FPC Bethlehem
Senior Staff
A friend asked me recently, “What kind of strategic work are you doing right now at First Presbyterian Bethlehem?” My answer was that we are doing alignment work. We have priorities and goals that have been developed; we have brought in staff and now new teams are forming and learning to perform; but the challenge is to get everyone (new and old) rowing in the same direction.
SENIOR MINISTRY STAFF ALF HALVORSON, Pastor/Head of Staff
JACK BRACE,
Associate Pastor for Mission & Outreach
JACK FELCH, Dir. of Church Business Administration
GREG FUNFGELD,
Dir. of Music,Traditional
BRENTLY GROSHONG,
Dir. of Music, Contemporary
MANUELA KAUER,
Associate Pastor for Congregational Life & Care
CODY SANDAHL,
In a book called Church Unique, by Will Mancini, there is an image that makes good sense to me. The author writes, “When you talk about alignment, I picture a huge metal ring in the center of the room. It has seven or eight ropes tied to it, the thick kind you use in a tug-of-war. Each rope has a powerful horse harnessed on the other end. Then someone sounds the gun, and the horses start pulling with thousands of pounds of force. The problem is that the ring goes nowhere. All of the horsepower dissipates because of the canceling effect of the horses misaligned across the ring. The sum effect of this picture is zero movement.” The book points out that there are four stages of alignment, pictured below. Stage one is confusion. Here there is no alignment and each sub area is simply doing its own thing. Stage two is communication, where lay and staff leaders and ministry areas learn the value of sharing information and keeping dialogue open. Stage three is coordination, where ministry areas sequence and leverage individual activities for collective gains; where hard conversations occur about programs, ministry emphases, and people resources; where some dead horses need to be buried; and where new ideas are tried and meshed with key ongoing areas. The final stage is collaboration. When that happens, the vision and values (the priorities and goals) actually drive the decisionmaking and ministry bus rather than personal agendas. Mancini summarizes, “together we can accomplish far more than anyone can individually. The win-wins don’t just happen; they are developed from commitment to diligent creativity and dialogue. If the church is generally successful and more than twenty years old, achieving collaboration can’t be done in less than three years.”
Associate Pastor for Discipleship
Confusion
Communication
Coordination
Collaboration
I think that we are mostly in the communication stage right now but beginning to put our feet in the water of the coordination stage, too. We are in the middle of a process that is exciting and maddening at the same time. I hope you are seeing greater and greater movement in more and more God-honoring ways. And I pray and trust that you will join us, with your God-given horsepower, so that we can make a collaborative Kingdom difference as “iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17) in the Lehigh Valley and around the world. In Christ’s Service Together, Alf Halvorson, and our Senior Ministry Team Page 2