Robert Dale, To Dream Again: How to Help Your Church Come Alive. Wipf and Stock, 2004.
Referenced in: Strategies for Church Leadership and Renewal – Congregational Health Cycle
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This is a recognized classic in church leadership, first published in 1988 and now in a nice reprint edition. Dale provides an excellent discussion of how to utilize the Sigmoid Curve, or “Organizational Life Cycle.” This idea is borrowed from a popular leadership resource by Ichak Adizes, Corporate Life Cycles (1988). Interestingly, most strategic planning models incorporate some version of Adizes’ Sigmoid Curve, thus the value of Dale who gives a more complete explanation as it relates to churches. I recommend this alongside George Bullard’s Pursuing The Full Kingdom Potential of Your Congregation.
Dale says that there are four ways commonly used to revitalize a church: 1) change policy, 2) change personnel, 3) create new program structures, and 4) define and to act on its fundamental purpose. The last one, clarifying purpose, is the most effective way.
To help with this, he suggests congregations can make use of the organizational health cycle. This cycle may be thought of in terms of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death. In order to prevent its death, a church must have new dreams when it encounters decline. Out of these dreams will come new plans to insure that the church is healthy and growing.
He describes this cycle in nine stages: dream, beliefs, goals, structure, ministry, nostalgia, questioning, polarization, and dropout. One can imagine a bell curve, with dreams at the bottom left, with the curve moving upward as clarifying beliefs, strategic goals, and facilitating structure are added to help a church reach a peak in ministry effectiveness. This peak does not last forever, and decline sets in as churches begin to celebrate accomplishments or fall into a kind of preservation mode to lock in their successes. Soon, the congregation starts to recognize that “there was a time when” they were more effective than they are at present, i.e. they start becoming nostalgic. In this stage, there is still enough momentum from the past to sustain a semblance of current effectiveness. But this is simply the lull before the storm. The seeds of decline have already been sown, and if left unchecked, the congregation will continue the downward slope of the curve into questioning, polarization, dropout, and perhaps even to organizational death. This decline is usually marked by escalating conflict.
According to the theory, congregations must build upon their peak in ministry effectiveness by building into their normal practice an intentional renewal of their dream and vision as part of a completely new planning phase. In other words, preempt the downward momentum into nostalgia by keeping a missional future in front of the congregation. New kingdom dreams must constantly be formed. Not uncommonly, however, congregations settle for something less than the new dreams, and try to jump start the congregation through restructuring, which provides only a slight jolt to the system, but not enough to birth a new future. The key at this point is to examine and reshape the congregational dreams, values, beliefs, etc. Momentum for new ministry grows out of these shared meanings as the members find new ways to apply the gospel to life situations.
This book does a very fine job describing each phase in the health cycle. It also shows which personalities are likely to be most active in each phase: visionaries at the dream phase, theologians at belief phase, activists at goal phase, organizers at structure phase, activists at ministry phase, traditionalists at nostalgia phase, etc. He also describes the best strategies to follow at each stage.
From the Publisher
There are four ways to revitalize a church, organizationally speaking. The easiest change is policy change. You simply adjust the way you do things.
A second strategy is to change personnel. Firing the minister or electing new lay leaders is a common approach.
Another change tactic is to create new program structures. Reorganization plans are familiar in institutions of all kinds.
Change policy. Change people. Change programs. Each of these approaches has its advocates. But the approach I suggest is the most basic of all—clarify purpose.
The fourth way to revitalize a church is to define and act on its fundamental purpose. A new dream awakes a congregation. A poster motto challenges: “Aim for the sun. You may not reach it, but you will fly higher that if you never aimed at all.”
About the Author
Robert D. Dale is assistant executive director of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and director of the Ray and Ann Spence Network for Congregational Leadership. He has created many leadership development resources in his twenty years of training leaders within congregations and other church and parachurch organizations and is the author of twenty ministry books.
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