What I Learned This Summer, Part 4
Last week I wrote about how the Synod of our denomination – the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) – adopted an audacious 10-year strategic plan for church planting. The goal is that our denomination of about 900 churches would plant 1,000 new churches in the next 10 years. How would that even be possible?!?
A couple of quotes from the report that Synod adopted:
Ten years is a long time from now. To help us know that we are making progress toward this vision and to clarify what we need to do in order to get there, we need “vision with teeth” for the next five years, followed by a strategic “reset” for the five years after that. The focus for these first five years will be to build the foundation, to gain clarity on ownership for the five core strategies that make up this strategic plan, and to test and learn from pilot projects to discover what works and is scalable.
It will be primarily in the second five years that we anticipate seeing exponential growth as these core strategies scale and multiply across our denomination.
For the first five years, we need vision that includes indicators of success. We need something that is specific and time-bound. We need a measurable slice of this vision that will give us strategic focus. We need something that will stretch us toward our ten-year vision while at the same time being achievable and reasonable for us to go after together. As the visionary-leadership consultant Michael Hyatt
has put it, “Vision must be big enough to stretch people but not so gigantic that it feels absurd.”
What could provide this kind of strategic focus for the next five years? We believe an aspirational vision to plant 150 new worshiping communities across North America by 2031 will hit that sweet spot of stretching us without feeling unreasonable. To put this into a strategy statement for the next five years, we offer the following: If every classis in the CRCNA has a sustainable church multiplication pathway in place that helps local churches (1) make disciples, (2) develop leaders, (3) equip planters, and (4) plant new churches, then 150 new worshiping communities will be established across the U.S. and Canada by 2031.
I do have a little personal experience where something like this happened on a local level. Fresh out of Seminary, Sarah and I moved to Sacramento, California where a group of CRC churches (called a “Classis”) decided to step out in faith together and plant a new church on the east side of Sacramento where the population was rapidly expanding at the time. An entrepreneurial young church planter, my friend Rev. Kevin Adams, was eager to embrace this challenge and moved to Sacramento with his family. After a year of prayer, organizing, and building relationships, a new church was born:
Granite Springs CRC. I arrived a few years later, and already – after less than five years of existing – Granite Springs was dreaming of how to plant more churches. The excitement of new conversions, rapid growth, and spiritual renewal was contagious. The momentum began to grow!
Over the next five years a network of church planters developed, we started coaching up interns and pastors in training, and soon we needed both hands to count the church plants that had sprung up from our young, fledgling church. That’s the story that our denomination envisions multiplying in every corner and cranny of our churches all over North America. Could it happen?
The CRC has a long way to go. Our shared culture and behaviors would need to change drastically.
It would take some miracles! Do those still happen? I’ll write more in next week’s blog about the possibility of these miracles and how they might even impact us right here in Elmhurst, Illinois.
- Pastor Gregg