Stop Thinking Incrementally

Leading a church or ministry or non-profit isn’t easy. You never have as many resources as you’d like. You are reliant on volunteers who can be fickle. There are many societal pressures that are working against you. And if your organization is more than 5 or 10 years old, you have the added complication of trying to bring about change in a culture that clings to the status quo. So it’s no surprise that many leaders in these environments think incrementally. Incremental thinking hopes for a 2% increase in attendance next year. It makes a small change in the worship service or the Sunday morning schedule. It adds two new small groups or brings one new leader into a long-standing program. I’m not saying that any of these ideas are bad, nor am I suggesting that it’s easy to make even modest changes. But there is a certain mindset that develops if this is all that you think about. And it’s very different than the mindset of thinking exponentially. Exponential thinking asks, “What would have to happen to double attendance?” “If we started from scratch, what would our Sunday morning worship services and schedule look like?” It pushes past the excuses of “we’ve never done it that way” or “we don’t have the resources for that.” It pushes outside of the box to imagine something far more than today’s reality. While it’s true that you’ve never done it that way and that you don’t have the resources (right now), if you constrain your thinking from the start, you’ll never make more than incremental gains. And frankly, the world isn’t going to be changed by ministries and non-profits that inch their way forward year by year. It’s easy to receive my blogs by email. Just sign-up on Feedburner by clicking here.]]>