Leadership Connexion FALL 2023

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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.
TE OR STAGNATE INCIPLE ears on doctoral work, working with established approaches and coaching many leaders, I have s and organizations of all sizes and styles: TINUOUS RECALIBRATION, EADILY DRIFT OFF MISSION. PERIOD! Recalibrating is something more than a practice, an event, or a moment. It is a perspective and a way of viewing your entire ministry and organization. It becomes a cultural norm, a way to approach every aspect of leadership and church life. The theory of the bell curve states that every organization will hit its peak, at which time it must either reinvent itself or go backward. Every successful leader knows this intuitively. So you often see signs that say, “Grand Opening,” or “Under New Management.” It’s why Apple always seems to be releasing new versions of its iPhone or iPad. When you infuse a culture of recalibration into your church, you make sure that your church will never hit the peak of the bell curve and then begin to drift inexorably downward. This one practice allows you to get ahead of the bell curve. How Often Do I Need to Recalibrate? Church leaders tend to want to find the latest silver bullet or hit program they need to grow their churches. We all want to add the latest piece of software . . . but few of us want to update the church’s cultural operating systems. This comes to the forefront in one of the first questions leaders often ask me: “How often do I need to recalibrate?” While nothing is wrong with this question, let me assure you, it’s not that easy! The real challenge is to create a culture of recalibration. You must create a culture of recalibration that becomes an integral part of the life and bloodstream of your church, a culture where change becomes normal and not a process that puts the church into a tailspin. To recalibrate effectively, you have to infuse new principles into your congregation and build new leadership muscles in your own life. When leaders ask how often they need to recalibrate, it reveals that they tend to create events and programs, rather than creating a culture that transforms every spectrum and facet of the organization. The real goal, therefore, is to create a culture of recalibration, not merely a series of cosmetic changes. The goal is to create a new cultural norm, not a pile of hype that will get you some quick results but more than likely frustrate a lot of people. THE EARLY CHURCH RECALIBRATED ACTS 2. The Holy Spirit recalibrated the people of God and empowered them to take the gospel to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth. ACTS 6. God recalibrated the early church leadership. As the church grew, no longer could the ministry be contained to the twelve apostles. So they recalibrated and empowered others in the church to do ministry - and so the church grew again. ACTS 10. Peter himself faced a recalibration of huge significance. This is perhaps the most radical recalibration in Scripture: God speaks to Peter and shows him that the ethnic and cultural barriers to faith have been cast down. Gentiles now have unhindered access to the grace of God. ACTS 11 AND 13. The church recalibrated because of the martyrdom of Stephen and the persecution of the early church. The church scattered throughout the region, a few of them taking the gospel to the Gentiles in Antioch. At Antioch, the name of the movement got recalibrated to “Christians.” New leadership emerged, especially through Barnabas and Saul. The church at Antioch sent out the church’s first missionaries to the entire Roman Empire. ACTS 15. The church experienced a theological recalibration. At the Jerusalem Council, Peter and James recalibrated what was required for salvation in relationship with Jewish customs and the role of grace in the life of all believers. LEADERSHIPconnexion | Fall <strong>2023</strong> 7
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Page 21 and 22: THE NEW ROYAL RANGERS The Best Boys
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Leadership Connexion FALL 2023

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