Leading significant change is a challenge in any church organization, but the level of difficulty only increases as a church grows and expands to multiple locations. There is a substantial difference between turning a speedboat and turning a cruise ship. And while many people advise that a large ship can’t turn quickly, I believe that an effective change agent can create the right momentum to lead an organization through a rapid season of transformation that produces long-term benefits.

Over the last year, I had the opportunity to serve on a team that charted a course to revamp an already successful student ministry model in our multisite church. Even though we averaged 1,200 students per week in our midweek experience and had connected 50 percent of those students into small groups, we noticed some patterns that could not stay the same. We were offering small group experiences for students on the weekends that competed with them finding their place and using their gifts to build church. Secondly, we wanted every student under our care to have a go-to godly adult who would know their name, know their story, and be able to invest in their life.

So we made a shift. We moved all groups off of the weekend and combined them with our already existing midweek service. This allowed us to connect more students into groups during the week and allowed us to focus our attention on the weekends to connecting students to the overall life of our church. In addition, we added a monthly global student experience where we bused students and leaders from all campuses to our broadcast campus for a highly creative and evangelistic service.

Needless to say, there were several challenges along the way in leading our staff, volunteers, parents and students through such a significant change in our model. One of the primary reasons we were able to effectively do this is because we had a united vision that fell in line with the heart of our senior leaders. The other reason we experienced success is because we had a well-crafted strategy to get us where we wanted to go. These are the five steps I believe leaders must take in order to chart a course of significant change in their complex church setting.

1. Clarify the Win
Andy Stanley is notorious for saying, “You must clarify the win for every staff and volunteer position. When you clarify the win, it becomes the magnetic north for the energy and get-it-done doers of the organization. When you don’t define the win, each individual will define it for themselves.” This is such a critical first step because as the primary change agent, you already have the win defined in your head. The challenge is getting the appropriate people around you to see the same picture that you see. You have to clarify on paper what you see in your mind.

When I led the overhaul of our student ministry model, we defined three clear wins that everyone on our team learned to articulate:

1. We wanted every student to engage in the life of the church (not just our student ministry).
2. We wanted every student to have a go-to adult in his or her life.
3. We wanted every student to find a place to use his or her gifts to build the church. As we sought to lead every other step in this process, we did so through the lens of these clearly defined wins and made the wins as visible as possible to the team.

2. Create Healthy Urgency
The second step in the process is creating healthy urgency. In his book, The Heart of Change, John P Kotter indicates that creating urgency in your team combats immobilizing behaviors such as complacency, deviance and pessimistic attitudes. Urgency can be a powerful thing when it is channeled in the right way. I think a great biblical example of this came in Nehemiah, when the great Israelite leader led his people to repair walls that had been destroyed for years in just 52 days.

I believe Nehemiah was able to do this because he clearly defined the win and created a designated window of urgency for his people. Generating healthy urgency among your people has the potential to result in motivated teams that rally around ambitious goals and discover uncanny ways to produce rapid results.

While revamping the church's student ministry model, our senior pastors challenged us to enter a season of increased urgency as a team. We set a few aggressive goals over a 60-day period that would ultimately contribute to us achieving the long-term wins that had already been defined. The most aggressive goal we set was to double the number of volunteers at each campus so that we were prepared to launch our new model of ministry with a healthy 1-to-8 adult/student ratio.

We created incentives for campus teams that reached the goal and had the student pastor at every campus define potential consequences if they fell short. We also established daily and weekly measures for every team member to ensure that their to-do lists reflected the short-term mission. This focused time of healthy urgency surrounding clearly defined wins allowed our team to accomplish something significant in a short period of time.

3. Capitalize on Existing Culture
The third step to leading significant change is learning to capitalize on healthy values and methods that already exist within your organization. I believe that the most effective ministry leaders consistently lead with the same heart, values and vision as their senior leaders. In the same way, the most effective change agents lead change in line with the culture and values that drive the entire organization.

Some of our most innovative ideas and problem solving solutions came as a result of creating a culture of collaboration on our team.

Deanne Aguirre claims that instead of attempting to change the culture in their organization, effective managers “draw energy from it. They tap into the way people already think, behave, work and feel to provide a boost to the change initiative.”

One of the ways we tapped into the already existing culture to lead change in our student ministry was to plug students into experiences that were effective in helping adults get connected to church life. A practical example of this was empowering adult leaders to take students through The Journey, a four-week experience that teaches participates how to know God, grow in relationships and discover their purpose so they can impact their world.

If we wanted students connected to the life of the church, we knew it was essential to plug them into our existing church-wide strategy rather than creating a student specific version of the same experience. This also created a healthy environment where multiple generations were able to connect to church life at the same time.

4. Collaborate at Multiple Levels
The fourth step in charting the course of change is to create an environment of collaboration. To collaborate literally means to work jointly on an activity, especially to produce or create something. This includes, as Aguirre endorses, getting input from even the “lowest of levels.”

Collaboration is so essential because team weigh-in and team buy-in always trend together. I firmly believe that we must create space for our team to weigh-in on appropriate decisions, best practices, struggles and adjustments if we want them to buy into the mission we are on together.

Some of our most innovative ideas and problem-solving solutions came as a result of creating a culture of collaboration on our team. While different voices on our team carried different weight, everyone on the team knew they had a voice. We made a conscious effort as a team to collaborate by planning together and evaluating together.

5. Communicate Your Values and Vision
The fifth and final step is all about effective communication. Most change agents focus on communicating values and vision well in the early stages but fail to execute throughout the entirety of the process. Aguirre notes that, “Powerful and sustained change requires constant communication, not only throughout the rollout buy after the major elements of the plan are in place.”

As leaders, we must communicate with our teams and people in a way that is consistent, authentic and specific. We have to constantly remind people why we are doing what we are doing and how we are going to make it happen. At the same time, we have to avoid overwhelming our teams with information overload by creating outlets for them to find information for themselves.

Kotter affirms that, “Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision.”

When leading our student ministry through this significant season of change, our team developed several different communication plans, including one for staff, one for volunteers, one for parents, and one for students. We even piloted these communication plans to a test group of volunteers and parents so that we could find out what questions they would ask and figure out where more clarity was needed.

But the biggest lesson we learned along the way is that it is nearly impossible to over-communicate our vision or values to our people. As a leader, one of your primary roles is to be the CRO (Chief Reminding Officer) of your organization. I believe that George Bernard Shaw summed things up best when he said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has actually taken place.”

I encourage you as a leader to implement these five steps and adapt them to your unique setting the next time you are charged with leading change in your organization. You just may surprise yourself with how quickly your team can turn the large ship in a new direction. Chart the course!