When it comes to “keeping score,” churches in North America have typically focused on three metrics: buildings, budgets, and butts. The fact is these three metrics really give us no real sense of the influence a church is having on its community. There is absolutely no correlation between the number of people who show up for an event and the difference those people are making where they live. The same is true with how much money people give to the church and how large a church’s buildings are. The reason we “count” those three things is because they are easy to count. While we often use the language of “counting” and “measuring” interchangeably, there is a difference between the two.
Counting is giving attention to numbers. When counting, the question to be answered is: “How many?” It is quantitative. Measuring is giving attention to change. When measuring, the question is not about “How many?” but rather about “How far?” Measuring is about qualitative change. Since the church is a missionary entity—we are the sent, missionary people of God—we need to count and measure new things in decentralized networks of microchurches. In this webinar, we will explore the scorecard of leadership in the new wineskin.
We are reimagining the Church as a decentralized network of multiplying missionaries and microchurches that fill a city or region with the fullness of Jesus. For most of us, that requires a shift from the centralized form of leadership that we’ve been using to a decentralized one.
This decentralized form of the Church requires a new wineskin: a culture of decentralized, polycentric leadership with flat structures. In this miniseries, we will dig into the source, structure, scorecard, speed, and skill of leadership in this new wineskin.
