thinking.church podcast

Goal Setting isn't easy at the best of times, but the tech industries in Silicon Valley have been crushing it for years, and it's all thanks to OKRs. In this episode, Chris explains what OKRs are to Lee and how you can implement them in your church. 

KEY POINTS

• What does OKR mean?
• Why are they becoming so popular?
• Objectives
  • About sustaining and growing
  • Significant, concrete, action-oriented & inspirational
  • What does success look like?
  • Aspirational
  • Committed
  • Learning
• Key Results
  • Must have a number
  • Input
  • Output
  • Outcome
  • Quantity & quality
  • Incrementals, leaps & holds
• Cascading OKRs
• Putting OKRs into practice
  • Set
  • Check-in
  • Grade
  • Reflect

This week, Chris and Lee give updates on what they've been up to in the first few months of 2021. They dive into some of the situations they've encountered, as well as projects they've been working on, things they've been learning and trends they're noticing.

KEY POINTS
1. Who we've worked with
2. What we're working on
3. What we're learning
4. Trends we're noticing

With statistics saying that church congregations will be down post-COVID, and with the rise of hybrid ministry, what does this mean for the future of the church building? Will large facilities still be a good route for growing churches, or will thinking smaller benefit the church more?

KEY POINTS

1. Multi Service
2. Multisite
3. Multi Church

This week, Chris spoke with Jason Ham from Rediscover Church in Exeter all about hybrid ministry.  Jason is doing an incredible job, not only in his church but also the entire Elim denomination, to help people leverage online for the Kingdom of God.

KEY POINTS
1.     Hi Jason, I’d love to hear a bit about you… so tell us where you’re from and all that.

2.     We met recently as your church was helping out my church think through livestreaming plans for the future. What are the common mistakes you’re seeing when churches livestream?

3.     There a growing conversation about the need for Hybrid ministry. Why do you think that Hybrid ministry is important for the future of the church?

4.     What are the different routes that a church can take when thinking about livestreaming their services?

5.     There are many different platforms that you can use with livestreaming services. Which ones are your church using, and what are the things we need to consider when choosing our platform?

6.     How can we cater well for people in the room as well as people online at the same time?

7.     How can a church use hybrid ministry to help them reach more people with the gospel?

8.     Has social media and online church replaced community activities as the go-to onboarding strategy? Can we utilise both working together?

9.     What are some tips and tricks small churches could use to do livestreaming better?

If you've ever been in a discussion about anything meaningful in church, you're going to start debating at some point. Ideas will be put forward and will get refuted, or agreed on. However, we can all level up if we can spot when we are refuting an argument by using logical fallacies. These often don't actually address the issue, but make things more personal, or just deflect things. In this episode, Chris & Lee help you spot 10 common fallacies.

KEY POINTS
1. Appeal to probability (Field of dreams)
2. Ad hominem
3. Sunk cost fallacy
4. Moving the goalposts
5. Appeal to the stone
6. Appeal to authority
7. Appeal to Novelty
8. Appeal to emotion
9. Genetic/Psychogenetic Fallacy
10. Straw Man

This week, Chris spoke with Hannah Williamson, who has run a fantastic survey of women in church leadership in the U.K. Her insights and practical steps to help you find, raise and release women in ministry will really help you.

KEY POINTS
1.  Hi Hannah, I’d love to hear a bit about yourself. Where are you from, which church etc

2.  You’ve run a fantastic survey of women in church leadership. What was your motivation in running this?

3.  What were your stand-out findings from the survey?

4.  What are the main challenges you’ve seen in churches when it comes to bringing through female leaders?

5.  What’s your experience as a female in church leadership?

6.  How has the landscape changed, if at all, in regards to male church leaders recognising and accepting their female colleagues?

7.  In your survey you asked this question: Have you ever asked yourself, “can I really lead as a woman?” with 61% responding ‘yes’.  How can we change that narrative? 

8.  Your report says that half of the respondents had problems with explaining what the Pauline letters say about women. How do you explain these passages to people in your church?

9.  You talk about church leaders being intentional about raising female leaders. What things can church leaders do to start that process?


RESOURCES
SHELeads Survey 

1. What's the point of the meeting?
2. Are recurring meetings a bad idea?
3. Can't it just be an email?
4. Chairing the meeting
5. Conflict
6. Making decisions - vote, consensus?
   1. The Decision Box
7. Setting actions
   1. What? By who? By when?
   2. Communicating the action
   3. Radical visibility

We might think we're doing ok, but how do we really know? Personal and church performance is not an easy thing to track, so in this episode, Chris & Lee dive into the ways you can think through personal and church productivity, management, tracking & evaluation.


KEY POINTS

1. Personal & Church Productivity
   1. Projects
   2. Areas
   3. Resourcing
   4. Archive
2. Personal & Church Management
3. Personal & Church Tracking
4. Personal & Church Evaluation
5. Communication

Christmas was like no Christmas you've ever had in your church. The amount of new thinking and new approaches was massive. The next big event in the church calendar is Easter. However, the thinking you had to put into Christmas can actually help you plan for Easter. In this episode, Chris & Lee talk about two different domains: Complexity and Complicated, and how different domains need different approaches. But the great news is that they link into each other perfectly.

KEY POINTS

1. Christmas
   1. Complexity
      1. Probe - explore the options
      2. Sense - Assess the facts
      3. Respond - Formulate a response based on established practice
2. Easter
   1. Complicated
      1. Sense - Assess the facts
      2. Analyse - Investigate options available
      3. Respond - Formulate a response based on established practice
3. Assessing the facts
   1. What do we know about the lockdown rules at Easter
   2. Churches can be open, should they?
4. Investigating the options available
   1. Online Service
   2. In-Person Service
   3. Hybrid Service
   4. Community Activity
5. Formulate a response based on established practice
   1. What has worked well for you?
   2. What serves your city best?
   3. Who are you serving?
   4. Why are you doing it?

Church statistics used to be easy. Attendance, giving, baptisms, groups. Track it over time and hope it all goes up and to the right, right? Well no, and however we used to think about statistics, COVID has completely changed everything. Tracking attendance between 2019 and 2020 is now, useless. So what can you do? In this episode, Chris & Lee explore how we can re-think metrics.

KEY POINTS

1. What we used to measure
   1. Attendance
   2. Finances
   3. Baptism
   4. Salvations
2. COVID measures
   1. Engagement (clicks, retention)
3. Has the thinking been debunked?
   1. 'If you don't measure it it doesn't matter"
   2. Everything needs to go up and to the right
4. Measuring Health instead of Performance
   1. Human body measurements
      1. We measure very few things when we're healthy
      2. Symptoms force is into tracking symptoms
   2. Church Health
      1. What measures?
         1. Statistics
         2. Symptoms
         3. Stories