Since it's just you and me here, I'll admit that there's something dark about my humor. I get a particular glee when I have the opportunity to sit in a mall or at Panera and watch people do things when they think no one else is looking. I'm amused by the little kid who secretly annoys his sibling to get her excited and then looks away innocently when mom turns around to discover the problem. I chuckle quietly as a girl on an outing with her significant other almost runs into a trash can because she was checking her hair in the reflection of the store window. But it is always a moment of stifled hilarity when I see someone attempting to push open a pull door. I'm sure it is the elementary part of my brain that I never allowed an opportunity to develop. Maybe hanging upside down from the monkey bars for a protracted period did some cerebral damage. Regardless when I watch a person desperately trying to push open a pull door, it takes everything in me not to point and laugh–even when it is me.  

However, in stark contrast to someone's inability to operate a door, it is disturbing to me to observe the trends of Push Visionary Strategies in congregational environments versus a Pull Approach.

Before I go further, let me emphatically state I have several well-respected colleagues who utilize a push approach to the visionary planning process. Their work is pivotal in helping bring about kingdom transformation in and through churches. They are brothers and sisters in Christ who only desire to see the gospel spread, and churches create a disciple-making culture. Their innovative work has contributed to my own consulting in ways that I cannot begin to express. Their endeavors are applauded, and I’m excited at the impact they continue to have in the churches they serve.

I look forward to future opportunities to labor alongside them. It’s not that I do not see the value in the push approach; it is simply that I’m concerned that it minimizes an integral part of the visionary process—the congregation.

For clarity, a Push Visionary Strategy happens in various ways, and to illustrate them adequately, I'll use a couple of hypothetical examples.  

One example is when previous experiences are used to determine possible future scenarios based on an organization's typical habits and trends. One instance, "Organization X" is similar to or resembles the habits and behaviors of organizations "A-F"; therefore, the solutions needed for organizations "A-F" must be the solutions needed for "Organization X." When this bold assumption is made, then "Organization X" receives a predetermined list of possible solutions based upon similar habits and behaviors of organizations "A-F." This sort of Push Visionary Strategy expedites the visioning process and allows changes to be suggested faster. This is often seen in organizations that attempt to apply practices from other contextual case studies from national and sometimes state entities. Sometimes an organization will read about the latest methods in a popular book and attempt to implement them in their contextual environment to achieve a different result than their usual lackluster performance.

A second method by which Push Visionary Strategies present themselves is when a single individual or group of individuals within an organization walk through a vision planning process without including the larger organization in the journey. When this happens, the leaders develop a mission, strategy, measures, and vision in the proverbial smoked-filled back room and then emerge, having triumphantly wrestled with organizational chaos and clarity. With arms raised in victory, these leaders gleefully declare a clear direction discerned and proceed to sell it to those who must execute the decided mission and vision. While these leaders may tactically approach the "selling" of the vision through wet cement sessions, the fact remains that they are Pushing a Vision birthed from among their personal labor rather than from the congregational DNA.  

While these Push Visionary Strategies are not necessarily wrong or unbiblical, they are, the vast majority of the time, not as helpful to the long-term vitality of the mission of Jesus Christ in a given context. Listed below are Five Reasons to Consider a Pull Approach to Congregational Innovation and Strategic Change:

Emphasizes the Spiritual Growth of the Congregation

If you take a brief look into the New Testament, Jesus frequently challenged the crowds to consider brutal truths: Let the dead bury the dead (Matthew 8:22), one must hate your parents, spouse, siblings, and children (Matthew 10:37), we must be perfect (Matthew 5:48), and sell all you have and follow Him (Mark 10:17-22). However, Jesus didn't limit the difficult challenges to the crowds; he also used them to stretch His followers: Leave your nets and follow me (Mark 4:18-22), feed the people (Matthew 15:32-39), go out and heal (Matthew 10:8), do greater things than me (John 14:12).

In an age where everyone is discussing the importance of discipleship, it is interesting how many strategic planning processes focus on leaving it up to "the professional" pastor, pastoral staff, or key leadership team to set the direction of the Bride of Christ. How can we seriously say that we think discipleship is crucial if we're unwilling to allow the Bride behind the curtain to participate in developing the future story God wants to tell through the local body of believers?  

Suppose the leadership of a church isn't confident in the Bride of Christ's ability to discern God's will for the congregation's future. In that case, we must ask two questions: Are we using the push approach to strategic change to maintain control, or is it simply that we know we’re more managing a club than ministering as the under-shepherd to God's flock?

A pull approach to congregational innovation invites the congregation into the challenge of discerning the will of God for the congregation's context. It forces the congregation to answer difficult questions like who's church is this, what is God's will for His Church, is what we're currently doing fulfilling the will of God, and what needs to change to ensure that we're faithfully stepping into the future in which God is pulling us? The pull approach allows the congregation to wrestle with discerning the will of God for the church.  

As a brief sidebar, if the leadership positions the wider congregation to wrestle with discerning the will of God, they will be forced to grapple with their understanding of God's will for their individual lives. Because the church is composed of interdependent parts that comprise the whole body of Christ, they will be forced to recognize that their individual decisions affect the congregation's direction.  

Creates a Holy Discontent Across the Bride of Christ

As one elevates the call of God in their lives and the life of the church, having sufficiently wrestled through the truths of scripture about the mission of God, the pull approach creates a holy discontent with the status quo. A proper understanding of God is fundamental not only to correct theology but also to practical Christian living.    

Change is difficult to accept in general, but it is challenging to accept when you can't see the potential of something greater down the road. However, with a proper understanding of God's larger plan, people can imagine a future beyond their current knowledge.  

Only by allowing them to go through the initial struggle of the pull approach can they begin to participate in dreaming a new dream beyond what they could have ever imagined. It allows them to consider "the far more abundantly than we can ask or think" from Ephesians 3. This approach also permits them to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo with possible solutions to organizational issues that the church may be facing as it embraces a potential future story.  

The pull of God on the heart of people draws them to embrace change because it means they are growing closer to Him. While those changes may be complex and come with bumps along the way, they are much easier to navigate when people have already experienced a spiritual change in their heart, and they understand that God is doing a new thing among his people to impact another generation with the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

It is during this period of creating a Holy Discontent in the life and body of the church that we are having teams of people of passion about the future ministry of the church meeting with others in the congregation in groups of three for prayer and dialogue around spiritual and practical topics of the church. It is always an eye-opening experience when people begin to approach leadership, having been transformed by the spirit of God through prayer and study of his word, and almost demand that something has to change in the church for the congregation to reach the lost with the gospel of Jesus Christ

Encourages the Possibility of New Leaders

While not necessarily bad, the push approach tends to limit the leadership and planning to the trusted few. Typically, those individuals brought into the process have a vested interest in the success of the push strategy and usually are more likely to stamp their approval on the plan, not because of the details, but rather their connection to the staff or leadership. In contrast, the pull approach to strategic planning and innovation opens the door for people outside of the safety of the existing leadership structure to speak about the church's future.  

While this may be terrifying for some leaders, these leaders tend to open up a conversation and often reveal cognitive bias in people's thinking and potential blind spots. As a brief explanation, a cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world that leads them to misinterpret data. For example, when there is a set group of leaders in a room, there is typically an unspoken hierarchy of who speaks their mind, who is ready for action, who is prepared for the details, and who is the visionary thinker. A closed push strategy may not reveal an anchoring bias where people tend to rely heavily upon the first piece of information they receive when making decisions. Also, a closed team will have a greater tendency to allow the base rate fallacy to rule over them because there is always a team member who has heartfelt specific stories of change in a ministry area, even when the statistics reveal that the particular ministry is no longer functioning vitally. Also, on several occasions, stagnant teams will embrace a "good enough" strategy based on their previous bars of excellence, called the bounded rationality bias.

However, when a pull approach occurs, and people are transformed by God spiritually awakening them to a new reality, leadership should take note of those people and look to involve them in the conversation about the new story that he may be writing among that congregation. Fresh eyes tend to ignorantly speak the truth about areas where changes need to be made because they don't possess the working or emotional baggage that comes with past experiences in those areas.  

As you develop a team based upon the Pull Approach to Strategic planning Patrick Lencioni's 6 Types of Working Genius based on natural gifting that needs to be present for a team to thrive may be helpful:

• Wonder - you see potential

• Invention - you see ideas

• Discernment - you assess ideas

• Galvanizing - you rally others to act on ideas

• Enablement - you help bring ideas to life

• Tenacity - you push ideas to completion

Allows for the Emergence of Better Methods

In a pull approach to strategic planning, there is a greater level of involvement from the congregation to participate in developing the congregation's future vision. It's important to note that regardless of how people interchangeably utilize the words "vision" and "mission," they are connected but have different ideas. The mission is what you do every day in obedience to the explicit commands of God, in content and context, to achieve the future vision into which God is pulling you from tomorrow. As a future team and the congregation continues to discern the future into which God is drawing them, and new leaders emerge, other methodologies and approaches emerge. While not every idea that people present is helpful to the long-range objectives of the body of Christ, there are opportunities to embrace new processes.  

One example can be found in a small church in Ridgeway, SC. Having been involved in the strategic planning process of the church for the first time, a long-term small group leader, who we'll call Richard, was a person of position who had a spiritual awakening and was asked to participate in a more involved conversation concerning the future vision of the church. After hearing the list of programs that the church was currently engaged with, this new leader boldly and without personal agenda pointed out that ninety percent of the church's outreach budget was going toward internal ministries. His suggestion was that rather than cut the existing ministries, why not tweak them to have a more outward focus? Since Richard taught the senior adult class that founded most of those ministries, he became the spokesperson for the change, and eventually, the idea caught fire in the church. Some of the ministries combined to have greater impact, saving the church money and aligning them with the church's long-term vision.  

In a large congregation in rural Georgia, one newly transformed leader saw an opportunity to build disciple-making relationships in groups of three. After a year, the group had gone from three to nine to eighty-one people engaged in disciple-making relationships. Why? Because rather than getting caught up in the traditional machine of the way it's always been done, this leader said I'm taking the responsibility on me to champion a disciple-making culture in our church's context. It was what the pastor had prayed for, but it took God's pull on another's life to see it come to fruition.  

In both of these circumstances, the two people pulled forward into the future through the strategic spiritual process were able to quickly move past the cognitive bias of declinism which is when people feel the past is better compared to what the future holds. In doing so, they more quickly involved others in the transformation and brought about innovation in an expedited way.  

Embraces the Reality of an Evolving Terrain

The final reason to consider a pull approach to congregational innovation is that the congregation is better positioned to navigate life's evolving terrain. In March of 2020, the paradigm shift of the century occurred when the country was locked down due to the pandemic. Churches were forced to either embrace the current reality and change or risk irrelevance and eventual death. That particular change was something that was pushed upon them. The results were disastrous over the long term because people would argue about meeting vs. not meeting, meeting with masks vs. meeting without masks, meeting without masks online or in person with masks, meeting in the parking lot with cars or meeting in a tent without cars but masks, or for some, not meeting at all. There was no clear path that satisfied all sides of a single congregation. Then when it was all said and done, most churches noted a 40-50% drop in overall attendance but a maintained, if not increased, budget.  

What happened? People were pushed into change, and the backlash was exponentially felt on all sides.  

Now, what would've happened if a congregation had recently experienced a Pull Approach to Strategic Change or Innovation? What if, as a congregation, they were commonly united to the mission of Living as Everyday Neighborhood Persons of Peace with the vision to Bring Peace to the City by 2025 by deploying 2,500 everyday neighbors in the places they live, work, and play?

That might've changed how the pandemic played out in their context. Instead of the mission and vision running into the blockade of an unexpected mountain in the church's faith journey, they've just discovered a launching pad to catapult their efforts into the stratosphere.

A push approach to strategic change would've resulted in the pastoral staff and critical leadership team convincing the church to see the pandemic as an opportunity, not an obstacle. Precious time would've been wasted on "selling" vision rather than "living" mission.

Practical Matters

Now, I know some people may be reading this and saying, "While that's all well and good, the Push Approach to Strategic change is necessary because we're currently in a state of emergency in western-cultural Christianity and the Pull approach of involving the larger congregation in a spiritual strategic journey takes too long. It’s too cumbersome and too messy of a process.”  

To that, I would say that there's a great quote by GK Chesterton, in All Things Considered, that I love. He says,

"One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time."

He was speaking of articles he had written in a hurry, and because he didn't take enough leisure, he wasn't quick in getting to his point.

The most common hindrance to a church's vitality is that people and church leaders don't desire to invest the time it takes to make it happen. They want an easy and quick solution that fixes their acute pain on a lack of enthusiasm and excitement when if they took leisure to consider the facts, they would realize that the dull ache of a lacking spiritual vitality and shared congregational vision built upon a Pull Visionary Strategy that is what is keeping them from stepping into the future that God would for them. 

It is also important to note that in most Push Approaches to Congregational Change, the ownership of the mission and the longevity of the vision are largely dependent upon the tenure of the pastor. When the pastor goes, so goes the direction of the church. The bride of Christ must understand her individual calling independent of the person behind the pulpit.

If you're interested in learning more about a Pull Approach to Congregation Innovation and Strategic Change, visit The Prism Journey or set up a conversation with us.