I recently met with Every Nation regional directors from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. We gathered in Dubai to clarify our top global priority for the next twelve to twenty-four months. We used Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, as the framework for our discussions.
The Advantage teaches that organizational health is dependent on leaders practicing four disciplines:
- Building a cohesive team
- Creating clarity
- Over communicating clarity
- Reinforcing clarity
In order to make point #2 happen, Lencioni crafted six questions designed to help organizations create clarity. Of course, if we do not have a cohesive team, we will never be able to create, over-communicate, or reinforce clarity. All four disciplines build upon one another.
Warning: after you read our answers to Lencioni’s six questions, you will wonder how it took us three days to come up with something so simple. The truth is, simplicity requires disciplined thought and rigorous debate.
Here are Lecioni’s Six Questions, and Every Nation’s best answers.
1. WHY DO WE EXIST? We exist to honor God by establishing Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered, socially responsible churches and campus ministries in every nation.
If the question had been: what is your mission statement, the answer would have been easy. But answering why we exist sparked quite a debate. The fact that our regional directors settled on our mission statement as the answer told us that our mission statement is more than words on a website, that it is actually a useful guidepost for our movement.
2. HOW DO WE BEHAVE? We behave spiritually, relationally, and globally.
Again, that seems like an obvious answer, but it took time to get to the obvious. There might be a blog coming in the near future about this answer.
3. WHAT DO WE DO? We do church planting, campus ministry, and world missions.
Of course, we do other stuff, but these three are core. If we stop doing any one of our Big Three, we will cease to be who God has called us to be. Other programs, ministries, departments, brands might come and go, but these here are permanent.
4. HOW WILL WE SUCCEED? We will succeed by making disciples, developing leaders, and doing life together.
Each phrase in this answer is loaded with meaning. The starting point is making disciples. We make disciples by engaging our culture and community with the gospel, by establishing biblical foundations, by equipping believers to do ministry, and by empowering disciples to make disciples. We take those disciples and develop them to be leaders in all walks of life. We develop leaders by identifying gifts and strengths, by instruction, by impartation, and by internship. And finally, for Every Nation to succeed, we must do discipleship, leadership, and life together. If we stay together, we succeed. If we scatter, we fail.
5. WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT NOW? Our most important priority in the next twelve months is to strengthen and expand campus ministry globally.
This will require us to do the following:
- Create a cohesive global campus ministry leadership team
- Assess the status of campus ministry by region
- Create a global campus ministry brand
- Create buy-in from pastors and campus missionaries
- Synchronize our campus conference themes globally
- Identify best practices
6. WHO MUST DO WHAT? The answer to this one is still being processed among our global staff.
Of course, every pastor, campus missionary, church planter, and small group leader in our movement has a role in building cohesive leadership teams, creating clarity, over-communicating clarity, and reinforcing clarity.
