Many of the people reading my blog are from the West– not the Western US, but the global West. Most of us then, approach life through a cultural lens of guilt and innocence. We see wrongs that need to be “righted.” If you are an American, think of how much our country is built around the idea of “Equal justice under law.” Our lens influences our perceptions about the world and the way we work across borders. This is the topic of The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guild, Shame, and Fear Cultures by Jayson Georges.
The premise of Georges’ book is that there are essentially three types of cultures, and they determine how we receive information, like the Gospel. He provides some great charts throughout the book showing how each of the cultures view grace, salvation, the sovereignty of God, and other aspects of the faith. One of the best examples is how each of the cultures is seeking to answer a particular existential question. For Guilt/Innocence the question is “How can my sins be forgiven to be assured of my salvation?” For Shame/Honor the question is “How can I be a part of the community to be respected?” And for the Fear/Power culture the question is “How can I access the power to control life?”
For the practitioner reading the book, which is less than 90 pages, they will begin to see why it is that some denominations have flourished in certain parts of the globe, while others have not. It also becomes clear that certain types of gospel presentations are better suited to particular audiences rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
I would highly recommend The 3D Gospel to anyone who plays a part in an international missions organization, missions committees, or lay people with a desire to have an impact across the globe. You can purchase the book here and read more by Jayson Georges here.
“No man is an island,” “the wisdom of the crowd is greater than the lone genius,” etc – We’ve all heard our fair share of quotes and thoughts about working as a team. However, at my organization, we use a collaborative management style and work closely with our colleagues across departments. In an attempt to learn more about working in a team-centered environment and improve my own management skills, I read Patrick Lencioni’s“The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”
Lencioni lists the five dysfunctions as:
Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results
Each of these dysfunctions leads to sub-optimal results. For instance, a lack of trust prevents conflict, which in turn prevents team commitment to decisions, where no-one is held accountable and results are never measured for achievement. He uses a simple pyramid to illustrate the concept.
His writing is easy to read as he couches his ideas and principles in a story format. This particular story focuses on a leadership team with a new leader who is attempting to turn around their organization. She takes her team to multiple offsite meetings to focus explicitly on teamwork.
As the book progresses you see the personalities of each of the characters and begin to wonder which one of them is you. As I read, I definitely found myself in the situation and thought “geez – I’ve got to be a real pain sometimes!” However, it’s because of the fact that we have a level of trust on our own leadership team that I am able to be myself and provide the critical input that myself and others were hired to provide.
If you’re someone looking to lead a team and don’t have a ton of time on your hand, I’d strongly recommend grabbing a copy of this one. I’m a really, really, slow reader and was able to finish this one in about 4 hours.
In the online marketing and advertising world, our process is what is commonly referred to as a “sales funnel.” At every point in the process, you can expect to lose some of your customers as you push them through to a conversion or sale. For GMO, we are striving to turn the process into a column. To have a greater kingdom impact, we work diligently to achieve our mission to “Share. Grow. Connect.” A greater kingdom impact would be a larger number of seekers engaged with all three pieces of our mission.
We’ve demonstrated a very successful model of sharing the gospel throughout the past 11 years. We have over 6,000 volunteer Online Missionaries serving as online disciplers for our seekers. We provide them the opportunity to download a bible, visit discipleship websites, share content with their social networks and become reproducing disciples themselves. Over the next couple of years we will be working to implement the third leg of the mission of connecting our seekers to local Christian community.
To do this, we are undertaking 3 strategies by asking the following questions: 1.) What languages do people use on the Internet? 2.)What is the most culturally relevant experience we can provide our seekers in order to shepherd them well? And 3.) How can we connect them to the local body? To achieve these strategies we are engaging with leading cultural experts and organizations “on the ground” throughout the world to serve our precious seekers God has entrusted to us.
We believe that with a proven model for sharing and growing our seekers, and a strategic focus on providing the most culturally relevant experience and connecting them to a local Christian community, GMO will remain one of the best kingdom investment opportunities that exists.
It’s important to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) regardless of the type of your organization. A KPI is a metric you measure to ensure that your activities are leading you toward achieving your vision. In ministry, it’s even more important to do this as you are stewarding resources that people have entrusted to you to achieve a vision that aligns with their heart.
For most ministries, the goal is to see lives transformed by Jesus Christ. For GMO, we hope that seekers’ lives will be transformed by being presented the Gospel, indicating they’ve prayed to receive Christ, connecting with an online missionary to be discipled, interacting with discipleship content, and eventually connecting to local Christian community. This leads us to the natural KPI’s of Gospel Visits, Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and On the Ground Connections.
Over the past eleven years, we’ve seen several shifts in technology and marketing. For instance, when we began most of our seekers were using a desktop computer and typing in a search query in Google as they sought to answer deep questions about themselves, the universe, and their place within it. As we fast-forward to the present day, people are accessing the Internet from any screen – their mobile device, tablets, laptops, televisions, and watches! In addition, we’ve learned that in order to reach the world, we have to interrupt a person’s day by using display advertising on websites as opposed to search queries only.
These changes in technology and marketing have affected how people use technology. Consider yourself and how you engage with content online – you probably are consuming massive amounts of information in short pieces, rather than taking in a lot at one time. Also, when you consider “the world,” there are major chasms between the technology available in the developing world and the developed world. To best serve all device types and capabilities, GMO utilizes the “lightest” websites possible. This is based on the premise that if a website cannot load on a device because it has too many graphics, etc, then we will have lost an opportunity to share the gospel with that seeker.
In 2013 GMO adopted a strategy of “opening the flood gates,” driving for the lowest cost per gospel visit while we work to reach everyone on Earth multiple times with the gospel. After following this approach for approximately 18 months, our leadership team conducted a review of the strategy and determined that we could make a bigger kingdom impact by adopting a more balanced approach.
During this time, we also began tightening the definition around some of our main metrics, such as “gospel visits,” “indicated decisions,” and “new contacts.” In order for GMO to confirm that we have shared the gospel, we have placed a code at the bottom of the web page, which tells us that the gospel has been presented only when it renders on a seeker’s device as opposed to when it starts to download. When a person indicates a decision for Christ, we are not assuming a salvation. What we are assuming is that the seeker has indicated they are beginning their journey with Christ. And finally, for an individual to count as a new contact, they must submit a legitimate form through one of our websites. Through technology, we have been able to eliminate “bad submissions” from our numbers, which has helped provide our 6,000 volunteer Online Missionaries with “warmer” leads for discipling.
If you were to review our metrics over the past three years, what would you see? At first, there would be a decline in overall gospel visits, indicated decisions, and discipleship numbers. But upon further review, you would see that with fewer dollars, GMO has been able to stretch those funds for a greater kingdom impact than before. The proof is that with spending fewer dollars, we are seeing a higher percentage of Indicated Decisions, Discipleship Engagements, and New Contacts. This means that each gospel visit is netting a higher amount of engagement downstream.
Since 2004 GMO has reached nearly 1.5 billion Gospel Presentations
The name Peter Drucker is synonymous with management, having written numerous books on management, politics, society, and economics over his storied career. I picked up a copy of The Essential Drucker which is a compilation of 60 years’ worth of his writing. It’s neatly divided into three sections: Management, The Individual, and Society.
In the Management portion of the book he speaks to the role of entrepreneurship and innovation for the enterprise. One of the best nuggets I’ve seen play out time and time again in my own work is “In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship.” In a technology-based organization we are always striving to discover the latest and greatest, but are always constrained by the existing successful model.
In the Individual section he speaks to how an individual can become an effective executive. One of the most important things I’ve learned from this portion is to ask those who report to me ‘What are the contributions for which this organization and I, your superior, should hold you accountable? What should we expect of you? What is the best utilization of your knowledge and your ability?’ Then they write out a management letter to let me know where they see themselves contributing the most. Drucker points out that often, where the manager sees the worker contributing and where the worker sees themselves contributing are often quite different. The point of the exercise is to open up better lines of communication between managers and their workers.
In his writing on Society, he traces the transition from the farmer to the industrial worker to the knowledge worker and how each have disrupted the social fabric for a time. The rise of the knowledge worker has led to an increase in education, placing it at the center of society, a redefining of what it means to be “educated,” and an increase in competitiveness. This book is a fascinating read and I would highly encourage reading it if you don’t have the time to pick up Drucker’s numerous volumes.
I’ve been very fortunate over my career to lead teams that produce results. Often you’ll find me spending time thinking about how to better lead them to continue achieving, and hopefully surpassing our agreed upon goals. Much of the success is based on focusing on people and process. On people – hire competent people, provide an environment for them to succeed and get out of their way.
In this post, I want to focus more on the process. I work at an organization that runs Internet advertisements on a global scale 24/7. Nearly 500,000 people land on our web pages in 26 languages on a daily basis. We are data driven which means that we have to take time to see what the data is telling us, think about what changes we can make to increase performance, and then implement them.
Let’s talk then about how to give ourselves the space to do this in the midst of all the other “work” that has to be done. It’s starts with how you plan out your week. I divide my week into two parts: “operations” and “strategy.” Operations is managing today, today, while strategy is planning for tomorrow, today. Think of it like this: you’ve got to spend time working “in” the business and time working “on” the business.
With data coming in over the weekend, I like to spend Monday and Tuesday focused internally. This means that my meetings are focused vertically inside the organization. On Mondays, I review what is happening with those who report directly to me. On Tuesdays, I meet laterally with those on the leadership team and with my leader.
I try to hold off on external meetings and conversations for the first two days of the week and push them to Wednesday and Thursday. I love Wednesday’s and Thursday’s because those are the days we dream. I’ll often meet with different people throughout the organization asking “what if” questions. You’ll see me writing on the writeable walls and brainstorming about new opportunities.
On Friday’s, I like to focus a little more on myself, the manager. I like to spend Friday mornings focused on reviewing our strategic projects, and my calendar for the next week. I’ll look at the meetings coming up and make sure that I’ve got my ducks in a row before they arrive so that they are as fruitful as possible. Then, we have Friday afternoons. This is when I spend some thinking time by myself. I’ll read some articles on leadership, strategy, technology, innovation, etc and see if there are a few opportunities for me to implement what I’m reading. It’s also a way not to sprint into the weekend, but to ease into it.
Today is the beginning of Advent, which is the start of the new year for the church. The purpose of Advent is that we as Christians, are looking forward to the return of Christ. This was expressed in the passages in the Daily Officetoday where both New Testament passages (2 Peter 3:1-10 and Matthew 25:1-13) refer to Jesus’ return coming “like a thief” (2 Peter) and that we “neither know the day nor the hour” (Matthew).
When I walked into the sanctuary at church there was a noticeable difference. The church was absolutely beautiful as the colors have changed from green to a rich violet. Even the service began a little differently by the reading of a passage, confession and then procession. The readings from Jeremiah spoke to the fact that a “branch” (Jesus, the Root of Jesse) was going to be given to Judah and Israel. This was symbolic for the Jews as they were looking forward to the coming of the Messiah.
Next, the Collect of the Day read:
“Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the deeds of darkness and to put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”
During the Eucharist we joined together as a congregation in affirming: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
And our closing prayer read:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying ‘Behold the dwelling place of God is with man, He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.'” (Rev 21:1-4, ESV)
When I was a child, I was always amazed at how all the old folks could hardly wait to leave this world to see Jesus. They were referring to heaven as their home and praying that God would either return or take them any day. — I didn’t get it then. But I do now. After living through some pretty difficult times in my life (nearly losing my wife and daughter in child birth, my wife’s thyroid cancer, job losses) it’s all starting to make sense. A new heaven and a new earth sound awesome!
After the recent attacks in Paris, I’ve seen much debate (like everyone else) on cable news and social media. The responses among the people I know have ranged anywhere from “don’t let another person from Syria enter the country” to “open the flood gates.” This entire ordeal opens up a plethora of subjects to discuss – How should our governments respond (force, tighter immigration policies, only let in Christians, roll out the welcome mat)? How should Christians respond?
Among Christians debating the topic, the most striking difference is between the approach of older evangelicals and the millennial evangelicals (especially those who travel internationally). What I am reading from the more seasoned crowd is that we should shut off the borders to the United States to Syrians because European national Muslims attacked Paris (there is yet to be any evidence that the attackers were Syrian). Much of this crowd have had their opinions formed during rise of the Moral Majority and other conservative Christian causes which tended to conflate Christianity and the United States Government. They often see attacks like this as an affront to the United States.
The millennials, on the other hand, have had their opinions informed by the end of the Clinton era (where we disputed the definition of “is” and other moral absolutes) and the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. For their entire life our country has been at war. They tend to view the world through the lens of social justice, and are less concerned about security and national borders. They do not intertwine the United States and Christianity and often feel that the United States reacts in a very “un-christian” manner towards the powerless.
So, what should we do? I’m not going to advocate for opening the floodgates or shutting off the spigot. What I am going to argue for however, is a change in the tone. We do a disservice to our faith when we answer with smugness, anger, or heated rhetoric.
What should be uniting all of us is the Gospel of Jesus Christ – the fact that we no longer live our life condemned, but on the other side of the cross. It is only the Gospel that will allow us to open our hearts and minds up to those with whom we disagree. It is only the Gospel that will compel us to walk across the street to love our neighbor who may be a Muslim. And it is only the Gospel that will change the life of the radical jihadist. Our prayer should be not one of imprecation against those with whom we disagree; rather it should be one that he will open the hearts of those who stand at enmity with him to his saving Grace.
Businesses and organizations are in one of four cycles: Accelerating, Booming, Decelerating, or Tanking. Regardless of where they are, they search for ways to continue growing, get out of ruts, or prevent having to close the doors. They do not lack vision, but often lack a management process that allows them to see where they should be spending their time and resources. The Paterson StratOp Process provides exactly that. It is a six-step process consisting of perspective, planning, action, structure, management, and renewal.
StratOp walks leadership teams through a three-day process where we focus on perspective, planning, and action. Upon the conclusion of the three-day session, we break into teams that develop detailed action plans. Approximately one month later, the teams present their plans to the leader and StratOp facilitator where we work to ensure they are logical and feasible. Afterword, the facilitator and leader discuss the structure of the team to ensure that all of the members are poised to succeed in their roles.
Once structure is confirmed and a launch date is set, teams begin working their plans. StratOp reinforces the adage: “Plan your work. Work your plan. Your plan will work.” This is where StratOp truly separates itself from any other strategic planning process- it equips your team with a new strategic operating and management system. This system allows you to set goals, measure outcomes, and adapt to emerging trends.
StratOp is not a process to take lightly and requires dedication to trusting the process. If you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself wanting to do things outside your normal scope of business…which is why StratOp is so important. It keeps you focused on “what’s important now” so you can move the chains down the field.
