I was inspired by Craig Groeschel‘s post, The Death of the Five-Year Plan.
“Instead of planning for specific buildings, campuses, staff roles, and outreach, I’m planning to be prepared for opportunities that I can’t name today. We are creating margin and planning to respond quickly to ideas that we don’t yet have.
Speed, agility, flexibility, and financial margin are far better than a detailed road map.”
This is a great articulation of what I believe will be most helpful both at Resurrection Online and at any of the churches that I will serve in the future. It is not helpful to become captive to a vision of the future that includes tangible specifics more than five away. So are you ready for it?
Here is Resurrection’s Online five year plan:
- Build a Christian community where non religious and nominally religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians.
- Share the gospel of Jesus Christ using the latest technology and tools that are effective in connecting people.
Rev. Andrew Conard 
3 replies on “Resurrection Online’s Five Year Plan”
was suprised not to see more on your 5 year plan. Like ‘to provide a place where _______ can connect with one another’ ‘____________ place where others can serve in a communtiy through online actions. a place where important theological questions comments and concerns can be heard, viewed and discussed through online small groups ect.
Just some of my thoughts.
Thanks again for all your do and are doing!
Chris
Andrew,
I agree with the thought that you cannot be captive to a particular process/thought/concept/idea, especially with the change in technology today being what it is.
But how do you use the second step in your plan to make the first a reality? And I mean a reality? If we are talking about a virtual community, then the relationships and the nature of interaction between individuals are virtual. To me, the community that one builds must be a real one, with soil and flowers and water and all that encompasses the world around us as part of the community. To say that we can have a church that is totally on-line is to remove that which is the heart and soul of the community.
What I am afraid might happen is that there are too many people who thrive in a virtual community because they can create a false persona. How can you keep that from happening? Is the building of an on-line religious oriented community simply another marketing tool that takes away from the true meaning of the Gospel in order to bolster membership numbers?
Andrew,
Not to be a pain in the (insert favorite body part – hey, why did you go and get all nasty on me!), but what you have written isn’t really a plan. I would call that a mission statement. A plan should have goals that are measurable.
I think what Groeshel is going after is a real plan, but one that isn’t completely boxed in. For a church, that might mean having certain administrative and ministerial tasks defined, but work towards having 20% more manpower than those require. Similarly with financial goals. Include in your goals enough margin to be able to service new mission opportunities without breaking the people or budgets for existing opportunities.
I am reminded of a church I attended for a while which had recently completed a building campaign. However, they had no margin in the fund-raising. A good idea was proposed regarding linking the new building with the old via a breezeway (probably should have been included from the start, but that is not the point). The church leadership had to make a decision about whether or not to risk funding to their mission objectives by building the breezeway. Thankfully, just after they decided to build, they had an unexpected cash influx thanks to a new neighbor willing to pay for the ability to connect to their parking lot. It worked out in the end, but would have been less stressful had there been some budget margin.
Admittedly, I am not sure how this would apply to your Resurrection Online 5 year plan, but I am sure that you can come up with something!