Advanced Strategic Planning a New Model

This book addresses the widespread decline in North American churches by introducing a visionary strategic planning process designed to help church leaders navigate cultural "megachange." Arguing that conventional, incremental planning is obsolete, author Aubrey Malphurs presents the "sigmoid curve" concept to explain the natural life cycle of organizations and provides a framework for churches to proactively start new growth curves through church planting, growth, or revitalization. The book offers a step-by-step guide for leaders and their teams to discover their church's core values, develop a compelling mission and vision, and create a five-part strategy covering community outreach, disciple-making, team building, ministry setting, and finances, ultimately equipping them to implement and evaluate a unique ministry model that effectively accomplishes the Great Commission in their specific context.

What it argues

Advanced Strategic Planning a New Model

Key ideas it contributes

• Leadership Commitment — The degree of dedicated support and sustained engagement from the senior pastor and governing board for the entire strategic planning process and its outcomes. It is a critical prerequisite for initiating and sustaining the effort.
• Spiritual Foundation — The state of spiritual readiness and renewal within the church's leadership and congregation, which creates a receptive and God-honoring environment for the strategic planning effort. This includes corporate and personal spiritual health.
• Strategic Planning Process — The comprehensive, ongoing envisioning process a church's leadership team uses to design and redesign a ministry model that accomplishes the Great Commission. It is a set of structured activities intended to create a coherent strategy.
• Organizational Clarity — The degree to which a shared, coherent, and compelling understanding of the church's identity (values), purpose (mission), future direction (vision), and operational plan (strategy) exists among its members.
• Congregational Alignment — The extent to which the church's members, ministries, programs, and resources are unified and oriented toward the same strategic direction, creating synergy and reducing internal friction.
• Congregational Mobilization — The degree to which the congregation is actively and effectively engaged in the work of the ministry, utilizing their unique God-given designs, rather than being passive consumers.
• Ministry Effectiveness — The successful accomplishment of the church's God-given mission to 'make and mature disciples' (the Great Commission), which is the primary measure of success.
• Church Growth — The quantifiable increase in the church's size and reach, representing the initiation of a new 'S-curve' that moves the organization off a plateau or out of decline.