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Demonstration Presentation

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Why Strategic Planning? Overcoming Fright and Flight
By Dr. Friedrich

I have created this description for two purposes:
1. Churches need to plan for the future before the future happens to them.
2. Strategic planning can be accessible to just about any congregation - or, for that matter, any cluster, deanery, or judicatory.

1. At the beginning of the new century we are witnessing whole denominations in fright and flight. Judicatories (Presbyteries, Dioceses, Conferences, etc.) are retrenching and even closing church doors. Why? Simple economics. The same way I would have to move out of an apartment too expensive for my budget, hierarchies are finding their constituents increasingly holding back on their giving to the larger church because those constituent congregations are feeling the money squeeze themselves.

Sadly, it's become a more serious problem. I think it's essentially spiritual. Again and again I consult with parishes who remember when: the Sunday School was so full they had to use the pews to fit all those kids; young people crowded youth groups; adults filled the pews; choirs were large and the singing was good. "When was all this?" I always ask. The always answer is the 1950's. "When did it begin to decline?" Inevitably the second half of the 1960's.

Over and over, the same refrain. Why? Cultural shifts were occurring in North American culture that had a profound effect on churches. When service personnel came back from the war, they produced "the Baby Boom." They built suburbs. There is no surprise that churches swelled, and new ones proliferated in the new communities.

Why the decline in the latter 1960's (certainly by the 1970's)? The boomers had moved through school and out, political life seemed to be falling apart - an unpopular war, assassinations, demonstrations, riots. Without commenting at all on whether this was good or bad (I personally think the civil rights movement was a needed shift in our civilization), the effect was almost universal - a reversal of the upward trend that preceded it.

Similarly, cultural movements are stamping us now. Why are we always surprised to find ourselves, our churches, our larger church bodies, in a new place? Perhaps we didn't forecast and plan.

We will come back to this because the tools we need are available to us right now.

2. Planning with strategy - Strategic Planning - is not the province of business and government alone. Churches can use the same kinds of technique - and have the added advantage of prayer!

Strategic Planning is not an exotic and complicated exercise that only the largest congregations or judicatories - with budgets able to bring in "experts" - can employ. This is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

The Ekklesia Institute has for several years provided training and consulting services to churches and judicatories. We have helped many a congregation to birth a strategic plan.

I am making available the tools I use with church groups so that "anyone can do it." A church with a Sunday attendance of 25 can profitably use this. So can a corporate church with 3 services and hundreds in attendance. And, with little adaptation, so can a judicatory.

Unique - this process is congregation-based and God-based.

The point is, do it, before "it" gets done to you. Congregations are either pro- active or reactive. They either plan their future - prayerfully - or their future comes up and overtakes them!

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