Are Your Next Steps Premeditated?

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Yesterday I asked, “How would you rate the first steps out of your auditorium?”  If you’ve been around much in the last couple years you know that we’ve been working on the idea that our strategies ought to include “next steps for everyone, and first steps for their friends.”  See also, Clue #2 When Designing Your Small Group System.

Taking a cue from the Saddleback circles (representing their crowd-to-core strategy), we’ve wondered, what would it look like to design next steps that would help everyone in our church take a next step?  Everyone meaning the people in the crowd who come only on Easter and Christmas as well as the people who really do consider your church to be the church they go to…even though they only come when it’s convenient.  And then doing the same kind of thinking to describe the people in your congregation, committed and core.  See also, Next Steps for Everyone…and First Steps for Their Friends, The Engel Scale and the Need for Customized Next Steps, and 5 Powerful Ideas that Could Shape Your Ministry Approach.

First steps for their friends has to do with designing first steps for the friends of the people in your church.  Many of us already have events or programs that are intended to be first steps from the community.

Here’s Today’s Question:

Are your next steps premeditated?

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a couple weeks now.  Mulling around in my head the notion that there is a difference between a murder that is premeditated and one that is a crime of passion.  They’re treated differently.  Why?  A premeditated murder is calculated.  In a kind of Walter White way, all of the details have been thought about…in advance.

Now stop and think about the next steps you’ve designed in your strategy?  Could you be convicted for committing a premeditated next step?  Or do the next steps in your strategy have more in common with an afterthought?

What do you think?  Want to argue?  Have a question?  You can click here to jump into the conversation.

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