Scope Your Mission

Use your Mission Telescope, Periscope, and Microscope.

Your team needs a clear scope. The scope of a team is what the team sees, what it is focused on, the object of its work. Scope is the lens that sharpens the focus on mission and context. When a team has a clear scope it experiences energy and a sense of satisfaction as it achieves its mission.

A team can be in a presbytery or mid council whose mission is to resource the worship, witness, and mission of congregations. Or, your team could be at work, in school, or simply be your family. Whatever your team, it requires a shared clarity and focus to achieve success. Like a magnifying glass focuses the sunlight's energy into a powerful beam, clarity makes for better decisions and confidence in aligning the priorities, process, and resources to achieve the team's vision.

How does your team see the convergence of mission and context? What does your team focus on? Does your team sometimes appear to be little more than a collection of individuals sitting around the table focused on their own needs? When the team seems preoccupied with itself, staring inward, more effective lenses are substituted for mirrors, as if each member reflects back only what is sitting across the table. Mirrors are not lenses.

The uniqueness of each individuals' gifts, ideas, experiences, skills, and competencies are honored and optimized when the team has a clear scope. Let's look at three scopes your team can use to be more effective.

Mission Telescope: A telescope allows the viewer to observe an object from a great distance away. In our work, we often view  congregations with a telescope, from a distance. We can learn a lot at this distance because we can zoom in and out to be attentive to a church's activity and energy. Often the church cannot see themselves as clearly as others can using the mission telescope. For the team, the telescope removes local distractions so the object stays in view. We can also choose to view the church's immediate context, take look across the street from the church, for example, look around and gain a better understanding of church and community intersections. When we share our discoveries with the church's team, they gain a bigger perspective, too. The mission telescope brings activities of the church into view.

Mission Periscope: A periscope lets the observer view the object around obstacles and barriers. In mission work, we can see the church's effects and outcomes in the community. The mission periscope allows us to celebrate a church's positive contributions to the community. What is the community engagement? Since the periscope allows us to see around barriers that can inhibit the church's own view, we can offer guidance that increases the impact of the congregation's ministry in the world. The periscope can provide important insight into the jobs to be done in the community, offing connecting points to a healthy church. The mission periscope lets us see the context, even around the corners and brings the impact of the church into view.

Mission Microscope: A microscope allows the observer to view an object up close, and under the surface. Zooming in on a congregation's mission with a microscope helps to understand the church's spiritual DNA, its core values, the fears and driving forces that influence the congregation's ministries of worship, witness, and mission. What to gain insight into framing your congregation's signature ministry? Then you'll want to resonate with the spiritual assets that can be identified with the mission microscope. The microscope also helps identify damaging or impaired behaviors within the church's leadership that without a deep look remain hidden. Does the congregation demonstrate an authentic sense of community in its processes and in the way it allocates resources? The microscope can help encourage higher levels of functioning. Congregations benefit when relevant and reliable data is available to think more deeply about what God has called them to do. The mission microscope lets us see within the congregation and bring the church's health and wellness into view.

What lenses do you use in your work?

What new "scopes" should be employed? (I wonder if a radio scope, or an oscilloscope analogy could be useful in understanding our data inputs for mission?)

Are you ensuring that your team's scopes are working optimally?

How can we attain a more complete view that would lead to greater congregational wellness and effectiveness?

How will you use your telescope, periscope, and microscope to scope your work?

Scope your work. You will be energized by what you see. 

Getting Unstuck, Mission Ahead

Getting Unstuck

A colleague recently posted a great question to our community of mid council leaders:

Who/What is helping your congregations get unstuck from the closure vs. merger trap, and move into better questions about faithful congregational ministry?

No one likes to be stuck. Without hope. Without options. If true, likely you're without a mission.

How does your church or your leadership team get un-stuck? As congregations try live into God's preferred future, they can sometimes get stuck with a two-option future: close or merge. The two-option future is a trap based on an experience of God as not a God of scarcity, not of creative abundance. Let's think more deply and explore how to get unstuck.

Congregations are not victims to their future or their past. Neither need they be victims stumbling into their future! There is a present-tense of hope which is a choice available to all of us in God's emerging future. When a congregation is traumatized (for example) by their lack of energy and ministry satisfaction, there are many options ahead.

Symptoms resulting from a lack of mission focus include decline, unhealthy systems, ineffective ministries, inwardly focused leaders, and depleted resources. They can still choose a better path forward when they realize that congregations, worshipping-witnessing communities, are not isolated systems, even if they think they are. Sadly, at times they prefer to be. Congregations have a context: the community. A place on the planet they are geolocated. Once re-engaged, new possibilities can emerge.

I invest a lot of energy in conversations with sessions to frame alternate questions. For example, instead of the familiar presenting question: "What is our church to do?", I invite them to explore two more useful questions, "What life-giving energy has our church experienced?" and "What is our church context?" When they are given permission to rediscover their original charter, their purpose, and then celebrate what has brought them to "here and now" they can imagine "doing again" the good they did. In conversations, we understand that people just like them have invested spiritual and monetary equity in them. They are not alone.

When a session/congregation seems to have "ended up" at that awful stuck place of "close or merge," there still remains a unique opportunity to redeploy their assets to bless others. I recommend a process such as the excellent New Beginnings assessment. Almost any church can stop behaving like a victim and instead choose a different future. Of course, dissolving and merging are two of the many options to explore, but through the New Beginnings process, they realize every choice is a "best" one for them right now.

You can't have healthy congregational transformation without effective community engagement.

I have found that almost every session with whom I have worked welcomes a process of hopefulness as they rediscover they have something to give to others. Even if that "gift" is expressed in a merger, or dissolution, or any one of a dozen other outcomes, the key is that they are empowered self-identify that special "something," then collaborating with the regional council and others in the community, they can effectively redirect their resources outward.

Outward focus is an antidote for being stuck.

A revolutionary practice of reciprocity has stimulated congregation and community transformation. (See the model I developed under the Reciprocity In Action tab.)

Stop where you are and consider you place, the inner and outer place you inhabit, individually and organizationaly. To get unstuck, you have to get clear about your mission, and a God of abundance offer many options on the road ahead.

Happy Birthday! (Whatever day that is, build a great one!)

Birthdays can be pretty awesome. Growing up, I really enjoyed knowing of others who were born on my day. My favorite birthday partner was Benjamin Franklin, born January 17, 1709. Who couldn’t like Benjamin Franklin? What a great thinker, adventurer, inventor, and world changer. His life wasn’t perfect by any means, but his accomplishments as a writer and a revolutionary remain a persistent inspiration to me.

Ben, as I refer to him (as in What would Ben do?), added a lot of meaning to my birthday. As I grew older, my birthday became a time to reflect on my own life, not only others with whom I shared a special day. My birthday wasmy New Year’s Day, an auspicious day like no other.

On Benjamin Franklin’s 300th Birthday Celebration in 2006, my wife, Dr. Melissa Arnott,  surprised me with a birthday trip by taking me to the Franklin exposition that just opened at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. You can imagine how thrilled I was to visit exhibit after exhibit exploring the attributes and contributions of my birthday partner. All that came to an abrupt halt when in a corner, a small, poorly lit plaque explained that Franklin’s birthday was not January 17, but in fact, I learned that Ben’s birthday was actually January 6th! What, I gasped! How could I have missed that fact? As a student of history, how did I get that date wrong. Upon further research, I learned something even more remarkable about Ben than his date of birth.

It seems that Benjamin Franklin was born during the time when standardizations regarding calendars were in flux. In the 18th century, most of the world since 45 C.E. used the Julian Calendar which was replaced with the radically different Gregorian Calendar. The Julian Calendar also moved the beginning of the year from March 1 to January 1. Crazy.

When Pope Gregory XIII decreed the calendar fix, not everyone embraced the change. In fact, Great Britain was (naturally) not a fan of the Roman Catholic Church and many in England protested the calendar change. For those born in that vortex, they lost 11 days of their lives (See calendar image)! September 3 instantly became September 14 and, “as a result, nothing whatsoever happened in British history between 3 and 13 September 1752.” The British Calendar Act of 1751 proclaimed that in Britain (and American Colonies) Thursday September 3, 1752 should become Thursday September 14, 1752. According to Slate, Franklin embraced the change while others in England and America were a bit upset. Many people believed their lives would be shortened. They protested in the streets, demanding “Give us our eleven days!”

Artist William Hogarth, ca. 1755; captured the sentiment in a painting titled: “An Election Entertainment” (See my call-out in the photo showing "Give us our Eleven Days" protest slogan against the Gregorian calendar at lower right, on black banner on floor under foot). While anxiety ensued, Ben offered a more optimistic, if not effective, approach to calendar shifts and changes in general. The most complete reference to Ben’s advice from in his Poor Richard’s Almanack was found in the English Forums which included this quotation:

“Be not astonished, nor look with scorn, dear reader, at such a deduction of days, nor regret as for the loss of so much time, but take this for your consolation, that your expenses will appear lighter and your mind be more at ease. And what an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow to lie down in Peace on the second of this month and not perhaps awake till the morning of the fourteenth.”
(From Benjamin Franklin’s Almanack, quoted by Cowan, 29; Irwin, 98) Cowan, H.C., Time and Its Measurement, World Publishing Company, New York, 1958. Irwin, Keith G. The 365 Days - The Story of Our Calendar, 1964. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, NY.)

Ben was born on January 6th, not my birthday, but when he was confronted with new data, he did not argue with the information, but instead internalized the contextual changes in his life. When asked when his birthday was, he would have replied, January 17th, because Ben got it. He understood that the birthday change did not change his life. Its just a day on a different calendar.

Like Ben, change occurs in every part of our lives; our bodies, mind, and spirt. Change affects our families, our communities, congregations, and our world. Many of us try to resist change, like the British protesters did in 1752 (depicted in William Hogarth’s painting, above). We hold fast to the familiar instead of embracing God’s emerging future which by definition is always, de facto, change. The future is that time that is “going to be” what’s next.

We ask questions that are often a way to deflect the reality of the change by debating the change observed, such as, "Was the Julian to Gregorian calendar shift a good change or a bad change?" Or, we describe our neighborhoods that change, calling them the "badlands," or we disparage change that appears to take away our comfort, convenience, or preference. "The pastor keeps changing things." What's worse, those of us in a community of faith often mistakenly equate God's changeless attributes as justifying a rigidity in our mission and our methodologies that soon become anachronisms, testimonies of irrelevant mission, and our churches become institutions, then museums, and finally, monuments. Even monuments change and crumble to dust. Life changes. Mission must adapt and our messaging and practices must be more agile to actually be more faithful.

Change is not a problem to be solved. Change is a delta, the difference between two or more events in a different space-time relationship. Change is. It is not good or bad. Even though Ben's birthday shifted on a piece of paper, he didn't loose one second of his life of learning, discovery, invention, and engagement! To Ben, he had two birthdays. No matter what your date of birth, (maybe you have multiple auspicious days, too); you are God's gift of enormous value offered to the world. Be that gift.

Let every new year find you a better person (Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, # 321)

I think Ben is an even more amazing birthday partner than I first imagined, no matter the date. You can’t get what was back again, but what’s ahead, that’s your's to gain. No wishes, but your's to make. Birthdays are awesome, no matter when they occur. Build a great one. That's what Ben would do.