Practicum, Part 2 – Parts

Last week’s post was the first part of a discussion of some general challenges of or approaches to ministry design.
In it we focused on understanding the needs of our new ministry.  Recall that we selected as our challenge the design of a weekly dinner for homeless people.

In this post I want to make two observations  about the design of that ministry:

1. First, although in the previous post we didn’t state more than the most obvious of the needs driving the dinner ministry, we stated enough for us to get started on design.  We’ve said this before, but I repeat because it’s important to let it sink in deeply: All Design Is Redesign.
   At first. this aphorism suggests that whenever we design we should look for and embellish whatever previous design we have for the ministry.  And we actually have a previous design, a very simple one.  It is the design implied by the statement of our challenge: a weekly dinner for homeless people.  Most of us could picture this dinner in our minds and synthesize a pretty good picture of — that is, a pretty good design for — how it works.
   But there’s another application of the aphorism available to us.  This is that, if all design is redesign, then we should approach every ministry design challenge with the understanding that it need not be perfect.  We can always go back and redesign again.  We relied on this understand when we agreed that we have stated enough needs to get started on our dinner design.  If our design team had worked harder to uncover more needs, we’d use them, but since we’d like to get a quick look at what our dinner ministry might look like, we settle for the obvious needs and move on to the design phase.  We will undoubtedly return to redesign again.
2. Another observation is an answer to the question, What exactly do we mean by design?
   We mean several things, but one important one is that our dinner ministry has parts. We know this from a couple of observations from earlier blog posts, starting with A Ministry Is An Examaple Of A System. Since the definition of a system is “a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole,” we know that A Ministry Is A Set of Connected Smaller Ministries.  And,if we don’t know what those smaller ministries (or ministry parts) are, then a huge part of our design challenge is to identify them. Fortunately, while indentifying them is hugely important, it is not very difficult. We have already hinted at several of them for our homeless dinner. I see:
   • Homeless people
   • A dinner (tables, chairs, silverware, dishes, food, etc.)
   • People preparing and serving the dinner
   • A place to hold the dinner
   • Some kind of publicity, letting the homeless know the dinner is available
   • A planning team

   This list is clearly not complete, but it covers everything we mentioned as needs, except it does not include any mention of the fact that we want the dinner to occur weekly.  This need is not a statement about what’s in the ministry, but rather about how it will operate.  We’ll have to treat this need a bit later in design.

Regardless of what design method we use, if we’re going to design a ministry, we need to know we can alwasy come back and make it better and we must first to identify its parts.  We have a good start at these.  Next blog post we’ll talk about what we do with the parts.

P.S.: (Want to find the component ministries easily?  Look for the nouns in your description of it’s needs.)

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