Throwing Away Trash Cans

Today is trash day in Loveland, OH and it made me think of something. Have you ever tried to throw away a trash can? Believe it or not, it is very hard to do. If you put the trash can out on the curb they take the stuff inside but not the trash can itself. If you leave it by itself they do nothing with the trash can. If you try to put the can in another trash can they think you have made a mistake and take it out for you and leave both trash cans behind. Thanks for the help right but come on... Seriously... I want you to at some point in your life try to throw away a trash can and then you will fully understand how hard it is to change the culture of your ministry and not just the programs of you ministry.

Anybody can change programs, curriculum, and even the environment but how do you change the culture? We have had to do this over the last 2 years that I have been at Horizon. We have had to help our people see that there we have issues and then try and make them healthier. How did we do this?

Let me give you one example of what I am talking about. I will give you more in the future but this is a good starting point. When I showed up to Horizon we had around 20 paid teachers in our Children's Ministry for Sunday morning. Now that wouldn't have been bad if we were averaging 1500 to 2000 kids a weekend. Paying teachers to teach on Sundays is not bad as a back up program. It does give you a nice safety net but by no means should it be your vehicle of doing ministry on a week to week basis. Now as you can tell, I thought 20 was way to high when we were only averaging 85 kids a weekend. That's right. When I showed up almost all of my teachers were paid. Now you have to understand that Horizon is in a very wealthy area. The average house sale price is over $1,000,000 and the people that we reach are used to paying for almost everything. A culture shift needed to happen when it came to Children's ministry. We needed volunteers and not paid workers. So myself, and my wonderful assistant, Tami, set out to replace all but 8-10 paid teachers the first year and all but 4 paid teachers the next and replace them with volunteers. So how did we do this right?

Let me pause and tell you how to throw away a trash can. The secret is you have to make the trash can not look like a trash can. You have to change the way the trash men and women look at the trash can.

The same way you have to change the way you look at trash cans is the same way you have to get your people to look at your ministry in order to change its culture. Your first step is change the vision. Then you have to change the questions you ask. Then you have to change the way you measure success. Then you have to show that you are being successful. This is how we went from 20 paid teachers to 4 paid teachers in less than 2 years.

What part of your ministry culture needs to change? Is it the idea of excellence... the idea of "they are just kids"... the idea that ministry can be done by others...