Agile Church Development

Rapidly changing situations call for agile leadership.

Pinnacle Leadership Associates is partnering with Central Seminary (Shawnee, KS) to respond to the needs of church leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. It is an example of what social entrepreneur Michel Gelobter calls “agile development.”

The key words in this model are Build–Measure–Learn. Those three words capture the iterative nature of agile development. Gelobter says, “They are the way we make the product or service we are offering and how we test our hypotheses about the best ways to make it effective.”

How does this work in the Central/Pinnacle partnership? Pinnacle planned to respond to the COVID-19 crisis by gathering Pinnacle Associates and clergy leaders online for several weeks to identify and share emerging church practices. Central received a grant in 2019 from the Lilly Endowment to launch a Thriving Congregations initiative to respond to the realities of significant social and cultural trends affecting congregational life and patterns of participation and had invited Pinnacle to be the service provider for this initiative.

In light of the current crisis, Central Program Director Angela Barker Jackson and Pinnacle team leader Mark Tidsworth readily agreed that it was time to pivot--helping churches right now and gathering data for the future of the Thriving Congregations initiative.

Through a series of webinars sponsored by Central Seminary, Pinnacle will call together clergy to identify and share emerging church practices (ECP) in this rapidly changing environment. Central Registrar Jessica Williams will provide the expertise to gather feedback from participants to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention. As a result, the learning will inform the five-year Thriving Congregations program Central is offering to churches and leaders and Pinnacle is providing.

Out of the tragedy and tumult of the COVID-19 crisis, we are learning new ways to be the church. We are practicing agile development. This partnership between Central and Pinnacle will harvest that experience to equip churches for a complex, volatile world.

For more information and to register for the Emerging Church Practice webinars here

(This article originally appeared in Pinnacle Leadership Associates e-news on March 25, 2020.)

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