When you hear the sucking sound…
How do you respond when you hear that sucking sound- the whistle of available resources starting to shrink or contract? It is a sound that a lot of non profits and ministries have been hearing these days. Its a function of the economy and sometimes it just plain hurts. It especially hurts when it begins to impact the people you rely on, and the plans that you have worked to develop. Our response during these times makes a difference in our mental and spiritual health and the future of our work. So what do we do?
I will try to avoid the usual platitudes as I make these suggestions, since it seems that shallow encouragement has the opposite effect.
Donors Expect us to Trim
It is a reasonable expectation from our donors and supporters. Responsible management should be expected to look for and trim waste–so do it and talk about it. Not in a way that makes you look like you were not at the steering wheel before, or that you had to down size from a caddy to a Volkswagen, but responsible management does what it needs to do when the economy shrinks.
Allow the pressure to drive you toward innovation.
When the going gets tough, the tough innovate. We take the things that we do have in our hands and we recombine them, refocus them. We might be stripped of the capacity for status quo– is that a bad thing? There is a lot of new opportunity out there for enterprising non-profits and ministries. Without giving up on your values and mission, you do need to explore new ways to get it done. Stay tuned here for some innovation ideas.
Allow the pressure to push you back to your core.
Donors and supporters all give to what matches their values. And while you might have many strengths, we only one one core of value. That is where we should live, but given the liberty to play–we often stray. Use this time to re-discover what is important to you.
Talk about the Vital Parts of Your Mission
The important thing that you do–that is what your donors care about. And they don’t want children to go hungry, youth to go to jail, elders to be without care, AIDs orphans to be left alone– get down to it. The parts of your work that you can honestly share as essential, share. The stats right now are not universally down– some groups are doing better, some are doing worse. Critical missions do matter.
<–Join a discussion about whether grants might be right for your organization on the schedule tab, July 15 at 5:00 p.m.
Three Reasons Churches are Forming Secondary Non-Profits
Is it ever appropriate to used bullet proof glass instead of the stained variety?
Lots of churches are considering the formation of a second non-profit for community purposes. While the various reasons cover lots of ground, I have found that they usually fall into one of three categores: Risk, Resources or Rapport. Lets explore these reasons to see where your church might fit:
1. Risk- some of the service activity that you provide is enough to make an insurance man’s hair stand on end. Skateboard parks, medical clinics, counseling families, activities with children, school athletics, even rescuing bridge builders during earthquakes. Have you ever asked your insurance provider about this? Since we have a sense of calling to many people and situations that normally make police nervous and would most often have some bullet proof glass involved, we tend to ignore risk. We are there anyway, and we should be, but it doesn’t mean we have to go in without thinking. The big question is what kind of insulation we have between the various kinds of risk that are involved in the services we offer and our assets. Does your church have buildings and vehicles and a budget– that is a set of assets you need to protect. It is also one of the reasons why churches establish secondary “legal persons” for some of their activities. While I am not one of those who sell “risk mitigation” services, I do want to make sure that you can continue to do the ministry that you have been called and resourced to do.
2. Resources- This is an obvious one. We have bigger missions that we do budgets and we are looking for some ways to maximize our ability to raise funds. These resources come in a variety of packages, but many of them do require something beyond the church accounts to be accessed. One common fear of donors and grant makers: that funds going to churches are going to go into their current obligations like building costs, buses and bibles. Not true of your work? Then you might need to consider a secondary corporate structure to convince some of those donors out their. And you know like I do that people have more than one pocket when it comes to giving. When surveyed, many major donors are only planning to give about ten percent to their church, while they have much larger sums to give to “more qualified charities.” The big question here is: “are you willing to create a structure that really serves the demands of donors while staying true to your mission?”
While our mission and the content of our message stays constant, do we need to consider new “wineskins” to help us reach our culture?
3. Rapport- There are some places where the words, “Hello, I am with XYZ Church” are fightin’ terms. I hear lots of stories from ministries who have a real struggle getting access to community events and service opportunities because of an over-sized bias in their communities about church. The real truth is that in many communities, they have never see a real “serving church” and so every church encounter raises red flags, green flags and all kinds of other flags. This varies from place to place and is a real consideration when serving in a long-term way is a commitment. The access that you can create by going through the service channel is often very significant, and allows people to get to know you without conjuring images of stained glass and itchy wool pants (my personal church image from childhood). On top of that, some leaders like principals and others have big job or legal concerns about direct participation with churches.
Explore these issues in greater depth by joining a Non-Profit Briefing with David Mills. Select “schedule” from the tab on the left and join the next available session (june 24th 3:00 p.m.). Click the schedule tab, select “non-profit for churches” and “webinar” and the open time on the 24th.
Second Non-Profit as Missional Platform
A ministry platform is a program, service or endeavor that we put in place to give us entre’ to new relationships within the surrounding culture. An attractional approach to ministry will build programmatic platforms within our ministry– so that people will be attracted to us. The logic is, perhaps some men will like our fishing ministry enough to also try attending service too, or perhaps a relationship will develop that leads to a faith introduction. One program leading to our core programs. An externally focused approach, or a missional approach seeks to put us in the culture, instead of bringing the culture to us.
Ministry platforms have been used for decades in foreign missions, but they are now becoming normal course of business for domestic ministries. Business as mission, is an expression of this in which business people see their work as mission. This is not an institutional effort, it is a personal expression of mission. Community service efforts, and the needs assessment offered by Compassion by Design are more examples of ministry platforms in which we enter the culture through service doorways.
What about ministry platforms that take believers into places domestically where they have never been before? If we believe the researchers who tell us that the American Church cannot reach 65% of the population, then we need to take a hard look at where else we need to go, and a platform approach is just outside the box enough that it might help us reach more. In the process, we might also find that we have more “missionaries” cut from a business cloth than we ever imagined.
Linked here please find an excellent article written by David Befus, past president of Latin American Mission (permission requested). He writes, ” Productive economic activity is a means to enhance and support Christian ministry. This phenomenon of “Kingdom business,” though relatively unknown, has seen successful implementation in the church since the Apostle Paul first discussed his own work habits in his letters to young churches.”
One way to view a business oriented ministry platform is as “cultural scaffolding.” You erect scaffolding to get access to places inaccessible to get something done. And right now, 65% of our culture is inaccessible. A business oriented ministry platform can offer than scaffolding so that we can engage culture where we currently cannot reach.
A Road Map to Community Impact
There are lots of decisions facing us as we look at the future of our ministry and the church. For many leaders, greater effectiveness in engaging the community is becoming a non-negotiable, but there are few models to follow.
If we go along with the current default, we will believe that community engagement means a serious of unrelated service events in which our people have minimal personal contact with people they will never see again. If we are designed to serve and impact our community we have to find ways to invest ourselves that we can sustain, and ways that fit the unique talents, resources and calling of our church. It takes more than events to reach people.
Jesus’ approach to the world around us started with questions. He asked and listened to the words and the heart of the Samaritan women leading to impact that touched a village and then a people. Compassion by Design offers a process that is guided by the use of community needs assessments that have been developed for use by church teams. This is an essential step toward gaining both insight and relationships that will result in open doors for service and insightful engagement.
A big step forward for any church that is serious about community impact is to find a way to listen and gain insight that can lead to ongoing impact and service.
A listening approach like the one built into needs assessment tells community members and leaders a couple of important things, including the fact that you care about their perspective, you are sophisticated enough to start your service with needs assessment, and that you are here to stay.
Our road map into community impact requires that we stop to ask for directions…from the community.
If you are like me, you hate to stop and ask for directions, but in a serious effort to touch a community it is essential. We cannot plot course toward community that fails to ask and then hear from the community itself. If paints us as self-centered and ill informed, and ultimately ensures that we won’t arrive where we intended to go. Needs assessment is the established way to ask those questions, and will serve us well as we discover the path we should take into community impact.
Compassion by Design can support your community engagement in two ways:
1. Our Leadership Manuals– one for church planters, and one for existing and restart churches, now at reduce prices.
2. Expert Coaching and E-Tools- Join David Mills for a 90 minute orientation that will help your needs assessment process to go more smoothly and receive a CD with tools, forms and surveys that you can duplicate for your team. The next orientation will be held June 21 at 3:00 p.m. (click schedule to the left to join).
3. Ongoing Coaching for your needs assessment. Simply make an appointment with one of our seasoned coaches using the schedule button to the left, and get expert advice along with way toward community impact (click schedule on the left).
Join a 90 minute coaching call with David Mills on June 21 at 3:00 p.m. EST to start your journey.