In the Coracle

Strategic Planning for Missional Churches

January 5, 2006 // Tags: Church Planting, Leadership, Rockefeller Habits, Strategic Planning, Strategic Planning Series, Uncategorized

This is part 1 in the Strategic Planning for Missional Churches series

I wrote a quick blog entry two months ago now that announced that I’d been able to take a very interesting job with Quardev Laboratories, who provides software testing and user education services to software companies. I love the company and am having a great time assimilating and running a project as a senior test lead.

I was honored to be invited to join my company’s executive team this week for a 2-day seminar entitled Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. The seminar is led by Gazelles, Inc., which does executive planning with mid-sized, fast-growth firms. The seminar walked us through a strategic planning and communication system based on John D. Rockefeller’s business habits, and follows closely the book of the same name by Gazelles founder Verne Harnish.

This was a fantastic opportunity for me - both in terms of career opportunity with the new company and the invitation to help shape corporate strategy, but also for me to glean what I could about strategic planning and communication for our church re-start. I truly believe that this was orchestrated by the Spirit of God as a blesssing and invitation to me. I’m also seeing the hand of God at work in conversations and relationships that I am forming in the company, and it’s a welcome to see how God is at work in the company, and to see how I can join the missio Dei.

But as this blog focuses on the church, and leading a missional community, I think we can get some mileage out of many of these topics in the Kingdom realm as well.

I should say now also that I’m still committed to leading a community of faith through a model that is emphatically not the corporate, CEO-driven style. I believe a church could be run this way, focusing on market share and sales techniques and leader-inspired vision. In fact, many churches in the last century were lead this way; many continue to be. I also don’t think it’s the best model for church leadership; I don’t see Jesus as a CEO but as a foot-washer and cross-carrier.

So I find myself in two worlds - seeing this tool set as incredibly helpful for the corporate world; and seeing the tool set also as translatable, with a good deal of effort and systematic prayer and contextualization, into the world of Kingdom leadership.

Inspired by Scot McKnight’s frequent and fruitful use of the series approach to blogging, I’d like to pass along some of the training from this seminar, and comment about some of my contextualization of this strategy for the missional church.

This series will touch on these topics, at least.