In A World Full of Churches, Why Did You Start Yours?
You didn’t start a church just to keep it afloat. And yet, sadly, we seem to be inundated with churches whose sole objective is to stay alive and grow. It sounds like mission, but is it really? I have a hunch that you weren’t called to start a church just so that you could have a church to run, so you could keep the lights on and keep people in chairs. My guess is that you felt called to start a church because you prayerfully discerned God’s call to join Jesus’ redemptive mission of transforming your neighborhood and world.
No matter the intentions of any church starter, over time the missional impulses that provided inspiration to form the church begin to get overshadowed by the many other complications of leadership. Pretty soon, the missional center of the church is lost.
Churches that begin to lose a sense of their mission begin to fuss over external metrics like attendance, budget and programs. They can tell something is off, but without a clear sense of mission, they try to stabilize by making the business of the church more about keeping people in the church. They offer more conveniences, they switch gathering times or spaces to try to accommodate people’s schedules, and they begin to restrict their finances to things that have immediate return for the church itself.
Meanwhile, leadership begins to get stressed because fewer people are volunteering and showing up. Fewer people are offering their gifts or inviting neighbors. The missional heart of the church has begun to disappear; leadership can feel it, even if they don’t know exactly how to respond.
Core Values of Faithful Innovation
Cyclical INC is a network of hundreds of faithful innovators who are starting and leading new churches around the world. We’ve noticed that common to all of them is a deep identification with God’s mission. It’s one of the reasons why Cyclical INC’s WHY statement is: We believe in God’s love for the world, inspiring faithful innovation through the church. Faithful innovators believe in God’s love for the world, the heartbeat of mission. While we’ve developed a total of twelve core values that parse out what how we live out our WHY statement, the following four core values describe what we mean when we say faithful innovators identify with God’s mission:
- Generativity: Faithful innovators understand that they are part of a long heritage of saints God has called into mission. They are not the first to try something new, and they won’t be the last. Healthy churches send and empower some of their people to start new churches. Healthy non-profits send and empower people to start new non-profits. For faithful innovators, this is the normal, historical, Spirit-filled tradition of the church that we carry on into the future, courageously initiating new faithful innovations out of existing innovations.
- Contextual Leadership: As they begin sensing God’s call to start something new, faithful innovators begin discovering and discipling a team of people that together are called to bear witness to God’s love in a particular place. They do not recruit volunteers, but active participants who are willing to develop their gifts and offer them to the emerging community. Faithful innovators always prioritize and invest in their leadership team, cultivating a decentralized, Spirit-led, and load-bearing culture. In doing so, the team begins living out God’s mission long before they “launch” the new church.
- Diversity: Certainly, diversity must mean more than choosing “one of each kind” for the church website. True diversity leads to the best innovation—wide-ranging relationships that value and empower the community to bring their unique experiences, questions, gifts, and resources to the table. Faithful innovators don’t filter for similarity but courageously build diverse relational ecosystems that reflect God’s purpose and foretaste of the coming, fully realized Kingdom.
- Hopeful Transformation: Faithful innovators do not set out to create new social clubs, become leaders of a movement, or generate an income from a promising community niche. Faithful innovators partner with God and others to transform their corner of the world so it is more like the New Creation God is inaugurating through Jesus. At the same time, they understand that God is already active in the lives of their neighbors, and they subject their models, methods and preconceptions to the movement of the Holy Spirit. They discern what God is doing and they join in for the prospect of hopeful transformation.
To learn more about these values, and the rest of our Cyclical INC core values, take the Leadership Assessment for Faithful Innovators (LAFI), through which you’ll get a copy of your results as well as an eBook that walks you through some specific questions to help you develop all 12 core values.
Both the LAFI assessment and eBook will help you gain insight into your unique strengths and weaknesses as a leadership team, avoid the most common pitfalls to starting up faith communities and organizations, and create a framework for how to continue to grow as a leader of a new faith community.
Once you’ve taken the assessment, we invite you to schedule a 15-minute coaching session with us—getting an outside perspective can be really valuable in refocusing your sense of mission. We’d love to hear from you and see how we can partner with you in your faithful innovation.
Reflecting on Mission
If you’ve experienced mission drift, don’t beat yourself up! All faithful innovators live in the tension between vision/mission and the practicalities of leading a new worshiping community. It’s not too late to remind yourself of your “why.” Consider the following questions around the mission of your faithful innovation:
- What is it about God’s mission that threatens the status quo of your church? What do you stand to lose and gain when God’s mission is central to your leadership?
- Of the four signs of strong mission, which one is most evident in your leadership?
- Which is least evident?
- What aspect of joining God’s mission in your context gets you most excited?
