FY22 Strategic Initiatives

FY22 Strategic Initiatives

Organizational strategic initiatives and major projects

Introduction

A church and an organization

The Austin Stone is aiming to do and be two complimentary things at once. First and foremost, we are a church ruled by God's word and so defined by the New Testament. We follow an ecclesiology for how we shepherd, lead, disciple, and mobilize our body through our teams of elders, deacons, and leaders. 

Because we are a large church, we also are supported by an organization, a team made up of the divisions and departments of our staff. The organization does not run the church, nor does the church ignore the need for organization. Rather, the organization is positioned to support the effectiveness and fruit of the ministry of the church. Ultimately, we want to be faithful to bring God more glory through the work of our church for His kingdom.

As we strive for faithfulness to this call, we continually see places where we need to change or develop to address a need, overcome some barrier, solve some problem, or bring about something new. So, as an organization we’ll focus some capacity of our work in these places. However, the outplay of our work in the ministry of our church is always our end objective.

Setting priorities

From season to season within our ministry together we are always doing yet another two things at the same time: 1) maintaining ministry rhythms and trajectories and 2) developing and/or improving things. Ideally, we are built throughout our organization for effectiveness in our established direction of ministry, while keeping some margin available to continue getting better. Particularly for our larger development efforts, a broader clarity and alignment is especially needed to support our collective decision-making about priorities, effort, and resources.

When special developmental efforts and resources are required that impact a large section of our organization, we need to be aligned in making the priority decisions throughout our team to accomplish them. So, the aim of this summary of our current priorities is to make clear what we believe God is leading us to concentrate development efforts on in the current season, how we want to go about it, and how we’ll know when it’s been accomplished.

Understanding our current priorities

To help us plan and align our efforts in consideration of the capacity of our teams overall, we are classifying our priorities by the scope of effort and organizational cooperation that will be required. To do this, let’s introduce a few definitions. 

Strategic Initiatives

Organizational Strategic Initiatives are expected to require the most significant development and/or change leadership efforts across our organization. As a rule, these initiatives are ones which require a partnership of responsibility between at least 4 of our divisions to accomplish them, and are expected to require focus for a duration of 2 or more quarters of the year. We’re calling these “initiatives” because they will often be more broadly integrative into our ongoing ministry philosophies and strategies, than they will be neatly-contained projects. The aim is to define an objective that can be measured and accomplished in no more than 1 year’s time.

Organizational Major Projects

Organizational Major Projects are development efforts that require responsibility partnership between 2-3 divisions for 2 or more quarters of the year.

Divisional Major Projects

Divisional Major Projects are developmental efforts that are primarily within 1 division for 2 or more quarters.

Projects

Projects are most any other developmental effort that is expected to be able to be accomplished within a single quarter. 

Organizational Strategic Initiatives are ones that we all need to be aware of and consider most in our planning. When it comes to trade-off decisions, these are the initiatives that should generally “win”. So, these are the ones to be communicated and coordinated more broadly and in more detail.

Other projects require efforts for which it will be helpful to make them clear and visible so that we can better understand what we’re all working on, and cooperate accordingly.

As you can see, greater anticipated dedication of time, effort, and teams gets greater visibility in the alignment of our decision-making throughout the organization. For each initiative or project, the primary owner will be responsible for defining and communicating the key details.

Communication

These initiatives are for communication to all church staff, elders, and deacons for their understanding, expectations and context for their ministry leadership in a forward-looking posture.

These initiatives are also for use by our organizational teams who own resource decisions and responsibility for such initiatives. This should provide the starting point for us to define, for our key development efforts, the tools of communication, coordination, and execution to:

• Point to where we are going through conveying vision.
• Identify what is unclear and to clarify.
• Define wins by establishing clear goals.
• Quantify what should be expected to be realized in the timeframe of planning horizons by setting out milestones.
• Assign responsibility by establishing ownership.
• Manage priority of church-wide resources in funding and personnel.

Summary of FY22 initiatives and projects

The focus of this document is to define, at a summary level, our Organizational Strategic Initiatives and Major Projects in play now through July of 2022. Divisional and departmental projects are not included here.

Strategic Initiative

1. Strategic Initiative: Developing leaders
2. Strategic Initiative: Organizational clarity
3. Major project: Improving groups engagement in our congregations
4. Reviving the church’s engagement in corporate life and worship

The following pages provide further description of each.

Organizational Strategic Initiatives

(4+ Divisions, 2+ Quarters)

1. Developing Leaders

Responsibilities

• Project owner: Kevin Peck
• Responsible development team: Church Discipleship Leadership Team
• Key Execution Stakeholders: Church Discipleship Leadership Team
• Teams needed for cooperation
  • Ministry Strategies (ASI) and Church Discipleship Team for content development
  • Congregations Division and Congregational Leadership Team for pipeline development and implementation planning
  • Ministry Strategies (ASI) and Ministry Operations (HR/Technology) for LMS and knowledge management implementation planning
  • Ministry operations (HR) for contribution and alignment of coaching and development process as organizational leadership development pipeline

Background (why)

Our ethos of developing leaders for the work of ministry is foundational to our church.

“We believe that the Church is uniquely set apart to develop and deploy leaders for the glory of God and the advancement of the gospel. The Church is designed by God to create leaders for all spheres of life, and our church is designed to lead, designed to disciple leaders who are, by God’s grace, commanded to disciple people in all spheres of life.” (DTL, Peck, Geiger, 2)

As we have continued to grow and mature as a church and as an organization, we have stretched the limits of our current leadership development systems to scale in support of this pursuit. We recognize the need for our church to move further from intuitional impulse to more intentional systems to develop and deploy the leaders whom God would use to make a Kingdom-shaped mark on the world in our time.

Key objectives (how)

We desire to have robust pathways of leadership development among the three principal leadership pipelines of our church; organizational leaders, ecclesiological leaders, and volunteer leaders (i.e. volunteers). These pathways need to be clear across our whole church, sharing common concepts, frameworks, competencies, and language. We want these systems to provide consistency both to drive and to provide opportunity for development. 

Milestones (what and when)

In 1 year, we desire to:

1. Architect a master plan for leadership development in each of our three principal leadership pipelines;
   1. Ecclesiological, which represents the development of elders and deacons
   2. Volunteer engagement, which represents the development of volunteers as leaders of groups, e.g. MC leaders, coaches, leaders of 10’s
   3. Organizational, which represents development of staff leaders in ministry engagement as above, PLUS job competency development and progression
2. Implement a programmatic and intentional development plan for future Pastors and others who we might hope to be our future key leader developers, modelers, and culture keepers for ecclesiological leadership.
3. Develop core content and system of delivery for development for group leaders (“Leaders of 10” in Exodus 18:25), among our church. This effort includes setting the standards for leadership competencies at this level across all three pipelines

2. Increase organizational clarity in leadership, decision-making, and communication

Responsibilities

• Project owner: Dave
• Responsible development team: Organizational Health Leadership Team
• Key Execution Stakeholders: Central Elders and Department Leaders
• Teams needed for cooperation
  • Ministry Strategies (Communication) for process and support for communication
  • Ministry Operations (Finance, HR, Tech) for process, platforms, data, and measurement
  • Congregation Division for implementation: Department Leaders for departmental participation in macro-level planning, reporting, data insights analysis at ministry level, and OKR management.

Background (why)

In our relational and informal culture, we have historically relied on proximity a great deal for clarity of leadership, decision-making, and communication. As our organization has grown in support of a growing church, we have increased in scope and complexity, and have extended a great deal of leadership and decision-making out through a larger number of organizational leaders. Being separated in proximity by COVID, in a time of confusion caused by COVID, has made it clear that as proximity decreases, clarity needs to increase to maintain relationships of trust and effective cooperative leadership as a team.

As a value, we still aim for effectiveness over sheer efficiency. So, in our desire to improve our systems and bring more clarity to our work together, we do not aim to be mechanical or dehumanizing as an organization. We believe that systems and structures are helpful to support and enable the organic and spirit-led work of ministry, for a certain scale and scope. 

Key objectives (how)

We desire to clarify our [collective] understanding of how leadership responsibility, decision-making, and organizational communication should normally work together among our team.

Prospectively, we aim to put effort into larger systemic development to help us [maintain] an ongoing shared understanding for who’s doing what and how we can do it well together. Unity and effectiveness both in our vertical leadership structures as well as cross-organizationally, will require good definition for our systems, projects, decision-making, execution, and communication. To support this, we hope to clarify how cascading communication should support understanding, prioritization, and implementation together. Written documentation to support this will be essential.

More immediately, we also aim to clarify organizational structures and communicate around emergent questions to help our leaders stay on the same page as we grow here.

Milestones (what and when)

By Dec 31, 2021, we desire to:

1. Update and communicate our overall organizational leadership design. Describe vertical division/departmental leadership functions for leadership, decision-making, and communication. Describe the church leadership design of horizontal/cross-organizational leadership teams, establishing roles, functions and written charters for each.
2. Develop and implement a consistent cascading communication process.
3. Develop our system and process for macro-level planning and reporting to keep us focused and prioritized with describable and measurable outcomes
4. Develop an architecture and systems for management data and reporting, knowledge management, project/process coordination, and organizational communication that builds on standardized platforms.

Organizational Major Projects

(2-3 Divisions, 2+ Quarters)

3. Improving groups engagement in our congregations

Responsibilities

• Project owner: Walt Lengel
• Responsible development team: Church Discipleship Leadership Team
• Key execution stakeholders: Spiritual Formation Directors
• Teams needed for cooperation: Ministry Strategies (ASI), Congregational Division (SFD’s)

Background (why)

A biblical concept of discipleship is always corporate, communal, and one-to-one relational. Our discipleship strategy is only as good as our weakest link. The communal aspect (one-anothers, house-to-house) seems most lacking in our church at this moment, and groups are our basic strategy for this. At present we have a lacking in both quality and pervasiveness of our groups and we want to fix that.

Key objectives (how)

We desire to elevate the place of priority of our people for group life. Barriers that make it difficult are now seen as barriers too high to be worth fighting to get over. We want to correct that narrative and revitalize our people through their commitment to group life. Currently, our good groups are products of happening to have a good leader. We want to build a support system for building our groups leadership layer (relationship here to leadership development). We want to equip our group leaders to be able to adapt and innovate as they proactively pursue people for group engagement and lead toward growth in the maturity of a group. We also have confusion and competition in the interaction with and between groups. We want to correct the result that it has become more about the form and rhythms, and place a focus back on the product of communal discipleship.

Milestones (what)

In 1 year, we desire to:

• Improve our quantity of Engagement
  1. Example metric = 1x/month involvement in a group / % of average attendance 
• Improve our quality of group health: [Metrics TBD]
  1. Family, discipleship and mission
  2. self-assessment for members, leader, coach

4. Reviving the church's engagement in corporate life and worship

Responsibilities (who)

1. Project owner: Ross Lester
2. Responsible development team: Momentum Leadership Team
3. Key execution stakeholders: Congregational Leadership Team
4. Teams needed for cooperation: Congregation Division Teams

Background (why)

COVID has caused general disconnection and helped many in our body to ‘unlearn’ the rhythms and importance of corporate gatherings. As vaccines become more available over time, we need to be planning for the day when we are able to gather once again indoors. Our Sunday worship gatherings as well as other corporate rhythms of gathering are essential for a healthy body as well as a key aspect of our church discipleship strategy. This disruption due to COVID has created new learning and new challenges.

Among these is a need to lead many in our body on a journey back to emotional and spiritual health.

Key objectives (how)

We desire to reinvigorate the church to engage in corporate gathering AND other congregational gathering rhythms. “Revival” through Leadership vision and invitation, partner vision and invitation, unique moments and experiences in liturgy.

Milestones (what and when)

In 1 year we desire to:

1. Reinvigorate our congregations to in-person engagement post-covid with the goal of seeing Sunday and other attendance return to pre-covid participation levels.