Teams, Stages, Personas, and Surrogates
The other day I was meeting with Tim, our Associate Pastor of Adult Ministries, discussing how to rethink our church’s discipleship ministry and who should help us. The discussion rather quickly centered on four topics that at first seemed distinct and then became more and more entwined. These topics were (1) faith stages, (2) design teams, (3) personas, and (4) surrogates. Together these topics say a lot about who we should engage in ministry design efforts.
It seems valuable to explore each of these topics as we think of ways to figure out who should help us create or redesign a ministry. So, In my next few blog posts I’ll describe how Tim’s and my conversation progressed. (And, Tim, I hope you’ll allow me a bit of artistic license here.)
As we talked, I wanted Tim to begin. He approached the topic theologically. (Surprised?) He is very familiar with the works of theologians who point out that in any church there are people at a wide variety of faith stages; that is, stages of spiritual development. He knows that a good program of church ministries will engage with people in all of these stages.
From his training and experience Tim also has a pretty good idea of what it takes to satisfy these needs. In other words, although wanting to minister to all stages is to state a need functionally, it’s clear that not very far behind this functional statement are, in his mind, some specific things he’d like to see in the outcome of the design process, in its product. In other words, in his mind the design that results from any ministry design process has to include things of which he has a pretty good idea right now. Although our discussion didn’t get that far, I know from other encounters that they are there.
So, we’ve got to find a way to work faith stages into the design. The question is, how do we do that? (Hint: think of our other topics.) I’d be happy to hear your ideas. You can share them by clicking on “Leave a Comment” under the date of this post.
Ministry Design 