packaging. They are hoping to recapture their past glory by repositioning their past products. Good luck with that!
The problem, according to the organization’s leaders, is the increase in competition. In other words, if people didn’t have so many options, they’d be perfectly fine buying subpar products. Victims, huh?
Victim-thinking will only lead to bitterness and competition. Leaders who blame outsiders and external factors actually are confessing their own failure to think creatively and inspire their team. Churches in their leisure suits are victims of the changing taste in clothing. When the world returns to thinking the way they thought forty years ago, they’ll be dressed for success. Until then, they’ll look sadly out of place!

What a great point today!
In His Grip,
Pastor J