Author: Nate Vander Stelt, Executive Vice President for GACX. | Source: GACX
Summary
Nate Vander Stelt, Executive VP of GACX, shares the many ways he sees GACX members effectively modeling intentional collaboration. In this blog post, he shares several common themes he sees running across many different kinds of effective collaborations.
- Pray and Connect: Members are intentionally praying together with other organizations, starting their journey together before God’s throne. Relationships are key, and GACX is helping start and strengthen them. Leaders are seeking the Lord’s wisdom on whom He is leading them to work with, followed by where and how to accelerate church multiplication.
- “We” vs. “Me”: Those who are seeing great traction in effective collaboration are those who sacrifice some of their own time, energy, and resources and invest in the “we” (together) efforts. This is magnified even more when their Boards and senior leadership purposefully incorporate collaboration as part of their missional DNA.
- Assess: Before jumping into a project or area of the world, partners evaluate who’s doing what works where. They include both national churches and ministries, along with global ministries, in their assessment.
- Form a Common Vision: With good awareness, ministries can prayerfully form a fresh vision and define a scope of work. Together, they boldly ask the “what if we…” questions and explore answers. As new or expanded visions emerge, they also seek out additional strategic partners with whom to collaborate.
- Plan & Implement: Collaboration turns to action when vision translates into forward-moving plans which are implemented through sharing time, resources and energy.
- Evaluate: Collaborators ensure adequate time is given for a project to grow and set mile markers for evaluation. The candid assessment of what has and hasn’t worked well leads to adjustments which ensure progress moving forward.
Source:
Nate Vander Stelt. What Collaboration Looks Like. Blog Post. 28 March 2018.