THE VALUE PROPOSITION

The Lean Start Up Canvas has been making the rounds this year as social and spiritual innovators think through their plans for changing the world and blessing their neighborhoods.  My friend Bill Gibson, who directs new church development in the Pacific Northwest for the United Methodists, adapted the Start Up Canvas to the new church context.  I have used Gibson's adaptation of this tool with my students at Wesley Seminary and with the planters that I helped to train this year at Path 1's Launchpad.

At the heart of the Start Up Canvas one finds a big box labeled 'The Value Proposition.'  What is the value that this new thing purports to offer to the people who might buy it, take advantage of it, partner with it or invest in it?  What is in it for the Community?

When I was a kid growing up in a pastor's home, one of my dad's friends served a church in south Texas with a neon sign that lit up, facing the highway, proclaiming JESUS SAVES!  I am not sure how compelling that was to the neighbors, but it served in essence as the church's value proposition.  "You are going to hell and Jesus saves.  Stop by here and we can help you cut a deal."  Years later, in my own pastoral ministry, at Gulf Breeze UMC our three key words were HOSPITALITY, HOPE and HEALING.  These three items summed up an effective value proposition that our community wholehearted embraced (a community very orange in Spiral Dynamics terms).  In my nine years at Gulf Breeze, more than 1300 persons professed faith in Christ and signed on to the team (all aside from membership transfers).  This would never have happened had the community not clearly seen our church's value.

Last month I talked about our need to flip the sustainability question - it is not the ongoing sustainability of the church that most concerns the human beings all around us - it is the sustainability of their lives, of the neighborhood itself, of their children's lives, of the planet.  The church that has a value proposition related to any of those things has something relevant to say.

Too many churches where I work have long neglected their value proposition.  Where it exists it is mostly internal - we offer a church family to folks who don't have one.  We offer nice services on Sunday with our choir doing a little special song and our preacher at her inspirational finest, as she reads her theological musings, rarely looking up from the pages.  Maybe if there were still millions of 1980s church shoppers buzzing all over the place, this would be adequate.  But honestly, even if we limited our market to the remnant of church shoppers - most communities have at least one or two large, compelling ministries offering something more life-giving and relevant than a church family of elderly aunts and uncles along with a sweet little church choir.  If that is the best we can offer to the world, we will continue shrinking to oblivion.

I sometimes ask churches, "If this place were to disappear tomorrow, what would this community lose?" Given that in many cases the church members simply commute into the neighborhood for a few hours on Sunday, and then disappear - honestly, what would community lose when they close shop with most of the current mainline congregations sometime in this century?  It's like the old question about the noise that a tree makes falling in the forest, when no one is listening.

There is no more important work that any of us can do in terms of coaching churches - than to help them discover that their value proposition is probably too internal...and a big yawner to most of their neighbors.  The Gospel demands so much more of us.  How is God calling us to bless our neighborhoods?  And how does life get demonstrably better when and if the neighbors come on in and sit down?

A blessed Advent to all!