Predictability Creates Scalability

I have recently been reading a number of posts regarding churches and their lack of creativity. Many say that the church should be leading the way in how we do technology, marketing , and events. While I agree with this in principle, it can take quite a bit to get there, requiring us to step back and rethink how to get there from here. I’ve seen some church leaders get the creativity bug – that bug that sometimes comes from a great conference or a book. These things can be healthy, but sometimes it can cause a distraction from the day-to-day, even to the point of sacrificing the essentials and possibly driving volunteers away. So, how can we move forward, be innovative, and not lose focus on what we have to do day-to-day? The key is predictability.

Predictability in a ministry and within a church helps ensure that the lights work, video is recorded properly, the soundboard is adjusted, the song lyrics are correct, the website is updated, the computers are working, and the facilities are clean. It goes a long way to making the attendee experience a great one. It makes a church experience go from “Why is that paint chipping off and the carpet frayed?” to “This looks like a brand new building! How long have you been here again?”. Just like going to any McDonalds means you can order your favorite combo but have some local flavor, predictability ensures that things operate while enabling your church or ministry to be unique. This predictability brings comfort to those that don’t like change.

Here are some tips that I’ve found work well to create predictability within your church or ministry:

1. Favor repeatable processes over “on-the-fly” solutions
2. Document these processes so that others may learn how to solve similar problems consistently
3. Construct a paper or electronic binder of these documents and train each new ministry volunteer from “Day 1″
4. Recruit volunteers that prefer to be trained once and then repeat the process rather than those that prefer to be creative or enjoy a variety of tasks
5. Find volunteers that exhibit management skills for training and supporting these types of volunteers so you are free for other things

I’m sure you are saying to yourself (or yelling at your computer screen and getting some odd glances your way), “But, this is boring, not creative! We are going backwards!!!” Exactly! Each of us are wired differently, and those of us that are writing or just reading blogs probably aren’t those kind of people. And that is why many of us suffer from not creating a predictable church in favor of creativity. We’ll talk more about this in a future post, but for now, focus on making your ministry predictable and recruit accordingly. You will make a more pleasant experience for your church attendees, and make your ministry more scalable to see your creative ideas to fruition.

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