 |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
|
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
|
|
|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
The three phases of launching a church-based social enterprise
| Faith & Leadership | INNOVATION, SOCIAL INNOVATION, MONEY, NEW ECONOMIC MODELS
Matt Overton: The three phases of launching a church-based social enterprise | |
Bigstock / Makc
Starting a Christian social enterprise is difficult and passion-filled work. It comes with a ton of setbacks and self-doubt. And a ton of excitement.
I believe that social enterprise -- a business with a social good in mind -- can offer a new way forward for the church.
But I realize as I evangelize about this new model that people will have questions about how to get started. How can a local congregation or minister launch a social enterprise that maximizes missional impact in a community?
I have identified three initial phases for this work: habitation and discernment; consulting with the community; and testing.
The advice here is aimed at ministers and congregations interested in starting a small-scale enterprise that has a relatively low bar for entry into the marketplace. Launching a large-scale idea for social innovation requires much more capital and risk.
Habitation and discernment
As Christians, we have an obligation to prayerfully inhabit a place in order to do this work in ways that honor God and neighbor.
I have participated in several programs that help launch social enterprises, and one problem I’ve seen is that they often encourage people to ideate quickly.
This worries me. We Christians have a long history of doing things to others in unhealthy and wasteful ways. I think we have a theological obligation to take the time to inhabit a place, to listen well and to pray, and only then, after a period of discernment, to come up with an idea.
Ideally, I think would-be social entrepreneurs should live in a community at least three and a half years to discern the context and to build up leadership capital and trust within the local church before formulating ideas. That time is also important for discerning whether the needs of the context and the specifics of a potential enterprise line up with a leader’s God-given gifts.
I happen to love physical labor and mentoring teens, and I know something about lawn care. So launching a teen landscaping company made sense for me. It was also something that our state’s highly restrictive teen labor law would allow.
It’s critical for churches preparing to launch a social enterprise to understand the social needs and marketplace of their particular community. And since the purpose of social enterprise is to place the mission ahead of the profit, it is crucial to think about the mission thoroughly.
Consulting with the community
The next step is to look at the cloud of witnesses.
One of my favorite lines in the book of Acts is when the apostles and the elders at the Jerusalem Council, trying to discern how Jewish and Gentile converts are to interact with one another and the standards of faith, arrive at their answers and say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us ...” (Acts 15:28 NIV).
The idea here, at least in my Reformed mind, is that the discernment of God’s will seems to have been a group, rather than an individual, process. This is an important ethic in starting a Christian social enterprise.
That’s why I began by talking with the leadership at my church.
My initial conversation was with my head of staff. I made sure he understood why I was trying to do this and what the potential implications were in time, energy and dollars.
I also shared a couple of books to help explain the concepts behind my project, such as asset-based community development and social enterprise in general.
What was critical, in my case, was that my head of staff understood missional theology, allowed the staff a good deal of autonomy and was not opposed to marketplace-based thinking. We also had trust in each other.
My next step was to inform our Session, which is our church’s governing body. I worried that they would find my idea confusing or frightening, so I prepared a presentation on my own ministry journey, my idea for the enterprise, the financial implications for them and a critical FAQ.
I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t proposing to detonate their existing youth ministry. I also was not planning to leave the church. I made sure to help them understand how my idea linked directly to my job reaching out to teens in our county.
I also framed it as a six- to 12-month experiment and asked for four to eight hours per week to work on it during the initial phase.
To my utter amazement, they really liked the idea and thought it fit well with the stated mission and vision of our church.
I gathered eight key people on an informal team. I invited people who had run their own businesses, people who would be good mentors and people who were trusted by the church. I also consulted with folks who had legal and tax experience.
For a church that doesn’t have folks with particular experience, I’d recommend exploring congregants’ connections to people in the community who support the idea and consulting with the local community foundation.
Testing
The last phase is experimentation and testing.
I started small. I hooked up my V-6 to a church trailer and mowed a few clients’ properties each week. I also shadowed a local landscaping company’s crews and paid close attention to people I saw out working.
The point is to start with a manageable volume of business to see whether the ministry leader is cut out for the work. This also provides a glimpse of what the actual market looks like in the area -- sort of like an informal market survey.
But most importantly, this phase offers a test of what ministry looks like in this setting.
Is it possible to do effective ministry within the context of this business? What is the actual potential of kingdom impact on customer and employee? This is essential.
At the heart of Christian social enterprise is the mission. Whatever shape it may take, the mission must be the focus in a church-based business.
|
 |
|
|
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: INNOVATION
|
Faith & LeadershipDesign comes to church
CONGREGATIONS, INNOVATION
Dave Odom: Design comes to church
Bigstock / Ammentorp
|
In a time when congregations are customizing or developing their own events and services, all church leaders are designers. The design process centers around questions about audience and needs, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
“What are we going to study next?” In listening as two church Bible study teachers worried about what would engage their group, I longed for the “good old days” when our denomination laid out lesson plans, provided all the materials and offered training. If our denomination tried to do that now, these teachers would be suspicious.
What has changed?
In the program era, national denominational offices designed most events and services for congregations. Through publishing houses, the denomination supplied all the materials. Regional denominational groups furnished training for teachers. The system required a stable world with a homogeneous audience. For those who inhabited such a world, the system worked pretty well.
With such stability gone, and amid a growing hope for honoring diverse voices, events and services are now almost always designed at the local level. This is one of several factors that have dramatically increased the workload for pastors and church staff. Publishing houses still produce materials, but now church leaders sift through the materials to choose specifically what series to teach. Nearly everyone feels responsible to customize what they purchase. Even then, it is difficult to satisfy the needs of each group in a church. Larger congregations often embark on writing their own materials.
The signs of this “age of design” are everywhere. Each smartphone user designs her phone’s functionality and look by installing apps, customizing alerts and selecting backgrounds. The more a user invests in creating her own design, the more valuable the device will be.
Good designers focus first on those who will be served. Who are they? What do they say they need? How will they be engaged? The design process begins with identifying the audience, asking good questions and listening carefully to the answers.
Designers use what they learn from this initial step to inform the development of the design idea, as well as the means for measuring its effectiveness. And they continue to ask questions: What impact are we trying to achieve? How does that impact relate to the needs the audience has identified?
After these two steps, designers begin brainstorming all the possible ways forward. They create and test prototypes. They refine the ideas that show promise and test again.
My colleague Gretchen Ziegenhals describes this process as one of deep hospitality that reflects the core of what the church is about, pointing to Genesis 18, where Abraham and Sarah receive three visitors to their tents in the oaks of Mamre.
How does this work step by step?
For those like me who long for practical guidance to walk through the mystery of design, IDEO’s human-centered design(link is external) process, which typically is applied to developing products, is instructive. For a broader range of design challenges, the Google Ventures sprint process -- explored in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days(link is external)” -- is a good resource. The process begins with information sharing, understanding the challenge and setting a goal for the week(link is external), and then unfolds from that foundation(link is external).
When reviewing the literature, you will likely find that you already know something about many of the steps that are wrapped into design process. We all do some of this work every day, although many of us may use different language for it.
The most important insight I have gleaned from working with design thinking experts is that it is crucial to learn from the audience. It would be much easier to start with our own agenda -- what we want to do or what we want to say -- but design thinking requires an empathetic connection to the audience.
Christian leaders are prepared to engage in such deep listening through the practice of theological reflection. We listen for God’s intentions for creation though Scripture reading and prayer, learning to see God as both the author and the audience of our work.
Design requires leaning into conversations, being curious about what is happening, listening carefully to stories, and reflecting thoughtfully and theologically on the hopes and fears expressed. If the ideas that are generated in a design process are grounded in a love of God and neighbor, the result will be the types of services we long to share.
|
|
L. Gregory Jones: Social innovation as Christian practice
Photo by Jessamyn Rubio
Father Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries is not a Christian who is also a social entrepreneur. He is a Christian social entrepreneur, his faith animating how he leads and serves.
Father Gregory Boyle, affectionately known as “Father G,” is justly celebrated as a successful social entrepreneur for his vision for, and leadership of, Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles.
Its several operating businesses embody the motto of Homeboy Industries(link is external): “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And beyond Los Angeles, its Global Homeboy Network encourages innovative strategies among other organizations for gang intervention in diverse cities around the country and the world. Thousands of lives have been touched and transformed by the program. New frameworks for diagnosing and addressing the challenges and opportunities in dealing with kids and gangs have been developed. Father G has drawn the attention of George W. Bush’s White House (and particularly Laura Bush), and both he and Homeboy Industries have been featured in documentaries, books and newspaper profiles. He even has a TEDx video(link is external).
Fr. Greg Boyle's memoir, "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion," was named as one of the Best Books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly. Photo courtesy of Homeboy Industries.
I had known that Father G is a Jesuit priest, and that being a Christian is central to his identity and work. Early in his moving memoir, “Tattoos on the Heart,” he writes, “Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God.” His stories, and his life, shine forth with the light of Christ.
Until recently, though, I hadn’t quite realized how deeply his Christian faith animates his vision of Homeboy Industries. I, like many others, had seen Homeboy as a remarkable example of social innovation whose visionary founder just happened to be a visionary priest. After spending significant time recently engaging Father G in conversation, I realized that Father G isn’t a Christian who also is a social entrepreneur; he is a Christian social entrepreneur.
What do I mean by this distinction? Father G moves beyond a framing of Christian faith and social innovation to display how Christian faith animates social innovation in a distinctive way.
Three themes are essential to understanding Father G and Homeboy Industries:
- Everything Father G does, including Homeboy Industries, is shaped by his vision of God and what it means to bear witness to God’s reign. He begins with the end, the telos. He often cites Habakkuk 2:2-3, “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”
- Father G keeps the vision plain and bold. He notes that while it will surely come, we also need the patience to be willing to “wait for it.” There is a profound patience in Father G’s vision and work, even as it is accompanied by a sense of urgency to bear witness.
- “As a Jesuit for thirty-seven years and a priest for twenty-five years, it would not be possible for me to present these stories apart from God, Jesus, compassion, kinship, redemption, mercy, and our common call to delight in one another,” he writes in “Tattoos on the Heart.”
The genius of Father G is that he speaks these words in the same breath with words like jobs, prison reform, therapy, gang rehabilitation and drug testing. His commitment to social innovation is an expression of his Christian life. If we are in fact kinfolk, then we ought to be in relationship with our brothers and sisters and foster their flourishing as they do so for us -- even if, perhaps especially if, they seem so different from us.
Father G describes his life as learning to see the world as a “companion of Jesus,” which means that he doesn’t see gang kids as unfortunate folks he will condescend to help because of his love for God; rather, he says, he has “learned, with their patient guidance, to worship Christ as He lives in them.”
Father G’s vision for Homeboy focuses on healing and wholeness, for people, communities and systems. Rooted in his vision of God’s reign, Father G’s work holds together what others push apart. He cares as much about the kids’ souls as he does their bodies, jobs and relationships.
Homeboy Industries began as an experiment, a jobs program, to support gang kids in finding new life, and to help change the environments in which they live. Its first commercial ventures, Homeboy Bakery and Homeboy Silkscreen, have become the cornerstone of the organization, which now includes nine businesses in several locations (including Los Angeles City Hall).
Fr. Greg Boyle, Homeboy workers and city officials gather on the steps of city hall to celebrate the opening of Homeboy Diner. Photo courtesy of Homeboy Industries.
Father G has recently observed that he doesn’t think Homeboy’s well-known motto, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” gets at the heart of their mission. “It’s about healing,” he says. Jobs are a key part of that healing, but only part. Early on, he says, the focus was too much on transactions for jobs and job training, and not enough on relationships and healing -- healing of the souls of the gang members, healing of the community, healing of our relationships one with another. It is, he suggests, about our unlearning the profound brokenness that diminishes and divides us from one another and learning to delight in our common kinship -- and even hold one another in awe.
Today, Homeboy’s services include not only jobs programs but also mental health care, legal aid, substance abuse support and tattoo removal. Its campus also functions as a community center.
Father G is at his best as a visionary priest, and he entrusts the institutional expertise to others. Father G recognizes that Christian social innovation is a team sport. He embodies a humility shaped by his ever-deepening intimacy with God, a humility that enables him to focus on how best to accomplish the mission rather than presume he needs to be in charge. Early on, Father G had to play most of the roles of a social entrepreneur; over time, though, he began to realize where his gifts lie and where he needs to depend on and empower others.
Father G recognizes that there are gifts he brings to Homeboy Industries as a priest: vision, storytelling, blessing, helping the pilot light of hope catch fire. Even his “recruitment” strategy to attract gang kids to Homeboy is deeply rooted in his celebration of Masses in diverse settings, especially in jails and prisons.
He also candidly admits that he is neither particularly good at the day-to-day administrative tasks of leading an institution nor particularly interested in them. If you want to know about how to build and lead a remarkable institution, he directs you to others.
Father G, whose leadership at Homeboy extends more than two and a half decades, says he isn’t particularly worried about succession planning, because other people are in place to lead the organization. Businessman-philanthropist (and board member) Bruce Karatz has helped Homeboy discover new revenue-producing strategies(link is external) to make the nonprofit more sustainable financially. A former gang member, Fabian, now leads the drug counseling aspect of Homeboy’s work. Father G has cultivated virtuous cycles of training and leadership for the whole organization and beyond.
Those efforts address the sustainability of the day-to-day institutional operations. When the time comes for Father G to step away from the work, though, they will not easily replace his priestly leadership, which has cultivated a culture where, as he says, quoting Julian of Norwich, “we are ‘clothed in God’s goodness.’” It is tempting to focus only on the gang intervention strategies and underestimate the significance of Father G’s Christian vision in shaping Homeboy’s culture.
Father G’s hope gives Homeboy Industries its lifeblood. He continually points to miracles, kinship, awe, blessing and delight, even as he acknowledges the pain, brokenness and suffering. Father G is no optimist; he has buried too many kids felled by gang violence. But neither is he a pessimist; he has witnessed too much transformation. He embraces both a hope-filled future orientation and a clear-eyed awareness of humanity’s brokenness.
He shines that hope through his vision of God, his work for healing and wholeness, and his empowerment of others to lead. Father G’s witness and leadership invite us to see how the end is our beginning, to learn to see as God sees and to join the team of Christian social innovation.
Read more from L. Gregory Jones » |
|
Faith & Leadership
Everything old is new againINNOVATION
Gretchen E. Ziegenhals: Everything old is new again
Bigstock/Maren Winter |
As Christian leaders, how can we recognize and honor both the new and innovative and the old that grounds and roots the new? A managing director at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity ponders this when she sells an antique spinning wheel.
In the living room of my childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois, stood a large spinning wheel. I was the one in charge of dusting the wheel when we cleaned house, and at Christmastime, my mother hung a small elf off the distaff. When my brother and I, my cousins, and later the grandchildren horsed around, we were always warned not to knock it over. Sometimes we did.
My mother liked Early American antiques, and she had spotted this one in a small antique shop in Plymouth, New Hampshire, during one summer vacation. My father protested in vain, and ended up tying it to the roof of our car for the long drive home. I’m sure we made quite a spectacle entering Chicago on the Dan Ryan Expressway.
After more than 30 years in one home, my parents downsized to smaller dwellings several times. My mom convinced my dad to drag the spinning wheel along with each move. It perched jauntily on top of an enormous bookcase in their Kentucky condo. In the retirement community in North Carolina, there was no room for it in their small, tidy layout, so it rested quietly in the attic, the wheel detached and leaning against the frame.
In my ongoing attempt to sort, keep or give away a lifetime of accumulated treasures, I recently listed the wheel for sale. An elderly man with a long gray beard and gnarled hands answered the ad. He and his adult daughter brought their truck to my house, where I had set the spinning wheel in the front hall -- the only place I had room for the large frame.
The man immediately went over to the wheel and began touching it, as would a man used to horses or machinery, someone who knew the worth of things by feel. “Well,” he pronounced almost at once, “it’s missing a small metal piece here, but I can make that. We’ll take it.” Astounded, I asked, “Are you an antiques dealer?” I had tried with no success to sell it at several antique shops.
“Nope,” he replied. “I’m a spinner. I have sheep, and I spin the wool to make yarn.”
It had never occurred to me that the wheel could be returned to its everyday use. As an object sitting in my childhood suburban home, it was a piece of history that we sometimes contemplated, but we always assumed it was missing too many crucial parts to be of use anymore.
The man went on to tell me that he would also be taking the wheel to Civil War re-enactments and other historic sites where he is a volunteer spinner. “This wheel is gonna get a lot of work,” he said fondly, one hand resting on the structure.
Instead of feeling like a bad daughter for selling off my mother’s favorite treasures, I can now feel grateful. I’ve been amazed at the resurrection in this story, the beautiful redemptive elements.
When we talk about traditioned innovation in the world of Christian leadership, we refer to the ways in which what is new and good is rooted in deep, long-standing tradition. We call traditioned innovation “a way of thinking and being that holds the past and future in tension, not in opposition,” and we have seen the ways in which it is crucial to the growth and vitality of Christian institutions.
The spinning wheel also reminds me of the “wheel of time,” the concept that everything old is new again and comes around in its time. As leaders in congregations and other Christian institutions, how can we recognize and honor both the new and innovative and the old that grounds and roots the new? And at the same time, how can we faithfully affirm that the end of all of our efforts as Christian leaders, the telos, is the coming reign of God?
For even the end is a part of the cycle, Duke theologian Greg Jones tells us: “In our thinking as well as our living, we are oriented toward our end, our telos: bearing witness to the reign of God. That is what compels innovation. But our end is also our beginning, because we are called to bear witness to the redemptive work of Christ who is the Word that created the world. We are the carriers of that which has gone before us so we can bear witness faithfully to the future.”
|
|
|
|
|
by Jeffrey D. Jones
Church today isn't the same as it was fifty years ago-or even ten years ago. In spite of the powerful stories of turn-around churches with skyrocketing memberships, the difficult reality is that most congregations are getting smaller. Jeffrey D. Jones asks brave questions for congregations facing this reality-what if membership growth isn't the primary goal for a church? How can churches remain vital, even with declining attendance?
Facing Decline, Finding Hope is an essential resource to help congregations confront their shrinking size while looking towards the hopeful reality that God is calling them to greater faithfulness. The book draws on biblical and theological resources, as well as contemporary leadership studies, to help leaders-both clergy and laity-set aside a survival mentality and ask new questions to shape ministry more attuned to today's world.
Facing Decline, Finding Hope is a powerful book for leaders who want to honestly assess the size of their church and plan for faithful, invigorating service regardless of whether membership numbers are up or down.
|
|
|
Follow us on social media:
  |
|
|
|
 |
|  |
|  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment