Transforming Church

Cohort Structure
The tentative structure of the Learning Journey is gather participants three times a year for three years. We expect classes of around 50 participants. Participants will form cohorts of six and within the cohorts of six, there will be two peer-coaching triads of three. There will be one main gathering of all participants each year, and two opportunities for the cohorts to choose a Signature Ministry for a mentoring visit.

The Cohort will create accountability to set goals, and report back on a regular basis the progress towards the goals. At every gathering, each participant will set goals moving forward and review the goals set at the previous gathering. Mentors from the Signature Ministry will participate in this dialog to provide a reality check, and help ensure that goals are appropriate and will be taken seriously. The monthly peer coaching will allow the triads to check progress and support taking the steps to create healthy movement.

Themes for the First Year Curriculum
A missional church has a healthy Body of Christ at its core. In the first year, pastors will seek a deeper understanding of themselves and work to create a healthy, vibrant church community where leadership is shared with the laity. There are three themes for the first year.

Development of leader: The first theme is to build awareness and self-differentiation as a leader, the leader as person. Participants will be invited into a deeper spiritual journey, better understand their giftedness and calling, and learn much about their leadership style.

Intentionality of Team: A second theme is leader in relationship to significant others. Leaders need to take this journey in partnership and team (spouse, cohort and leadership team). They will learn to build cohorts, coaching triads and a leadership team. They will work with spouse (where applicable) to build a shared vision of God’s call on their lives.

Baseline of Current Reality in the Church Community: The third theme is to plant seeds for discipleship community and growing health, the larger communal aspects of church life. The theme is determining a baseline for where we are starting as a congregation.

Key elements of the first year Learning Journey:
1. Overview of the Learning Journey. We will give participants an overview of the entire Learning Journey, the outcomes that we hope to create, and how it all fits together. We will articulate our philosophy of adaptive leadership, servant leadership and leader as change agent. We will define what we mean by learning community, and examine church as interdependent system (the Body of Christ). We will cultivate leaders as change agent. We will put an emphasis on systems thinking and the process of transformation as we give participants an overview of leadership and what to expect. The first year of the journey will help develop them as self-differentiated leaders. This is a major paradigm shift, and we need to ground participants in the expectations for accountability and movement towards healthy discipleship community that will be key measures of success. The first year curriculum will give participants a lens through which to examine the Signature Ministries, and help them see how well practitioners are demonstrating these elements of leadership.

2. Spiritual Disciplines. Participants will be invited into a deeper personal relationship with Jesus, a deepening spiritual journey, learning to live the Marks of Discipleship and learning to draw others deeper into spiritual disciplines. We will encourage pastors to engage a Spiritual Director to help coach and guide them in their spiritual lives through this time the three-year learning journey and beyond.

3. Spiritual Gifts. Participants will clarify their own spiritual gifts, work with key leaders from their local church to discern their gifts and calling, and set a plan in place to introduce Gift-Based ministry into their local church. The first year we work to see a healthy body of Christ emerge at the core of participating churches to create shared leadership flowing out of the gifts of the leadership team.

4. Personal Visioning. Participants will articulate a personal vision of what God is calling forth out of their Giftedness. A critical skill is to learn the elements of personal mastery: a clear, actionable vision and a brutally honest view of their starting point in current reality. These elements are key to creating helpful tension in lives and organizations that is only resolved with the accomplishment of the vision. Learning this skill will enable leaders to facilitate discerning what God is calling forth in their lives and churches, and create a pathway to the realization of this calling.

5. Coaching Skills. Pastors will be coached and learn how to coach. Within the cohorts they will initiate the peer coaching triads that will meet, in person or by phone, each month for accountability, encouragement and support throughout the three years. Learning this skill will help pastors implement coaching as a method of developing leaders in the local congregation.

6. Team Building with lay leaders. In the first year, pastors need to create/develop their lay leadership team, and go through the stages of team-building together: setting norms, roles, expectations, measures of success, etc. This core leadership group in the local church will function as a small group to help develop an understanding of two things: why small groups are critical to spiritual development, and how to move from committees to Gift-Based ministry teams. In order to do that, they must move from being a committee or board to being a small group or leadership team. This core team will also work together to reach clarity about core values and clarify the mission of the congregation.

7. Self-Awareness. In addition to learning about their Spiritual Gifts, participants will engage with a number of instruments to learn their more about their Personality, Leadership and Conflict Management Styles, understand their Emotional Intelligence, and foster a deeper awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. Many of these same instruments will be shared with the key lay leaders during the team-building process. Leaders will learn to deal with their own anxieties, and how to manage conflict in a healthy way, being a “non anxious presence” in the congregation during times of change.

8. Building Discipleship Community. Participants will begin the work of shifting the culture of their church from membership to discipleship. This work will focus on the key leaders, while at the same time introducing Discipleship consistently through sermons, and many other channels of communication within the congregation. The leadership team will learn about organizational change and begin to shift the culture to become a Spirit-led learning community that has discipleship at its heart.

9. Spouse and Lay Leader Involvement. Spouses and key lay leaders will be invited into the learning journey, and will each attend one conference a year, with additional distance learning opportunities to enhance their participation, personal growth and alignment with the intended outcomes of the initiative.

10. Baseline Church Health Measurement. Each church will complete a baseline health assessment of the congregation using the Natural Church Development survey to stake out current reality so progress over the three years can be measured. The survey will be repeated each year to chart movement towards health.

Stay tuned for the second year’s curriculum in next month’s newsletter.