Further Thoughts on TEC

Grand Strategyby

Ted Mollegen

Senior Deputy

L-2, CT for GC2015

Nominee for Executive Council

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May 22, 2015Rev. 5

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Introduction

The Episcopal Church (TEC) needs an effective Grand Strategy because it has been in numerical decline since 1965. This document outlines a practical way to reverse that decline.

Although this document is in slide format, it is expected to read on a computer monitor, or on paper, rather than by being projected on a big screen before an audience.

This document contains the opinions of the author, speaking only for himself.

Please help refine this document by sending your comments and suggestions to the author at tmollegen@gmail.com

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Outline

• What is a Grand Strategy?• A Draft TEC Grand Strategy for Today• TEC’s Status Today• TEC’s Context Today• TEC’s Present Trends• Appendices:

– Primer on Church Planting– Improving Your Parish Website– The Job of the Designated Leader– Bibliography and References

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What is a Grand Strategy?

• A strategy is a scheme for using cause-and-effect relationships to obtain a desired outcome. For TEC, this is growth.

• A Grand Strategy is an overall approach for guiding/controlling an organization’s future. It guides decision-making at lower levels. It does not itself consist of detailed plans.

• An example: the US Civil War. The North’s desired outcome had two parts: (a) preservation of the Union and (b) the ending of slavery. The North’s Grand Strategy was to encircle the South so as to cut-off foreign assistance that might counter the North’s much greater industrial might, and then to divide the South into pieces. The North carried out that strategy by blocking the South’s ports and then fought their way down the Ohio-Mississippi river system to the Gulf, cutting off any assistance to the South from the West; then Gen. Sherman swept east from the Mississippi Delta toward Atlanta while Gen. Grant drove south through Virginia.

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Characteristics of a Good Grand Strategy

• A good Grand Strategy can be expressed in very few words.

• A good Grand Strategy is based not only on the present, but also on the foreseeable future. (A quarterback doesn’t throw the ball to where the receiver is now, but to where the receiver will be when the ball comes down.)

• Plans can be appropriately adjusted as the situation develops.

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TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 1 of 5

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• Turn around TEC’s long-term persistent numerical decline. This is absolutely critical. Use:• effectiveness improvement in TEC’s congregations. (See slide 15 below) • church planting• generational targeting, particularly:

– campus ministries, and – singles under age 35 (who may or may not be parents of families

with children).

• Use outside money for church planting, for widespread campus ministries, and for congregational turn-arounds; get outside money via the TEC Development Office. Church growth and/or redevelopment should be a high priority.

TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 2 of 5

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• Improve congregational effectiveness- See Simple Church by Thom S. Rainer and Carl Geiger, 2015

See slide 15 for more explanation.- See How to Break Growth Barriers: Capturing Overlooked

Opportunities for Church Growth, by Carl F. George, 1993. See slide 17.

- See Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, by Dr. Diana Butler Bass (2006). Contains lots of good examples for improving what’s going on in congregations. See slide 23.

- See Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, also by Dr. Bass (February 2012). See slide 19.

TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy – Page 3 of 5

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– Use service music which involve drums and other percussion instruments to provide a broader appeal. See Ref 1.

– Find out more about what all generations today, especially the under-35s, want and need, and experiment with ways of addressing same.

– Attract, engage, and incorporate under-35s, especially via well-funded campus ministry, by congregational attitude change, and by use of social media for communication. • Campus ministry is a good source of future clergy and can

also experientially help counter the intellectual forces of atheism that frequent college campuses.

• TEC congregations are often-to-usually found to be unfriendly by single under-35s (who constitute the majority of under-35s).

TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy – Page 4 of 5

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– Connect at all levels to steady outside sources of money• Churchwide level gift solicitation (TEC Development Office)• Diocesan gift solicitation (diocesan development staff)• Congregational-level income producing activities, e.g.

– Nursery and/or preschools– Renting weekday use of the parking lot to nearby businesses– Teach tithing:

» Theologically» By successive annual percentage increases

• On websites at all levels of TEC, add donation links to the descriptions of dedicated projects and programs.

– Continue/grow TEC’s support for social service and social justice programs at all organizational levels, but increase evangelism and church growth efforts to equal the social efforts.

TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 5 of 5

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• Address regional changes in the need for church buildings. Some regions need more church buildings and some need fewer. Both needs must be attended to.

• When creating new buildings, don’t build future empty-during-the-week structures – keep the infrastructure footprint light. Create flexible space, and/or use someone else’s flexible space.

Supporting Ideas and Data

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The subsequent pages provide support for the ideas in the Draft TEC Grand Strategy

TEC’s Present Context

• In the Sunbelt, evangelicalism• In the North, secularist individualism• In the North, the word “tithe” is almost never heard, even in

churches.• Throughout the US, materialistic individualism• Economic stress throughout society (except for the top 1%)

• The younger a person is, the more likely they are to identify with spirituality but not with organized religion.

• Religion itself is increasingly under attack in universities, colleges, and the public media.• TEC is accused by splinter-Anglicans of having deserted

biblical teachings (when it is actually they who have done so).

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Some Aspects of TEC’s Context are Changing

• As the economy improves, migration to the Sunbelt will pick up again, especially among the massive Boomer generation

• This will cause:– More growth in existing Sunbelt congregations– Opportunities for more church plants– A need for more new church buildings– A greater need in the Northeast and upper

Midwest for physical infrastructure consolidation and/or liquidation

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Why TEC Needs This Grand Strategy

• There is continuing long-term shrinkage, ignored except for necessary cost-cutting.• While the historical source of new Episcopalians has been that they were born to

existing Episcopalians, this is no longer true. Worse still, the average age of TEC members is now well past the child-bearing years.

• There is a serious dearth in TEC of under-35 adults (a majority of whom are single), indicating that there will be continuing membership declines as older generations die off.

• Congregations are usually focused on attracting young families, but are usually focused only on dual-parent nuclear families.

• Congregations virtually ignore: - Single under-35s (many of whom may be unmarried parents), - Hispanics (the fastest-growing US population segment), and - African- Americans.

• According to the Episcopal Congregations Overview: - 58% of TEC congregations have average attendance of fewer than 75 persons - 73% of congregations say that more than half their members are over age 50

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The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 1 of 4

A simple church is defined as a congregation designed around a straightforward process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth. Simple churches are far more likely to be growing than more complicated churches.

Congregations should set up a simple process which moves members through the following stages:

– Love God– Love others– Serve others

Most TEC churches are complicated, that is not designed around or focused on such a process.

For further information, see: Simple Church by Dr. Thom S. Rainer and Carl Geiger, 2015

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The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 2 of 4

The 2020 Task Force concluded that by far the fastest and most reliable way to get church growthis by church planting.

Report of the 2020 Task Force, October 2001

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was the Secretary of the 2020 Task Force. Its report may be found on my website at

www.mollegen.net/2020TF

15 years ago, GC 2000 adopted a growth goal and commissioned the 2020 Task Force to figure out how to meet it. (GC2000-A034)

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The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 3 of 4

Head clergy in congregations should adopt the attitude that their job is to arrange for others to deliver ministry rather than directly delivering the ministry themselves. In the church growth movement, this is known as having the attitude of a rancher rather than a shepherd.

This approach helps break down growth barriers at 200, 400, and 800 members.

For further information, see:

How to Break Growth Barriers: Capturing Overlooked Opportunities for Church Growth by Carl F. George 1993

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The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 2 of 4

Congregations should initiate services (late Saturday afternoon and/or Sunday morning) that are tailored for under-35s:– Music that under-35s find appealing (see slide 8, above)– Sermon styles that they find appealing

• Use of silences to permit reflection• Use of short testimonies from lay members

Saturday and/or Sunday afternoon services typically increase attendance of families whose kids have Sunday morning athletic activities.

In areas of high population density, different congregations may be started which use different locations or approaches to appeal to the under-35s.

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TEC’s Present TrendsPart 1 of 3

According to author Diana Butler Bass in her February 2012 book Christianity after Religion (meaning after institutionalized religion), the world and all its religions are in the midst of a massive transformation from the institutional hierarchical religious institutions of the last several hundred years to a new more-personalized and spiritualistic religious pattern. The shift is from

believing behaving belonging

to a new pattern of

belonging behaving believing where the symbol means “leads to.” If her view is even partially correct – and I think it is correct – then shouldn’t our new Grand Strategy respond to the change that is going on?

Note that one’s sense of belonging is strongly influenced by whether one is moved by the style of music used in the worship services.

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TEC’s Present TrendsPart 2 of 3

• Religious educational institutions are under severe economic pressures. Two Episcopal seminaries (ETS and GTS) recently had to sell part of their campuses in order to survive.

• Under-35s are largely absent from TEC’s mind. They are unsought-after, and are mostly single, a big change from two generations ago.

• Most congregations don’t know how to make singles feel comfortable and typically don’t even think about making singles feel comfortable. Singles, who make up over half the population, are just about invisible to TEC.

• Likewise, some congregations continue to struggle with other biases: interracial and same-sex couples, for example. Dioceses must identify and remediate these as best they can.

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TEC’s Present TrendsPart 3 of 3

TEC has demonstrated that we have an effective Development Office. In December 2013, the Presiding Bishop announced that the Development Office had obtained a signed pledge of $5-million to benefit the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti.

Approval of the Development Office was controversial at GC2012, because an earlier effort to establish an effective Office failed. However, under its present manager, Ms. Elizabeth Lowell, the Office has quite visibly succeeded. Ms. Lowell has long career experience in this type of work.

I hope that raising major funds for (a) church planting and (b) parish turn-arounds will become a high priority for the Development Office in the near future. Without such funds, I doubt that a turn-around in TEC’s numerical decline can be accomplished in the next decade.

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Church Turn-Arounds/Re-Starts –Part 1 of 2

• “Church revitalization” is the polite term for church turn-arounds. Another term is “re-starts.”

• Re-starts are a lot harder to accomplish than new starts.– About half as many priests are qualified to lead turn-arounds as to

lead new church plants. The reason is that whatever is causing the present decline probably lies in deep-seated unrecognized motivations of the present opinion leaders in the sick congregation, and that sickness must be cured (or the sick people dispersed) before a healthy congregation can be built.

– If you can’t find a turn-around leader who is truly qualified, then shut the failing operation down. An alternative to this is to arrange a merger with another weak congregation, but only if the merger effort is led by a truly transformative leader.

• Obviously it’s better to do re-starts than closures, so let’s look more closely at how to do re-starts.

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Church Turn-Arounds/Re-Starts –Part 2 of 2

In her 2006 book Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, Dr. Diana Butler Bass describes her three-year study of healthy growing US Protestant congregations; some but not all of which are Episcopal. The middle section of the book,“10 Signposts for Renewal” describes the important traits of healthy, growing congregations. They are:

This book could be required pre-retreat reading for a vestry retreat, with each vestry person to come to the retreat with at least one idea for improving parish performance in at least five of the above 10 areas of activity. Alternately, the whole congregation could be polled, using either a paper survey or surveymonkey.com. The whole congregation could be polled only if the majority have read at least a summary of the book. (You don’t ask a group of horse-and carriage drivers what makes a good racing car – or even a good family car.) 23

1. Hospitality2. Discernment3. Healing4. Contemplation5. Testimony

6. Diversity7. Justice8. Worship9. Reflection

10. Beauty

Strategically Important Observations

The restructuring proposals planned for GC2015 won’t turn around TEC’s negative growth trend –because they basically consists of treating only the results of decline, not the root causes. TEC needs to search out and counter the root causes of decline, while concurrently taking action to get positive growth going again.

Relocating the Episcopal Church Center out of NYC would involve major moving costs, with minimal – if any – long term benefits. Advocates of such a change should cite what benefits (if any) would be gained. 24

Evangelism and Church Growth – Not the Same Thing, but Hand-in-Hand Partners

A good approach is to use church growth principles to get people into the congregation and then teach them an appreciation for true Anglicanism. • This is much more than teaching people who theologically

are still Baptists how to use Prayer Books. You haven’t completed the job until you’ve taught them what the bible really is, and how to react to it with intellectual integrity. Teach them about the bible, not just what’s in it. Otherwise they are likely to interpret the bible as though it were a present-day history book and/or God’s behavior manual.

• The relationship between church growth and evangelism is that church growth can be an excellent first step in evangelism.

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Church Leader and Member Happiness

People are happiest when:• They know what they are supposed to be doing• They know how to do it well• They are supported in doing their work• They believe that what they are doing is important to:

- God - The people who benefit from their work- Their family, their friends, and their community- The higher-ups in the organization

• They feel appreciated• They are growing in capability and effectiveness• Their organization is growingFollowing this document’s Grand Strategy will lead to happier church leaders and members.

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Better Balance Needed • Because of TEC’s continuing numerical decline, we must strike a better

balance between our emphasis on- improving social justice and social services- propagating the faith

• No matter how one does the analysis, TEC at the churchwide level is putting far more effort, time, and money into social justice and social service than in responding to the Great Commission. Analysis of the January 2015 draft budget comparing totals for each of the Five Anglican Marks of mission shows that there is nowhere near a balance between the categories cited above.

• Those members who are most interested in supporting social service and social justice work should keep in mind that if TEC keeps getting smaller and smaller, then TEC will be able to do less and less such work. Much better propagation of the faith is thus a necessary foundation for continuing and/or expanding our work in social service/social justice.

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The Episcopal Church Offers a Better Way of Being Catholic

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IMO, one of the objectives of TEC should be to establish and implement a plan for marketing TEC to disaffected Roman Catholics.

TEC is both catholic -- small "c" -- and protestant: we have many institutional features and all the sacraments of the church of the early and middle centuries, but we have avoided such present-day abnormalities as: Mariolatry; misogyny; clerical celibacy; widespread, persistent, and covertly-protected clergy ephebophilia; rejection of the most effective and convenient forms of birth control; church leadership which both excludes and insultingly devalues lay leadership and women, and is determinedly and unconscionably hostile to sexual minorities. One of the worst abnormalities is so-called Papal Infallibility -- a hubris-encrusted doctrine which has led to required belief in such non-biblically-based doctrines as the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By today's standards of belief, today's Roman Catholic Church would have to excommunicate the church of the early centuries.

In my opinion, we should intentionally offer clear-sighted disaffected Roman Catholics a spiritual home that is more rational, more historically-catholic, much more loving, and less hubris-encrusted, and which values all orders of ministry in all people.

Designing/Redesigning Future Church Buildings

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• Let’s not be in the business of constructing soon-to-be-out-of-date church buildings.

• Plan to share space with organizations that don’t need buildings during the same hours that your church does. Examples might include:– private or public schools (including pre-schools)– movie theaters– sports arenas– synagogues

• Build for flexibility. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals didn’t have fixed pews. The chapel at the Diocese of Texas’s Camp Allen doesn’t have fixed pews either. Its seating can be set up for large or relatively small groups to worship in, or for secular groups to have business meetings, such as corporate shareholders’ meetings and corporate management retreats. It has projectors that are unobtrusive and screens that can be dropped into place only when needed.

• Use the building design advice and assistance of the Episcopal Church Building Fund (ECBF). That’s what they do and they’re good at it.

Dealing with Empty, Crumbling and/or Near-Empty Church Buildings – Part 1 of 2

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• Completely empty church buildings are a cash-flow sink and an investment sink because the buildings are not only depreciating but also are continuing to have ownership costs such as insurance and minimal-but-still-present energy costs. Insurance costs go up rapidly for deserted buildings, especially because sprinkler systems don’t work when the building’s interior temperatures are below freezing. Empty buildings are more subject to break-ins, which speed-up depreciation. Either use the buildings or sell them and invest the proceeds in a new church start elsewhere in the diocese.

• Or in the case of congregations that attempted to secede, lease-to-sell the buildings back to the people who used to occupy them. A good model agreement was entered into in Northern Virginia, where the diocese and the secessionist congregation agreed for that congregation to take over the use of the buildings and to pay operating costs (insurance, energy, etc.). The congregation agreed not to affiliate with another denomination for five years, and both the congregation and TEC agreed not to publicly criticize each other.

Dealing with Empty, Crumbling and/or Near-Empty Church Buildings – Part 2 of 2

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• Consider the situation where there is a very large building and a very small congregation which can’t afford to take proper care of the building. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a serious problem with the building and the diocese is suddenly going to have to intercede, likely at substantial expense to the diocese. Wouldn’t it be better to intercede before the inevitable major problem occurs?

• One way would be for the diocesan canons to specify that when a congregation’s Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) falls below a certain level, the congregation is placed in an Intervention-Needed status.

• Such congregations will develop plans for getting well. Each such plan will have milestones, which if not met will cause the congregation to come under closer diocesan control.

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Note: in the business community, pouring money into continuously substandard operations is known as backing your losers. In the church, it’s known as being caring, but it’s very poor mission strategy, not to mention poor stewardship.

– b

Laying the Foundations for Future Reunion with Departed Groups

Part 1 of 2

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Reunion with the recently departed ex-Episcopalians won’t happen overnight, but we can begin laying the foundations now.

Think separately of the schism-leaders (mostly clergy) and the schism-followers (some clergy, but mostly laity).

The schism-leaders had to work themselves up into an emotional tizzy to justify to themselves breaking their ordination vows. Reversing their schism decision will not come easy for them. An organized return to TEC may need to wait until the leaders of schismatic organizational units (dioceses and/or congregations) are replaced by their successors. This is already beginning to happen.

However, the followers of the schism-leaders may individually much sooner be ready to return when:– “Their” church building is returned to TEC– The broad society (including themselves) concludes that gay marriages in fact have not harmed traditional

marriages– Members of their own expanding number of descendents include some who are GLBT– When it is more broadly recognized that the main effect of the effort to replace TEC as the US member of

the Anglican Communion has been to contribute to dividing the Anglican Communion– TEC is broadly recognized as a leader in inter-communion agreements– TEC recognizes that lease-to-buy agreements with some secessionist congregations can be a win-win

solution– TEC recognizes that the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral should apply to relationships with :

• CANA• The Reformed Episcopal Church• Other breakaway groups

Laying the Foundations for Future Reunion with Departed Groups - Part 2 of 2

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Steps to take include:• GC2015 should authorize a blue-ribbon Task Force to design and

test approaches to departed Episcopalians and report back to Executive Council which then should make appropriate implementing recommendations to GC2018

• These approaches should include providing explicit paths for reunion with:

• Departed dioceses• Departed congregations (including their deserted property)• Departed priests/deacons• Departed parishioners

A Call to Rectors

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• With your Bishop’s permission, prepare your congregation for the experiment of saying “trust in” rather than “believe in” in the creeds for a season. The authority for this translation is explained in Chapter 4, “Believing,” in Dr. Diana Butler Bass’s 2012 book.

• In parallel with the preceding, engage your congregation’s lay leaders in studying Dr. Bass’s 2006 book, repeatedly asking the question, “How does this idea apply to our parish as we live out our role in carrying out God’s Mission?” (See slide 23.)

• Share your experiences with your bishops and clergy colleagues; encourage each other.

• Look for the signs of Dr. Bass’s “new Great Awakening”* and respond accordingly.

• Pray for God’s guidance in this venture.

=======================================================* Described in Dr. Bass’s 2012 book.

Appendices

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The following pages address:

- A Primer on Church Planting

- Improving Your Parish Website

- The Job of the Designated Leader

- Bibliography and References

A Primer on Church PlantingPart 1 of 3

Church Planting is not broadly well-understood in TEC (see below). Church Planting requires lots of money.

At the time of the 2020 Task Force (2000-2001), the fastest growing TEC dioceses were Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. All three had steady streams of new church plants and all three were paying for the new church plants from non-budgetary funds donated by big givers with whom the respective bishops had developed dependable funding relationships.

For each new start, decide at the beginning what the target size is. The Episcopal Church Building Fund (ECBF) can help you do this. For a family size church, have one church planter. For program size, from the beginning, have one clergy church planter plus one lay or clergy program leader (usually musician/choirmaster or Christian education leader.)

One of the best places to locate new church plants is in areas where farmland regularly is being converted into housing developments. Buy the land before ground is broken for the first new house, and put up a big sign that says a new Episcopal Church will be built here. However, don’t start construction until the new congregation has grown to about the size you have chosen, presumably program or corporate/resource size. 10 acres is a good lot size to pick because it will support buildings for a program-sized congregation, including parking. If the new start doesn’t work, the diocese can sell the unused land, usually at a profit, and then use the money to buy land for another new start somewhere else.

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A Primer on Church PlantingPart 2 of 3

Church planters, who have a tough job, do better when they have a qualified coach with whom they are in regular contact. Texas and Virginia each had a dedicated coach on diocesan staff. Tennessee was too small to have an expert coach on the bishop’s staff, so they sequenced things so that the planter who started a church last year would be both leading his own plant, plus also coaching the planter who was starting a new plant in the present. In the professional field of organizational training, this is called the daisy-chain approach, and it is frowned upon because if one of the planters introduces a bad idea, it gets passed on. The daisy chain approach can be used if there is some way of insuring that bad ideas don’t enter the system and/or get passed on. This needed quality control can be established by sharing one coach among several dioceses, and/or by having a Church Center staff member serve as a coach for several new starts scattered among several dioceses, using a lot of video conferences with the planters in each given year group, supplemented by one-on-one teleconferences and quarterly group face-to-face meetings.

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A Primer on Church PlantingPart 3 of 3

In some dioceses where church-planting is an on-going process, to help get a new start going, “borrowing” of lay-leader families from adjacent larger congregations is intentionally arranged. The intended length of the “loan” is 3 to 5 years. At the end of the intended loan period, some such families return to their prior congregation, some stay in the new one, and some go on to another new start. Such “borrowing” may also be applicable in church turn-arounds.

For further information on church planting, contact the Rev. Tom Brackett at the Episcopal Church Center, 646-203-6266 or tbrackett@episcopalchurch org, and/or see the 2020 Task Force Report at www.mollegen.net/2020TF

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Improving Your Parish Website – Part 1 of 3

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• The parish home page should convey the sense of a warm caring community for both families and singles. A photo of a Baptism is a great choice for the home page. The photo of the church building may make present church members feel warm and fuzzy, but to people who have just moved into the area, it may convey “we’re a century or so out of date” or “our old building is a money-pit.”

• Say: “Our kids love to come because we have a great Sunday School and youth group.”

• Convey that worshippers here usually feel that they have experienced deeply meaningful and joyful contact with the Divine. (PS: The services and the individuals’ coffee-hour conversations must convey that also, not just the website.)

• Convey that providing the visitor with the experience of God is of utmost importance to us. We don’t ask people to subscribe to a list of theological propositions -- this isn’t the 16th Century.

• Convey that there is continuing education for all ages.• The photo of the church building belongs in the “directions to our church” section, and

the directions should end by describing where the entrance to the parking lot is, and which door you should use to get into the building.

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 2 of 3

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• Convey that “families” here includes: single-parent families, nuclear families, unmarried couples (with or without children), and singles. Don’t make singles activities sound like “find-a-mate” sessions; you don’t want to covey that there’s something wrong with being single.

• Have a “comparisons” section: TEC compared to others. We represent the historical church brought up to the 21st century. Also see earlier slide 28– “a better way of being catholic.”

• TEC is jointly governed by four orders of ministry, providing a check and balance system among the four orders:– Bishops in the Historic Succession– Priests and Deacons ordained by bishops in the Historic Succession– Lay people in Mutual Ministry (lay people participating in leadership)

Until the ELCA received the historic succession from TEC in a recent agreement, TEC was the only major US Church with these characteristics.

• Convey that we wear our name tags to all church events. This is single most important thing that a congregation can do to make newcomers and visitors feel that you truly want to include them. (Don’t say it unless you do it.) But do it.

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 3 of 3

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– Make sure that the words ‘spirit’ and “spiritual” appear somewhere on the homepage (so that a seeker’s search engine can find your website.)

– Remember that the basic question in the back of the mind of a seeker or a website visitor is likely to be: “What things that are meaningful to me are going on in this church?”

– On the whole, we need better answers than we usually give to that question.– Good answers may depend on whether the seeker is a boomer, millennial,

silent-generation person, Anglo, Latino/Hispanic, etc.– We also need to counter mistaken impressions that people may have:

–Christianity is NOT anti-gay–Christianity is NOT anti-evolution–Our Churches DO NOT care more about their clergy than they do about their children–Our Churches DO NOT deny their faults rather than fixing them

– Henry VIII DID NOT establish the C of E because he wanted a divorce . [Being a good Roman Catholic, Henry sought an annulment. His request was denied because the Pope was under the control of King Philip of Spain, a political enemy of Henry.]

The Job of the Designated LeaderPart 1 of 2

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• Get a good set of Goals and Grand Strategy created and promulgated. The leader doesn’t have to create these items him- or herself, but the leader has to make sure that a good set of them is created by someone. Then keep communicating them -- it will take a while for people to realize that you’re serious about it.*

• Set the organization in motion toward the goals and keep it in motion.• Having a good grand strategy will make budgeting a lot easier.• Keep an eye on:

- Progress toward the goals- The environment -- it will change

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* For more info, see Leading Change by Prof. John Kotter, Harvard Business School Press

The Job of the Designated LeaderPart 2 of 2

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- Make sure that best practices are continuously sought out, adopted, and continuously improved.

- Occasionally look back over your shoulder. If there’s nobody following, then you’re not leading, you’re just somebody out for a walk.

- Understand and promulgate your organization’s Critical Success Factors (CSFs). These are the factors which are both necessary and sufficient for the organization to reach its goals. If you don’t know what the CSFs are for your organization, have a retreat for you and your top-level leaders/managers to define the CSFs.

- If you have a list of more than eight or nine CSFs, you have too many, and need to do some consolidating. (For instance, just list ”regulatory compliance” rather than listing all the regulations.)

- This really works. In addition to being part of the Grand Strategy, it tells your people what’s important.

- Evangelism is an often-overlooked Critical Success Factor for the Episcopal Church.

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Author’s Qualifications

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• CEO of two fast-growth companies. One grew from 56 to over 1500 employees under my leadership, the other from zero to over 100.

• Active in TEC at congregational, diocesan, and churchwide levels:– TEC Executive Council 2003-2009– GC Deputy 1991-2015; Alternate 1982-1988– CT Stewardship Chairman 6 years– CT Executive Council 15 years– Member General Convention Legislative Committees on three

different subjects– Member 1997-2003 Joint Nominating Committee for the Election

of the Presiding Bishop– Nominee for TEC Executive Council in 2015

For more info, see www.mollegen.net

Bibliography and References

1. Simple Church by Dr. Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger 2015 B&H Publishing Group

2. How to Break Growth Barriers: Capturing Overlooked Opportunities for Church Growth by Carl F. George 1993

3. “New Facts on Episcopal Church Growth and Decline” an article by Dr. C. Kirk Hadaway, The Episcopal Church Center, March 2015

4. Christianity after Religion (meaning after institutional religion) by Dr. Diana Butler Bass (February 2012)

5. Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, by Dr. Diana Butler Bass (2006)

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In Closing

Please post comments and suggestions about this document on the HoBD list. That way others can comment on your thoughts, and the more thinking we get applied to these issues, the better off TEC will be.

If you want to write me privately, my email address is tmollegen@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading this.

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