The shift from planning to preparation

There have been several instances over the past month or so where I've been reminded of Reggie McNeal's idea of the need to shift from a planning mindset to a preparation mindset (in church leadership). So, I finally dug out his fantastic blue book, "The Present Future." A quick skim-through and I was immediately reminded of just how influential and important this book had been in my understanding of church/kingdom thinking.

I finally sat down and re-read chapter 5 ("New Reality Number Five"), and while I had already underlined and highlighted almost the entire thing, I found even more insights these sixteen years after first reading it! There is just SO MUCH in this one chapter alone!

I think I will start out trying to decipher by merely jotting down here everything that HE highlighted in the chapter. The gist is...

Wrong Question: How Do We Plan for the Future?
Tough Question: How Do We Prepare for the Future?

Here are some of the main points...

• Most of what has ultimate effect on the church happens outside of it and outside its control.
• Typical approaches to the future involve prediction and planning.
• The better (and biblical) approach to the future involves prayer and preparation, not prediction and planning.
• The Bible sounds a recurring theme: God wants his people to pray and to prepare for his intervention.
• Spiritual preparation has the goal of getting God's people in partnership with him in his redemptive mission in the world.
• The five elements of a spiritual preparation architecture are vision, values, results, strengths, and learnings.

VISION

• What does vision do for you?
• Vision informs your decision making
• Genuine vision engenders commitment
• Genuine vision creates meaning

• How do you cultivate vision? Vision is discovered, not invented.
• I am moving more and more to a position that the pastor does not necessarily even need to be the chief architect of the vision.
• In the emerging world people will increasingly demand intentionality in the organizations they belong to.

 VALUES

• Values are demonstrated by behavior
• Practicing kingdom values may mean adjusting the church calendar to give people more time to participate in community or workplace ministries.
• Effective congregations keep score and they play to win.
• I am convinced that the reason for much burnout, lack of commitment, and low performance in our churches among staff and members is directly related to the failure to declare the clear results we are after. We don't know when we are winning.
• The results you are looking for need to be informed by your vision and values.
• What gets rewarded gets done.
• The key is to reward the right behaviors so that you get the results you are looking for.
• Designing the ministry scorecard is going to become increasingly important as congregations move to embrace the future described in this book.

STRENGTHS

• ***Balance is a myth. I do not know a single balanced leader. In fact, leaders by definition are imbalanced people. They are "out of round" in the areas of their passion, their giftedness, and their vision.
• Your best shot at making your best contribution is for you to get better at what you are already good at.
• In American business we tend to hire people for their strengths and then beat them up for what they're not good at.
• Do you think people are fundamentally problems for God to fix or child-creations to celebrate?
• The perfectionism of the North American church rears its ugly head here. It not only militates against grace, it also makes it hard for pastors, staff, volunteer servants, and leaders even to admit to weaknesses, thereby making it harder to celebrate their unique strengths and contributions.
• Designing a strategy for preparing for the future based on the congregation's strengths also upholds for people the value of celebrating their own strengths.

LEARNINGS

• Just because we don't know how to do something doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do it.
• Church leaders must go to "school" all the time.
• Go where it's happening
• Get outside the box
• Don't pursue privatized learning
• Develop a chief learning officer
• Secure a learning coach for yourself 

Reggie ends with this:

"The future belongs to those who prepare for it, not those who plan for it... After all, Jesus taught us to pray, 'thy kingdom come.' That phrase is the fast-forward button in the Christian's prayer life. The kingdom is a future that is already present. Our mission is to introduce the kingdom into this world, with its preferred future for humanity."

There is so much good stuff in this chapter. The above doesn't even begin to touch all the things I underlined. Maybe I will add some more posts later. I need to re-read it a few more times...