I like to see dreams and goals become reality. In my personal experience, however, and from viewing the experiences of others, most of us have more ideas than we have reality. Figuring out how to implement our ideas is the hardest part of the process it seems.
I hope this post helps.
Here’s an example of how an idea often become reality in my world. As an illustration for each step, I’m sharing a real-life example of how we made the idea become reality of going multi-site by adding our second campus, which by the way, launches this week.
Idea – The first step is always the idea and ideas are many for me, so at this stage I try to filter through which ones are worth pursuing. The idea for us going multi-site, at least this time, came after Easter last year. Easter Sunday was huge at Grace Community Church, bigger than we planned for or expected. (God still does things like that!) It prompted an idea that if we continue to grow towards our Easter number in the new year, which has been our trend, then we would be out of room in our current high school. That thought led to another idea that we needed to do something sooner that we could build a building, which led to the idea of multi-siting our church. This was an idea we had previously explored, but decided the timing was not right.
Brainstorming – The next step is to begin thinking through this decision with others. If the idea has merit, in my experience, God is already raising up others with similar thoughts. In the multi-site example, this is where we organized a group of people to pray through this idea, explore the options, and look at the demographics, costs, etc. This process took several months and numerous meetings. Ideas may or may not make it out of this step, but if they survive, the chance of success is much greater.
Experiment – At this step, you want to try out your idea before attempting to launch it. My co-pastor suggested that we do this Christmas Eve. We decided to have our Christmas Eve service at the possible new location, which is another high school across town. As it turned out, the crowd was far more than we expected, which was another good indication that our idea was a good one.
Practice – You’ve heard the saying, “Practice makes perfect.” I’m not sure about pefection, but it certainly makes the idea better. For us, this meant that we had a practice service at the new location, just for the people who had committed to be part of the launch team. It helped us work out the kinks, we learned some valuable things we hadn’t thought about, and we were able to test out our idea.
Product – This is the fun part! The launch! This is the part we all are waiting for and want to see come to fruition. This week our church gets to view the product as we launch our second campus at Kenwood High School. It’s been a long, difficult process taking an idea to the product stage, but I feel confident we are proceeding in the right direction.
(Now comes the fun part…enjoying the journery…evaluation…repeat…)
I realize this is a specific example and may not exactly work the same for your individual project, but I believe the process will help more of your dreams come true.
Is this helpful? What would you add to my list?
