Leadership Connexion FALL 2023

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR | DR. TROY JONES
DR. TROY JONES is the Lead Pastor
of New Life Church in the Seattle area.
Troy launched Recalibrate as a way to help
churches and their pastors energize their
ministries by rediscovering the vision in their
hearts. He is the author of “Recalibrate Your
Church: How Your Church Can Reach Its Full
Kingdom Impact” and “Ignite Your Church:
How to Be an Architect, Not an Arsonist.”
THREE
RECALIBRATION
QUESTIONS
YOUR CURRENT
REALITIES, VISION
AND VEHICLE
Where are you?
The facts are your friends. You need to
know your current realities. In his book,
“Mission Creep,” Larry Osborne describes
the overriding first step for a church to get
back on mission. It requires the critical
examination of where you are as a church.
“If no one realizes that we’ve drifted,” he
writes, “everyone thinks we’re on target.”
RECALIBRA
THE ONE TRANSFERABLE PR
After analyzing New Life Church’s growth, spending five y
churches of all sizes, styles, structures and philosophical
formulated one core transferable principle about churche
YOU EITHER CREATE A CULTURE OF CON
OR YOUR CHURCH WILL SLOWLY AND ST
In other words, you either recalibrate, or your church will eventually stagnate.
This single transferable principle explains why so many churches have
stopped growing.
Many churches haven’t restarted, rebooted, or relaunched anything new for
years, even decades. If you don’t intentionally recalibrate your church, then
you are choosing to sit idle, lethargically watching while your church eventually
drifts into an ingrown, irrelevant, comatose state.
So what does it mean to recalibrate your church? To calibrate means “to plan
or devise (something) carefully so as to have a precise use, application, appeal,
etc.” When things are not calibrated, they work inefficiently, burn through
resources, and eventually break down. Churches require precision and care in
order to stay on course and avoid mission drift. Established churches need to
recalibrate so they can function precisely and effectively in their communities
and appeal to the authentic needs of a changing culture, thus fulfilling the great
mission of Christ.
All churches, organizations, and leaders need to recalibrate. It is not a matter
of if you need to recalibrate, but when you will need to recalibrate.
6
Where are you going?
What vision is God birthing in your heart?
Where do you see your church nine months
from now? In the next twelve to eighteen
months? Five years? What is burning deep
down inside you?
How will you get there?
The vehicle to recalibrate your church is a
Relaunch Initiative. A Relaunch Initiative is
a time-bound, well-defined, mission-critical
endeavor that serves to recalibrate your
church. When you hit the tarmac, you need
to date it, define it and do it.
Jones, Troy. Recalibrate Your Church: How
Your Church Can Reach Its Full Kingdom
Impact.
It doesn’t matter if your church is:
• Missional or attractional
• Big or small
• Urban, suburban or rural
• Loud, with contemporary worship, or softer, with liturgical worship
Regardless of your style, shape, size, experience, history, staff, or
congregational affiliation, one thing is true about your church: if you don’t
recalibrate, your congregation will slowly and steadily drift off its mission and
die a slow death.
This should surprise none of us, because everything in this
world needs to be periodically recalibrated. Think about it:
• Your body shuts down every night and wakes up every morning.
• When your computer gets slow, the experts tell you to reboot it—shut it
down and restart it.
• When your Wi-Fi stops working, you call your Internet provider, who tells
you to reset your modem.
• When the scale gives you an unfavorable number, you kick it, hoping to
get a new number more to your liking.