My Book Is Coming Soon

I am writing it to let you know that I am putting the final touches on a new book, Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories.  It will soon be available from Amazon and from my publisher, Xulon Press.

The book observes that some ministries can (or should) be too complex to emerge from the ad-hoc processes usually followed by churches and para-church organizations.  My experience is that ministries become less and less effective the larger and more complex they are.  The reason for this is simple: they weren’t designed; they were assembled.

Most ministries are created either by adapting a ministry the organization has used or seen before (and this is not a bad method for simple ministries), or by putting together the products of brainstorming.

By brainstorming I mean the familiar process of assembling a group, asking for ideas from everyone, and, later, selecting the best ideas to be combined into the ministry.  Brainstorming has two big drawbacks.  First, it is somewhat hit or miss; it just collects ideas, and there is no objective way to know if there are enough ideas or if they span the needs of the ministry.  Second, brainstorming creates no information on the relationships between the ideas.  Ministries are not just a collection of ideas or as I prefer to call them, ministry components; they need to be structured so that those to whom the ministry is aimed can move easily from one ministry component to another.

Tell Me A Story suggests a more powerful method for designing or redesigning the more complex ministries.  I call it the Story Method because it begins with stories written by several people and simply but systematically draws a structured ministry design from this collection of stories.  The Story Method is based in proven design methods from the business and technical world, but one way to view the book is that it translates these proven methods into everyday language.

In any event, I’ll tell you more as we go along and get closer yet to the publication date, but I wanted you at least to know what to anticipate.