How to Get Your Church Campaign to GO!
8 Steps to Realizing Your Mission
Before thinking about the next step for your congregation, you must be working on member ownership and responsibility for the ministry, creating or encouraging a discipleship culture, developing a transparent and open leadership style, and as part of discipleship, sharing an understanding of financial stewardship.
Now, you're ready to start the process of executing a visionary plan of ministry. A Spirit-led process of visioning requires more than a simple blog can do adequately. The vision will determine what you discern your community to look like in the future. Your mission will determine what steps you take to live into that vision.
These 8 steps deal with adapting what and how you "do" ministry within the resources you have to work with:
1. Listen, listen, and listen
It bears repeating - listen to members and leaders about current and future ministry dreams. Listening may be a simple act of everyday interaction, but a disciplined process is best to be sure all voices get heard.
2. Create a tangible vision
Distill the voices into a vision for ministry. These voices must eventually be articulated and turned into a tangible vision for the future of your congregation.
3. Listen again
Listen as the voices respond to the vision and adjust if it is evident that it does not take members where they are willing to go.
4. Assess your resources
Knowing form (building structure) follows function (ministry), assess what resources you have, and how they must be modified to facilitate the new direction of your vision. Create a concept drawing of the new form your facilities must take to carry out the vision.
5. Share the vision
Share and listen as members view the concept and hear the vision. Modify if necessary.
6. Make progress
Keep moving - some dissenting voices invariably are heard. Don't allow a few to become an obstacle to the many.
7. Decide if you're ready
Assess the members' capability to fund the plan and begin to set member giving expectations necessary to achieve the goal. This may be a time for a consultant to lead a Readiness Study to make this a formal process, which will give leadership a more secure handle of whether members accept the plan and funding necessary.
8. Construct a Campaign Plan
Set the giving expectations, an achievable/challenging goal, create a communication plan, recruit leadership, coach leaders and workers of the campaign, execute your plan and prepare for living into your vision.
