February 19, 2025 • 34 mins
Is your church plateaued, declining, or in need of a fresh vision for the future? In this episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, hosts Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu go back to the basics and break down the essential steps for launching a church revitalization process today.
They discuss:
✅ Who revitalization is for (and who it’s not for)
✅ The six critical steps for turning around a struggling church
✅ Why assessment, team formation, and intentional planning are key
✅ How churches can move from decline to growth with practical, actionable strategies
Whether your church needs minor optimization or major revitalization, this episode provides a clear roadmap to get started. Plus, learn how The Malphurs Group can come alongside your church with training, coaching, and strategic planning to help you succeed.
🔗 Show Notes & Resources: malphursgroup.com/278
🎧 Subscribe for weekly insights on church health & leadership!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
How to start a revitalization process right now on the Church
Revitalization Podcast.
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.
(00:22):
Mathieu. 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. That's the exact phrase I was about
to use, back to the basics. Yeah. Well, I think this is important.
We've we've picked up a lot of new
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
an an episode with the word revitalization in the
title in a very long time. So Yeah.
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
(01:29):
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? Yeah. I mean, you know, generally speaking, we
might refer to, churches that are plateaued or declining,
(01:51):
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,
(02:13):
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. So, yeah, that's that's it in
(02:35):
a nutshell. 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
(02:57):
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
(03:19):
away from our core purpose. 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
(03:43):
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,
(04:06):
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,
(04:28):
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. And it's mainly those churches which are past that
(04:51):
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. Yep. Yeah. Exactly. And we've laid out six
things that, that are important, as components
(05:12):
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
(05:33):
and, follow along. So, Scott, let's get
started, with the first element, in a
revitalization process. 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
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
need to start with some sort of an assessment. 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
(06:39):
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.
It's a consulting service that we do. And it helps it this is an
(07:02):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:48):
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.
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. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Not
that not to discount those feelings. A lot of times those
(08:09):
are accurate. Yeah. Sure. 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
(08:31):
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
(08:54):
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. 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
(09:17):
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,
(09:40):
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 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
(10:02):
all the way to cancer. Wow. Grief.
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.
(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
(10:46):
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. Do you my
first kind of question is, is there a
group of people, let's say 20, you know, of your of your
(11:09):
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
(11:32):
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. You see a new
(11:54):
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
(12:18):
year ago. 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,
(12:39):
it's usually never about the money. 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
(13:00):
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
(13:22):
making some projections on things and going, well, this is gonna be
hard because of these problems. 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
(13:43):
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
(14:06):
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. 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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
things operate. 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. Yeah.
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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 then You you begin to know what you're looking for in
a pastor, and you become a lot more attractive to a candidate. 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
(15:58):
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.
(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
(16:43):
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,
(17:03):
you know, these people, they could just do anything they want. 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,
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:10):
one another up, and teach his word and do, you know, do all
these really important things. 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
(18:33):
when you're working with the Malphurs group, is forming a revitalization
team. 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
(18:55):
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. 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
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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. And it's the church is not a
business. And so, it's important
(20:03):
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
(20:26):
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
(20:47):
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.
(21:09):
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 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
(21:31):
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.
(21:54):
This team is going to explore biblical,
actionable values in the church. 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,
(22:16):
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
(22:36):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:43):
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
(24:05):
subsequent years, towards really significant things that are
gonna change the trajectory of the church into one of health and
growth, and kingdom expansion. So the plan step,
this fifth piece that we're talking about, is the actual get together
and make decisions step. Yeah. We we
actually go through all of those key pieces that you just outlined,
(24:27):
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
(24:50):
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. And what
happens is the longer you draw out the planning phase, the
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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,
(25:59):
it has been the most successful approach for us. 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
(26:22):
into the the final step of an implementation process, which is
I mean, of a revitalization process, which is implementation. So
Yeah. 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
(26:45):
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
(27:08):
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
(27:29):
change to that? How are we going to incorporate more people
into understanding what the change is? So there's communication aspects.
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
(27:51):
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?
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
factor that, you know, we at the Malphurs group work in in our
revitalization process, is coaching.
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,
(28:58):
to to be able to answer questions, to to spur you on, and to
to help you continue to move forward. Mhmm. And so
sticking with how we prescribe implementation, we're seeing,
the high majority of churches, implement
positive change and find success.
Yeah. There's a quote
(29:21):
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
(29:44):
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. And
when you, we have found that that's the case. But so but
just sitting back and going, what, like, self reflecting on
(30:07):
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
(30:30):
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.
Every church that goes through it has been successful and has seen
movement, has seen growth, has seen positive change and
(30:53):
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
(31:13):
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. Who is going to be guiding this work?
They don't have unrestricted, unfettered, you
(31:36):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:44):
the process. 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
(33:05):
part or a revitalization, we can help you. Our our process is
inexpensive and highly effective. So Absolutely. So this outline is 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
(33:27):
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. And
here in The US, we have a a broad team of certified
guides that are ready, willing, and able to come alongside your
(33:49):
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.
How to start a revitalization process right now on the Church
Revitalization Podcast.
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.
(00:22):
Mathieu. 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. That's the exact phrase I was about
to use, back to the basics. Yeah. Well, I think this is important.
We've we've picked up a lot of new
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
an an episode with the word revitalization in the
title in a very long time. So Yeah.
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
(01:29):
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? Yeah. I mean, you know, generally speaking, we
might refer to, churches that are plateaued or declining,
(01:51):
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,
(02:13):
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. So, yeah, that's that's it in
(02:35):
a nutshell. 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
(02:57):
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
(03:19):
away from our core purpose. 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
(03:43):
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,
(04:06):
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,
(04:28):
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. And it's mainly those churches which are past that
(04:51):
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. Yep. Yeah. Exactly. And we've laid out six
things that, that are important, as components
(05:12):
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
(05:33):
and, follow along. So, Scott, let's get
started, with the first element, in a
revitalization process. 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
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
need to start with some sort of an assessment. 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
(06:39):
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.
It's a consulting service that we do. And it helps it this is an
(07:02):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:48):
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.
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. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Not
that not to discount those feelings. A lot of times those
(08:09):
are accurate. Yeah. Sure. 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
(08:31):
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
(08:54):
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. 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
(09:17):
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,
(09:40):
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 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
(10:02):
all the way to cancer. Wow. Grief.
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.
(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
(10:46):
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. Do you my
first kind of question is, is there a
group of people, let's say 20, you know, of your of your
(11:09):
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
(11:32):
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. You see a new
(11:54):
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
(12:18):
year ago. 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,
(12:39):
it's usually never about the money. 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
(13:00):
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
(13:22):
making some projections on things and going, well, this is gonna be
hard because of these problems. 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
(13:43):
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
(14:06):
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. 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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
things operate. 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. Yeah.
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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 then You you begin to know what you're looking for in
a pastor, and you become a lot more attractive to a candidate. 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
(15:58):
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.
(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
(16:43):
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,
(17:03):
you know, these people, they could just do anything they want. 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,
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:10):
one another up, and teach his word and do, you know, do all
these really important things. 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
(18:33):
when you're working with the Malphurs group, is forming a revitalization
team. 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
(18:55):
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. 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
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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. And it's the church is not a
business. And so, it's important
(20:03):
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
(20:26):
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
(20:47):
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.
(21:09):
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 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
(21:31):
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.
(21:54):
This team is going to explore biblical,
actionable values in the church. 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,
(22:16):
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
(22:36):
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
(22:59):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:43):
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
(24:05):
subsequent years, towards really significant things that are
gonna change the trajectory of the church into one of health and
growth, and kingdom expansion. So the plan step,
this fifth piece that we're talking about, is the actual get together
and make decisions step. Yeah. We we
actually go through all of those key pieces that you just outlined,
(24:27):
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
(24:50):
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. And what
happens is the longer you draw out the planning phase, the
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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,
(25:59):
it has been the most successful approach for us. 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
(26:22):
into the the final step of an implementation process, which is
I mean, of a revitalization process, which is implementation. So
Yeah. 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
(26:45):
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
(27:08):
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
(27:29):
change to that? How are we going to incorporate more people
into understanding what the change is? So there's communication aspects.
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
(27:51):
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?
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
factor that, you know, we at the Malphurs group work in in our
revitalization process, is coaching.
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,
(28:58):
to to be able to answer questions, to to spur you on, and to
to help you continue to move forward. Mhmm. And so
sticking with how we prescribe implementation, we're seeing,
the high majority of churches, implement
positive change and find success.
Yeah. There's a quote
(29:21):
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
(29:44):
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. And
when you, we have found that that's the case. But so but
just sitting back and going, what, like, self reflecting on
(30:07):
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
(30:30):
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.
Every church that goes through it has been successful and has seen
movement, has seen growth, has seen positive change and
(30:53):
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
(31:13):
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. Who is going to be guiding this work?
They don't have unrestricted, unfettered, you
(31:36):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:21):
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
(32:44):
the process. 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
(33:05):
part or a revitalization, we can help you. Our our process is
inexpensive and highly effective. So Absolutely. So this outline is 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
(33:27):
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. And
here in The US, we have a a broad team of certified
guides that are ready, willing, and able to come alongside your
(33:49):
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.
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