The Church Revitalization Podcast – Episode 278

Church revitalization isn’t just for struggling congregations. We often interchange the term “church health” in reference to what we do when working with churches that are experiencing growth but want to continue to optimize. Whether your church is declining, plateaued, or even growing but seeking optimization, a structured revitalization or strategic health process can help strengthen your ministry and refocus your mission. Based on years of experience working with churches worldwide, here are the six essential steps to begin a successful church revitalization journey.

1. Assess Current Church Health

The first step in any revitalization process is establishing a baseline understanding of your church’s current health. While gut feelings about church health are common, they’re not sufficient for developing an effective turnaround strategy. A proper assessment should examine multiple aspects of church health to create a comprehensive picture. This includes evaluating your mission effectiveness and how well you’re living it out, examining your discipleship values and their implementation, and assessing how well your ministries align with your overall discipleship goals. The assessment should also look at vision clarity throughout the organization, how effectively you execute on strategic initiatives, and analyze attendance and giving trends over time. By gathering concrete data across these areas, church leaders can make informed decisions about next steps rather than relying on assumptions or feelings alone. Think of it as going to the doctor for a complete physical – you need to understand your current state of health before you can create an effective treatment plan. The Malphurs Group can help your church assess its current health through our comprehensive Church Ministry Analysis, available at malphursgroup.com/cma.

2. Agree on the Need for Revitalization

With assessment data in hand, church leadership must reach consensus on both the need for revitalization and the willingness to engage in the process. This agreement is crucial because revitalization requires significant commitment from the congregation. The process typically requires a time investment of 12-15 months and needs a dedicated core group of leaders and volunteers who will champion the effort. There must also be an openness to change and new approaches throughout the church body, along with the necessary financial resources to support the process. The encouraging news is that even smaller churches can successfully undertake revitalization. Having just 20 committed people willing to engage in the process can be sufficient to begin. The key isn’t the size of the congregation but rather having genuine agreement about the need and a shared commitment to the work ahead. Without this foundational agreement and commitment, even the best-designed revitalization plans will struggle to gain traction.

3. Form a Revitalization Team

The next step is assembling a strategic leadership team specifically for the revitalization process. An effective team typically consists of 12-15 members, bringing together both staff and key volunteer leaders from various ministry areas of the church. The strength of this team lies in its diversity of perspectives and experiences, as different viewpoints help ensure comprehensive planning and implementation. While this team plays a crucial role in the revitalization process, it’s important to note that they operate within a defined scope of work. They aren’t given carte blanche to make sweeping changes, but rather work within the church’s established governance structure. Major decisions still follow normal church approval procedures, whether through elder boards, congregational votes, or other established leadership channels. The team’s primary function is to guide the revitalization process, bringing together different aspects of church ministry into a cohesive plan for renewal.

4. Train Your Team

Before diving into planning, the revitalization team needs shared language and understanding of key concepts. Training ensures everyone operates from the same foundation when approaching the work ahead. Team members may come with varying levels of experience in church leadership – some might be long-time ministry leaders while others bring valuable business experience to the table. The training phase bridges these differences by establishing common definitions and frameworks for discussing church mission, core values, and discipleship pathways. It also provides tools for vision development and strategic planning that are specifically tailored to the church context. This alignment in understanding and terminology is crucial for effective collaboration in the later stages of the process. When everyone uses shared language and understands concepts in the same way, the team can move forward more efficiently and effectively in their planning and implementation work.

5. Develop the Plan

The planning phase brings together all the previous work into a concrete framework for moving forward. During this crucial stage, the team works on crafting or affirming the church’s mission statement, ensuring it clearly expresses how your congregation will live out the Great Commission. The team also identifies biblical, actionable core values that will guide church behavior and decision-making. Together, they build a clear discipleship pathway that organizes ministry efforts in a way that effectively moves people toward spiritual maturity. The planning process includes creating an inspiring vision for the future that the congregation can rally around, along with determining specific strategic priorities for the first year. While this planning phase is intensive, it should not be prolonged unnecessarily. The goal is to create a workable framework that can be refined during implementation, rather than trying to perfect every detail before taking action. Most churches can accomplish this crucial planning work in a focused weekend retreat or, at most, over a couple of months. This allows the church to maintain momentum and move into the implementation phase while energy and enthusiasm are high.

6. Implement with Excellence

The final and most crucial phase is implementation – this is where the real work of revitalization happens. Success in this phase depends on maintaining consistent momentum through regular monthly team meetings and creating detailed action plans for each strategic priority. The implementation phase requires clear communication with the congregation about changes and progress, coupled with ongoing assessment of what’s working and what needs adjustment. Churches that find the greatest success maintain transparency about their progress, celebrating wins while being honest about challenges. This phase is most intense during the first year, during which the team continues to meet regularly to hold each other accountable and ensure forward movement. Having a coaching relationship during this time can be invaluable, providing external perspective and encouragement to keep the process moving forward. The Malphurs Group’s Strategic Envisioning process includes one year of coaching to help ensure success. While each church’s specific action items will vary based on their unique context and needs, the key to success is maintaining consistent execution of the plan rather than letting it gather dust on a shelf. Churches that maintain fidelity to their implementation schedule consistently see positive changes in health and growth within the first year.

The Path Forward

Church revitalization is not a quick fix, but it is a proven path to renewed health and ministry effectiveness. Whether your church is struggling or simply seeking to optimize its impact, these six steps provide a framework for meaningful change.The process requires commitment, but churches that follow this framework consistently experience positive transformation. With proper assessment, agreement, leadership, training, planning, and implementation, your church can experience renewed vitality and increased effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission. The Malphurs Group is ready to assist your church through our Strategic Envisioning process. For more information about how we can help your church, visit https://malphursgroup.com/strategic-planning/.

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A.J. Mathieu is the President of the Malphurs Group. He is passionate about helping churches thrive and travels internationally to teach and train pastors to lead healthy disciple-making churches. A.J. lives in the Ft. Worth, Texas area, enjoys the outdoors, and loves spending time with his wife and two sons. Click here to email A.J.

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Church Revitalization Podcast Transcript:

A.J. Mathieu [00:00:00]:
How to start a revitalization process right now on the Church Revitalization Podcast.

Introduction [00:00:07]:
Hello, and welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast brought to you by the Malphurs group team, where each week we tackle important, actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now, here’s your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu.

Scott Ball [00:00:26]:
Welcome to the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I’m joined by my friend and co host, A.J. Mathieu. A.J.? A little bit of back to the basics.

A.J. Mathieu [00:00:36]:
That’s the exact phrase I was about to use, back to the basics.

Scott Ball [00:00:39]:
Yeah. Well, I think this is important. We’ve we’ve picked up a lot of new folks in in recent months and over the course of the last year listening to the podcast, especially watching on YouTube. And, I think that we have not actually done an episode on even though this is the Church Revitalization Podcast, we were going back and looking. I don’t think we’ve had an an an episode with the word revitalization in the title in a very long time.

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:13]:
So Yeah.

Scott Ball [00:01:15]:
It felt appropriate to maybe pause, take a step back, and go, All right, how do we even get started in a revitalization process if you’re a church that’s struggling, maybe just by way of introduction, and we we’re gonna move pretty quickly through these these steps, A.J.. But who is revitalization for? Like, who’s the who’s the prime target? But that’s probably a a good episode all on its own, so let’s not go too deep in here. But who who is, who’s revitalization for? What kind of church?

A.J. Mathieu [00:01:45]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, generally speaking, we might refer to, churches that are plateaued or declining, needing revitalization. You know, we we also, Scott, commonly use church health, as as another phrase for this. I you know, I and I’ve even said this on more than one occasion. If your church is is growing and doing pretty well and you’re looking for optimization, I would call what we do a church health process. If your church is plateaued or declining, I would call what we do a church revitalization process. And honestly, and not not have never, hidden this fact, it’s the same it’s the same work. So, the results, you know, doing the same process in in two different churches in two different states results in the same thing, a healthy growing church.

A.J. Mathieu [00:02:32]:
So, yeah, that’s that’s it in a nutshell.

Scott Ball [00:02:36]:
Yeah. I think I would add to that. There’s there is a need for critical mass. So there there would be you know, in terms of who is revitalization not for, I think you’ve you’ve you’ve definitely said who it’s who it who is for. It’s for churches that even if you’re growing, you could be a church of 1,500 people and still there’s room for optimization, and our process is going to help with that because you you you tend to start getting ministry bloat and Mhmm. You know, maybe lose direction on why are we doing the things that we’re doing. I’ve done a lot of that actually in the last couple of months working with churches that are in that situation. And so the work that we do is helpful in helping to recenter and making sure we’re not getting too far away from our core purpose.

Scott Ball [00:03:22]:
And certainly churches that are declining, you know, the church of of a hundred people that five years ago was 200 people. But in terms of who isn’t a good candidate for revitalization, generally speaking, I would say if your church is down to your your last 20 people and there isn’t a desire, we’ll talk about this more in a minute, but there’s just not really an appetite to to go all in and see see things turn around, then then it’s probably not a good investment of your time. You’d be better off looking at replanting. And I think that in the church revitalization space, I’m not gonna name any names, but there are some people who call revitalization what they’re what they’re calling revitalization is actually replanting a church, closing down an old thing and starting a new thing. And that is not what we call revitalization. What we call revitalization is helping an existing church to turn around, you know, and in, in Aubrey Malphurs’ parlance, start a new s curve, start start a new growth curve Mhmm. And become healthy again and begin making disciples again and anew. So, there are a lot of people that revitalization is for, but there are some people that revitalization isn’t for.

Scott Ball [00:04:48]:
And it’s mainly those churches which are past that point where they wanna put in the effort and turn around, in which case you really should. Look at merging with another church. Look at closing and reopening as something different, you know, under a replanter or something. There are other options, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

A.J. Mathieu [00:05:06]:
Yep. Yeah. Exactly. And we’ve laid out six things that, that are important, as components of revitalization process. That’s what we’re gonna walk through today. And these are in a particular order, so you can make note of that. And, of course, today’s show notes with these documented for you are gonna be at balfourgroup.com/270eight. So you’ll be able to, to go back and and read over that and and, follow along.

A.J. Mathieu [00:05:36]:
So, Scott, let’s get started, with the first element, in a revitalization process.

Scott Ball [00:05:43]:
Yep. First step is to assess the current health of your church. You’ve got to get a baseline. You have to establish baseline reality. What we find in so many churches, and again this this is true of big churches, small churches, and everywhere in between, is, most people just go by gut feel. Mhmm. It feels like this, but we haven’t actually looked at certain numbers, or assessing certain realities, subjective realities, but realities nonetheless. And so you need to start with some sort of an assessment.

Scott Ball [00:06:19]:
Now if you go just go to our website, any page on our website, malfirstgroup.com, you’ll get a pop up that will encourage you to fill out the church ministry analysis mini. It’s a miniature version version of the church ministry analysis. You fill it out on your own. It takes just a couple of minutes, and it will automatically send you a report. And that’s a good place to start. It would at least give you an indication of how are we doing, you know, at a very, very, very vague macro level. It’s it’s not in-depth at all. But we do something called a church ministry analysis, the full version, and it and it’s included as a service as part of the Healthy Church’s toolkit when you have a plus membership.

Scott Ball [00:06:58]:
It’s a consulting service that we do. And it helps it this is an in-depth analysis, A.J., that, you know, we’re putting together a survey group. We are sending out that survey, then our someone on our team is poring over that data, manually writing a report, and then working with your leadership team to understand these pockets or key pillars of church health as it relates to how effective are we in our mission? You know, how aligned are we with discipleship values? How clear is our, you know, do our ministries work together in a discipleship pathway? Do we have a clear vision for the future? Do we execute on key strategies? Like all of these things that we would say are important for church health, we assess those things and, and then deliver a report to you. And it really does start with understanding reality. You need to look in the mirror. You have to go to the doctor. You have to get the blood test. You have to do the scan.

Scott Ball [00:07:55]:
You have to do the thing. You can’t just go, I feel sick. It’s not that’s not sufficient because you can’t treat something that you don’t know what the illness is.

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. Not that not to discount those feelings. A lot of times those are accurate.

Scott Ball [00:08:10]:
Yeah. Sure.

A.J. Mathieu [00:08:11]:
You’ve gotta have those you gotta have some detail to that. And the reason you have to have some details, I’m gonna I’m gonna kind of move us into our second point here, Scott. There has to be agreement on the need for revitalization. So starting with assessment is going to give you good data to make good decisions. We can’t, we can’t just, again, trust our gut, and it’s sometimes hard to build consensus around feelings. But when we have data, then we can begin to build consensus. And revitalization will never get past the point of assessment without agreement on the need that the church is in a particular state, in a particular trajectory and, you know, to in, I guess, in to some degree has a demand for change. And so by having good information, church leaders at various levels can, you know, can begin this conversation.

A.J. Mathieu [00:09:07]:
Like, here’s what we have found by assessing really particular areas of need that you just mentioned, Scott, and coming to some conclusions when faced with reality. And just like you said, go you go to the doctor, you get the blood test that, you know, your doctor might say, you’ve got cancer. And but you then have to agree. You’d first of all, you’ve got to agree with with your doctor’s assessment. Do I trust my doctor that the tests we’ve done, are true? Do I really have cancer? And then, you know, maybe get together with your family. Your doctor says I’ve got cancer, and he’s prescribed, you know, some treatment. Do do we wanna go through that, or do we want to see if it just goes away? Or maybe do we wanna try some things on around? I don’t want, you know, drag this analogy out too far, but

Scott Ball [00:09:53]:
He went he went pretty drastic on Faced with the information. Like, this is like a baby, like, cholesterol high cholesterol. So maybe, like, a like, you went, wow. You went all the way to cancer. Wow. Grief.

A.J. Mathieu [00:10:06]:
When faced with information, decision makers need to you know, they they’ve got to look at that and then and then make a decision together. But it’s then that you’re gonna have that consensus together, like, alright. We need to do something. That’s then when we can start talking about what are our options and how are we gonna move forward.

Scott Ball [00:10:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think this is important, that you agree on a course of treatment, so to speak. And, I had this conversation with churches a a lot, A.J., where they are maybe on that below normative size. I’m not I’m not I’m not talking to church of, you know, a hundred or a 50 people. I’m talking about the churches of 30 or 40, And they they’re going, I don’t even know. Should we should we even attempt a revitalization process? And I’ll and I’ll say, look. Let’s let’s see.

Scott Ball [00:11:01]:
Do you my first kind of question is, is there a group of people, let’s say 20, you know, of your of your 30 people that you have left or whatever, are there 20 people willing to put in the work for a year, twelve to fifteen months? And if they say, yeah, we’ve got we’ve got about 20 people or so who would lean in, then I would say, well, then let’s try it. You know, if you’re working with us, our process is not expensive compared to what you’re what you’re gonna see out there for a for a the level of service that we bring. Like, we’re we’re working with you directly. It’s not just like, here’s content. Do it on your own. Like, we’re we’re working with you. So the the, financial cost is not that high, and the time cost is twelve to fifteen months. So you try it, and best case scenario, the church starts to turn around.

Scott Ball [00:11:54]:
You see a new trajectory. The trends are reversing. We’re starting to grow. I’m not saying that the church is gonna, you know, grow by a % or something in in a year, but you could reverse a trend. You could start to see guests again. You could have new families joining the church. The church really could be turning around. Or a worst case scenario, you’re no worse off than you were a year ago.

Scott Ball [00:12:18]:
You know, you lost a little bit of time and money, but you’re you at least wouldn’t be going, gosh. I wish we had tried. Now if you’ve if you’ve got a church, A.J., and they’re like, look, it’s just not even worth it. Like, we don’t have the people. We’re not gonna have the energy. It’s usually never about the money. It’s you because our our process just isn’t that expensive. So, I mean, it’s usually never about the money.

Scott Ball [00:12:40]:
It’s usually about the energy and the time and the people. And it’s a different conversation. But, the last thing I wanna say on this though real fast before we move on, and I know we need to move on, there’s I’ve got a church that I’ve been working with, and they’re in the middle of I’ve been working with them with it for about eight months. And I had a conversation with them this week. They have made so much progress in a year or not even a year, eight months. And they’re working with another partner for a different project, something that we don’t do. You know, I I made a recommendation, and they came in and did some analysis. And they’re only seeing what hasn’t been fixed yet, and so they’re all they were making some projections on things and going, well, this is gonna be hard because of these problems.

Scott Ball [00:13:27]:
And so when I was meeting with them this week, they seemed a little discouraged, not not negative, but just a little discouraged going, do you agree with this assessment? Are we missing something? And I said, well, I think they’re missing something because they’re only looking at how things are right now. They’re not seeing how far you’ve come in eight months. And so their assessment is based on the challenges that they see. They’re not accounting for the nuance of look at how much has changed in just eight months. So you’re on a positive trajectory. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to do, but you have momentum. And, it’s, it’s a, it’s a search thing that they’re working for. I’m like, if I’m a candidate and I, and you only give me the problems where you guys are at right now, then, yeah, I guess I would agree with their assessment.

Scott Ball [00:14:16]:
But if I’m a candidate and you tell me how much has changed in eight months, the progress that you’ve had in eight months, and your willingness, not just stated willingness, but proved willingness to make changes. Like, I can point to your willingness to change because you’ve changed a lot in eight months. So when you say, hey. We’re open to changing this. That’s not lip service. I can prove it. I’d feel totally different about that church as a candidate. I’m going, I think I would enjoy this because you’re positioned for this, you’ve grown by like 40% in eight months, you’re willing to make changes on how things operate.

Scott Ball [00:14:53]:
So I would disagree kind of with their assessment, actually. Mhmm. And and so the not to get stuck on this. I just I want to encourage churches that you you if you agree on the need for revitalization, you’re willing to put in the effort, you really can see changes quickly. And we won’t solve every problem in a few months, but you can change it can change a lot.

A.J. Mathieu [00:15:13]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just as an aside, just I wanna put out there for our listeners. We we work with a lot of churches that are in that position. Maybe it may not be, always a senior pastor that you’re, that you’re seeking, but, we but we frequently do that, work with churches that don’t have a pastor in place and, and help get them really on level ground and and moving forward prior to calling a new pastor. And for these reasons that you’re talking about, Scott, you can Yeah. You can begin to show, positive movement, positive change, and

Scott Ball [00:15:44]:
then You you begin to know what you’re looking for in a pastor, and you become a lot more attractive to a candidate.

A.J. Mathieu [00:15:49]:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s kind of an aside. So, so, yeah, we and, because these because these all fit together and do go in order, I’m gonna tag on again to something that you just mentioned as we move into our third point here, and that is forming a revitalization team. You just mentioned that as part of, you know, describing, you know, potential candidates for revitalization. And so it requires a team, in at least in our opinion and in our process. This is a teamwork that happens.

A.J. Mathieu [00:16:21]:
Forming a revitalization team, we use the term strategic leadership team. That’s just a bit of Malfour’s group tradition that, that’s what we call this team. And it is formed just for the process, out of a group of known leaders in the church and people that are leading ministry areas, whether they’re, you know, staff or or volunteers. And and we formed this team. It’s usually in the 12 to 15 person range, but that, you know, that varies by size of church. And this is the, this is the group that is sort of charged with this scope of work. You know, I we we I don’t have an I I haven’t haven’t had to answer this question in a while, but I know we we have over the years, Scott. You know, people are like, well, we just, you know, these people, they could just do anything they want.

A.J. Mathieu [00:17:06]:
No. They don’t. They have a particular scope of work. It’s not a blank check team. They’re gonna work through these things that you mentioned earlier, Scott, on on the mission statement of the church, on the core values of the church, on forming a discipleship pathway to organize the ministries, on future vision for the church. All still going through necessary approval processes, you know, especially when there’s elders in place or church councils and things like that. But this is, this is a really unique point in time and a really unique team for most churches to have a really nice varied set of people and perspectives and voices and and, experiences to be able to speak into the future of the church. But we totally believe God, through the Holy Spirit, works through people together in a team environment like this, to craft a future for the church that is biblically sound, that is builds an attractive future because God has an attractive future for the church, as as his kingdom enlarges and and as we build one another up, and teach his word and do, you know, do all these really important things.

A.J. Mathieu [00:18:16]:
But forming the revitalization team is really kind of the initiation then of launching the work. At this point in the process, the decision has been made. We we do want to make change. We wanna move forward. And this then is sort of, this is the step one, especially when you’re working with the Malphurs group, is forming a revitalization team.

Scott Ball [00:18:37]:
Yeah. That’s right. So just to recap so far, our first step is to say we need to assess assess the state of the church. You know, are we are we healthy? Where are we unhealthy? Where where do we need to grow? Where do and and so on. Step two is we need to agree on the need for revitalization. We have to agree that there’s a problem and that revitalization is the is the treatment. Third, we’re going to form a revitalization team. I’ve got nothing to add to that.

Scott Ball [00:19:03]:
Team of 12 to 15 people. You know, it’s really important. Now we’re really moving into the process. So all of that is think of that as onboarding or prework. Now now the real work begins and the and the so the fourth step in this chain is to train your revitalization team. You gotta train your revitalization team. If you are a pastor or an elder or you’ve been in ministry for any period of time, kind of the topics that we’re we’re chatting about, things around great commission and mission and what is it, discipleship values and discipleship pathway and vision. These are terms that you’re probably familiar with, but there are people in your church and especially on your team that are less familiar with these things, or they’ve thought about mission before, or they’ve thought about vision before, or strategy, but only in the context of the business world.

Scott Ball [00:19:57]:
And it’s the church is not a business. And so, it’s important to train up your team so that everybody is using shared language. You know, I’m working with a church recently that they went through our training, and we still had to spend not tons of time, because going through our training helped but we had to spend a little bit of time cleaning up some languish in terms of understanding the difference between the purpose of the church and the mission of the church, and, you know, the values versus what a discipleship pathway is. And so that’s totally normal, but going through some training helps to clarify that, not because there’s one right way to use these terms, but you need unified language. So you’re trying to bring everybody up to the same level of competency and to have everybody using the same terms the same way so that you actually can get work done together. So, all of our strategic conditioning training lives inside the Healthy Churches toolkit. So if you go to healthychurchestoolkit.com, you can you can access that for seven days for free and kinda get a glimpse of what that’s like. But what we do is we have churches go through that training together so that they would be prepared for the fifth step in the process, which is

A.J. Mathieu [00:21:18]:
plan. That’s right. The fifth step in a church revitalization process is actually making some future plans. Make this is the decision making step in our process, in the strategic envisioning process that we lead churches through. So the strategic leadership team has been trained as Scott just described, and we finally get together and we talk about all of these things. What is gonna be our mission statement going forward? How are we going to express the great commission together? This team will will, craft that or possibly affirm an existing mission statement. There’s options there. This team is going to explore biblical, actionable values in the church.

A.J. Mathieu [00:22:00]:
What does what does a healthy church, a disciple making church look like as far as behaviors and the motivations behind those behaviors? So we’re gonna talk about core values. More importantly, sometimes, we’re gonna explore the current core values of the church because, again, from an assessment standpoint, like, where are we coming from? What do we value now, to know what maybe there’s behaviors that need to be cast off. Maybe there’s positive behaviors that need to be affirmed, but this is an important exercise. What what’s gonna motivate our actions, and which takes us into kind of that next step, and that’s building a discipleship pathway. How are we gonna organize the ministries of our church in in a way that’s simple to understand, simple to apply, and achieves discipleship outcomes that are predetermined? We want people to mature in the faith. We’re instructed in scripture to strive for that, to present everyone mature in Christ. And so how are we gonna do that that’s not confusing, that doesn’t have, gaps that people can fall through? How can we present everyone mature in Christ through a simple to understand pathway? And then what is our future vision for the church? What exciting picture of tomorrow are we going to rally around together as we live out our mission of making maturing disciples of Jesus and building people up in the faith? And and what does that look like in our context for in in our city, in our town or or, you know, to the ends of the earth? What what transformation are we going to see happen that we can look at and be excited about knowing that God is behind it? And then finally, in our plan planning work that we will do in this step is determining what are the most needed and positive moving changes that we can focus on for the next year. Not overwhelming ourselves, doing it in a way that is manageable, and that we can start, to see things happen to build momentum and work over in the first year and then in subsequent years, towards really significant things that are gonna change the trajectory of the church into one of health and growth, and kingdom expansion.

A.J. Mathieu [00:24:15]:
So the plan step, this fifth piece that we’re talking about, is the actual get together and make decisions step.

Scott Ball [00:24:22]:
Yeah. We we actually go through all of those key pieces that you just outlined, A.J., in a single weekend. And it’s it’s a it’s a marathon weekend. There’s a lot of work that happens there, and I always tell churches, look, we’re not trying to we’re not trying to figure out in this weekend every detail. We’re trying to build a framework, you know, just that scaffolding scaffolding around which we can can build build the whole plan as we as we execute. It there there can be some value. If you have the luxury of time, I guess, you could you can spread this work out over a couple of months. But we’ve found that, to be honest, the quality of the outcome doesn’t shift that much.

Scott Ball [00:25:09]:
And what happens is the longer you draw out the planning phase, the more people feel like they’ve done something when they actually haven’t actually executed anything yet. So we try to compress that planning time into a a smaller frame, but lower the expectations for the outcomes. So we like, for the deliverable. Go, okay. Look. We’re we’re just trying to get an operational framework because when we move into the the final step of implementation, we can flesh this thing out. Like, we don’t we we don’t have to wait until we have nuanced every detail before we execute. We can create a framework that we can operate from and then fill in the details as we go, which is out, you know, it’s it’s not saying it’s necessarily the only approach or the right approach, it has been the most successful approach for us.

Scott Ball [00:26:02]:
We have found that the quicker we can get churches moving and acting, the better. And so that planned session for us, because you already know the concepts, because you’ve gone through the training, when we get into that planned session, it’s a pretty it’s a blitz of time. And then we move into the the final step of an implementation process, which is I mean, of a revitalization process, which is implementation. So Yeah.

A.J. Mathieu [00:26:31]:
Yeah. Our sixth final piece that we’ll unpack today is implementing the plan that was developed. And based on, you know, how Scott just described it as not having not drug out the planning process, we’ve got momentum. We’ve got still have plenty of energy, and an element of excitement around in within the strategic leadership team, and now perhaps even this team growing into some slightly larger implementation teams. We’ve we are ready to launch out, implementing some of our decisions. And implement still has some phases to it of, as Scott just said, putting the details to the strategies. We’re starting with a framework, and now the implementation teams can add some details. What information do we need to gather? What might the, process of of making this change look like over how many months? How are we going to assess as we start to make changes, whether we’ve done this, you know, right the first time or whether we need a little bit of change to that? How are we going to incorporate more people into understanding what the change is? So there’s communication aspects.

A.J. Mathieu [00:27:37]:
There’s lots of details in implementation. But one of the most important things that we have found over the years, and we’re we’re very prescriptive about this, and and dogmatic about it, is that throughout the implementation phase, the churches that find the greatest success are the ones that continue meeting regularly, and we prescribe monthly, plus additional side work that teams might be doing on their own, and hold each other accountable to the work. Remain transparent with one another. How how well are we doing? Where are we falling behind? What successes are we having so we can celebrate together? And striving together, pressing on towards the goal, of of what we’ve got, what we have laid out for our strategies, in implementing positive changes in the church. Some a lot of churches have, you know, common things that end up being worked on. Others have very unique things. And but it fits within the framework, no matter what that’s going to be. And then another really important factor that, you know, we at the Malphurs group work in in our revitalization process, is coaching.

A.J. Mathieu [00:28:44]:
That we remain entangled with you for at least twelve months, while you go through this. So your teams are working, you’re assessing how things are happening, and we’re remaining in contact with you through remote coaching, to to be able to answer questions, to to spur you on, and to to help you continue to move forward.

Scott Ball [00:29:04]:
Mhmm.

A.J. Mathieu [00:29:05]:
And so sticking with how we prescribe implementation, we’re seeing, the high majority of churches, implement positive change and find success.

Scott Ball [00:29:17]:
Yeah. There’s a quote or a concept in in, medicine that movement is medicine. That, you know, if you if you’re you got a backache or whatever, like, oftentimes, movement movement is medicine. So that’s why they send you to physical therapy or whatever. But it’s not just any it’s not random movement as medicine. It’s it’s intentional movement. You know, when you go to physical therapy, they give you stretches to do for your back or whatever. And you so you could think about that plan phase is about creating that intention, and the implementation phase is about generating that movement.

Scott Ball [00:29:58]:
And when you, we have found that that’s the case. But so but just sitting back and going, what, like, self reflecting on what it is that we ought to do, it just isn’t helpful. The implementation phase of actually moving and executing and doing things is the medicine. It is the work of revitalization. And so, we are bullish on this. We push it really hard. We have a bias for for this implementation plan and the systems that we build around that for you to execute that implementation plan. And we’ve not encountered a church yet that when following our prescribed system for implementation, not not the content of the implementation because every church is different, but the system for implementation.

Scott Ball [00:30:45]:
Every church that goes through it has been successful and has seen movement, has seen growth, has seen positive change and increased church health, which is the goal in the first place. This is, this is this is this is how you go through a revitalization process. So let me just briefly recap for us as we wrap this up. First, you need to start with an assessment. Figure what is baseline reality. Good, bad, or indifferent? Where are we? Two, agree that a revitalization plan, or process would be beneficial, either because we’re declining or we’re plateaued or we just need to optimize. We’re doing well, but we wanna be sure we’re staying on course. Number three, form a team, a revitalization team.

Scott Ball [00:31:31]:
Who is going to be guiding this work? They don’t have unrestricted, unfettered, you know, latitude to do anything they want. They have a very distinct set of things, and and the decisions they make must still follow the normal governance, so be an approval process, whether that be through the congregation or through elders or some other team. Number four, they go through a training process together to make sure that everybody’s operating from the same level of competence and with the same language. Five, they go through an intense planning season, whether that be in our process, it’s gonna be an intense weekend, you know, at most spread out over a couple of months, no more than that, so that we can move into step six, which is where the real magic happens. And it’s not magic, but, it’s it’s the implementation phase where if you aggressively approve I’m sorry. Assively chase, implementation using our process for implementation, you’re gonna see change and church health over the course of twelve to fifteen months. So there you go. That’s the process.

Scott Ball [00:32:45]:
We’d love to help you with that. So the things that are in the Healthy Church’s toolkit will help you because there’s tools in there that will help you implement strategies, and there’s the training in there that we have all of our churches go through. The only thing that’s not in the toolkit is our help in that plan phase, which is really valuable. So and we’d love to talk with you about that. If you’re looking for a part or a revitalization, we can help you. Our our process is inexpensive and highly effective. So Absolutely. So this outline is

A.J. Mathieu [00:33:11]:
at malphorsgroup.com/270eight. At malphorsgroup.com, there’s ways to connect with us. If you’d like to have a conversation, we’d love to grab, some time with you, have a Zoom call, talk about this in the context of your church in particular. If you’re listening outside of North America, we do this work all over the world. And so reach out to us for sure. Let’s open a conversation. I personally travel to do this work. We’ve got, guide team in Europe already established to do the work there.

A.J. Mathieu [00:33:42]:
And here in The US, we have a a broad team of certified guides that are ready, willing, and able to come alongside your church. So that would be it on, on the topic of starting a revitalization process today on the Church Revitalization Podcast. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next week.