Most church leaders were never taught to think strategically. (I wasn’t) And it shows. What little exposure we had was trickling down to us through the business sector. The word “strategy” comes from a Latin word referring to the general in a war. This was the person charged with seeing the whole picture, thinking ahead, and anticipating contingencies. Manuals for training generals go back to antiquity. The business community seriously started adapting military thoughts for their own needs sometime in the early 1960s. Churches were importing these business ideas by the 1990s. That was the decade when we started asking every congregation to develop a mission statement, a vision statement, and values’ statements. For most congregations, looking back 25 years, that approach has been futile. So I began to explore the concept of strategy in 2015, with an eye to seeing what the church has been overlooking. Below are links to a bibliography and some of my thoughts.
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