Recently, I've been thinking a lot about vision. It seems as though I've been hearing about it from everyone - the folks at school, the folks at church, our staff here, in the books I've been reading, and so on. I've always been a big proponent of a vision, especially for a church. God has a plan and a design for every church, and it's up to the leadership to get alone with him and determine what it is. At BridgeWay, the vision is "to connect people to God, each other, and His plan for their lives."
Over the past few months, God has blessed this church with great growth. In September BridgeWay had 160 attenders every Sunday (average). In April, we had 270 attenders average weekly. It's pretty awesome when you think about it. God's incredible! Along with that though, there becomes this reaction from leadership and the congregation to begin adding ministries. "We need to do a ministry that does ______________" or "there's a lot of people who want to do _____________." Usually the suggestions are good things that come out of the hearts of good people. But the bottom line is we can't do everything. A church is like any organization; it has limited time, resources, money, and people. We can't do everything people suggest.
So how do we determine what to do? In thinking about this dilemma, I came up with a document that should help as a filter in this arena. It's nothing really impressive, it's just putting all of the things we talk about as a staff down on paper. Here it is:
BridgeWay Preliminary Objective Rubric
Level I
1. Does this line up with our mission?
a. BridgeWay Community Church exists to connect people to God, each other, and God's
plan for their lives.
2. Does this line up with the culture we are in?
a. Acts 17
b. Is this going to be culturally relevant?
3. Does this line up with the culture of BridgeWay?
a. “A church for people who don’t like church.”
b. Is this going to keep us on the cutting edge of 2008?
4. Is this going to keep us faithful and effective to the mission God has called us to?
a. Faithful – staying true to whom God has called us to be while reaching lost people for
Christ.
b. Effective – using the limited money, time, people, and resources that God has
entrusted us with in the best way possible.
c. The question is not “Is this a good use of our _______?” The question is, “Is this
the best use of our ________________?”
Level II
1. What is the win (desired outcome)?
2. Is this a logical next step for people? How?
3. Is in line with keeping a narrowed focus? How?
4. Does this help us teach less for more? How?
5. Does this help us listen to those we are trying to reach and reach them more effectively? How?
6. Will this help increase (eventually or immediately) our volunteer base? How?
7. Will this help us to improve how we do things at BridgeWay? Will BridgeWay be a better place because of this undertaking?
I'll expand on it in future posts. The first level is the "will this think fly here" level. Level 2 is based on "The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry" by Andy Stanley, Lane Jones, and Reggie Joiner. (p.s. PHENOMENAL READ!)
As always, all comments/suggestions are appreciated.
Yeah I have a suggestion for you, you need to change the title. "BridgeWay Preliminary Objective Rubric" I mean come on. What does that mean!? Are you getting your Master's Degree in Strategic Communication and Leadership from Seton Hall University or something? You need an easier to understand title for us less educated folks.
But seriously have you run all of your current ministries through this rubric's cube. Did you have any that did not fit the cube and did you stop doing that ministry?
Yeah, it's a rough draft so we haven't gone through it yet with everything we're doing. Right now we are really pretty streamlined so the idea is to stay that way. Rubric is a cool word.