Systems Change Behaviours

“Systems change behaviours.” – Andy Stanley

That simple quote has meant a lot over the last number of weeks as the post-Drive Conference energy continues.  Over the last number of weeks our team of leaders here has been working behind the scenes on many of the systems that make up how we do ministry.  It’s definitely not glamorous work but I am beginning to understand the importance of taking the time to do it.

For the longest time, many of our systems have been unwritten gut sort of things instead of documented processes.  As our ministry to students has grown over the year our need to streamline some of these systems has become paramount to our continued success.  It used to be easy to keep track of new students when it was one every couple of weeks.  Now that we’re getting anywhere from 5-10 a week, we need to figure out a way to make sure no one is falling through the cracks.  The same with people making decisions for Christ or jumping into small groups.  With size comes the need to create good systems.  As I’ve been thinking about it and working through them over the last number of weeks I’ve begun to realize that it doesn’t really matter how big the student ministry is, whether it’s 10 or 100, systems help to make sure that students are actually moving forward in their faith.

Andy Stanley did a talk on systems that’s got me thinking about the potential of systems on people growing in their relationship with Christ.  We haven’t been very good at tracking with students in their journey, sort of leaving it up to them and their small group leaders to figure it out together, hoping that our large and small group environments would be enough to keep them motivated.  I’m not convinced it has or will in the future.  By creating some systems and tracking mechanisms within our programs we can begin to see where students are, where they are going and whether they end up getting there.  That kind of information is really helpful for us in working with students and motivating them to keep going.

How this all sort of began for us was basically just beginning to ask ourselves some basic questions.

1. How do we follow up with students who make first time decisions for Christ?
2. How do we follow up with new students?
3. How do we track students?
4. What does our large group environment look like?
5. What does our small group environment look like?

We started with these questions and then began to chart out what we thought the ‘ideal’ might be.  What would we ‘want’ the student experience to be if money, time, resources, etc., weren’t an issue?  We then began to map out what it would look like, one week out, two weeks out, ongoing, etc.  The result for us has been the creation of some great tools that we think will help students and leaders.

It’s been so helpful for us that I’m now trying to figure out what questions we aren’t asking that we should be.  Systems & Logistics are things that many of us just do naturally or without thinking about and the challenge for many of us is to try and take those habits we have in our head and translate them to manageable processes that our teams can do as well.  The benefits for us are pretty clear: more people can do the same tasks (not dependent on me), systems can be tweaked and improved by more than one person, and our team has a greater sense of ownership in our environments because they actually know what’s going on.  The benefits for students are that more will be encouraged sooner and our hope is that our attrition rate (the number of students who show up once and then never again) will go down too.