Planning

Our ministry staff is heading out of town this morning to do some planning. When we do planning we stay on-site or go to someones house for a change of scenery, but we reserve our retreats for playtime. As a result, our "retreats" have been tremendously scaled back this year for perception reasons. Although our church is in a pretty good place financially thanks to some of the most generous people in Fort Worth, it just doesn't seem right to spend a bunch of money on pampering when everyone is tightening their belt. 

Although we've scaled back our retreats, we have ramped-up our planning. For months we have been working on the communication of our clear, common purpose as a church. We found that most people can get close to communicating what makes McKinney Church unique, but are working to help focus our communication in such a way that it makes it simple to communicate why we exist. 

Today, we will be drilling down into two huge topics: roll-out and metrics. How do we get the most momentum behind new verbage, and how do we measure our success? 

The last topic is the most tricky. It is extraordinarily difficult to measure spiritual growth and impact without becoming legalistic. People grow in different ways at different rates. Plus, some people do all the right things for all the wrong reasons while others do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. We recognize that God is more concerned with the heart, and want to be concerned about what God is concerned about. 

So today, we will try to answer the simple question: "How do you measure heart-change?" 

I can't wait.