THE POWER OF AN MRI

 

One year ago this week, as my hosts in the Philippines were driving me from church to church in the Cavite province south of Manila, I experienced chest pains.   Given my family history of early onset heart disease, this troubled me. On Palm Sunday 2011, I preached at Puno United Methodist Church in Quezon City.   Before worship, their pastor prayed over me and assured me that I would get home safely. After worship, a physician in the church examined me, and concluded that I might have pericarditis - exactly in line with my symptoms. She gave me a prescription, and my journey continued, with considerable discomfort for another three weeks.

When I got home, a series of tests indicated no apparent heart trouble, but the pain persisted. My physician's assistant, a young woman in her mid-20s, looked at me one afternoon and said, "I think it could be your back." The pain was in the middle of my back, radiating from the left side of my rib cage and down my arm. So a middle-back MRI was logical. However, armed with the power of a pen and prescription pad, this young woman ordered up an MRI for all three sectors of my back. I was having no pain in my neck or in my lower back, and I thought to myself, "This is American medicine at its most wasteful extravagance." But insurance was going to pay, and I went to get my MRI.

The MRI revealed the problem. Three disks high in my back were pinching nerves and two disks at the base of my back as well (both outside the areas where I would have looked). Without the full MRI, we would not have found what was wrong. I stopped carrying a backpack, increased my swimming and stretching, and realized that I cannot probably ever run long distances again. All the pain resolved in a few weeks.  

Thanks to very intuitive diagnostician and the miracle of an MRI!

I am a diagnostician with churches - its what I do for a living - and I'm also pretty intuitive. But I wondered, "What might happen if I had an MRI to look deep inside a church's heart, beyond the obvious vital stats that end up on medical charts and cabinet dashboards?"

During this same time, Christie Latona and had begun working together to develop the Readiness 360 inventory, a tool that we thought would simply help potential mother churches get ready to plant new congregations in a healthy and effective way.   (We did not yet fully understand what we were creating!) Taking research from the multiplying church around the world, working with partners that taught us about good survey science and about automated tools, we were in fact building an MRI for churches.   From the research, we isolated the four key drivers of a church's capacity to multiply ministry and to reach new people.

• Spiritual Intensity
• Missional Alignment
• Dynamic Relationships
• Cultural Openness

From these drivers, and the attendant behaviors and issues surrounding each, we built a survey. Then, the former CEO of Border's Books (from the days when they actually made money) spent a day with us and helped us rethink how to deliver the instrument on a wider scale.

Early in 2012, Christie lost many nights of sleep, talking with our engineers in India (during their work hours), as they built the platform for collecting data from an unlimited number of persons in a church, according to the specs we provided, and then delivering an automated report with recommendations for action, carefully indexed to each of several thousand survey answers given in a particular congregation. We began to benchmark the survey with churches with proven ability to multiply ministry. In late winter, we began running the survey in varied churches... on the east coast, in the Midwest, on the west coast. One of the first pastors to see a report said, "Last year, we did the Reveal survey from Willow Creek, and it did not give us anything close to the kind of helpful information this gave us!" We were astonished to discover what the Readiness 360 revealed!

We began writing contracts with judicatories in two different denominations - for use of the Readiness 360 in their congregations - as they seek to help their churches discern where to focus in order to get ready to re-connect with their communities and to create new ministry for new people.    

Many of us have written books and produced resources sharing best practices for effective ministry, but never until now, could we so clearly document and address the underlying issues that are blocking churches from such action!   Now we can isolate the issues that sabotage the best-laid plans and discourage churches from ever trying again! And we can offer customized recommendations for action, building from each church's relative strengths.

Conference leaders, once they know the underlying readiness of several churches, can make smarter decisions about the deployment of limited leadership and financial assets. Once they can see beyond the ordinary vital signs, they can invest resources where there is the highest chance of church transformation and ministry effectiveness.

After you run an MRI, everything becomes easier. Anxiety is reduced. The real issues become apparent. Guesswork goes away.   Practical action steps are possible. Resolution of the problem issues enables health and fruitfulness. Both for human beings and for faith communities, an MRI is a revolutionary thing.

If you would like to know more about Readiness 360, go www.readiness360.org and take a look. You can take a sample survey and receive a sample church report. Or contact me directly (paul@readiness360.org). I would be happy to explore the possibilities for how this tool can revolutionize your work.