[ยป a culture of:encouragement, fun, trust]
Risk has become the norm… it is truly ingrained into the culture of Community in a way that I have never before seen or experienced. My guess is that early on in the life of the church there was an emphasis on taking risk. Now this may not seem to different from many other church cultures out there, but I think there was probably one big difference: there was action taken as opposed to simply talking about taking risk.
Taking risk is never an easy thing, especially early on, however the more you do it the easier it becomes to jump into the ring and allow God to work in remarkable ways. Community is about to launch their 9th campus, and although there is a great deal of expectation that it will flourish, there is still a lot of risk that joins along with that expectation. It wasn’t too long ago that Community had a failed campus launch. Their 4th campus planted in a community just didn’t survive. However, that hasn’t stopped them from learning from the experience, moving forward, and continuing with their mission to help people find their way back to God.
The risk involved in launching new campuses around the Chicago-land area and new churches in metropolitan surroundings like Boston, Manhattan (NYC), Miami, and soon to be San Francisco are what I would call macro-risks. Macro-risks are those endeavors that take place on a large scale, they’re the result of a commitment to and a collection of micro-risks that take place on a day-to-day basis. A micro-risk culture is what is ingrained deeply into the culture of Community that allows for the high percentage of successful macro-risks, and this is the type of culture that I wish to develop in San Francisco in our community.
A micro-risk culture begins with how we view people and trusting (a culture of trust) that they are completely capable to be used by God to lead. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you immediately place someone in leadership, rather it means that you pull them along side of you to “shadow” you and to be your apprentice. By taking the micro-risk of asking someone to apprentice with you, you are setting the stage for a potential macro-risk. (There are several stories like this that float around Community, but one that is perhaps the most interesting took place with Troy McMahon, former staff member at Community and now a church planter in Kansas City working to plant Restore Community Church. Troy’s journey started out by being asked to be an apprentice leader of a small group…) This is only one of the ways that a church can begin creating a culture of risk by utilizing a series of micro-risks. There area slew of other possibilities for engaging in and creating a culture of risk, but the most important aspect is to start doing it… not just talk about it.
Related posts:
- a culture of fun
- a culture of encouragement
- a culture of trust
- be unstoppable: from idea to implementation
- cultural markers: an introduction
i really like the this series, especially in this one that micro-risks set up macro-risks. we can’t do the later without the former.