How can a church resiliently mobilize its ministry, break through the barriers it faces, and overcome disruption when you must continue your ministry faithfully throughout the uncharted territory of the digital age? Let us get to the bottom line. The tipping point in today’s ministry is no longer its size but its cohesive power of enlisting early adopters to your ministry and eventually growing with them into a faith community. You can visit one of my blog posts, “How can we intentionally reach early adopters?”

Then, the next question should be, “How do we develop leadership with such competency?”.

It Starts with Your Transform first.

While working closely as a coach and ministry consultant, I have found that their congregational culture is the foundation of leadership development while working closely with pastors over the last three decades. I will revisit the topic of organizational culture in the following posts. When your congregational culture is relevant to the prevailing culture of your target community, your church could move forward successfully with your ministries seeking to reach the new people in the community.

Fostering an organic culture and shifting into this new culture starts with you, pastors. There are two things a pastor can do to set the stage for a successful shift. These should happen concurrently.

Technical Competencies mean Just-in-time Learning or Agile Ministry.

First, equip yourself with technical competencies. It might sound very technical, but the reality is all about owning a new mindset. We used to call it “the missionary mindset,” now, I refer to it as a just-in-time ministry or agile ministry. There is no way to get trained for all the cultural competencies. When you are ready, your ministry context might not be the same anymore, and people may no longer need the proposed ministry. Your community evolves faster than you keep up with the changes. Training is necessary for pastors to feel comfortable and motivated. What is needed is to experience a successful ministry development while learning the just required competencies on the fly that produces meaningful relationships and engagements with new people in your target community. It is pretty straightforward than it sounds. All you need to learn is to initiate a small pilot project one after another that can be done within weeks, and that cannot be failed. Even though these pilot projects create minor riffle effects for your congregation, they begin to mobilize your church resiliently and move forward strategically with relevant ministries while learning the required competencies.

To help pastors who want to try out with Agile Ministry, I have developed the I.G.N.i.T.E. frameworks for your ministry development. Ministry tools and operation platforms are also available to modify according to your ministry situation. There also exists a coaching program provided by LeadershipEdges. I.G.N.i.T.E. Coaching is unique for motivated pastors looking to develop their ministry strategy and understand the need for practical ministry operation platforms for today’s ministries. For these specific needs, I.G.N.i.T.E. Coaching first aims to guide pastors to construct an effective ministry strategy in their local context through a simple Ministry Innovation Diffusion process. I.G.N.i.T.E. Coaching differentiates itself from Spiritual Life Coaching by taking a systemic approach blending coaching, consultation, and experiments with a clear focus on your ministry strategy construction and critical leadership development for the emerging culture. It allows engagement with alignment in performance and co-creates individual and team vision leading to collaborative actions.

Agile Ministry Means Just-in-time Team Discovery

With your transformation underway, the next step is to develop an effective leadership team. As said earlier, it is not possible to build up culturally competent leadership overnight. It would help if you learned to connect with and invite the participating early adopters into the team as community connectors. Collaboration with professionals and business entities in your community would bring in cultural competencies and connections with them. This just-in-time team discovery makes your agile ministry continue into the next round of leadership development and cultural transformation.