Ministry Growth: Create Your Discipleship Strategy (BRETT WRITE)
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Bottom Up Growth Strategy (BRETT EDIT) (TOWER Mental Model) Add IMG

Self-Awareness: In this layer, the most foundational layer is where you keep your beliefs about yourself, God, other people, and reality. This is your most fundamental operating system. If your most basic beliefs about yourself, God, reality, or other people are incorrect, everything you try to do will be met with resistance.

You must have a complete understanding of your beliefs on this subject because any false beliefs will change what happens on all the levels above this.

At the self-awareness level, you must look into yourself from a third-person perspective and think through your beliefs.

One important thing to realize is that God created the world to reward those who act morally (read Proverbs). These beliefs are generally the beliefs that God wants us to have.

INSERT VERSES FROM PROVERBS

It’s generally true that good ideas produce good results. This is what we see in Proverbs and through natural revelation in general.

Bad ideas also produce bad results. (It’s never a good idea to try cocaine just this once or to quit working to pursue your nonexistent professional gaming career.)

If we are not seeing fruit in our ministries, it’s most likely because some of the ideas we believe are untrue. It’s time to find them, and replace the with more true beliefs.

This should be an ongoing process (like sanctification) where we are continually challenging our beliefs and replacing old, untrue beliefs with more true beliefs. The goal is to have the mind of Christ.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” -Romans 12:2

Recourse Allocation Layer: This is the layer that prioritizes one task over another. People that succeed at this layer can do in-depth analyses of multiple different opportunities at the same time and prioritize them based on their level of risk and reward, urgency, etc.

People who excel at the resource allocation layer understand that at any given time, there are only so many resources that can be allocated and therefore there are only so many tasks and opportunities that can be taken on at once.

If resources are not funneled to the best places, it’s impossible to create the most fruitful ministry.

This is also the layer where we need to consider what tasks should be delegated and which should not.

When I see ministry leaders allocating resources and putting first priority on tasks or opportunities that are useless, I know there is something that’s not quite right about the resource allocation thought process.

We also find the ability to break down work into correctly sized pieces over a timeframe. This is also where we find contingency planning. What happens if plan A doesn’t work? What’s plan B, C, D, etc?

Problem-solving. When unforeseen issues arise in your grand strategy, how do you figure out how to get past that roadblock? Do you go over? Do you go around, under?

Ministry Principles: In this layer, we find the beliefs you have about how a ministry should be run. Most ministry leaders look around at how other ministries are doing things and think that they must run their ministry this way too. The thing is, the majority of ministries ARENT getting the results they want, so doing things the “normal way” is almost always wrong.

Here are 3 ministry principles that most ministries use that also lead to fruitless, growth-less ministries. (We will explore each of these later)

  1. The irrational obsession with social media marketing.
  2. The hyperfocus on making new guests feel welcome.
  3. Trying to reach everyone.

In the ministry principles layer, we should be asking the correct questions that will lead us to discover what will generate a fruitful ministry – whether or not it looks like other churches.

VAN ROOF VENT EXAMPLE

Ministry Disciplines: All of the former layers are foundation layers. When we come to ministry discipline, we can have many different pieces. You may have disciplines like:

Marketing discipline

Theology discipline

Hermeneutic discipline

Accounting discipline

Stage Design Discipline

Worship Discipline

Event Planning Discipline

Church Comms Discipline

Poor understanding of the ministry disciplines’ layers brings problems to your ministry. This is where cylo ministries begin to come into play. If each ministry leader goes to school and only learns one ministry discipline, there is nobody in the ministry who can see the full picture. Everyone believes that their individual discipline is the critical piece of the puzzle (because they can’t see any other pieces). Ministry leaders with only one skill can’t give good advice because they are unable to see how all of the parts of the ministry work with all of the other parts. They can’t see how any individual action will cause a reaction in some other area. They can only see and understand their little part. This leads to infighting over resources as a result of over-specialization. This also leads to one person acting “properly” in his area of the ministry while being completely unaware that his action broke something in someone else’s area.

Instead of hyper-specialization, you should be focused on giving your ministry team cross-training. Prepare every person to fill any position. When everyone on your team has developed multiple disciplines, they can see the bigger picture and make decisions that will have a positive impact on more areas than just their own.

This is called generalization. Ministry leaders who generalize their knowledge across multiple relevant areas and specialize in one are able to do the work of an entire ministry team, in less time than 20 ministry leaders would need to communicate and execute the same task. Because the generalist can see the whole picture, they can make decisions faster and quickly more to taking massive action.

I do my best to practice exactly this. Here are some of the ministry disciplines I have spent years studying.

Speaking, teaching, biblical studies, hermeneutics, apologetics, finance, investing, bookkeeping, accounting, corporate structures, strategy, marketing, sales, psychology, product & service development, management, etc.

When you are able to use more than one disciplinary lens to solve problems, you are able to leverage far more information in your decision-making processes.

Individual tools: In the final level of the bottom-up growth strategy is where you will find individual tools and processes. Each ministry discipline has its own set of tools. Just within the marketing discipline, I may know how to make landing pages, work with Google Ads, or a Google Ad Grant. I know how to use Canva to create graphics, how to use SEM Rush for keyword research, and how to then keyword target videos on YouTube to make sure they show up at the top of search results.

These individual tools and processes are important, but unless they are built on the rest of the foundation we have discussed, they are useless. What good is it to know how to design a beautiful website, if you don’t also know how to optimize that website for conversions (marketing) so people actually sign up to join your ministry events?

To become the ministry leader who is given 5 talents and gets 5 more, we must develop every area we have discussed in this process.

In this section, we will begin looking at our belief systems and analyzing our self-awareness layer.

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