Managing Change in a Church Movement

"Church life is not immune to the impact of a quickly changing world"

As a member of the Newfrontiers international core team I was asked by Terry Virgo to address our apostolic forum on the subject of Apostles in times of transition. It was fascinating to work through the gospel narrative and see how Jesus led his apostles into the major transition of his death, resurrection, and to them leading the ongoing mission. I also looked as well at how some of the experts in the corporate world were addressing the subject of transitioning an organization. The next series of blogs will cover the material given in that talk.

Church life is not immune to the impact of a quickly changing world.  There is increasing aspiration for churches to grow and impact the communities and nations they exist in and are part of. This can put tremendous pressure on leaders. I once read that Church of England Vicars have gone from having one of least stressful jobs to one of the most stressful, due in part to the rising expectations of the denomination and congregations they serve.

Up skilling leaders to navigate the church through multiple changes is a vitally important priority. This is even more telling when we read the following daunting comment from an article called “Leading through Change” in The Harvard Business Review:

“Change management isn’t working, as it should. In a telling statistic, leading practitioners of radical corporate re-engineering (that’s what many churches and movements are currently going through) report success rates in Fortune 1,000 companies are well below 50%, some say they are as low as 20%.”

In the next post I will highlight one of the main reasons for the low success rate in churches and church movements.

Managing Change in a Church Movement

As a member of the Newfrontiers international core team I was asked by Terry Virgo to address our apostolic forum on the subject of Apostles in times of transition. It was fascinating to work through the gospel narrative and see how Jesus led his apostles into the major transition of his death, resurrection, and to them leading the ongoing mission. I also looked as well at how some of the experts in the corporate world were addressing the subject of transitioning an organization. The next series of blogs will cover the material given in that talk.