Strategy Is Critical—but You Already Have One!

If pastors really understood what “strategy” or “mission statement” means in a business context, they wouldn’t be so quick to apply it to the church—or at least they might do so in a more discerning way.

Let me explain. I’ve served as a pastor for the last 15 years, but prior to that I spent a decade in the business world, running a line of business for a large consultancy focused on strategy and operational work. In my years of ministry, I’ve found it interesting how fluid the exchange of ideas and vocabulary is between the world of business and the world of the local church. But there’s at least one problem with developing a “strategy” in the local church: God has already given us one.

In business, strategy revolves around two factors. First is a plan for differentiation: how will my company stand out? If you’re eBay, for example, your differentiation is the sheer volume of auctions on your site (why would anyone go anywhere else?). Second is a plan for a target market. Who are you hoping will appreciate what differentiates you from your competitors (and will therefore purchase your products and services)?

Now shift to the church. Often as pastors, we’re told that we need to develop a strategy, generally stated in the form of a “mission statement.” Typically those conversations run in the same direction as the business world. What do we have to offer (e.g. relaxed, authentic community) to attract our target market (e.g. unchurched urban professionals)? Tellingly, these conversations often blend what we are doing to differentiate ourselves from the world and what we are doing to differentiate ourselves from other local churches.

While a business might have to create this kind of strategy from scratch, we are privileged in the church to have received it in God’s Word.

What’s Our Differentiation?

Fundamentally, it’s the gospel.

The New Testament is full of exhortations and examples of how the gospel should make us radically different from the world. We love each other in a way that the world cannot understand. Our hearts should not be gripped by the things the world around us craves. We shouldn’t worry about what worries them nor fear what they fear. We love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We live lives that are holy. We do all of this because we’ve been transformed by the life-changing power of the gospel.

The Bible’s strategy for a church is to preach the Word and to watch as the life it creates in the hearts of its hearers differentiates that community from the world.

What’s Our Target Market?

Whomever God brings through our doors.

The focus of the New Testament is not on focusing the local church on one type of person (Gentiles, poor people, Hellenists, etc.) but on all types of people (Jew and Gentile in Ephesians 3, poor and rich in James 2, Hebrew and Hellenist in Acts 6).

Given the circumstances and setting of a particular church, there may be a certain group of people they should feel especially responsible to reach with the gospel. But if a church ever decides its mission is to only reach one kind of person, it is rubbing against the grain of Scripture and suppressing the glory of the New Testament church.

None of this means that church strategy or mission statements are necessarily wrong-headed. But it does mean that if yours is to be faithful to Scripture, it will look pretty much the same as the strategy that every other gospel-preaching church in your city also has.

Of course, while we may be different from the business world in our need to develop a strategy, we suffer the same consequences that the business world does when we fail to effectively articulate that strategy (or, worse yet, develop the wrong strategy). Without a strategy, a business ends up saying “yes” to too many unaligned opportunities. Its employees tend to chase inconsistent—or even conflicting—visions of success. Similarly, should you fail to adopt the Bible’s strategy for your church, you will subject your congregation and your leadership to the tyranny of pursuing the latest ministry fads, you will find within your church conflicting visions of what you should be, and you will neglect to follow hard after the opportunities that are in fact in line with the Bible’s strategy for your church.

Scottish pastor William Still put it well: “Either the Church will be content to apply itself to God’s ordinary means and trust him for their extraordinary ends; or, the Church will pursue extraordinary means and content itself with ordinary ends.”

The business world has it right: strategy is critical. But don’t take that to mean that you have to write one from scratch. Your heavenly Father has already given you a perfect strategy, the only one that will succeed in differentiating yourself from the world among the target market of fields that are white for harvest. Preach the word—in season and out of season. Work to see its implications take hold in the hearts of your congregation. And watch to see the fruit that it bears.