It also serves as a guide for day-to-day operations and as the foundation for future decision-making. VisionNOTES In antiquity, Moses did not merely lead the children of Israel out of Pharaoh’s Egypt to escape the harshness and bitterness of life there. A strategic plan is a management tool that serves the purpose of helping an organization do a better job, and it improves organizations because a plan focuses the energy, resources, and time of everyone in the organization in the same direction. You know what “shelf” we are talking about. What are the 1- to 3-year goals we are trying to achieve to support our strategic objective? For each goal put a measurement and target on a scorecard (in Excel). What will our church look like 10 years from now? Getting buy-in from your stakeholders is to ensure implementation of action items, it is important to assign responsibilities and deadlines. 2020, OnStrategy, All Rights Reserved. To manage our church on a fiscally sound operating basis. Churches can realize the same benefits. Realistic goals ought to serve as a tool for stretching an organization to reach its full potential. A church strategic plan can promote a church culture that is based on strategic thinking. To present authentic Christianity to our families, community, country and world. Objectives explain how you will get there. Through prayer, the framework for a plan can be established. Your core values are part of your strategic foundation. Just what is a unique advantage? Communicate the plan to everyone in your organization. Assess your opportunities and threats by asking what opportunities should we take advantage of and are there any emerging trends that might affect our organization? To improve internal process continually to realize efficiencies. Objectives state the broad direction; goals then operationalize that direction. Take corrective actions as needed. With the scorecard, you can actively track your progress on a monthly basis. It involves listing out the concrete steps that you need to accomplish in order to achieve your goals. He had a driving vision that propelled him and approximately two million people through the wilderness’s perils, obstacles, and interim If you do not change anything, will the future be any different than the past? Strategic Planning for Your Church. Details. Strategic Plan. For the Christian, this is not simply projection-based planning but the realization that through prayer and obedience you can be a catalyst to help bring about a future that is in alignment with God’s will. The strategic plan provides spiritual direction for our life as a church over the next 5 years. The three areas are: As you think about where your organization is now, you want to look at your foundational elements (mission and values) to make sure there has not been a change since they were originally created. This means that the church can conduct activities and programs that will allow its resources to be used accordingly while still ensuring that goals and objectives can be achieved. One sure-fire way to impact your church’s future is to dust off an old tool—the Strategic Plan. An action plan explains who is going to do what, by when, and in what order for the church to reach its goals. Know what your end result looks like and where your milestones should be. A strategic plan is a living, dynamic document. One sure-fire way to impact your church’s future is to dust off an old tool—the Strategic Plan. In this workshop I tackle the following topics: How to build and maintain a cohesive strategic planning team. You can develop one strategy for your church or guiding statement for each year. The plan needs to be supported with people, money, time, systems, and, above all, communication. With it, you can actively track progress towards your goals. MISSION STATEMENT: The Northeast Florida Baptist Association is a fellowship of Southern Baptist Churches organized to facilitate mutual encouragement and cooperation in fulfilling the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. More than likely, you will not revise these two areas very often. (DOC) STRATEGIC PLANNING FOR A LOCAL CHURCH | Evgeny Bakhmutsky - Academia.edu Business organizations and not-for-profit organizations have for years enjoyed the benefits of strategic planning. With short-term goals, the organization converts the mission, vision, and long-term objectives into performance targets. When Jesus was on this earth He served humanity, made disciples, proclaimed the Gospel and He spent time on the mountain top, growing spiritually. Additionally, strategic planning is not just something you cross off your list of “to-dos”—you must create a culture of strategic thinking, so your strategic planning does not become an annual retreat but, instead, a part of daily decision making. The Strategic Plan is “evergreen,” meaning it never expires, having no defin… Only by reaching clarity and consensus to address these unique challenges as a unified body can we more fully live our faith and give meaning to Christ’s Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations." What unique skills, resources, gifts and capabilities has God placed in your church? To serve more people in the community through new programs and services. Above all, remember that implementing the plan requires continued daily prayer for direction accompanied by obedient action in response to what God reveals. - 90% of local churches have a strategic plan by 2018. Some churches spent less than $500 on this but saw lots of fruit from relationships being built with neighbors, many of whom began attending. 28:19-20). Strategic planning is how we make it happen. Will you be a few steps closer to realizing your vision? Gathering information from your constituents and stakeholders about the effectiveness of your programs, services, and church is essential for the SWOT to identify key issues. It’s a lot easier to imagine where you’d like to be in the future than it is to … Ignore the semantics and focus on establishing a framework. praying for other Pastors, for other churches, for leaders and laborers and for the work of the Kingdom of God around the world. No one strategic model fits all organizations, but the planning process includes certain basic elements that all churches can use to explore their vision, goals, and next steps of an effective strategic plan. You want to have a clear idea as to what your church embodies so that you can come up with the goals that will compliment it. Match your strengths with opportunities, shore up your weaknesses and guard against threats. A plan spells out where an organization is going over the next year or more and how it is going to get there. Strategic planning is a process that helps focus on aligning the unique gifts and resources that God has given your organization to take advantage of your opportunities. Strategy answers the question “how.” It explains how you will travel to your final destination. - 95% of local Churches have Stewardship and Strategic Plans Committee by Some activities can be compressed, others expanded. Values are deeply held convictions, priorities, and underlying assumptions that influence our attitudes and behaviors. They are the continuous strategic activities necessary to achieve your vision. Each of these visions falls under one of three value areas: Economic Viability, Environmental Sustainability and Strengthening Community. To build an overcoming church out of broken lives through the power of Jesus. It is helpful to think of objectives as broad general area. What areas do we need to focus on over the next 3-5 years to accomplish our vision? How to … This is one method. Without regular evaluation, discussion, and ongoing clarity all of the church systems & strategies will eventually decline into sacred cows; bulky & ineffective ministry that is increasingly irrelevant to the church body and community. Formal planning has helped mobilize and motivate organizations in the achievement of goals and objectives. Size: 2 MB. In the mid-1990s the leadership of Berwyn United Methodist Church developed a strategic plan called Vision-2000. To develop a loving and caring Christian community effecting a global impact for Christ through its local, regional, and international outreach. Gets everyone on the same page focused and pulling in the same direction. A Godly vision makes your heart surge, carries you to heights you never dreamed possible, and causes exponential growth. With this strategic plan, the Church is aligning herself with God’s vision to meet the grand challenges of humanity in a diverse world. The Strategic Plan is implemented through the use of Annual Plans derived directly from the five-year plan. The overall aim is integrating the strategic planning with daily, weekly, and monthly routines. Use church strategic plan templates that can give you an idea on how you can properly and strategically plan … Think of the SWOT as a filtering tool to assess your current strategic position. The development of specific objectives, goals and action plans flow out of the four foundational planning components. You need to embrace your church’s uniqueness and develop plans around it. The strategic plan of the North New South Wales Conference was modelled on the life of Jesus Christ. They define what your organization is intending to accomplish both programmatically and organizationally. What matters is having a combination of long-term and short-term markers to keep your church moving in the right direction. To be an oasis of faith at a busy crossroad. The existing governance including administrative committees, deacon review, and recommendations to the church as previously practiced will … Think about achieving them in a 12– to 18-month time frame. A strategy is like an umbrella. Ask him/her to write the action plan and be responsible for making sure each task is accomplished. Strategic planning in a local church is a process that God through his Holy Spirit must direct. To exalt the Lord, equip the believer, evangelize the world, and expand the Kingdom. We are young-minded, progressive and culturally relevant messengers of the Gospel of Christ. The typical questions people have relating to the elements are the following: This is probably the most widely debated part of strategic planning. Or, if you are off target, how far are you off? Action items are basically a “To-Do List” for each goal. Without an openness to change, strategic planning is unlikely to produce meaningful progress. We have to aim high because the world needs Christ and FUMC should be the means through which the lost come to Christ. To be the premier seeker-driven, community church in the state. It delineates the future focus and where the church is going. We have set ambitious goals. To write values ask the following questions: The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a tool to help match internal organizational strengths with external opportunities to meet the needs of your constituents and community best. Goals are important because they provide direction, clarify job roles, give … You can continue this same process at every ninety-day increment until the goal is achieved. Effective SMART goals clearly state what you want to accomplish, when you want to accomplish it, how you are going to do it, and who is going to be responsible. We do the planning, but God does the directing. Picking the right one determines how quickly or slowly you get to your final destination. It serves as a unifying focal point for everyone in the organization like a North Star. To begin using the scorecard, select the “Top Five” key goals that you want to measure that will have the most impact in moving your church forward. Hold your plans before the Lord. What is the future I want to create for my church? By placing all the elements of the plan into three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces fit together. In today’s church there are so many urgent needs and issues that must be addressed. ... Download the 2019-2023 Strategic Plan. Additionally, use your SWOT analysis to write goals. Feel free to blend and bend this process to fit the needs of your church culture and size. It is simply the answer to “what does your church do best?” Your unique advantage is what your church does or potentially could do better than similar organizations. Think of the following elements of a typical strategic plan in the hierarchy as outlined in Figure 1: Because it is easy to confuse how all the elements of a plan come together and where they go, the visual Strategy Map in Figure 2 is a simple, yet clear way of looking at the whole plan. Are you where you thought you would be if you had been on target? It drives your church and must be integrated into every fiber of your organization, so all staff is helping to move the church in the same direction. We believe in empowering teams to do amazing work, consistently & passionately. Goals convert your strategic objectives into specific performance targets. As you do the planning, let God do the directing. The Strategic Planning Strategy. Each year the denomination will develop and implement an Annual Plan inclusive of all Breakthrough Objectives. Each goal should be specific and measurable. Your unique advantages are the foundation, the cornerstone of your strategic plan. Hold a monthly or quarterly strategy meeting to report on the progress toward achieving the goals. Perform a gap analysis. Continue building a plan with the OnStrategy Strategic Planning Template. As people of faith, we trust that God is doing a new thing in the world and we long to be part of this work. billing.church. The same is true for the LOCAL CHURCH. At our “kick-off” meeting last April, we shared the six stages of the strategic planning model prepared by … Expand programs/services to existing congregation. 3 years to teach them everything they needed to know, 3 years to give them hands-on training and experience, They have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization. Throughout the planning process you will need to evaluate every part of your plan to determine whether it supports or detracts from this. With this in mind, your mission statement will be one that expresses God’s call on your church—focusing on who you are and what you do. The strategic plan serves as a roadmap by which the organization can visualize where they are going and how to get there. Where are we headed? Therefore, we need to assess where we are today in the context of our Church community, our local community and within the Metropolis, which will form the basis for our plan for our strategic plan. A vision that is inspired by God is God-sized and will require the power of God to fulfill. Strategic planning is about keeping the plan active so that it does not gather that proverbial dust. The scorecard is to be used as both a measurement and management tool to assist in fulfilling an organization’s vision. FIA First United Church Strategic Plan –Final 3/24/17 10 © 2017 Descriptions: Strategic Initiatives Mission Work Description: It’s about seeking to be God’s actor in the world, bringing people together to serve God and to have greater impact collectively, and working for systemic and structural changes in our designated mission areas. In fact, it should be quick, simple, and easily executed. What are your specific, measurable, and realistic targets of accomplishment. Vision provides a clear mental picture, by faith, of what your church will look like in five to ten years from now. To write a mission statement ask the following questions: Values are enduring, passionate, and distinctive core beliefs. Assess your strengths and weaknesses by answering these questions: what do we do well, and where could we improve? Last year Elim Fellowship produced a professional recording of my one day workshop entitled, “Strategic Planning for the Local Church”. This strategic plan helps to guide the church’s decision- making for the next five years (2018-2022) in achieving its vision and mission for the student population of our church, including where to focus, how to approach our ministry, and how to best allocate people, time, and resources. - 90 % of local churches have an effective internal control system by September 2018. A Godly vision is based on God’s will for the church. Implementation is the most difficult part of the planning process: it is actually achieving the goals set out in the plan while remaining alert and flexible to new opportunities as they unfold.