KATHY PIERBURG

Community Outreach: Brainstorming

The Community Outreach Innovation Team I am leading at church is going to do something this week that is outside of our church’s normal operating practices. We are going to BRAINSTORM.

Innovation experts have a lot to say about Brainstorming. There are a few points I am focused on in preparation for the session.

First, brainstorming takes practice. It does not always come naturally to people, but it can be developed and cultivated.

Tom Kelley writes, “If you want to keep in shape, you have to exercise your brainstorming muscles more than once a month.”

So, with that knowledge, I am approaching our session this week with realistic expectations. Like when starting an exercise program, the first few sessions may be uncomfortable and uncertain, but with consistency and practice results improve. I hope brainstorming will become a regular part of this team as we learn how best to interact with our community and implement new ideas.

Second, in brainstorming quantity is more important than quality. Scott Cormode gives the picture of ideas being like seeds. When planting seeds, you never really know which ones will thrive and which will fail to sprout.

He explains, “the hallmark of an innovative organization is the ability to regularly generate lots of new ideas.”

I hope out of our brainstorming session, we can pull 2-3 ideas that we want to practice and integrate into our fall outreach event. Expectantly, we will learn something from implementing prototypes of these ideas and we can adjust or further develop for future community engagement.

Third, when brainstorming, list all ideas, even the ones that seem crazy. One key of brainstorming is to allow an environment where ideas are not censored but shared. Sometimes the “out there” ideas are the ones that lead to the best idea. If they are not shared the path becomes blocked.

Ultimately in a church setting, we hope that brainstorming is a process we can trust the Holy Spirit to lead. God is creative (just look at the world around us), and we are created in His image so that means we are uniquely creative for our specific community. As we approach brainstorming effective ways to reach our community, we need to make room for the Holy Spirit to lead, guide and direct. What areas of your life, do you need to make room for the Holy Spirit?

Community Outreach: Patience

Summer can be a challenging time in the work of a ministry. It is the time when things slow down as many people take time away from their day to day responsibilities, but it is also a time to gear up for the next ministry season.

Sometimes we are waiting for other people, and sometimes we are waiting on ourselves, but many of these waiting periods are times we are waiting for God. Often, there is not much we can do to change the rhythm of those around us, but we can be aware of the pattern and look for the momentum within it.

Summer impacted the community outreach innovation process I am leading with my church in very expected ways. We were at the point of the process that we needed feedback and direction from church leadership, and yet connection to get that guidance was delayed. And once it was obtained other plans were put in place, slightly redirecting the process.

Here is an update of the innovation process. The innovation team voted on the four areas of focus, you can find them listed here https://kathypierburg.com/2021/05/14/community-outreach-synthesize/. The vote was tied between using the church property to connect with the community and an emphasis on the youth ministry. Before meeting with church leadership, I had shared the research the team put together about our changing community.

By the time we met to clarify next steps, the decision was made to host an “End of Summer Bash” as a way to use our church building to outreach in the community. While our team may have chosen a different experiment, we are looking for ways to innovate within this event since the momentum is moving in this direction.

“Christian innovation is necessary because the church is paying attention to the wrong questions. It is calibrated to serve a world that no longer exists.”
Scott Cormode

The world has changed a lot in the last couple of years, and I expect it will continue to rapidly change. Churches and ministries need to be flexible and open to learning, experimenting, and adapting to those changes if they are to reach those outside their walls. I am hopeful having an innovation team and process will prepare my church to meet the challenges of the next season.

Community Outreach: Analyze

How do we choose which question we want to focus on?

Now that we have four themes from our observations and open questions written to explore these themes, we need to take a moment to analyze them and decide which to chose as the focus of our innovation efforts.

A simple analysis looking at value added, costs, and who needs to be included will help the team decide how to proceed.

For each open question here are some questions to dig into the details in such a way that allows a wise decision to be made:

What value would be added in addressing this question? What are our goals in this theme? Is there a benefit to our church? What about a benefit to the people we are hoping to serve?
What are the estimated costs in addressing this question? Consider time, money, volunteers, staff, and space? Is there a cost in using a building or changing the schedule or calendar?
Who else needs to be included? Is the current staff equipped with time, talents, and budget to look at this question? Would additional staff or volunteers need to be recruited or hired?
What support is needed from church leadership? Is leadership open to addressing this challenge? Is the church body open to potential changes created by addressing this challenge?
Who needs to catch the vision and be brought into the meetings? For example, if you are going to look at how to reach the youth in the community, which youth do you need to add to the team? Are the youth leaders included in the team? Do they agree with your assessment so far?

Once you discuss and lay out the answers to these questions, your team can vote on which open question to focus on thus pausing the others. Probably, you will need to provide an overview of the journey this far to church leadership and discover the level of support in addressing this challenge amongst the leadership. Before proceeding, make sure you have buy-in from all the stakeholders that need to support.

Community Outreach: Synthesize

Synthesizing results is the next step. It is important to share observations without judgment so there is an objective record of what is going on. Once all observations are spoken and on the table, the next step is finding themes and synthesizing areas of focus.

What are the themes we learned in our research?

In the process I am leading at my church, we found 4 key themes or points of interest. With the understanding that examples are a powerful tool in transferring information, I am sharing our themes here:

People are moving to the area at a high rate. Projections include our county growing by ½ a million in the next 20 years. People are moving from many different areas of the country and building of new housing subdivision is at a high level.
With the influx of new residents, the number of children and youth are also increasing. The projections are confirmed by the construction of new large schools.
Some people are not interested in returning to a church building, whether due to the pandemic or other issues.
We have an asset in our church building and property.

After identifying these themes, we used a framework developed by the Chalmer’s Center to create open questions to focus the next phase of our efforts. Once we have finalized and chosen one question to focus our innovation process on, we will put the others on hold with the understanding we can come back to them at a later date, but the one we choose becomes our main focus.

The four open ended questions we wrote corresponding to the themes above are as follows:

How might we help people feel connecting by using the church property so that there is a sense of community?
How might we help the youth in the community to find purpose and a way to connect so that they find common ground and faith in Jesus?
How might we help people who cannot or will not attend church to engage in Biblical teaching/community/prayer so that they grow in faith and relationships?
How might we help new transplants to find a church home so that they become a member of our church family?

The next step is to choose one question to focus in on.

Community Outreach: Learn

Once you have identified the stakeholders, it is time to learn from them. Who do you need to observe and consult? This next phase sends your team out into the community to interview, observe, pretend and experience how people interact and engage.

Often, I think a blind spot of many churches and ministries is an unconscious blame toward the people outside the church. There is an internal assumption that outsiders are the cause of their own inability to connect. Tom Kelley explains this is not specific to only to churches and ministries, but that it is a common challenge for the business world as well.

“The annals of business are chock-full of executives who didn’t understand why people couldn’t use their products correctly.”
Tom Kelley

This is a profound statement. Do we blame people for not being able to engage our church and ministry correctly? Is this blame properly placed? Or should we pause and explore what we are missing and not understanding? There needs to be a humility to explore how the church could be misunderstanding those outside the church and possibly causing roadblocks to engagement.

Learning from the stakeholders can take many forms. Sometimes it is important to talk to people and ask lots of questions, sometimes we need to observe, sometimes we need to pretend we are the stakeholder we hope to engage with and walk in their shoes. Kelley encourages us to do all of these things.

“Focused observation can be a powerful source of innovation…. Good, insightful observation combines careful watching with occasional well-chosen ‘why?’ questions to get at the underlying psychology of a person’s interactions with products and serves.”
Tom Kelley

An important thing to keep in mind in this process is to be open to what is discovered. Once your team spends sometime in the learning mode, you will come back together and share all you observed. The sharing needs to be done without judgment and without planning. The team needs to listen to each other and learn what they learned.

Once everyone has shared their observations, your innovation community outreach question will become more clear and the brainstorming and planning can begin.

Community Outreach: Stakeholders

The important next step in exploring appropriate community outreach is to identify the stakeholders. Ultimately, this answers the question: Who are the people in your neighborhood and how are they connected?

It would be helpful to use the chart you completed in the asset mapping section to think through the categories of people present in your community. Business owners, government leaders, service professionals, religious and educational contributors, formal and informal members of the community.

Think about people who have been in your community for a long time – What can they tell you about how your neighborhood is growing and changing? They are a wealth of information about the history of your neighborhood. What are the conscious or unconscious patterns they have seen in the community over time? Are they optimistic or pessimistic for the future?

Think about newcomers to the neighborhood- What influenced their decision to move here? Where did they come from? What unique perspective can they share that is hard to see for longtimers?

Think about people who might be affected by any intervention in your community. Be aware of stakeholders who might be perceived as negative influences in the community but still could influence and affect the outcomes of your intervention. One example I have heard about is a street gang who did not appreciate the intervention of a church into their community. Eventually, they were able to work out an appropriate engagement, but it is crucial to recognize the positive and negative stakeholders and how they relate to each other.

We need to reflect on the stakeholders in a community before launching an intervention, because who our neighbors are affect how we serve and love them.

One of the lessons learned during our missions emphasis in March. The mission is the same (love the lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself), but how we do the mission might change because our neighbors change.

The world is changing rapidly, perspectives are diverse and varied. If we who love Jesus want to impact the world around us, we need to be willing to learn about our neighbors and be flexible enough to meet them where they are with empathy and humility.

Community Outreach: Current State

When starting with a new community intervention, it is important to take into account the current state of interactions. I think this is especially important if we are wanting to adjust some way we currently interact with our community.

We can get stuck in a rut.

But when we take a moment to think about how things are working, we can start to see potential changes.

Here is an example from our experience. Pre-pandemic, our church hosts an annual Christmas event for our community (pictures with Santa, holiday crafts, festive snacks, etc.). A lot of people have made this a holiday tradition for their family, and our church is happy to serve the community in this way. We look forward to being able to host this event again in the future, but we recognize that part of our goal in inviting the community to this event is to invite them to our church for a Sunday service. In the past, we have seen very little conversion of attendance at the event into attendance at a Sunday service. Looking at our current state, allows us to ask questions about this and explore what might be happening.

Thinking about our current state provides the opportunity for us to be honest with ourselves. We need to be honest about both our positives and negatives in the current state.

In my example, a positive is that we are serving the community, with good turnout and growing numbers of neighbors come every year. A negative is that there is a disconnect between the event and church growth.

It is important to see both. The positive can be an asset, and the negative can be an area of further exploration.

Before latching on to the negatives and trying to solve them, do not make assumptions as to why that current interaction is happening. Instead, ask questions. Try to learn what is actually happening.

We could assume that people may already have a church home and that is why they do not come back. That may be true for some, but others may be looking for something specific in a church and do not see it when attending a holiday outreach event.

Asking questions about the current state and looking for connections and gaps in understanding is an important step. One that should not be skipped or rushed.

What is happening in the current state of your work? What positives do you see? What negatives are coming to mind?

Community Outreach: Assets

One of the quotes that I often use is attributed to Albert Einstein, and it states “insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.” Over the last year, I have often felt the North American Church has been stuck in trying to do the same thing and get different results.

Is your church doing the same thing expecting different results?

What if we recognize that our mission does not change, but how we do the mission might need to change? Could we start the process of figuring out how to do the mission in a fresh way? I certainly hope so!

Currently, I am leading a team at my church to explore new ways to serve our community. We are starting on a process that we do not know what result we will get. Yet, we recognize we need to try something different and trust God to direct us.

I have decided to share the process here. Perhaps, it will help someone else or perhaps, I can assist your church in a similar process.

The first step in exploring new opportunities of community outreach is to recognize the assets in the community. Assets can be looked at as strengths or positive influences in the community. The definition of asset is “a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality.”

Sometimes it is easy to list out the assets in a community, but sometimes you can get stuck. It is especially important to recognize and acknowledge assets in communities that are viewed negatively, based on perceived or actual housing, educations, job opportunities, etc.

Sometimes we can get stuck in what we see as broken or wrong in our community and we can focus our efforts on fixing those problems, but when we do that, we miss out on all that is good and right.

Our first step in changing our perspective is to brainstorm the assets in the community. It may be helpful to break down assets into different categories to spark brainstorming. You could use a version of this chart in that process.

Businesses/ Organizations	Events/ Activities	Education	Health	Religious/ Cultural Organizations	Gifts/ Skills/ Relationships

What is important here is looking for things that are working well so they can be used as a starting point or a resource in whatever intervention is planned.

Not only will asset assessment help shift your perspective, but it will also foster a sense of pride and purpose for your community. It is a great place to start.

When you brainstorm assets, are you surprised to recognize something that you had overlooked before?

Missions March

Part of my responsibility in my role at my local church is to lead partnership with local, national, and global mission partners. In March of every year, we spend a portion of each week’s church service to highlight and update the congregation on these mission partners. We conclude the month by making a faith promise to the mission fund that is then committed to the mission partners over the coming year.

We just finished our Missions March 2021, and I wanted to take a minute to reflect on a few recurring themes I saw through the presentations.

The world has changed a lot over the last year. Successful ministries, churches, organizations are able to recognize that the what of their mission will not change but how they do the mission might change. Flexibility and adaptive leadership are necessary now more than ever to share the love of God with a changing world.
Wholistic evangelism and discipleship has the greatest impact. People all over the world are dealing with more than ever before. People need others to be present with them and willing to work through thoughts, emotions, physical and spiritual needs. Each of us is a whole person and need a wholistic approach. When some aspects of a person’s life are ignored, often the whole approach is discounted. A wholistic approach is part of the needed pivot in our changing world.
Relationships built over time grow in trust, benefiting all involved. I always believed this was true between our mission partners and their communities, but this month I also saw the benefit of the growing trust between us as a church and our partners. Time allows us to see the growing fruit of God’s grace. Some seeds take longer to germinate and grow than others. When we invest in long -term relationships, we create a safe environment for growth at God’s pace rather than ours.
True development is when both givers and receivers grow. I saw that in trusting relationships, resources flow both directions. While we in the U.S. may have financial resources that our partners are lacking, our partners around the world have spiritual resources that we are lacking. The trusting relationship allows the exchange of resources – financial, spiritual, encouragement- to flow both ways.

Do any of these themes speak to you and your experience? Is there something that gives you pause and a desire to learn more about? Do not hesitate to reach out if I can be of assistance!

Insight + Action Words: Speak

“The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
Proverbs 18:21

In the Bible, there are many instructions about our words and how we speak. Most instruct us about controlling the tongue and warn of the consequences of our words.

These instructions reinforce the principle that words matter.

The words we speak matter.

The words we hear matter.

The words we tolerate or ignore or accept matter.

The words we read and watch and internalize all matter.

Most of us can remember a time when encouraging words built us up, but I would guess there are almost double the times that we remember when words tore us down. What I find interesting is often we have an opposite memory of our own words. We remember more the words of encouragement than discouragement that we speak to others. This simple trip through your memories gives a glimpse of the power of words on a personal level.

In our current culture, words are powerful and constant. The age of 24 hour news and social media has created an environment where we are continually bombarded by words. Some of us use a lot of words in these arenas as well.

Once we recognize the power of words and our constant contact with words, we can pause and reflect on how we want to act.

I believe that most people want to be encouragers. Most people want to speak words of hope and life, but we can get derailed by what we are ingesting.

What do we learn when we evaluate what we are putting in and determine if it is feeding words of death and pain or life and hope? Most likely, it is a mixture. Realizing the input and output of negative words, is the first step to changing our action.

We must be aware of what we are ingesting and put up barriers to the input that is not beneficial so that when we speak, we are a benefit to others.

“The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
Proverbs 18:21

We have the choice of what kind of fruit we will eat. If we ingest and spread words of death, we will have rotten fruit to eat. If we ingest and spread words of life, we will have delicious fruit to eat.

Words matter. Words have consequences.

Take the first step today to be aware of what words are influencing you so that your voice will benefit others.