Grass Roots Healthy Reproducing Churches Podcast Episode 6

Issue for Discussion: The Shift From Planning to Preparation

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After last week's episode, A Return to Spiritual Formation, I felt like an inexperienced swimmer who accidentally found himself in the deep end. Discipleship is the one thing Jesus told us to go and do, and it's the thing we put the least effort into. We counsel people. We hold worship services. We preach, which can have something to do with discipleship if we are intentional about it. But when I ask people if they were ever discipled, they almost always say, "No." or they say it was through a parachurch organization like the Navigators or Campus Crusade for Christ.

The temptation for me because of my personality is to "nail discipleship down," and I do hope we can at least give some better guidelines for discipleship. But before we make any pronouncements, let's let Reggie McNeal finish making his point in the last two chapters of his book, The Present Future.

Chapter 5 of his book is titled, "The Shift from Planning to Preparation." At first I didn't see that he was continuing to talk about discipleship. I would say that he started with planning because that has been a norm for churches in the last 25 years. They were encouraged to have a 5 and 10 year plan. But McNeal says those days are over.

Quotes from Reggie McNeil's The Present Future:


The Bible sounds a recurring theme: God wants his people to pray and to prepare for his intervention. It doesn't talk much about his people making plans and offering them up to him for his blessing (except in a negative sense -- see James 4:14, 15). -- p 93

The difference between planning and preparedness is more than semantics in the biblical teaching. God does the planning; we do the preparing. It is God who declares: "I know the plans I have for you," he says in Jeremiah 29:11. He does not say, "I am waiting for you to develop plans I can bless." -- p 95

Though vision does not arrive from consensus, it inspires consensus. A guiding vision helps with both routine decisions and critical choices. Vision informs budgeting, staffing, ministry direction, building architecture, and strategies for outreach. Vision gives content to your church's message. ... Vision can help reduce the number of decisions you have to make. p 96-97


I am moving more and more to a position that the pastor does not necessarily even need to be the chief architect of the vision. I have come to this position because so few pastors seem to possess this talent... The pastor must be willing to submit to the manifest vision of God as revealed to the leadership team. The pastor must agree with it down into his bones to the extent that he is willing to shift behavior and priorities to pursue the vision. The pastor must be able to communicate the vision with clarity and passion, even if he is not the key architect. p 100-101


Kingdom vision requires kingdom values to support it. Vision is the seed; values are the soil. I run into situations frequently in which the soil won't support the growth of the vision. Leaders who don't pay attention to clarifying values are often frustrated because they don't know why the vision goes nowhere... The clash between club member values and missionary values has claimed a lot of casualties. -- p 102


Links:

Guests:
Fran Leeman, pastor of the Lifespring Community Church in Plainfield, IL, a growing suburb of Chicago.

Lance Finley -- On Vacation. Lucky.

Bill Sloat, pastor of Faith Community Church, in Denver, PA, a small town in Lancaster country, PA, who also has a doctorate in church history, specifically revivalist history of the 1700’s and 1800's.

And I'm Brian Miller, pastor of The Crossover Church in Mattoon, IL, a town of about 20,000 in East Central Illinois.