So … in the past two posts we have uncovered some things our homeless ministry requires and, from these needs, identified several parts that are quite likely to be components of the dinner.
We recognize that, before we’re done, each of these components will have to be developed; that is, be well understood and fleshed out, so they are ready to serve their role in the dinner. While for something as simple as a dinner we pretty much understand each of these parts and how to develop them, in other cases some components will not be so familiar and will require a design of their own. In any event, it is good practice to write down what we know about each component before we continue with design.
However, there is one thing we need to know about every component of a ministry. This is how the component is related to the others that compose the dinner. In a previous blog post I discussed three kinds of relationships that components may have. We gave these the names composition, collaboration, and specialization. Here we’re particularly interested in composition and collaboration. Specialization comes into play during the development of each detailed ministry, and we’ll postpone its discussion until a later post.
Composition recognizes that ministries can contain other, more detailed ministries. So, when we look at our homeless dinner, the first question we should ask is, Are any of our identified components logically a part of one of the others? Obviously, they are all parts of the dinner. They are “nested” within it.
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As I look at the list of dinner components we identified in my last post, I find only one that has components of its own and this is what we called the dinner. To avoid confusion with the whole homeless dinner, let’s change this component’s name to “the meal,” rather than “the dinner.” Now, we noted in identifying the meal that it is comprised of at least tables, chairs, silverware, dishes, and food. These are nested within the meal component. So, our dinner ministry design currently has three nested levels. These are the whole homeless dinner ministry, supported by its key components (the meal, publicity, a planning team, etc.), and the meal, which is supported by tables, chairs, food, etc.
It is important to find composition relationships because they greatly simplify design and development. In this case we can talk about the meal as a single entity and not worry about its components while we’re thinking about the whole dinner. Then, we can design the meal independently of everything else. The meal component represents all of its own components. We can say it encapsulates them.
Collaboration is different. It is what we usually think of as a relationship. Given a bunch of ministry components, collaboration is how they work together. As noted in an earlier post, there are two different approaches available to a design team to express collaboration: dependency by precedence and dependency by assistance. We’ll not elaborate here because we did in the previous post. We’ll focus here on dependency by precedence. It is easier to understand and describe.
To identify the dependencies on our design, we ask each component, On what is this component dependent; that is, what has to happen before this component can happen? For our homeless dinner, I think it is clear that the sequence of dependencies would be (1) the planning team, (2) publicity, (3) homeless people who come to the meal, (4) people to prepare and serve the meal, and (5) the meal. A place to hold the meal happens at the same time as the meal. In this case both the meal and the venue have the same dependency. This should be clear.
Please note that each of these components needs to be developed; that the design must be fleshed out to the point that the homeless people can start coming. But this is development work. It is not part of the design of the ministry. We’ll talk about this in the next post.
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