Transforming Church
 Woodstock Bible Church is embarking on a journey. The journey is about transformation, “bringing out the good to get to the great!” When it comes to knowing whether Woodstock Bible Church is truly effective, there is only one thing that matters: transforming its local community and itself through the power of God. But how do we know if what we are doing is truly effective? What and where can WBC do better? Since November of 2007, WBC started this journey using a roadmap developed by TAG. The TAG Team, consisting of the pastors, staff, and an extended team of ministry leaders and lay people, underwent the first phase, ORIENTATION. In that workshop, the team initially discovered it core identity; a church caring community. The second phase was to assess where we are at as a church by having the church attendees take a survey called the Transforming Church Index (TCI). The TCI is a tool where we gathered input from our church attending body on a variety topics including; communication, outreach, leadership, member satisfaction, and others. More importantly, it serves in helping us establish a baseline, a starting point, in examining where WBC’s strengths and weaknesses are with regards to 5 key areas: - Involvement: Are we partners in ministry or are we consumers of the church‘s products?
- Core Identity: Do we own the values and mission of the church?
- Trust in Leadership: Is leadership a shared function?
- Community Impact: Does our church have an inward focus or outward focus?
- Cultural Relevance: What is our church‘s potential to embrace the culture so that we are able to transform lives?
A BIG THANK YOU, to all who participated in the Transforming Church survey. We had an amazing 80% of the church body fill out the survey! That is a phenomemal response. Thank you for taking the time to participate and giving us your feedback. Your time and effort is greatly appreciated, and the information you have provided is highly valued. The results from this survey can be obtained by contacting the church office.
We then moved on to Phase 2 of the Strategic Planning Process, where we hosted a series of Focus Groups to help us further gain insights into the survey results. These groups were made up of some of our church attendees and was conducted by our consultant from the Transforming Church team at TAG.
The groups that participated were: 1. Teens 2. Young Adults 3. Lay Leader / Volunteers 4. Newcomers 5. Long Timers 6. People with Kids 7. Elders Rounding out the final inputs into the activity were interviews conducted with the pastors, Bob and Len, and the church’s staff. These sessions were recently completed on April 2 and 3. Again, the activity was a success with over 99% of the participants showing up. The TAG consultants provided positive comments about Woodstock Bible Church and its people, how the sessions were very good and provided them insight to understanding our TCI results.
We are currently in phase three, which is the VISIONING phase. This is where the TAG leadership team will use the TCI and Focus Group results, and begin to strategize a plan to ‘protect‘ what is good and ‘improve‘ where opportunities exist. On May 2 & 3, 2008, twenty-six people participated in a one and a half day Strategic Planning Retreat. We were introduced to what a "strategic planning process" involved. We discovered and discussed numerous topics including: our code, target audience, mission statement, and assessment debriefing. We spent time drafting strategic objectives and left eager for the next steps. Below is the stated results from this meeting and what is being brought before the church at a congregational meeting on October 25.
CORE VALUES:
Our first goal is to identify and state our core values. These core values describe the DNA of Woodstock Bible Church. Core values are not our theological beliefs but define who we are. When done properly, it will set us apart from other local churches. We truly believe we have identified those core values and recognize that these do make us unique.
ACCEPTANCE:
We value being a community of accepting, authentic, compassionate people.
INTEGRITY::
We value God and His inerrant Word as our source of truth and strength.
CARING:
We value ministering to the spiritual, emotional, and practical needs of people.
COMMUNITY [family]:
We value environments that enable the development of close relationships.
FAITH:
We value moving forward while trusting God for what only He can do.
MISSION:
Our next assignment was to look at our mission statement. A mission statement defines what we do; and also defines what we don’t do. It includes our unique purpose, the results or benefit of our existence, and who the beneficiary is. The result…
WE EXIST TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE LOST AND HURTING PEOPLE INTO A LIFE-CHANGING RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS CHRIST
SWOT ANALYSIS:
We progressed into a SWOT Analysis that evaluates the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunites, and Threats to Woodstock Bible Church. We used the assessment results; the TCI survey and focused group interviews provided from our congregation body, to evaluate each of these catagories.
CURRENT STRENGTHS
1. Counseling 2. Staff Pastors 3. Bibllical Doctrine 4. Care & Concern for Youth 5. Desire to do God‘s will 6. Willingness to reinvent 7. Caring people 8. Transparency CURRENT WEAKNESSES
1. Facilities 2. Lack of communication 3. Lack of connectedness 4. Us vs. Them culture 5. Leadership "system" 6. Leadership training 7. Appeasing worship
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES
1. Youth & Young Adults 2. Population Growth 3. Growing Latino Population 4. Expand/Redesign Facilities 5. Add additional staff 6. Fresher worship 7. Leadership development
FUTURE THREATS
1. Inertia 2. Finances 3. Facilities 4. Aging staff 5. Growth adds more issues 6. Dissention 7. Lack of staff 8. Fear
STRATEGIC PLANS
We identified FIVE key initiatives that WBC needed to focus on: 1. YOUTH INITIATIVE
2. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
3. WORSHIP
4. COMMUNITY
5. MEN‘S INITIATIVE
The extended TAG team members were each assigned to an initiative team to develop a project plan and action items. They met beyond the regular TAG meetings to accomplish this task. Each team replicated the SWOT analysis to aid in the assessment of opportunities. They then proceeded to: * Define the strategic objective. * Identify target goals that measures progress of the initiative. * Establish milestones for the initiative. * Establish a project plan that accomplishes the milestones.
The following outlines the current status of each of these strategic planning teams:
YOUTH INITIATIVE Champion: Scott Smith Team: Len DiCicco, Sheryl DiCicco, Dan Webb ,Sheri Webb, Cheryl Matson, Maureen Ring Objective:
Develop and deploy relevant youth ministries
Goals:
Reach 2500 youths across all youth ministries within 5 years
Plan/Actions:
Hire a children and youth ministries pastor. Provide a dedicated space for junior and senior high teen ministries. Implement a comprehensive, strategy-driven ministry for children and youth.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Champion: Kevin Kent Team: Bob Barnett, Tony Vanagas, Chris Wienke, Anna DiCicco, John Jones Objective:
Develop and equip leaders to preserve our core values and accomplish our mission
Goals:
Improve leadership TCI baseline score by 50 percent
80 percent of congregation serving in accordance with their calling
Plan/Actions:
Define a communication plan for the congregation
Assess giftedness of leaders and establish their calling
Define leadership balance for burn-out prevention
Define the leadership model
Create leadership development programs for lay leaders, Elders & Pastors WORSHIP
Champion: Kenny McDevitt Team: Josh Barnett, Tony DiCicco, Elaine Schlung, Cindy Wilson Objective: Develop a worship experience and environment that engages people and exalts God.
Goals:Improve Worship TCI baseline by 50 percent. This applies to the innovation and creativity scores also. Go from maintenance mode to leadership mode through TAG worship coaching, creative team, and recruitment process. Continued development of potential solution[s] for additional worship time[s]. Increase/double the number of people serving on the worship team[s]. Plan/Actions: Develop a Creativity Team. Develop creative outlets for recruitment of the worship team musicians and vocalists using the REP model. Create a more interactive worship team. Develop plans for tech and sound teams expansion. Continued development of worship director and teams after current mentoring by TAG consultant. Conduct a one year in-house survey to evaluate progress COMMUNITY Champion: Holly Kisly / Kathy Birchfield Team: Debby Barnett, Bruce Heaven ,Scott Svitak, Gere Wissell Objective: Engage WBC family in being part of a flexible and sustainable process that moves people from strangers to friends to family. Goals: Each ministry will identify and implement appropriate bridges to move their target from stranger to friend to family. Community champion will have regular contact to encourage ministry directors, and to ensure that bridges are developed, measureable, being utilized, and are effective. Victories in each venue will be regularly celebrated. Plan/Actions: Develop job description for the community champion. Leadership team will identify, recruit and appoint a community leader. Develop a communication plan between leadership, ministries, and congregation. Plan/Actions: Develop job description for the community champion. Leadership team will identify, recruit and appoint a community leader. Develop a communication plan between leadership, ministries, and congregation. MEN‘S INITIATIVE[still in progress]
Champion: Tim Schlung Team: Brian Price, Tony DiCicco, Jim Davidson, Jeremy Metras, Rudy Torres, Chad Wombacher Objective: To become an enjoyable God-centered environment that reaches all men, and encourages men to grow spiritually. Goals: Significantly increase the number of men attending church, and the number of men ministering both inside and outside of church. Plan/Actions: Have an appropriate system in place to train men of all ages to be spiritual leaders. Have in place more activities / ministries that appeal to men. Develop trust and lasting relationships among men
The TAG leadership team prays that you are behind strategies that have been derived from your inputs through the TCI survey and focused group interviews. We also pray that you endure and embrace the changes we are embarking upon. Should you have any questions regarding the TAG process, contact Kevin Kent, TAG leader at 815/337-0663
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