Today I want to talk to you about building a coalition for change in your church. I’ve created a nine-box to help you evaluate a person’s influence and investment. So, let’s take a look.
Think about the people in your church. First, rate a person’s influence in your church as high, medium, or low. Next, you want to look at that person and really consider how invested they are – high, medium, or low. Then mark where those two boxes intersect on the grid.
I would suggest that you only focus on the people that fall in the upper quadrant because these are the most invested, most influential people. In fact, I’m going to discuss all four types of these people, so let’s take a look at those.
For the highly influential and highly invested people, you want to use them as spokespersons for your church, for this change. Put them out in front and give them a microphone. Make sure they use their influence for buy-in and for helping you move forward.
For the highly influential and somewhat invested people, you want to help tie them back in strongly to the church’s mission and leverage their influence in that way.
In a similar way, you also want to look at the people with medium influence and medium investment. Help them, not on mission, but on casting vision. You want to earn their buy-in by doing that and make it easy to increase their investment vs. their influence.
Now for the highly invested people but medium influence, you want their faces and their stories up in front and center. This may sound a little unexpected because they’re not the most influential, but bringing their stories to the attention of others will help build credibility and also social proof. This is kind of an everyday man behind the change vs. the people we all assumed would be on board anyway.
Now that you understand how to build a coalition for change in your church, what are you going to do about it?