One Warning Before You Begin
Introduction
Why 30-Day Change?
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
AFRICAN PROVERB
We’re making a huge assumption about you: You wouldn’t be in the business you are in, and you wouldn’t have even picked up this book, if you didn’t care about change. You want to see change in your own life. You want your life and ministry to be different a year from now than they are today. We share that passion with you.
And after watching way too many of our friends wallow in the same habitual treadmill of molasses for far too many years, we decided to do something about it.
This 30-Day Change project is about giving you the step-by-step support you need to actually make one of the most important changes you want to see in your ministry. It’s a thirty-day boot camp that allows you to focus on a single area of your ministry and make it radically different at the end of your thirty days.
Successfully completing this project, though, begins with a single admission: being stuck is a choice.
We’ll say it again: being stuck is a choice.
We stay stuck because we fail to give the sustained attention to a problem that solving it requires. We flit from one crisis to another, never giving any of them the intense, costly focus required to make any difference. Most people choose to stay stuck in an unsatisfactory situation until the pain of the status quo becomes greater than the pain required to change. And for some, not even pain is enough motivation to make changes that will make things different a year from now than they are today. But we don’t have to be in the same place a year from now that we are today.
Remember this, though: Most of the things we spend our time on actually change nothing. Most of our time is spent on maintaining our current trajectory, not changing it. Listen to how leadership guru Peter Drucker describes it:
In a social situation a very small number of events—10 percent to 20 percent at most—account for 90 percent of all results, whereas the great majority of events account for 10 percent or less of the results.
Did you catch what Drucker is saying? Eighty to ninety percent of our actions don’t change a thing! The 30-Day Change process is designed to focus our attention on that elusive 10 percent or so, on the actions that will leverage us into a different place a year from now.
You’ve probably read somewhere that it takes a certain number of days to form a habit. Some say twenty-one, some say ninety, and there are all kinds of opinions in between. What we do know is that habits create change and creating a habit requires sustained investment day in and day out for several weeks. We picked thirty days—four rhythmic weeks, with a launch day and a wrap day on either end.
Throughout these thirty days, we’ll be your accountability partners, your coaches. Champion coaches know that simply doing the right things does not create champions; doing the right things habitually does. We know for sure that focus and repetition create habits, whether it’s about exercise or diet or scheduling. The same is true in ministry.
The beauty of this process is that giving sustained attention to the top area of need in your ministry will create change that will ripple far beyond that single area of focus. When you begin to achieve success that has been out of reach for you in one area of your ministry, the confidence gained can’t help but seep into the rest of your life and ministry as well.
One of our favorite sayings is “Done is the engine of more.” If you want to see change multiplied exponentially in your ministry, start by focusing on a single area, targeting one incremental accomplishment after another. Eventually your sustained investments will hit a tipping point and the incremental changes will begin to show exponential results.
In the next thirty days, you will be guided to think in new ways about your ministry. But more importantly, we’ll be walking you through the actions you’ll need to take to create the kind of deep, sustainable change you desire. We are absolutely convinced that if you will take these steps in the next thirty days, your ministry will be different at the end of the thirty days. In fact, we guarantee it.
How to Use This Book
Though we hope you’ll be inspired and informed each day as you think in new ways about your ministry, this book is not to be read through like a devotional or an encyclopedia. You’ve read enough books that you marked up, that encouraged you, that gave you ideas.
This book is designed to be used like a recipe, a blueprint or an action plan. It only makes sense if you put it into practice. So if you bought it with the idea of reading it through in a night (which you could easily do) and checking off the accomplishment of (yet) another book read, you will have missed the point. This is a book that only makes sense as you do what it says.
Here’s the qualifier: Though we certainly want you to take personal responsibility to implement this process, it is in no way designed for you to operate in isolation.
There will be hundreds (thousands?) of things to keep you from tending to the steps required to create fundamental change in your ministry. You’ll have emails to check, you’ll have phone calls to return, you’ll have people drop by your office to talk for “just a second.”
That’s why we encourage you to invite two other people to come along with you in this journey. These two people will be your prayer and accountability partners for the month of this project. Once a week you’ll meet with this pair. In addition to praying for you, they will provide counsel and accountability and hold up a mirror to your ministry (to help you see from angles you might otherwise miss).
You’ll be looking for people whom you trust (you need to be able to hear them), who are willing to read this book with you (they need to be available) and who you are confident will speak the truth to you (they need to do more than just agree with everything you already think). Be unapologetic with your prayer partners about your hope that this process will not simply create change in your ministry, but in you as a leader as well.
It Might Go Without Saying
But we’ll say it anyway.
Too often we “professionals” do ministry as practical atheists. We tip our hats to the Holy Spirit, but put more confidence in our plans than in the unexplainable work of God beneath and beyond our plans.
Knowing our own tendencies to do ministry apart from God’s work in us, we have built into the rhythm of each week a deliberate day for prayer and spiritual reflection. On this day, you’ll be invited into discerning God’s work in the past week as well as opening yourself to any new directions the Spirit may be stirring in you for the coming week.
We are convinced that change comes most naturally to those who live rhythmically, particularly those who punctuate their weeks with a day that is wholly different from the others. The ancient practice of sabbath keeping can be radically contemporary in its impact, transforming our busy, aimless churning into profoundly strategic impact. Your reflection day will be your sabbath day each week. There is a great article on this topic posted on our website at ministryarchitects.com/30-day-change-resources. (Similar resources can be found at Mark DeVries’s blog, The Sustainable Life, at markdevriesblog.com.) We encourage you to make time to read this article before you begin the project.
Your ministry is where it is, at some level, because someone has chosen, whether deliberately or unintentionally, for it to be where it is. Maybe you chose. Maybe your predecessor did. The good news is that you can move from where you are to where you want to be. Here’s how the process will work.
Building Your Volunteer Team: A Weekly Rhythm
By selecting this 30-Day Change resource, you’ve made clear that you care deeply about building a ministry that doesn’t just orbit around you (and would fall apart like a house of cards when you left). We’re making the assumption that you’ve also picked up this book because you desperately want to transform your current volunteer situation into a team with the capacity to accomplish all that God is calling your ministry to do.
We’ve designed this 30-Day Change project in four rhythmic weeks, bracketed by reflection days at the beginning and the end of each week. Before beginning, you’ll want to sync the days with the rhythm of your current ministry (for example, if you have a regular sabbath day you might want to schedule your day seven on your sabbath and sync the rest of the thirty days from there).
After your initial launch day, your weekly rhythm will look like this:
Day one each week will always be a balcony day. Don’t be confused by the fact that the first weekly day one will happen on day two of the thirty days!
Your balcony day is not time off. It is probably the most important “time on” in your entire week. During balcony time you will set the course for your week, prepare for any scheduling landmines in the upcoming days and identify the “mission critical” tasks you must address to create the kind of change you truly desire. Your balcony days will help you start to think on your toes instead of reacting from back on your heels during these thirty days.
Days two through six will be when you work the process. On each of these days you will spend between one and two hours building your volunteer team. Each day, we’ll give you a brief lesson followed by step-by-step instructions. Following this process will add up to extraordinary change at the end of the thirty days.
Day seven will always be a reflection day/sabbath day. On this day you’ll prepare for your next meeting with your prayer partners, observing what God has stirred in you and in your ministry in the previous week. As you observe your progress toward building your volunteer team (as well as what remains to do), you will also discern what God may be bubbling up for you for the coming week. This reflection will clear the deck and set the stage for your balcony day the next day.
One Warning Before You Begin
This crash course will deliver results, but only if you work the process.
The 30-Day Change process is not a gradualist approach. If you want to accomplish the goal of getting your volunteer team in place in six months, there are ways for you to do that, but this is not one of them.
This book is only for folks who want (maybe need) to create change fast, in thirty days or less. So if you’re looking for something that won’t interrupt your normal schedule, this isn’t the approach you’re looking for. This is a boot camp for your ministry. It may require that, on some days, you get less sleep. It may require that you fall behind on some of your maintenance tasks (the 90 percent of tasks that keep you right where you are).
So, here’s what we ask:
Do only one 30-Day Change project at a time.
Do no more than two 30-Day Change projects in a year.
Carve out two hours a day, six days a week to complete the 30-Day assignments. Most days may not take that long, but many certainly will. If you’ve carved out the time on the front end you’ll have the margin you need when you need it.
Finally, confirm that your church has child protection and safe sanctuary policies in place. If not, lobby for that process to begin because you are going to rapidly expand the volunteer base at your church!
One more note: We (Nate and Mark) have written this book together, but throughout the days ahead we will speak in the singular “I” for ease and readability. Each of us has experienced everything we write about. No doubt you have also.
Enough said. Let’s launch.