Now What?
Let’s get you moving in the right direction.
You are without a pastor, so what’s next?
Well, Jesus is still building his church, and the harvest is still plentiful.
So, let’s reboot and get moving in the right direction.
Your Reality
- Your pulpit is vacant.
- Your church is stagnating or declining.
- What you’ve tried hasn’t really worked.
- You are hoping and wishing for a new pastor to make it better.
Can we make a suggestion?
Before you hire your next pastor, you have some work to do.
When we talk to pastoral candidates about a call to a smaller or a stagnating church, we are often asked, “Is the church a project?”
Ouch.
Projects are high-risk. You are asking a pastor and his family to move to a call that may not work out because of the state of your church.
FYI: Many pastors who accept a call to a project do not last more than five years.
It is hard on a family.
- The wife carries many of the family’s burdens.
- The pastor often lacks some of the key skills to get the church moving in the right direction.
- The kids get a front-row seat to witness the difficulty of getting the church moving in the right direction.
This leads to an exhausted family who loses enthusiam for the church.
What if you could flip the script?
What if you do the work so you are no longer viewed as a project?
Pastoral candidates will be intrigued with your church and will listen to your story.
What will it take to get there?
Our five-part process helps you start moving in the right direction. It aligns your church to a simple, Scripture-based vision and plan while helping you process the wounds your church may have felt over the past few years.
Logos Presbyterian Church in Seattle successfully engaged in our this process. Read their story below.
Now that you are moving in the right direction, it’s time to attract the right pastor.
This is harder than you think. If you hire the wrong pastor, it will set your church back years and $100,000’s of dollars. Hiring the right guy will move your church forward.
Our New Direction Process is five-steps of channeling the ministries of the church through the Great Commission. This will ensure that every ministry is equipped and empowered to reach out, share the faith, and disciple others. It is built on a double-edged platform of renewing people spiritually, then giving them something to do. These two simple acts will help them conform them to Christ.
1. Aligning Perception allows you to see your church as it really is. You will work through a church health self-assessment and answer the question, “Where are we?” This starting point establishes a baseline of comparison to the ending point of REBOOT NOW. This step usually motivates people to act like few other tools.
2. Aligning Vision puts the vision for your church in alignment with God’s vision for you. You will work through our proven vision process that answers the question, “Where do we want to be?”
3. Aligning Strategy makes sure that what you DO in ministry is in alignment with God’s vision for your church. You will wrestle with several questions and our strategy process which will answer the question, “What will get us there?”
4. Aligning Structure organizes your leadership around the central mission of being faithful to the Great Commission. Allocating resources and defining a decision making process will answer the question, “How will leadership function?” This will support your strategy and vision.
5. Aligning People draws your congregation into the vision of reaching a community and assimilating those reached into the life and mission of your church. Your leadership will figure out how to keep people involved and realize the future depends on a healthy culture of outreach, evangelism and discipleship.
We don’t know.
Because it’s a process, not a program, the completion time varies.
Here are some of the factors that affect how long it takes to finish:
- The church’s past.
- The leadership team’s character, knowledge, and skill.
- The ability to overcome limiting beliefs, competing values, and core issues that have held the church back.
- The time to you have to spend on the Reboot process.
- The way God decides to move and how fast.
What Others Are Saying
“From my perspective, Dr. Kenneth Priddy is one of the top two or three authorities on church revitalization in the United States. His approach to renewing churches is biblically sound, practically useful, and strategically solid. If you wish to see your church be fruitful in its evangelism and outreach, I advise you to listen, learn, and leverage Dr. Priddy’s insights for kingdom growth.”
Gary L. McIntosh, Ph.D., Professor of Christian Ministry and Leadership, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University
The Reboot process has helped move Logos Presbyterian forward.
This is a church that has had two significant church splits in the last five to eight years, and have plateaued/decline in the last several years.
Logos joined the EPC two years ago and started church revitalization a year and a half ago.
The process has given the church a focus. They have two strategic initiatives planned and they have accomplished the first one – the calling of a youth/outreach pastor. The second initiative is to start a second service that is English speaking and more contemporary. This is planned to kick-off next Easter.
Larry Jung has done an excellent job encouraging the church and its pastor and keeping both on track through this season. Larry has preached three times during this process including the sermon for the installation service of the new pastor. Logos welcomes Larry’s direction and experience. His own personal testimony of the importance of “high risk faith” has helped propel the church forward.
The new pastor has 25-35 youth/young adults in the middle school to late 20s range. They are all excited to have a pastor closer in age who wants to see a more contemporary service happen.
I anticipate that in the next year we will see numerical growth as the enthusiasm grows!
Thanks for the help and prayers!
Rev. Bill McDonald, Logos Presbyterian Church, Seattle, WA.
“This ministry has greatly helped to keep us on track as a leadership team, Session, and church. We have steadily seen our church grow with more and more people visiting and attending as we have made “people contact” of high priority, seeking to create “people flow” in order to reach lost people. During the time I have known Ken and gleaned from his ministry our church has grown 20% and we’ve added a Fellowship Hall and more classroom space. More than the growth, this ministry has kept our focus on the Lord and His mission to make disciples of all nations, the harvest is truly ripe!”
Dr. Rob Buchanan – EPC of Elkton, VA
“We are a small church (average weekly worship attendance of 70). While we are a mission church in the EPC, we began our journey together when a large group from First Presbyterian Church, Waynesboro (PCUSA) left after a protracted discernment process and the subsequent challenges we experienced in leaving the PC (USA).
In the early stages of our life together (spring of 2013), Dr. Ken Priddy consulted with us providing a very meaningful full-day seminar introducing some of the principles of the GO training (Building Your Church’s Great Commission Matrix). This training provided significant thought-provoking material, which challenged us to look at our life cycle as a new mission church, as well as the need for every ministry to have the same strategic design . . . GO . . . MAKE . . . DISCIPLES. He also introduced us to the Vision Team concept surrounded by prayer teams. We initiated this process shortly after the presentation. It has proved to be quite effective in helping us focus on God’s vision for us, moving from thinking only about what brought us together (shared theological commitments) to focusing on what God is calling us to be for Him and His Kingdom now (a congregation committed to being and making disciples)!
Since this March, I have been engaged in one of Dr. Priddy’s GO Clusters. These bi-monthly GoToMeeting video conferences have provided more specifics to the initial training. One specific gleaning from our most recent conference was to learn how to minister THROUGH our congregation rather than just TO our congregation. As a leadership team we are discerning how to move people to be agents of ministry rather than just recipients of ministry based upon this teaching.
The ministry Dr. Priddy is providing is a true blessing for me and our church as we continue to seek for ways to apply these ministry principles to our life together. I pray more of our EPC congregations across the country will benefit from this excellent training.”
Rev. Glen Holman, Organizing Pastor Hope Community Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.
“The training we received through individual consultation and GO Cluster participation was absolutely invaluable for our church. Rather than a “one size fits all” approach, this provided specific, detailed attention necessary for assessing the Spirit’s unique work here. Peace is attempting a “prayer based model” for church growth, which is not part of a standard “church growth” paradigm. Ken and Tom did not “despise the day of small things;” both recognized that what God is doing here is impacting lives not only in Durham and nationally but in many countries (I have been blessed with a writing ministry in the area of prayer—especially prayer for families with prodigals—and the church embraces this ministry as their own). The outstanding consultation and insight provided enabled us to investigate the relationship between prayer and evangelism in practical ways that have helped us reach deeper into our community. Further encouragement in a missional outlook through regular training at Presbytery meetings has also been indispensable (a recent presentation of “Christianity Explored” was very well received, and we will be launching our first outreach effort with it this Fall). Peace is now exhibiting positive numerical growth, financial stability, and fresh vitality and enthusiasm for a true Kingdom ministry.”
Dr. James Banks – Peace Church, Durham, NC