Episode Details

Thanks for the very thoughtful emails and responses to last week’s post about whether church is more like a family/community or more like a society/enterprise. If you haven’t already, you should go and read Callan Pritchard’s reflections in the comments. Very insightful.

(And if you didn’t get last week’s post because you’re not a ‘Payneful partner’ and you only get these free posts every three weeks or so … well, there’s something you can do about that as well.)

One implication of last week’s discussion is that if churches do have at least some characteristics of a society or enterprise, then we have purposes or outcomes that we seek together—purposes that are given to us by God, according to his marvellous plans in Christ. And if that is the case, then it’s reasonable to ask how we could go about seeking those purposes or outcomes in the best way possible.

And that brings us, perhaps reluctantly, to the difficult business of ‘strategy’ …

Strategy, schmategy

Campus Bible Study is doing something radical. For the first time in three decades we’re officially doing some ‘strategic planning’—and everyone is a bit nervous.

There’s a voice in most of our heads saying, “Strategy, schmategy! Do we really need all this stuff? These ‘Wildly Important Goals’ and ‘Key Strategies’ and ‘Vision Statements’, and all the rest? Can’t we make ‘glorify God’ our Wildly Important Goal and ‘prayerfully proclaim Christ’ our Key Strategy, and just get on with it (like we’ve been doing pretty effectively for the last three decades)?!”

I have these thoughts and feelings, I have to confess. In fact, it’s because of these thoughts and feelings, and the current state of play in the CBS ministry, that I’ve come to think that it’s just the right time for us to do some strategic planning. Just as Nixon was the right president to go to China, so it is anti-pragmatist, Bible-obsessed, sovereignty-of-God-loving strategy-sceptics like us who are just the right people to do some strategic planning.

Let me explain why, and why you should possibly do some strategic planning too, if you’re sceptical enough about it.

First of all, what is ‘strategic planning’?

‘Strategic planning’ is just ‘planning’, except more so.

Planning is leaving work early and taking a slightly different route so as to get milk at the servo on the way home. Strategic planning is the work that the milk corporation did to get that bottle of milk into that servo, positioned and marketed in such a way that you chose to buy it.

'Strategic planning’ is just like other planning in that it considers our present situation (milkless), looks forward to some future desired state of affairs (avoiding wifely wrath upon returning home milkless), and then formulates a plan of action that hopefully achieves that outcome (detour via servo). In the currently popular jargon, all planning consists of asking Now? Where? How?

'Strategic planning’ is just a bigger, more complex and more far-reaching version of the everyday planning we all constantly do. It considers the current state of play more broadly and deeply, looks further into the future to articulate some goals or outcomes, and then works out a co-ordinated plan of action that encompasses a larger, more complicated mesh of people and resources. It’s not just looking at how one soldier might prevail in one personal fight but at how the whole army is going to work together to win the war. (In fact, that’s where the word ‘strategic’ comes from. As Gus from My Big Fat Greek Wedding might say, “is come from the Greek word strateuo, which is mean ‘to wage war’”).

So strategic planning of some kind becomes necessary the larger and more complex any enterprise becomes. If we’re going to