Practicum, Part 1 – Needs

Ok.  Enough theory.  Today, let’s start to address a typical ministry design challenge.  What I have in mind (mostly because it’s new to me: I have not thought much about this as a design challenge before) is a weekly dinner for homeless people.  For this blog’s purpose this challenge has the benefit of fitting either a church or a parachurch organization.

My hope here is not to suggest a design nor to tell a design story.  It is simply to talk about what is involved in a design such as this.  There are, of course. several ways to address this challenge, and my purpose with this blog is to create a dialog about the various design approaches that might be applied, not to advocate an approach.  But, let’s admit it, I wrote a book about a specific method, and I’m not likely to stray too far from that.

For any design the first step is to say what needs to be done.  This step is generally called the requirements phase, but let’s not get fancy.  In setting out our design challenge we’ve already said quite a bit about wha the homeless dinner ministry is to be:

1. A dinner
2. For homeless people
3. Weekly
4. Done by our organization (whatever it is)

And, from simple logic, these observations imply a few other things:

1. There needs to be a place to hold the dinner
2. The homeless people need to know the dinner is available
3. There needs to be a menu, and it probably will need to be somewhat varied; that is, planned weekly
4. So, there needs to be a planning activity
5. So, there needs to be a planning person or team
6. It involves a loop; that is, several of the same things happen week to week.

That’s about it for simple facts and observations, but it’s not nothing.  I’m sure some design teams would begin design just from this.  However, most design teams wouldn’t stop here at documenting what needs to be done.

Under the Story Method of my book, Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories, the team members would now each write a story about how someone (the protagonist of the story) would experience the ministry.  Some of the protagonists would be homeless people; others would be those who serve in the ministry; still others might identify another, still different, participant in the ministry.  Together, these stories will be rich in demonstrated needs (and, it turns out, in design concepts — we’ll consider these next week).

Under different design methodologies something other than stories might be used.  These could include needs exhibited by:

1. Analogies from other group’s homeless dinner ministries
2. Brainstorming of ministry ideas
3. Focus group interviews.

In my next blog post we’ll walk through some approaches to creating a design from these needs.  I’d like to continue here, but … well, too many words.

Author: ministrydesign

Engineer and lay leader, Bill Spuck wants to create a community of people who share a desire to create or improve Christian ministries. View all posts by ministrydesign