Church Health: Doing Right Things, Doing Things Right

Monday, Feb. 1, 2010 Posted: 11:50:54AM HKT

Two critical processes determine church health: the strategic process, which focuses on defining the goals and purposes of a church, and the operational process, which focuses on developing the programs and procedures of a church. These processes are distinct yet interrelated.

Church strategy concerns such crucial matters as devising church outreach plans, developing ministries to meet congregational needs, determining budget priorities, and equipping lay leaders to carry out the church's mission.

Operations processes are needed to implement strategy, such as visitation programs, secretarial support, and formal and informal communications.

Strategy: Doing Right Things

The strategic process is the goal-determining process. To be effective, strategy must be:

- Christ centered. Goals must reflect God's will for the church.
- Clearly communicated. Goals must be visible to all in the church.
- Consistently constructed. Effective strategy must develop goals that are consistent with one another and appropriately prioritized.
- Consciously committed. Goals will be actively endorsed by church members only if they are personally relevant and participatively developed.

Operations: Doing Things Right

The operations process concerns goal implementation. The church engages in group and individual actions to generate and apply resources. Efficient operations should reflect several criteria:

- Quantity. Are enough time, effort, and resources being applied?
- Quality. Are the right actions being taken with a view to excellence?
- Timing. Are steps being taken when they should be, in the order they should be taken?
- Cost. Are resources being used at the planned rate and in reasonable proportion to anticipated results?
- Accountability. Are actions being taken by the right people?
- Feedback. Are the results of actions being collected, analyzed, and utilized to improve future performance?

Strategy and Operations: Four Positions

To simplify, we can relate strategy and operations on a grid:

For the sake of illustration, we have created four situations showing various combinations of strategic and operational strengths and weaknesses.

Position 1. This church exhibits both effective strategy and efficient operations. Simply put, the church knows what it wants to do and does it well.

Position 2. This church operates with great efficiency but lacks meaningful strategy. Such a church is not always easy to recognize because it is active and efficient. Committees meet, classes are held, budgets are developed, programs are implemented. But in some way the church has a problem with its sense of direction. Maybe its outreach effort is halting or rudderless, or considerable controversy surrounds budget priorities, or certain ministries undermine what other ministries are seeking to accomplish. To say that a church is strategically ineffective does not necessarily mean it is completely lacking a sense of direction. It may be that:

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Phil Van Auken & Sharon Johnson