Going from good to great

One of the resources that the GPS has drawn on as we think about what to recommend for Second's future is the small monograph Good to Great and the Social Sectors by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, a highly popular study of companies that went from being pretty good to being excellent.

This past Wednesday evening, Paul Rock described to a class at Second some of the ideas Collins writes about and how they apply to Second and the work of the GPS.

One idea is not to get all focused on measuring what Collins calls "inputs" but, rather, to pay attention to the "outputs," or the results of what you're doing.

In a church setting that means not obsessing about membership numbers, meeting budgets, minutes, policies, maintaining tradition, the number of baptisms and so forth. Rather, church leaders should be assessing how the work and witness of the congregation is helping to transform lives, meet member and societal needs, give more of our time and talent, serve more people and so forth.

Among many other points, Collins emphasizes the need to "get the right people on the bus and in the right seats," which is a reference in church terms to leadership. What that means for the Nominating Committee going forward is that it will have to do an even more focused job of matching talents and passions of our members to our governance needs.

Well, there is much more in the Collins book that has been helpful to the GPS, and it's a little booklet (and quick read) we recommend. You can even order it on Amazon.com by clicking here.

What if they can't even find us?

We hope you've been able to attend one of the first two Wednesdays Together classes about the GPS at which Paul Rock and Molly Hundley have been the speakers. (That's Molly in this photo in front of the screen on which she showed some PowerPoint slides.)

Both presentations have been excellent, with Paul giving an overview of the way many churches today are struggling to find ways to speak to new generations of spiritually hungry people and Molly sharing some of the epiphanies she and others have had as the GPS looks at where Second Church is today and where it wants to go in the next few years.

One finding that particularly distressed Molly, she said, was that Second Church is almost invisible to people on the Internet searching Google for churches in the Brookside area -- and Google is the way most people looking for churches in our area today will start the search.

Molly used these search terms "Kansas City, churches, Brookside." Try it yourself. Second's Web site finally shows up at the bottom of the third page of returns. On Yahoo, a reference to Second shows up on the first page of returns but Second's own Web site didn't pop up until the third page.

So Second simply must do a better job being visible, both on the Web and in person (meaning both our people and our building, which many people driving by on Brookside have no idea is a church).

There's one more week of GPS conversation as part of Wednesday Together. Join us this coming Wednesday, Oct. 26, as Molly and Paul wrap up these sessions. They'll be in Witherspoon starting at 6:15 p.m. after the 5:30 meal in Westminster Hall.

An idea from our teens

A couple of GPS members met with a small group of Second's teens for lunch on Sunday, Oct. 16, and out of that conversation about church and the future came an idea that may result in an initiative long before the final GPS report is even issued.

We were talking about how the church can help them make sense of events in the news and the public issues in the world and in our own community, such as homelessness.

Paula Isgrig reminded us that our youth would be participating in the second annual "One Homeless Night" event next month, when they will spend a night outside on the church lawn.

Suppose, someone suggested, that next morning the youth meet with some adults who can help give them an accurate picture of homelessness in the Kansas City area and a description of who is doing what about it.

This might even be a model for periodic youth-adult gatherings to consider other issues in the news. It's no secret that many teens don't pay much attention to the news. But one task of the church is to help everyone, young and old alike, understand what the Christian faith calls followers to do about various public issues.

Talking together about homelessness and a Christian response to it seems like a good place to start. So Paula and the teens now are thinking about how to make this adult-youth conversation happen.

Thinking about worship

Worship, as you know, does not always have to happen in a sanctuary or chapel. It can happen almost anywhere and on any day.

The other evening the GPS task force was thinking aloud about the worship opportunities that Second Church offers and imagining what possibilities there might be beyond our traditional 8:15 and 10:15 a.m. Sunday services -- and what it is about those services that we might want to suggest making better.

Well, put eight or ten committed Presbyterians in a room to talk a bit about that subject and the ideas begin flying.

For instance, what if we moved worship once in awhile to a place like Loose Park, as we used to do for our Easter sunrise service? What if we offered an occasional Taizé service? (Don't know about Taizé? Click on the link and learn.) What if we had a regular rotation of lay liturgists who would be thoroughly trained for voice projection, pronunciation and other skills? What about some kind of alternative Communion service offered on a day other than Sunday? What if we participated with other faith communities to offer an interfaith worship experience to the diverse student population at UMKC? What if the preachers inserts a sheet in our bulletin with points from the sermon they would like the congregation to take home and think about? And on and on.

What ideas about worship do you want us to think about? What do you most love about worship at Second? What would you like to consider changing or improving?

Let us know either by commenting here on the GPS blog, sending an e-mail to secondplan11@gmail.com or by dropping a note in the church file folder of Bill Tammeus, GPS moderator.

Join us on three 'Wednesdays Together'

You have a chance to hear about the GPS planning work and to make your voice heard about your own visions for Second when Dr. Paul Rock and Molly Hundley, a GPS team member, host Wednesdays Together sessions on Oct. 12, 19 and 26.

As is usually the case, each evening will start with a simple 5:30 p.m. dinner (if you're coming, please call the church office at 816-363-1300 and say so). Then the GPS gathering will start at 6:15 and go for most of an hour. If you can't make dinner, try to be at one or more of the sessions.

This will be a great opportunity to get a sense of what the GPS is up to and to share your dreams, your hopes, your fears, your wisdom.

The GPS needs to hear from all its members. So see you on Oct. 12, 19 and 26.

Some adult education thoughts

The GPS representatives met on Sunday, Sept. 25, with people who attend the Covenant and Bible Speaks Today adult education classes.

Here's what they thought Second Church does best:

* Food and fellowship.
* Welcoming newcomers
* Preaching
* Local mission
* Music
* Preservation of our art, architecture and our whole building.
* Our office management team seems well lined up now.

We asked people attending to dream aloud about how to make adult education at Second better. Some of their thoughts:

* We need a comprehensive, long-term Bible study program. (Think of such models as the Bethany, Alpha and Kerygma material.)
* Some Bible study should be clergy led, some lay led and some located outside the walls of the church.
* Consider a "progressive" model that moves from home to home.
* We should figure out how to make good Bible study available online with occasional meetings of the groups following the study program.
* Passion for Bible study -- and all of adult education -- must come from the people in the pews.
* Let's look into using Bible games, whether in-person with printed materials or online.
* Let's ponder the Village U model (from Village Presbyterian Church) to offer leadership training, Bible study, book study and speakers.
* Help people listening to sermons by using more graphics during the sermon.
* Prepare adults to engage sermons more fully by giving them material ahead of time to study.
* Focus adult education offerings on people's current needs and make these offerings relatively short-term.
* Don Fisher could take a more active role in helping to create adult education offerings beyond the Witherspoon Class.
* A crucial part of all adult education efforts should be fellowship.
* Let's create more mission trips for adults and create a strong educational component to such trips.
* The current third-floor classroom locations for the Covenant and Bible Speaks classes make it difficult for newcomers to find the classes. Let's rethink these locations.
* Let's try six-week series of Bible studies. Well-focused, well-prepared but limited in terms of time commitment.

* Many adult education offerings can be lay led but should have strong inspiration and leadership from the church staff.
* Let's draw on local seminaries to use some of the professors to lead some classes or speak occasionally.
* Let's find at least part-time space on our staff for a local seminary student to help us with adult education.
* Adult education offerings need to have much stronger staff support in the area of communications and marketing so people inside and outside the congregation know what's coming up.
* Let's more intentionally link adult education to upcoming sermon series so we can be more coordinated in what we offer.
* Why not create online chat opportunities in which anyone could connect to one of our pastors for an hour or so once a week to talk about the Bible, theology or any issues about which those who connect have questions. But let's not forget that not all of our members use the Internet.
* We need to train our people much more thoroughly to lead small groups and be leaders of adult education classes.
* Let's offer various adult education resources, such as Bible study material, on the Secondpres.org Web site. Maybe even a blog about what people are studying there.
* We should make sure that the education hour for both youth and adults does not get interrupted by other things. Keep it sacrosanct.

Taking care to consider all thoughts

As your GPS team met Wednesday night and thought about the ministry Second is doing now and what it might do in the future, we were well aware of two (well, at least two) emotions running through the congregation as we do our work:

* Excitement. Our future can be bright with promise, and there is hope that our work can help guide us to that future.

* Anxiety. Change is never easy, and there is fear that we may propose things that will upset people.

We're well aware of both emotions. In fact, at our very first gathering in July we read from the third chapter of the book of Ezra how, when the people of Israel returned to Jerusalem from an exile of about six decades, they began to build a new temple. The result was that there was lots of shouting for joy at what was coming and yet at the very same time there was great weeping from people who remembered the first temple.

So we know that whatever we recommend for Second's future will produce both joy and weeping, at least in a figurative sense.

We also know that the task of the church is to introduce people to Jesus Christ, who can transform their lives. And that's what the GPS continues to keep as our focus.

What we want to avoid is for the emotions of anxiety to lead to unfounded rumors and unexpressed questions about our future. And that means that everyone in our congregation has an obligation to speak to us about hopes and fears. You have several ways to do that:


* E-mail us at Secondplan11@gmail.com.

* Leave a note in the church file folder of Bill Tammeus, GPS moderator.

* Attend presentations by GPS member Molly Hundley and our pastor/head of staff Paul Rock the Wednesday evenings of Oct. 12, 19 and 26 after the Wednesdays Together meal.

* Talk to any GPS task force member.

We are trying to be as open and transparent as possible in this work and we really want members of our congregation to be that way, too. And as we do this work, we continue to ask for your prayerful support.

By the way, some of us GPSers have been reading a 2007 book called Who Stole My Church? by a pastor named Gordon MacDonald. It's about how a fictional church deals with change and is quite well done and helpful. To learn more about it, read this entry on Bill Tammeus' "Faith Matters" blog.