Integrated Planning Consultation
The Consultation Process
Exploring a possible consultation
If your church is considering whether to schedule an Integrated Planning Consultation, a helpful first step is for all the key leaders (such as staff, governing board, and long-range planing committee) who would be involved in the consultation to first read WHEN NOT TO BUILD: An Architect's Unconventional Wisdom for the Growing Church and NATURAL CHURCH DEVELOPMENT, or the booklet The ABCs of Natural Church Development.
If your leaders resonate with the principles and approaches to ministry described in these books, your church is probably a good candidate for an Integrated Planning Consultation. If not, we would encourage you to seek assistance from an agency that more closely reflects your church's vision and values.
During this time of exploration, we will be happy to talk with you about your church's needs and the consultation process. We normally wish to discuss your church's consulting needs with your pastor or another contact person for an hour or more to gain a basic understanding of the needs and issues your consultation would deal with. Based on this information, we can prepare a customized written proposal for a consultation for you to present to your governing body for decision. We are always happy to provide references of other congregations we have worked with. While every congregation's needs are unique, we try to provide references of congregations who were facing issues similar to those your church is facing.
For churches
that are seriously interested in a consultation
that are not yet ready to commit to a full
Integrated Planning Consultation, we offer an
option called a Introductory
Consultation.
After the Introductory
Consultation,
the church can then decide whether to proceed with
a full Integrated Planning Consultation.
Phase 1: Self-study
Once your church schedules dates for your consultation (payment of Installment 1 secures your dates), we will send you an extensive self-study package. This consists of about 100 pages of questionnaires covering five areas: general information about your church and community, ministries, staffing, facilities, and finances. This material is in loose-leaf form so that you can distribute each questionnaire to the person in your congregation best qualified to provide the information. For example, your treasurer or bookkeeper will fill out the financial section. Usually a dozen or more people will be involved in completing the self-study. The key person in this process is your consultation coordinator who will be our contact person through this phase. This needs to be a person who is well-organized and who is able to get material out and call it back in promptly, and who will check over all materials turned in for completeness.
The other aspect of the self-study is the Natural Church Development survey. This tool grows out of the largest study of healthy church growth ever conducted, involving over 1000 congregations in 32 countries on all five continents. That study, conducted by the Institute for Natural Church Development in Germany, identified "eight essential characteristics of healthy churches." This survey measures your church's relative strength or weakness in each of these eight areas as sort of a church health check-up. By using your strengths to address your weaknesses, you can remove the greatest barriers to your church's healthy growth. This has proven to be an extremely valuable tool in helping the congregations we work with to determine where they can most strategically focus their ministry time and energy.
The Natural Church Development survey consists of one questionnaire to be filled out by the senior pastor and 30 to be filled out anonymously by laity who are at the center of church life. The questionnaire takes 20 to 30 minutes to complete. For more on this aspect of our work, read NATURAL CHURCH DEVELOPMENT by Christian A. Schwarz.
It will take you four weeks of diligent work to complete your self-study. (If you have secretarial or administrative staff that can give the self-study project high priority, it can be completed in three weeks, if need be.) After you send us the completed self-study, we usually take two to four weeks to study the materials you have sent us. During this time, we will likely be in touch with you a number of times by phone or e-mail to request additional information or documents, or to get a sense of your congregation's openness to various options we are considering recommending.
This means the self-study should be started six to ten weeks before the site visit. Some churches prefer to take longer for their self-studies, especially if the self-study is being completed over the summer or during the Christmas season.
During this time your coach will work with your consultation coordinator to set up a Church Health Team that will spearhead the implementation of your ministry plan growing out of your Natural Church Development survey. And if you anticipate significant remodeling or construction shortly following the on-site visit, your coach will also work with you to identify or form a Facilities Task Force to follow through on the facility recommendations that will grow out of your consultation.
Phase 2: Site visit
Typically, a two- or three-person consulting team will make your site visit. (If the schedule of the consulting team prevents this, you may have a solo consultant on-site, with one or two other team members participating in other aspects of your consultation.)
A site visit typically runs Thursday through Sunday for a church of less than 400 in average worship attendance, Wednesday through Sunday for larger churches. Early in the visit, the consulting team likes to have a leisurely meal with the senior pastor and his/her spouse to get acquainted and talk about the church. The team will have individual conversations with each pastoral and program staff member and each office support staff member. We often meet with some key lay leaders. On the basis of your self-study, we may request to meet with specific ministry leaders whose areas may be key to the work of the consultation. We also take a 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hour tour of your facilities to review facility needs and explore possible solutions. We usually finish off Friday afternoon with a one- to two-hour meeting with the senior pastor to go over our learnings and discuss what we are considering recommending. Before we make major recommendations related to ministries, staffing, or facilities, it is important that those who will be charged with implementing those changes have strong ownership of the vision. There is not much point in our making major proposals that are going to be dead on arrival.
On Saturday from 9:00 to 5:00, we meet with your Leadership Team. This group consists of your staff, your governing board, your building committee (if applicable), and all your key ministry leaders, plus their spouses. We normally work with a group of 25 to 60 people. This is a long, intense day, but you will not be bored! This is an exciting time.
Our time together begins by looking at your ministries and ministry vision. This is where we go over the results of your Natural Church Development survey. Out of this comes ministry recommendations. This is usually followed by staffing, facility, and recommendations.
On Sunday we worship with you, and also do a walk-through of your facility during each time period, observing how each room is being used, looking for overcrowding and underutilized space. We look for traffic congestion as well as anticipate where congestion will occur as attendance increases.
Sunday afternoon we meet for three hours with
your Church Health Team, a group formed to flesh
out and guide the implementation of the ministry
recommendations coming out of this consultation
process. This session begins with a working lunch.
Its purpose is to orient and begin training this
ministry team for their work.
Phase 3: Written report and recommendations
Within ten days of your site visit, we suggest that either the Leadership Team that participated in the site visit or your governing board get together again to reflect on the Leadership Team meeting. This is a time to define any questions or issues that you want us to address in our written report that were not fully addressed during the site visit. If the ideas presented have sparked further ideas or questions, or if some of the proposals present challenges that should be addressed to make them practical, this is the time to raise these issues. The consultation coordinator will pass these questions along to us so we can address them in our report.
The report includes observations and recommendations in each of the areas covered by the consultation--ministries, staffing, facilities, and finances. View a sample report.
This report serves as a working document to define many of the key decisions your church will need to make in these areas over the next few years.
We do not
provide technical architectural drawings.
Phase 4: Ministry Coaching
The most challenging phase of your consultation is not developing a good plan, but implementing it. Many churches end up with wonderful plans that do little more than collect dust. The best plan in the world is useless unless you implement it.
The most important part of the consulting process, therefore, comes after the plan is developed, during the implementation phase. Our primary role in this phase shifts from planning to coaching. Usually four to twelve months of ministry coaching will be included in an Integrated Planning Consultation package depending on the church's situation. Ministry coaching can be extended on a year-to-year basis.
In most cases, one member of your on-site consulting team will serve as your ministry coach. Your ministry coach will focus heavily on working with your Church Health Team to identify the key issues that are contributing to your minimum factor, then developing and implementing an Action Plan to strengthen the weak areas, removing barriers to healthy growth. Your coach will recommend resources--books, training events, web sites, etc.--that may be useful in resourcing your Church Health Team or other ministry leaders as you focus on strengthening the health of your church.
Your coach will schedule regular telephone coaching sessions with your senior pastor or the leader of your Church Health Team. Your church will probably "meat by phone" with your Church Health Team at least a time or two shortly after the site visit. In addition, your staff and the members of your Church Health Team have unlimited access to call or e-mail your coach at any time during the coaching relationship.
About a year (and no later than two years) after your first Natural Church Development survey, you will take a second survey (included in the consulting package) to monitor your progress in strengthening your minimum factor, and identifying your new minimum factor, which will become the focus of the work of your Church Health Team for the second year.
What your church gets from an Integrated Planning Consultation