2nd Opinion: Is your church fragile or agile?

image_pdfimage_print

One of the most excruciating congregational projects I’ve experienced was a strategy-planning process at a church where I served on staff early in my ministry. 

Over the course of 18 months, I watched as a star-studded leadership group slogged through an onerous process of establishing a mission statement, core values, objectives and action plans. By the end of the odyssey, nearly all the committee members were exhausted, and the 60-page detailed plan promptly was set aside and ignored. 

bill wilson130Bill WilsonI vowed never to inflict that sort of pain upon a congregation. Over the ensuing years, I have enjoyed leading three congregations I pastored through a future–visioning process that emphasized speed and nimbleness over rigid and inflexible models. Now, with the Center for Healthy Churches, we continue to lean into helping congregations plan and envision their future in ever-more efficient ways.

One of the key learnings across many such experiences is the need to focus first upon the “why” of a congregation and its broad direction, and then upon the specific “hows and whats” that will define the congregation or the ministry. We often produce a rather lean final document that emphasizes direction and leaves much of the implementation details for future teams to decide.

In a recent meeting with an insightful lay-leadership group, I learned this movement principle has a name and is quite prevalent in project management circles. Organizational project management is a complex field of study and theory vital to computer software development, especially.

Agile Project Management

The phrase that caught my ear was Agile Project Management. Agile management is an incremental approach to planning. An agile project is completed in small sections called iterations. Each iteration is reviewed and critiqued by the project team, and insights gained from the critique of an iteration are used to determine the project’s next step.

The main benefit of Agile Project Management is its ability to respond to issues as they arise throughout the project. Making a necessary change to a project at the right time can save resources and, ultimately, help deliver a successful project on time and within budget. One of the four core values of Agile Project Management is “responding to change over following a plan.” That agility is what is desperately needed in congregational life.

What further caught my eye were the “12 Agile Principles” from the “Agile Manifesto.” Principles 10-12 seem especially relevant for churches trying to create a new and more relevant future:


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.

11. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

As I have reflected on these principles and models, I have been struck by how the leadership of Jesus and the launch of the early church align with such ideas. Simple, gifts-based and constantly improving processes have marked the church from the beginning. Knowing what was most important allowed Jesus, the disciples and the first missionaries to say no to many good things of secondary importance. Their ability to respond to opportunities and challenges in a shifting cultural landscape has something important to say to us.

Healthy church visioning processes begin with a compass and not a calendar. The most important work a church does as it launches into the future is to clarify why it exists and what direction God is calling it. Answering those questions may sound easy, but it is challenging for most churches. Too often, it is a perfunctory conversation dominated by platitudes 

Wise leaders give thoughtful consideration to such questions, as Jesus did, before launching out into the specifics of implementation.

In the end, the best plans are lean, simple and assume much of the work of specific ministries and initiatives will be revealed along the way. That agility is at the heart of relevance and nimbleness for churches in the 21st century.

Reading the story of how the early church in Acts navigated an uncertain future is a classic case study in agility planning. I am struck by how far we have wandered from that ideal. Rather than being agile and responsive, we too often are fragile and rigid. Perhaps we can learn from computer software planners how to be more like Jesus in our view of the future.

Bill Wilson is executive director of the Center for Healthy Churches


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard