Cup of Coffee - Shot of Espresso Introduction Article
Walter Bennett
In any organization, secular or spiritual, changing the culture is the hardest thing to do and the thing that will have the greatest impact on everything else in which the organization is involved. Organic Outreach in the context of the local church is about changing the culture of the whole church to engage in outreach naturally in the course of their daily lives. As a church begins this journey, it is pretty clear how to engage at the level of the Lead Pastor and ministry leaders. Kevin Harney’s book Organic Outreach for Churches walks through the concepts of identifying an Outreach Influence Team Leader and forming the Outreach Influence Team (OIT). Once that is accomplished, the monthly meetings begin. The Organic Outreach International website (www.OrganicOutreach.org) has a myriad of resources including videos, measuring tools, concept sheets, and a full seven years of agendas.
So now you have your OIT Leader and you have formed your team. Meetings have begun and everyone appears to be on board. Ministry leaders are beginning to think differently and everyone on the team understands that they are responsible for driving outreach into their area of responsibility and in their personal lives – even if they don’t have outreach in their title. But it just doesn’t seem like the culture change is going further than that team – what is the problem?
The single biggest challenge that we have encountered among all of the churches we work directly with – including Shoreline Church in Monterey which is ground zero for Organic Outreach International and the church that Kevin Harney (co-founder and visionary leader of Organic Outreach International) is Lead Pastor – is this roadblock to influencing from Level 3 (Outreach Influence Team) to Level 4 (ministry workers and volunteers). The charge given to the Outreach Influence Team is for each member to develop a way to replicate their experience in the monthly meetings (being infused with Inspiration, Accountability, Learning, and Planning) with their Level 4 – everyone who works in the ministry they lead.
Now the challenge in developing these influence plans (Ministry Action Plans), and the reason that Organic Outreach International has not developed plans and agendas that ministry leaders can download and use just like the OIT agendas, is that every ministry in every church is different. The number of ministry workers/volunteers and the frequency of opportunities to gather everyone working in the ministry varies dramatically among ministries. The availability of everyone working in those ministries is often little to none beyond the time they are already giving. Only the leader of any one ministry fully knows all of the dynamics of that ministry team and they are the best ones to develop those plans. Herein lies the rub – most ministry leaders do not have the bandwidth to develop their plans from scratch.
While we have some example Ministry Action Plans on the OOI website for influencing from Level 3 to Level 4, they are more structural and do not include specified materials to use as the OIT agendas do. This means that the Ministry Leaders still have to create an entire lesson plan each month that fits into a longer-range plan which introduces their ministry team to all the Inspiration, Accountability, Learning, and Planning in a logical and coherent sequence over the long term.
Well, now that I have clearly (I hope) laid out this particular roadblock of culture change within the church, I am happy to announce that we have produced some new tools to help with this issue. Our team at OOI (mostly Pastor Tom Green with editorial help and insight from the rest of us) has developed two new versions of agendas that are designed specifically to be used by ministry leaders to help with this Level 3 to Level 4 influence challenge. These new agendas follow the same sequencing of concepts as the OIT agendas but have been designed to be used when a ministry team doesn’t have 60 to 90 minutes at a time each month to engage.
The Cup of Coffee agendas have been carefully and prayerfully crafted to be done in a 30-minute session. And for those months that a ministry team can’t even gather for 30 minutes, we have developed the Shot of Espresso agendas. This briefest version of the agenda was designed to be accomplished in just 15 minutes. Even with these compressed time frames, we have included Inspiration, Accountability, Learning, and Planning in each agenda. You can utilize these resources along with many other Outreach Influence Team tools with a level 2 membership.
Our caution with these new tools is that they are in no way a substitute for the OIT agendas. As the core team that is influencing the church directly, the OIT needs the highest level of 30-day infusion to build momentum and keep it going. For the same reason, to ensure that Outreach does not become, or remain, just another thing that the church will get to if and when there is time, we continue to caution strongly against building your monthly OIT meeting into other meetings that are already on the schedule. If you are serious about changing the culture of your church, you need to treat it seriously. There is no substitute for relentless intentionality