Church Refocus
Ministry is challenging today! Because of the changing face of both culture and ministry, many pastors are required to function outside their areas of giftedness and passion. This can lead to a frustrating ministry experience, and that can take its toll.
One survey conducted by Focus on the Family suggests that 80% of pastors and 84% of their spouses regularly deal with depression, and more than 40% of pastors and 47% of their spouses report that they are suffering from burnout, frantic schedules and unrealistic expectations. They estimate that approximately 1500 pastors leave their assignments each month, due to moral failure, spiritual burnout or conflicts within the local congregations.
The solution is to regain a focus on ministry as designed by the Head of the church. Pinnacle Ministries can help you do exactly that!
Retool Kit Pathway
Every pastor asks how they can help their church grow…but is that the right question? Perhaps the better question is how can we have maximum Kingdom impact? If we do that, growth will happen naturally…but how do you do that? We’ve helped pioneer the Mobilization Retool Kit, a coach-led, six module experience that walks the extended leadership of a church through an interactive process that has a very specific goal for a church: “To arrive at a shared vision and effective strategies for impacting its community and world by reproducing disciples, leaders and congregations.”
- The Retool Kit is not a program, but a pathway. The church journeys together under the guidance of a coach to discover the plans God has for the church.
- The Retool Kit is biblical. It’s not a collection of church growth strategies, but a journey that starts with renewing the heart of the leader and the church congregation.
- The Retool Kit is comprehensive. The end result is a three year, written ministry plan designed to focus the best resources of the church on the greatest need of its local community.
To help you decide if the Retool Kit is right for you, give us a call, or check out some of the downloadable resources below:
A more “in-depth” look at the Retool Kit can be found on our Retool Kit support site: http://www.retoolkit.org
Participant Feedback
“Just a note of thanks for your wonderful investment in our team and our vision process. God has used you to bring great encouragement as well as important insights for our whole team.…Frequently I find myself trying to picture what Northbridge will look like five years from now. Each step of this process has made that a little clearer, and whatever fruit comes from that, you have had a big hand in it.” -Pastor from a Retool Kit Church
One retreat participant publicly stated, “When we were considering this I was skeptical because I thought it was going to take a couple of years before we started to see any changes. But already after the first retreat we’ve had some great results. The action points are being implemented & having a positive effect. The leaders are also pulling together & functioning more as a team. Praise God!” – Retreat Participant
“Our retreat #2 was truly amazing. God really worked in the hearts of the church’s Vision Team. They are seriously considering taking a break from the pathway to investigate the history of the church using “Healing the Heart of Your Church” to see if there is unfinished business that needs to be addressed. Their hunch is that there is a lot of stuff that has never been resolved….” Coach’s Comments
Natural Church Development
While Natural Church Development (NCD) is an integral part of the Retool Kit Pathway, it’s also a great stand-alone process to assess the essential health of a church. Have you ever wondered – “Just how healthy is my church?” Now you have a tool to objectively measure that!
NCD looks at eight essential health characteristics that hard research has shown are key in every growing church:
- Empowering Leadership – the ability to coach, delegate and lead the congregation through change.
- Gift-Oriented Ministry – Understanding spiritual gifts, and being able to match gift, person and passion to task.
- Passionate Spirituality – having personal and corporate spiritual disciplines in place.
- Effective Structures – Structures that enable ministry to accomplish their stated goals.
- Inspiring Worship – Worship that effectively connects people to God in a living way.
- Holistic Small Groups – Groups with authenticity and transparency that foster growth.
- Need-Oriented Evangelism – Evangelism that scratches where it itches.
- Loving relationships – Relationships that are honest, interdependent, and understand how to resolve conflict.
The NCD survey will give you an objective measurement of these eight characteristics. After completing the NCD Survey, you will receive a graph that measures the practice of these characteristics. Couple that with experienced coaching and you have a tool for fostering church health and effectiveness. We can provide and score the survey, as well as help you interpret and apply the results. You can download a price and information sheet here.
“The NCD survey and [follow up] affinity exercise is well worth the time and money. Gary is an excellent facilitator; he gets the ball rolling and makes sure that it stays rolling! He can critique in a way that is positive and non-threatening. I feel it is good for a church’s health to have someone non-biased to look at a church’s strengths and weaknesses. Gary seems not only to have a genuine interest in our local church but he has a grand desire to help the “church universal” grow.” Congregational Leader
Staying Focused in a Blurry World
Those of us who wear glasses know that every so often we need to go to the eye doctor and have a “vision check”. Likewise, every so often it’s important to check that our personal and ministry vision is on target. Pinnacle is here to help!