The very mention of "strategic planning" brings out the worst in some people. Meanwhile as a church we are doing strategic planning at national level and several presbyteries and congregations are developing a planning cycle to guide and inform their mission. Some people have a very fixed idea of what makes for strategic planning and reject other models. The time, I believe, has come for us to examine how planning fits with our calling as church and to explore more models of how we might think and plan strategically to be faithful in that calling.
While strategic planning has been developed over the years within a business environment, the church has within its own history and theology foundations for intentional corporate planning which need to inform and critique our efforts.
The concept of mission is, of course, well used in the history of the church. Our mission is part of the very mission of God revealed in the Christ person, Jesus. For Christians mission is flavoured by our understanding of "apostle," one who is sent. The church is "apostolic" because it is in succession with the first apostles in being sent to bear witness to good news of the reign of God among us. Christ is the apostle, sent by God. We share that mission. Firstly the church is called to be faithful to that.
This introduces a concept that is not widely used in business planning and evaluation, faithfulness. Often the focus is on effectiveness, or even efficiency. For the church we are called firstly to faithfulness. The cross is a foundational challenge to any tendency to be driven by effectiveness ahead of faithfulness. For the church as a whole and for individual Christians this mission in which we share is sometimes expressed in the language of vocation or calling, and is inherent in our baptism. Baptism is where we become identified with Christ in God's mission, where we take on a new life or faithfulness, and where we join with others in a body which is committed to living that life in the dialogue between the matters of the moment and the implications of our inheritance in Christ. As church and as Christians we are not free to start our strategic planning with a clean slate and simply ask ourselves what our vision and mission are. We are bound to continuously discern these in prayer, fellowship and disciplined reflection on the person and calling of Christ.
Again we have introduced a distinctive word, discernment. And we have noted that discernment in the Christian church is characteristically an expression of relationship. Discernment of direction for individuals and the church as a whole is by more and more fully realising the meaning of the relationship with God and with one another to which we are called in baptism.
Another key concept at the heart of Christian thinking is that of incarnation. We draw this concept from the insight that God's communication and relationship with creation is through a "living among" rather than by some remote management or purely spiritual communication. The church has, at its best, taken this not only as an attribute of God's dealing with us, but as the appropriate mode for our mission and involvement in the world. We are to embody our vocation and faithfulness in actual plans and actions in the real world. We are not to contain our baptismal vocation in some special spiritual realm in which direction is received in rarefied instructions, nor give our vocational energy simply to religious activity; we are to incarnate our faith by expressing the Christ life in response to the issues and complexities of every day life, and that takes planning, objectives, committing ourselves to particular action and then reviewing what we have done. In this sense, strategic planning becomes a disciplined way of living out our baptismal calling together so that we can continuously be accountable to one another and our developing understanding of our mission. It enables the church to be in a continuous learning cycle where the aim is to better and better express or incarnate the Gospel.
The Christian calling has rarely been seen as an individual matter. The imagery of the "body" for the church is basic. The modern language of "corporation" or "corporate" planning is derived from the idea of body (corpus). In undertaking corporate strategic planning the church is acting out its conviction that it is the body of Christ, and that it has a commitment to every part of the body. Planning allows for the participation of all. It allows for the gifts and the insights of all to become part of our discernment of the call of God on us now. It allows the needs perceived or experienced by any member of the body to be influential in determining what faithfulness would mean for us at the moment.
It may be that one of the sources for the current practice of business in basing planning on agreed mission statements comes from the initiative of Pope John XXIII and the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. The council called for the religious orders and by implication the whole church to rediscover and find new interpretation of their "founding charism." This led many parts of the church to re-examine their structures and activities against a sense of faithfulness to their founding 'gift'.
The fact is that the language of planning has been associated too often in the business and governmental world with an ideologically blindness which has sometimes seemed to be an excuse for pushing reforms through in the face of opposition or consequence. However, I believe that this should not make us reluctant to use a powerful tool which so well reflects our commitment as church to processes which are participatory, disciplined and mission orientated.
Graeme Nicholas