Strategetics

The Making of a Movement

Sometimes I get asked how to develop a movement, mostly because I had the opportunity to lead “the youth movement” in my denomination in the 1980’s. Some ask, “how do you make a movement.” This is the question they are asking when these folk take over a district or denominational job or launch a parachurch organization. I am not an expert on these things and often you simply can’t repeat things done in the past and get the same results in the present. Nevertheless, if we had a “recipe” of sorts during those years this is it. If you “reverse engineered” what actually in the “youth movement” in the 1980’s the following would have been the strategy

The “ingredients” of a movement

1. Man or Woman

Most movements are initiated by a man or women who feels compelled to “call out” that movement. While you may not possess all the characteristics of “movement leaders” you should posses many or most, or at least be moving that way. Some people seem to have these characteristics at birth. Others acquire them from their family as they are growing up (which is why leadership often runs in families). Still others develop these characteristics by discipline and accountability. Whichever, these characteristics of a “hinge pin leader” tend to describe the man or woman who is a movement leader.

• Anointed by God—the leader senses a “chosen-ness” for leadership.
• Chance-Taker—not fearing failure.
• Change-Agent—dissatisfaction with the present; compelled to change things.
• Commitment—eat, sleep, walk, talk, and dream about THE GOAL.
• Concentration—singleness of purpose; "This one thing I do."
• Conviction—unswerving in living according to own standards.
• Destiny- sense that you have come to the kingdom for this.
• Drive—working harder and longer than most others.
• Enthusiasm—so excited that others are attracted to follow.
• Generous—the flow of leadership is to the people not the leader.
• Goal-Driven—arranging day-to-day activities to achieve long range goals.
• Imaginative—not limited by conformity; drawn to new ways to do things.
• Initiator—starts things, “initiates initiatives.”
• Passionate—really cares about the cause; spins like a “small sprocket”.
• People-Person--regardless of my natural temperament.
• Persistent—just won’t stop even when coming up against barriers.
• Persuasive—you motivate, inspire, and challenge other people to action.
• Positive--insist on seeing the brighter side of all situations.
• Standing Alone—able to withstand the loneliness of leadership.
• Vision—seeing what God wants to accomplish through your leadership.

Of course no one person has all these qualities. But this should be the kind of leader in general a movement-leader is. Most are develop-able—you can become what you are not. We can develop some fairly well and others at least partially. At minimum they can be our aim. It could be argued that there is no such thing as a movement—only movement leaders. In that case the movement is merely the effect of a movement-leader. I’m not sure about that but I have seen it happen—a leader of one movement moves on to create another one. Even if these are not the right list of characteristics of “movement leader types,”

They are good characteristics anyway—so having a plan for self-improvement so you become this kind of leader and perhaps the movement will grow out of who you are not just what you want to do.

2. Meeting—a Sacred Gathering

A movement requires a meeting—usually an annual meeting at least. Most movements have a “sacred place” where they gather regularly—a retreat, a conference, a place where God moves and the people relate to others in the movement; a place they return to year after year for refreshing, refueling, planning, strategizing, reunion, relationships, motivation, and to remember the cause. A meeting that is a “means of Grace.” Indeed, John Wesley thought such a meeting was so vital he listed “Christian Conference” as a means of grace right along with prayer, fasting and Scripture. Such a meeting should be:

· Directed outward—the aim of the meeting should be directed toward the local church and not “upward” toward the headquarters or district or sponsoring parachurch organization. A movement meeting is about something external to itself. When a movement become mostly about the movement itself it is no longer a movement.

· “Fortifying” –the attendees need to be strengthened at the meeting—coming back from meetings better people, better equipped and with better resources and better attitudes and action plans for the next year. They should not go home talking about how great the leader or organization or department is.

· Spiritual life change—spiritual life change should the main event of the “programming” in the meeting—leaving strategy and plans in second place. The primary problems and barriers of the church are seldom structural and often spiritual. When God moves on us His will gets done—even if the spiritual work of God seems “unrelated” to the cause (of course no spiritual work of God is ever unrelated to the cause).

A meeting does not guarantee a movement, but without a meeting there will never be a movement.

3. Mission: a Worthy Cause

A movement will not happen or survive without a worthy cause. Evangelism, reaching youth for Christ, discipling children, camping, changing the direction of a denomination, launching itinerant speakers—whatever… the cause must be constantly reiterated and it must be a worthwhile cause. At the meting the “critical Mass” or “cadre” of people catches the vision for the cause from the leader initially, but soon they catch it from each other. Vision is “communicable” to others—it is more caught than taught. At the meeting—and in every other interaction—the cadre of leaders catches the passion for a mission so that they join hearts with others creating a “critical mass” that multiplies the mission in the hearts of others by “chain reaction.” As for the mission itself it should be:

· Clear,

· Repeatable,

· Memorable,

· Sustainable,

· Reinforced constantly, and

· Supported with story and testimony.

Make sure the people know they are committed to a cause not a person. The leader is not the mission, the cause is the mission. Sure, the leader is a significant influence on the movement—but the movement can never be about following the leader, but accomplishing a mission. You will not know for sure that you have been effective at movement creation until you leave this work. If they barely notice you are gone and commitment to the cause continues or even increases you have succeeded.

4. Materials: Frequent Contact

OK, we are stretching here to get another “M”—by materials we mean constant contact through the mail but also in person. A cadre of people can gather with an anointed leader once a year but if there is no contact within a month the movement will likely fizzle. The initiating leader must have continued contact—at least monthly, probably more. The meeting begins to “spin the plates” but if you do not revisit those plates often they will soon run out of momentum and crash to the floor. The 2^nd law of thermodynamics is at work—“entropy.” Make frequent contact with the “cadre” leading your movement. Soon after the meeting circulate reports on changes in lives since the meeting— “testimonies” of personal life change with or without names attached. This creates expectation for the next meeting and reflection on their own changes. Ask again to get the second wave. The cadre of leaders will begin to feel a part of something larger than their local church. They will recognize names of friends they made at the meeting and the “gestalt factor” will kick in. This means your communication as a movement-leader will include:

· Recollection. The leader of a movement constantly recalls past meetings “coming through the Red Sea” and reports the present activity of the people. They report that something is happening –this was not “just another meeting.”

· Creates anticipation. The leader also creates anticipation of the next meeting. The recipients feel they are part of a group, a club, a “cadre” of people and the leader is connecting and communicating between them, networking people and causing connections even when the movement-leader is behind the scenes and not even present at the connecting-networking meeting. This is not about the leader doing ego-therapy in mailings—but is it about the people, the grass roots, the “cadre” and what they have been doing. This can all be done my mail. But this is the easy part—to lead a movement you have to travel—more than you want to.

· Travel and speaking. You can’t leads a movement form one place. Movement-leadership requires that you will be traveling, speaking, visiting, staying in homes, listening, encouraging, taking walks with your people’s kids, sending notes when you’ve returned, showing up in their church unannounced, writing notes, cards, letters, making phone calls. In the building stage of a movement the leader must be virtually omnipresent. The leader of a movement must frequently “show up” in the life of the “cadre” of key people in the movement. Movements are not made by meetings on your turf—you must be on their turf too. You cannot lead a movement from an office—you must lead it in the field.

· By “materials” we also mean having abundant “appurtenances.” Appurtenances are the ordinary stuff of movements—stickers, badges, embroidered shirts, tags, books, cases, cups, videos, and the like. These are often called “promotional items” or even “gimmicks.” Appurtenances like stickers and tactile memory-objects yet never create a movement. However, though appurtenances do not guarantee a movement there are no movements without some appurtenances. Materials may not create the movement but sustain it. Out of sight, out of mind. A true movement cannot be “program driven” in the sense that we produce curriculum or materials and expect everyone to use them. A movement always produces an abundance of materials: magazines, newsletters, stickers, CDs, videos, Curriculum (often even resources that compete with themselves), pamphlets, jackets, pens, and a host of other “stuff.” These things “grow up” with the movement . Creating them will not ignite to movement, but if a movement is ignited they will be created. Bringing out too many too soon will only get you dismissed as a huckster who leads-by-gimmicks. The best way to introduce appurtenances is gradually and the best place is at the “sacred gathering”— where objects get associated with the sacred meeting and sacred place. Materials will not create a movement—but there is no movement that does not produce abundant materials.

5. Money—Economic Resources

You cannot build a movement without money. So don’t be bashful about money—figure out in your organization how to get it, make it, spend it, and spread it around. Movements by nature are entrepreneurial. As for money, learn how to:

• Get it by figuring out how to get in the budget of your organization—and how to get more by spending it all, spending it well, and tying all the spending to the cause—“sell your holes.”
• Make it by figuring out how to make a “profit” on events and materials. Become a movement entrepreneur and develop your own revenue stream from youth camp, conferences, workshops, publications and any other way you can make money while at the same time multiplying ministry. If you have a worthy product people will pay for it, and your movement can make money while at the same time doing the buyer a great favor when they buy and use it. The Christian church is far larger financially than General Motors or Microsoft—there are billions out there being spent by churches—get some being entrepreneurial!
• Spend it well so that you get the biggest bang for the buck. Spend it on your cause not yourself and your buddies. Plow your money back into the movement to make it grow. This is exactlywhat every small business does—if you want to “clip coupons” and benefit yourself and your family by paying your own way to conventions “because we’ve worked so hard” don’t expect to build much of a movement. Sacrifice now and re-invest the money you make into the movement, not yourself and your cronies.
• Spread it. Once you have money spread it—money is like fertilizer: piled up in one place it stinks, spread around it does good to the entire crop. We don’t pile up the cash at headquarters or on the district level or in para-church organizations. We are not a bank but should be a hose through which we squirt out money to bless our cause. If you always have unspent budget money left at the end of the year you should go run a credit union, not lead a church ministry. Spread it around the entire church and it will grow such a huge crop you won’t be able to harvest it all—a crop of great results for the kingdom of God.

6. Multiplying levels

Almost all movements eventually grow large enough to produce “levels” of service. When you start out there may only be one level of service—the “cadre” or the “critical mass.” But if you are successful at starting a movement eventually your 20 will turn into 200 then maybe even 2000, and maybe even more than that. As your movement grows you will need to structure in order to absorb a growing number of leaders not just followers. A movement can’t have 20 leaders and 2000 followers. You will have about as many leaders in your movement as you have leadership posts. To get more leaders you must make more leadership posts. Try to create a 10% excess of leadership posts—10% more than you have leaders prepared for. This creates a “leadership draft” that pulls new people into leadership giving them a chance to serve/lead and develop. After all, the best training for leadership is, well, leadership. This means that in some ways having more conventions or conferences or camps, or meetings, or training sessions or newsletters, or programs is equally as important to the cause of developing leaders as it is to accomplishing the (explicit) goals of the meeting or publication. After all, leadership development is the “real goal” of why you do many of these things. Sure, they have a worthwhile purpose themselves, but the larger and longer range effect of your movement will be in the leaders you develop—not in the events and publications you produce. This multiplying levels feeds on itself—the more leaders you deploy the more ministry gets done, the stronger and larger the movement becomes, and still more leaders will rise from that movement, which will create more ministry, and so forth. The multiplying cycle continues. Leading is not the core work of a leader—it is developing leaders. If you develop leaders, and they care about the mission, a greater movement toward the mission will result. You can’t jump directly to this “developing leaders” level however without mixing the first five ingredients. While it is mostly true “everything depends on leadership” it is not true that “thus we should start by developing leaders.” Developing leaders is the primary focus in the mid and later stages of a movement, development of the movement comes first. You aren’t ready to develop leaders until you already have in place a meeting, a mission, materials and money—but once you have laid the tracks with these, then do your primary task—leadership development and watch the movement multiply as these leaders create new movements!

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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:

Of course, no “recipe” can guarantee a movement will be created. But this is a good shot at putting together the “ingredients” if there is such a recipe. There are, of course, external factors affecting a movement’s success. These can block or enhance your efforts at creating a movement. God’s anointing may be there or maybe not. God’s timing may be ripe or you may labor and see no fruit of your labor if the timing is not right. Your cause may be “in season” or it could be “out of season” with the people. You might have a “protecting angel” in power above you as a DS or GS or senior pastor, or you could have detracting enemies who suspects your motives and tries to cut you off at the pass and hamper your effectiveness at developing a movement. You could have nobody thinking you are a threat or competitor for their job or church, or you might be viewed with suspicion and powerful people might believe you are only using this cause as a ladder to move into other (their) positions of leadership. Your district or denomination might have a great openness to strong leadership or it could have been burned by such leaders in the past and shut itself off from strong leadership. Your organization may allow and encourage entrepreneurs and profit-making or it may have choked off innovation and profiting or centralized all the “business” into one entity. Your budget may be expanding or it could be contracting. Your organization may be open to the chaos that inevitably comes with a movement or the organizational ethos could be so bureaucratic and controlled that a movement will be strangled before it gets past the first meeting.

There are a dozen other external factors that may influence your eventual success at leading a movement that the above “recipe” does not take into account. So what? What will you do? Whine about these factors? Condemn everyone who is your barrier? Or, will you try your best to lead a movement because you know the cause is worthy? Will you even be willing to sacrifice progress in your own future career just to get a movement rolling? Is it that important to you? Or, are you really only wanting to look like you are doing a good job and then get rewarded with some other job? If you are really serious about the cause and starting a movement then get about leading instead of whining. See if God blesses your leadership. If He does then thank Him and lead a movement that will contribute to His kingdom and be remembered for decades, maybe generations to come. And, if God does not bless you, or the people do not join up, or somebody sidelines you—so what? If you did your best for a worthy cause when you meet Christ he will say “well done thou good and faithful servant. And, after all, what more could you ask?

Keith Drury, November, 2005

www.TuesdayColumn.com

NOTES

1. HINGE PIN LEADERSHIP. The list of characteristics of movement-leaders is extracted from a study of a series of biographies of great movement leaders in the past—merely turning the description of the person into a list and sorting all the lists to discover the most common characteristics. No individual leader possessed all of these characteristics, but most leaders exhibited most of them. The results were turned into a self-study questionnaire first published c. 1982, Keith Drury
2. EDITIONS. The first edition of this concept was given in 1981 as a “strategetics” model when it was called 5M=Movement. At the time the categories were Man, Meeting, Mission, Materials & Money. The edition above includes six Ms. The sixth (Multiplying levels) was added in the late 1980s after reflection on the youth movement during the 1980-1988 period. The strategetics models were not written but were passed on by oral tradition to the “cadre” –a group of young youth leaders in the Wesleyan church’s youth movement. In 1996 this model was first written down as a letter of advice to a leader taking over a denominational post who asked the question, “how did the youth movement become a movement.” The later 2005 edition above is the third edition and only slightly revised from the 1996 edition.

http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/S_movement.htm