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Newsletter — August 2018

Systems Excellence

Dale Spaulding, Director, Passion for PlantingWith the NFL season less than a month away, every team is hard at work preparing to engage in battle on the gridiron. Teams are running sprints, studying playbooks (systems), scrimmaging other teams, all with their sights set on the Super Bowl. While talent plays a factor in a team’s success, a bigger contributing factor is their ability to work together as one cohesive unit.

Similarly local churches need systems that help believers work together to succeed in their mission of making disciples. This is one reason why Paul describes the church as a ‘body’.  When churches don’t have efficient systems in place that help believers work together, they compromise their ability to accomplish their mission.

With the NFL season just around the corner, perhaps we can take a lesson from a league that attracts thousands of ‘worshippers’ every Sunday. That is developing healthy systems that equip and free people within the church to make disciple makers. To learn more about these systems, and gather some free resources to help you design them, keep reading. Then get to work!

-Dale Spaulding, Director

August 2018 – Contents

  • Characteristics of Healthy Systems
  • Launch Sunday Checklist
  • Maximize Your Church Systems
  • Leadership Matrix Template
  • Exponential SoCal

Characteristics of Healthy Systems

Does the word healthy describe the systems that exist within your church? Do you know what characterizes a healthy system? Knowing what a healthy system looks like is important because healthy churches have healthy systems – just like healthy systems help human bodies function properly.  Why settle for systems within your church that yield less than desirable results?

When Toyota was on the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-20th century, management consultant W. Edwards Deming examined the company’s operations and told its leaders, “Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results it gets.” Could the same be said of your church?

What results are the systems within your church designed to achieve? Are they healthy and designed to produce fruit? Read 8 Characteristics of Healthy Church Systems by Tony Morgan from The Unstuck Group to find out more.

Launch Sunday Checklist

One system that pretty much every church has is a weekend worship experience. The Apostle Paul describes this system in 1 Corinthians 14 explaining how it should function “in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Cor. 14:40). While more established churches are typically set in their ways about how this system works, new churches have both the challenge and the opportunity to shape this system from scratch.

When designing worship experience systems, most new churches not only have to account for what happens during the worship time, but also what goes into creating an environment that’s conducive to that experience since most new churches meet in rented facilities. They don’t have the luxury of showing up at a building that’s ready to accommodate their worship gathering. They have to prepare that space every week. This requires more systems that manage the variables of setting up and tearing down portable church worship gatherings.

To mitigate that stress we’ve developed this free Launch Sunday Checklist to help portable churches develop and execute their worship experience system and make sure every part is present, in place, and accomplishing its purpose.

 

Maximize Your Church Systems

All this talk about church systems may have you confused. Maybe you’ve never used the word ‘system’ and church in the same sentence before. Perhaps church systems may seem unbiblical or just sound like a lot of unnecessary work. However, whether you can identify them or not, your church has systems. You’ve just never seen them as such. Just like we’re oftentimes oblivious to our body’s cardiovascular system that’s pumping blood to and from your heart, we’re oftentimes unaware of the systems that run our churches.

While this obliviousness might not seem like a bad thing, if you aren’t aware of the systems that exist within your church, you won’t be able to evaluate and improve them. According to Nelson Searcy, most churches, old and new, have 8 common systems. What are they? Read Nelson’s Maximize Your 8 Church Systems for a Healthier Church This Year to learn what they are and then seek to fine-tune them.

Leadership Matrix

One thing that every church system needs in order to operate effectively is people. Knowing the essential nature of people to healthy church systems, we’ve designed a Leadership Matrix template to help churches organize their people into cohesive ministry teams.

One of your roles as a church leader to help people find a place to serve the Lord and his church. This Leadership Matrix will help you from several different angles. For starters, it will help you see how many people you’ll need serving on a specific ministry team in order to execute their system. Secondly, it outlines the places and positions where people are needed to use their gifts and pursue the church’s vision together. Lastly, it will help ministry teams, and the individuals within, see how they fit within the overall system.

Download your free Leadership Matrix today!

Exponential SoCal

Has all this talk about church system got you feeling defeated? Could you use some inspiration and time rubbing shoulders with your fellow church leaders? Perhaps, leaders a little further down the road than you are when it comes to developing and implementing efficient systems? If so, consider attending Exponential Southern California or one of the Exponential regional events.

There you’ll have the opportunity to learn from national church leaders like Larry Osborne, Dave Ferguson, Ryan Kwon, and several more. Plus, when you register for the Southern California conference, you get free access to our Passion for Planting Equipping Lab which will highlight many essential ingredients to the systems that lead to the launch of a healthy new church.

Hope to see you there!

Photos by Denys Nevozhai, Glenn Caresten Peters, Daria Nepriakhina, and @rawpixel from Unsplash