The first one consists of three stages in a linear process promoting resilient thinking. Most leaders are trained to evaluate their situations and improve them by adding the required resources and equipping their leadership with needed merits. This approach is working when there exist accumulated assets, including relevant competencies. When it is not the case, many leaders are often confined by scarcity and struggling with an irresistible sense of disappointment, “My church is stuck or stagnant… Is that all there is?”

The bottom line of the problem-saturated stories becomes clear that old paradigms are no longer working. We don’t own the cultural competencies necessary to connect with the people we are seeking to reach.

To mobilize your church into your preferred emerging story even in today’s complicated ministry settings, we must impose relevance on our aspiration-based ministry development by taking a new approach that begins with identifying the underserved needs of your community.

Let’s acknowledge that the proposed ministries cannot satisfy everyone. Today, people are customed to high-quality professional services. They are demanding even higher quality, and advanced technologies have made it happen. When we live in a world where one bad review can close down a business, it is terrible news that churches do not own the technological and cultural capacity to provide such a high-quality service. That is precisely why we should intentionally locate a small number of the beneficiary group and to produce your ministry value propositions (“MVP”) just for them. We coach you to correctly narrow down your MVP with higher relevance for the specific group through the Systemic Narrative Thickening process.

We want to shift from the problem-saturated story that is the current reality to a preferred emerging story. It is itself a ministry idea that is then thickened, validated, planned in the RESILIENT THINKING innovation space, and implemented and executed in THE LOOP.

The Loop’s secret recipe is to enlist a small number of early adopters only as participants or team members. The scale of it is no more than ten to 30 early adopters to enlist. This Loop must be made within months, like three to four months. The prerequisite to the first round of The Loop is to locate a micro-target segment (“µSegment”) in your community. They should be actively looking for a remedy for their impending underserved needs. More narrow down is your MVP, and more comfortable will it be to enlist them.

The implementation is based on the Minimum Viable Ministry (“MVM”) methodology. The principle is to develop a ministry with the minimum MVP set, which is good enough to alleviate the pain points of the µSegment, without any intention of a full-blown ministry deployment in the first round. The initial Loop should be an experiment or a pilot ministry with a singular purpose of getting real feedback from the first participants. Validating your ministry’s relevance with real focused people and eliminating the gap between hidden assumptions and reality is critical for setting up a viral development of your ministry in your local community.   

Team Discovery takes two phases. Why two phases? It is to plant a DNA of intentional recruitment practice at the center of your ministry. The community should grow organically. Each member of the community invites no more, no less three people. She or he becomes a caregiver to find the community for their belonging and become self-reliant members of the community as inviting and welcoming their own three people into the community.

Team discovery is not a one-time activity but a recursive reproduction. The fertility rate of three new births may sound too high, but it is not when considering today’s trend that people easily hop to other communities and not easily find a place for their new perpetual home. The net fertility rate near two is a sign that an organism is in a very healthy condition. We coach you on how to maintain an optimum rate. We will analyze your community to find the best rate for growth. We don’t believe faster growth is healthy.

The team discovery and their leadership development should continue in each Loop. It will ensure your ministry’s effective operation even with team members’ short-term commitment of three to four months. The short-term commitment level from your leadership team is mandated in The Loop. It is not because people don’t want to commit themselves to a year-long leadership. Yes, it is easier to recruit leaders with a shorter commitment requirement. One of the most important goals is to establish the just-in-time ministry (“JITM”) model of recruiting needed leaders from existing abundant leadership resources in your community.  The effective JITM in your community development is a mark of resilience and Asset-based Competency Development (“ABCD”). The essence of the Innovative Ministry Model is to know how to communicate, get connected, get involved, and collaborate with community connectors. These connectors are bringing the demanded competencies and willing to participate in your ministry for a great cause. These community connectors also play a medium for networking other connectors or connecting people in your community. We coach you on how to onboard them as community co-organizers.      

When the first round of The Loop is successfully executed, your ministry team with the First-Twelve members is now activated to run your ministry as they participate in enlisting focused early adopters.

One of the crucial insights in this innovation space is for the team to understand what compelling reasons to join (“CRTJ”). Most people believe they are related to the purpose of your ministry. Most times, it is not. People are motivated by their recognition of a discrepancy between the reality and the desired state. The recognition is a need to change. Whether it is sometimes apparent and other times more latent, it certainly depends on your µSegment faces and how that situation can be improved when they join your project. In other words, the CRTJ is based on specific circumstances motivating your µSegment to join—not ministry attributes. We coach you on how to stimulate the desire for change by developing the CRTJ for your ministry. What messages do you need to construct for meaningful and relevant communications with people of various CRTJs? What channels are there available to reach each CRTJ group? You will be encouraged to study the focused group’s psychographics and use some of their obvious behavioral patterns to explore your options when answering the above critical questions.

We also provide technological platforms, solutions, and methods, including your up-to-date website, landing pages, your private social network, to make your outreaching endeavors possible and practical with those thriving in the culture with technologies at its center.

Feedback collection from those who joined your ministry is a must for successful pivoting the following round of The Loop by analyzing feedback to explore any false assumptions hidden in your ministry development. Rectifying your current MVP and creating the Experience Maps of as many participants before your revisit to Impact and Effort Matrix Analysis would increase your ministry’s relevance to the actual needs of your target segment. The Experience Map allows you to see your ministry through the actual participants’ eyes, including team members. It further helps determine which additional value propositions should be included or omitted in the next round of implementation. This innovation space’s bottom line is to evaluate, pivot, scale your ministry for the next round of The Loop.

Looping back into the Loop with the culturally competent ministry team and MVP, which has been actualized through the feedback analysis, is not the same as the first Loop. It is a Hyper-Loop experience! Your ministry is to be executed in another dimension. The tipping point in ministry growth is no longer its size but the cultural competencies to enlist early-adopters from its communities, who are thriving in the digital culture, and eventually grow with them into a faith community.

No more than three Hyper-looping is recommended before your ministry development set out into a normal ministry life cycle. The reason behind this recommendation is that it is hard to keep up with the values of a Christian community when it grows too fast with new people, possibly unchurched ones. It takes time to develop a character. Resilience and performance are crucial when mobilizing your stagnant church. I.G.N.i.T.E. coaching and the ministry innovation diffusion process is one of the best strategies for such a case. Once successfully mobilized with cultural competencies, a strong recommendation is to adjust the length of The Loop to a more extended period, three to six months, six months to one year during the transition to the normal congregational development life cycle.