To keep momentum going…you have to continually upgrade!
Georgia-Pacific is an International company with over 300 manufacturing facilities and 40,000 employees. They have products from building products to paper and own brands such as Quilted Northern, Angel Soft and Vanity Fair. They’ve been successful as a company since 1927.
Read what CEO & President James Hannan said in a recent Sky magazine article.
“Every one of our products has some sort of upgrade probably within a year to two years.”
Do you see that? Everyone of their products…every year or two…
And some of those products are toilet paper!
That’s what it takes to maintain momentum for over 80 years.
It made me wonder:
Why is it so hard to implement change or improvements with how we do things in the church?
In a world of constant change, upgrades must come sooner than ever, even in churches. You don’t have to change the message to get better at telling it.
If nothing else change your brand of bathroom tissue…it’s probably been upgraded recently anyway… 🙂
What do you need to upgrade?
We have decided to get in the homes of our converts for discipleship in place of trying to get them to come to us for extra services.
Awesome.
We're evaluating and upgrading everything we do in regards to connecting with first-time guests. Implementing a lot of Searcy's stuff for assimilation…
We are upgrading our fall kick off for our small groups ministry. Trying to start new groups, and connect new people.
What performance measures or other metrics do you have in place to determine the success of your current programs? Do you survey former small group attendees to ensure you are meeting cited expectations?
We try to connect 100% of our people into community groups. Obviously this is insanely difficult, but as far as measurable numbers that's what we are trying to accomplish. As for spiritual advancement we are hoping people are connecting with God, and with one another in those groups. This is a little tougher to measure.
Twitter: Benreed
says:
We measure success on connecting and spiritual growth. It's not all a numbers thing for us (though numbers are important), and we help group leaders focus on helping their group take steps of faith. If a group is taking steps of faith, they're successful.
And you do a great job with groups!
Twitter: BradBlocksom
says:
Good question – performance measures in ministry (I once attended an ETS seminar where they were using baptisms) tough thing to come up with metrics on though. In addition to reviewing our last year's worth of sermons we are asking all leaders (including the Sr. Pastor) to fill out a questionnaire to help us determine where people are and so we can figure out what the needs are and what we need to do to help people move further along in the discipleship process. Finally we are interviewing people who were judged by leadership to be making significant progress in their discipleship to help figure out what we're doing right.
Love it!
We are revising and working on improving our Sunday School program, and I'm currently working on moving to and updating our website with a content management system. Since I don't know coding, it is cumbersome to get updates put up on our web site. A content management system for the web site will make that a lot easier. But in general, I think things don't get updated/upgraded frequently because there are only a few people who REALLY care about how things get done in church, and since we worked so hard at putting it all together the first time, and we're all volunteers, who has the time to beat up all that work, when very few people want to help make the updates/upgrades. The majority of people in church are consumers. Those of us who care about the message get tired sometimes. Plus, for small churches, there is very little $$ to do anything.
Thanks for sharing Tina. Sounds like that's pretty intense.
Twitter: BradBlocksom
says:
We are currently reviewing/critiquing our last years worth of sermon series’ to assess how well we are doing at making disciples.
"…to assess how well we are doing at making disciples." That is a God honoring goal.
That's a great idea…