from January 24, 2010 prayer email

I had the privilege of spending last weekend with the missions leadership team (see photos below) at Fellowship Bible Church in Tulsa (a family focused, evangelical, non-denominational, 30 year old church of 1100). We met for 48 hours in a 19th century barn (that had been converted into a home) in a beautiful rural setting NW of Tulsa.



The missions leadership team had been struggling for some time with a “tyranny of the urgent” mentality. And many team members were discouraged and nearing burn out.

We spent all of Friday evening in a guided time of worship and prayer (a great way to start any retreat or extended meeting time).

All day (and night) Saturday were devoted to grappling with three major issues:
1. ALIGNMENT: How to best align local and global outreach with the vision of the church’s leadership, rather than having the missions leadership team function as a silo.
2. STRUCTURE: How to best structure the team to shift focus from urgent to important issues, how to decentralize responsibility and authority to avoid burnout, and how to empower those given delegated responsibilities.
3. STRATEGY: How to bring focus and intentionality to several dozen mostly unrelated engagements around the globe, shifting focus from the current 35 field workers to a few strategic local and global works.

God provided clarity and consensus as we interacted together. We were able to use our Sunday morning time to identify initial steps to take with the first two major issues. Sunday afternoon was devoted to dealing with a long laundry list of urgent issues that some on the team anticipated would take the entire weekend. But when viewed through a new grid, were handled in less than two hours, allowing us to wrap up our weekend together an hour early.



We anticipate on-going interaction early this year as we work through details of clarifying and aligning better with the vision of FBC’s leaders (senior pastor and elders) and put together a new decentralized structure for the missions leadership team. Once that is in place, we anticipate launching a major effort that will result in identifying a few field focus areas for the church. This will be followed by an effort that will grapple with a spectrum of church mobilization issues as they relate to these new field focuses.

The issues that FBC’s missions leadership team was struggling with are certainly not unique to them. Many MLT’s function as silos, somewhat divorced from the vision and dreams of the church’s leadership. Many MLTs are consumed by countless urgent and administrative issues, with little time to deal with the truly important issues. And they have a structure that insures that this pattern will continue indefinitely into the future. The number one issue I encounter in my work with churches is the issue of focus and strategy. Very few churches are focused in their mission efforts, and as a result see far less happen on the field than what could be.

Please contact me if I can be of service to your church as you seek to identify and grapple with the big issues that may be limiting the Kingdom impact of your church, locally or among the least reached globally. I would be delighted to talk with you.