May 16, 2018

Five Resources for Church Strategy

This month we are highlighting five resources to help your vestry or other church groups learn more about strategic visioning and planning. Please share this digest with new members of your vestry, and extend an invitation to subscribe to ECF Vital Practices to receive Vestry Papers and the monthly digest.

1. In Why Strategic Planning, Linda Buskirk describes what strategic planning is and why it’s important for churches to engage in strategic thinking. She also shares the necessary steps a church needs to take in order to achieve its vision and provides some thought provoking questions to help your church move forward in strategic ways.

2. Strategic visioning doesn’t amount to much unless there are action steps in place to achieve your vision. In From Vision to Action, Nancy Davidge and Susan Elliot suggest practical tips in order to get things moving. In addition to their great advice, they also introduce an often overlooked concept - the Strategic Filter.

3. How are we responding to the rapid pace of change throughout the Church and in the world around us, and how can we address it proactively? In this webinar, Strategic Vision and Planning presented by Donald Romanik, learn how congregations can begin to get unstuck and move into having relevant, meaningful, and vital conversations to effectively plan for the future.

4. ECF developed this tool, Strategic Planning for your Church, to help congregational leaders review all their church activities, ministries and programs. Strategic planning usually has two purposes: to seek God’s Will for a ministry or church, and decide to act in faith on what has been discerned.

5. In the blog post Strategic Thinking: How our biases impact our parish’s decisions, Erin Weber Johnson suggests that our own biases and attitudes might be the very thing that gets in the way of being successful. Unless we acknowledge how much our emotions dictate how we strategize, it is difficult to move forward in a meaningful way.