Abramson Mission Design

Leading Your Ministry Through Organizational and Cultural Change
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1307-6
Verlag: IVP
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Navigating Change in Complex Ministry Environments Mission Design by Aaron Abramson is a timely guide for ministry leaders navigating the challenges of a volatile and rapidly changing world. With technological growth, societal shifts, and economic instability reshaping the landscape, traditional five-year plans feel out of touch. Yet, even amidst uncertainty, opportunities for meaningful kingdom impact abound. Drawing on principles from design thinking, user experience design, and service design, Aaron Abramson provides a step-by-step approach to help pastors, church planters, nonprofit leaders and mission entrepreneurs adapt and innovate ministries to reach the shifting world around us. This book provides the tools and insights you need to adapt, pivot, navigate, and kickstart change for your ministry. Whether you're clarifying your vision, understanding your community's needs, or testing new strategies, Mission Design equips you to lead your organization into a flourishing future. With relatable examples and case studies, Abramson doesn't just show you how to launch impactful ideas-he also teaches you how to pivot, evaluate, and grow through the learning process. No matter where your ministry is in its organizational life cycle, God can do new things in and through you for the good of those to whom you are called. Mission Design features: - Step-by-Step Approach: Learn how to lead your organization through change with strategies drawn from experience and the principles of design thinking. - Practical Tools: Clarify your vision and design tangible solutions to adapt to a shifting world. - Real-World Case Studies: Explore examples from real-life ministries that show how to implement changes effectively and learn from the results. - Focus on Community Impact: Develop a deeper understanding of the people you serve to ensure your ministry reflects their needs and God's calling. - Expert Guidance: Gain insights from Aaron Abramson, CEO of Jews for Jesus, who has led impactful innovations in ministry and mission strategy. Why Read Mission Design? If you're a ministry leader looking to adapt to evolving dynamics, navigate cultural shifts, and lead with impact, this book is your trusted guide. Abramson's thoughtful approach combines experienced wisdom with practical tools that can give you confidence as you step into uncharted territory in your own ministry. Get your copy today and get equipped to lead more effectively through changing ministry dynamics.

Aaron Abramson (MPA, New York University) is the CEO of Jews for Jesus. He was raised in a Jewish home, studied in a religious Jewish seminary, and served in the Israel Defense Forces. Since having a life-changing encounter with Jesus, Aaron has been instrumental in helping Jews for Jesus revitalize recruitment, redesign mission processes, and develop the ministry's performance measurement system. He and his wife, Victoria, have three children and reside in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Abramson, Aaron

Leseproben

Introduction

“Great! So, who is going to take the lead on that?” We had just wrapped up a particularly productive team meeting on how to get local churches in New York involved in reaching out to their Jewish friends and neighbors. We were hammering out the beginnings of a solution when the question came up. Everyone avoided eye contact. None of us had time to add another job to our already overspilling plates.

Ministry can be overwhelming. Over my years serving with Jews for Jesus, I have put in my share of long weeks. I knew when I signed up for ministry that it wasn’t going to be easy. It is not unusual for pastors and missionaries (even volunteers) to put in fifty-, sixty-, and even seventy-five-hour workweeks as they try to get their church, their project, their (fill in the blank) off the ground. The work feels never-ending with always one more thing (or ten) to do. Many of us have gotten used to wearing multiple hats as we switch between roles as needed. Project manager, missionary, Bible teacher, scriptwriter, director, web designer, recruiter, fundraiser, painter, worship leader, facilities manager. These are just a few hats I have worn over the years, and I know I’m not the only one.

Ministry staff are typically over-employed, working two, even three jobs. We end up doing whatever is necessary to keep the ministry afloat, despite smaller budgets and strong competition for talent. Let’s face it: finding qualified, experienced, capable staff is tough. As writer Kate Shellnutt observed, “For many nonprofits—from sending organizations to food banks—demand is up, and they haven’t been able to find enough volunteers to help.”1 The deficit means more work spread among fewer people. Attrition due to burnout, financial constraints, and all sorts of personal reasons only makes things more difficult. According to a 2022 Barna survey done during the height of the Covid pandemic, 42 percent of pastors considered quitting full-time ministry in the twelve months prior to the survey.2 These findings were not an aberration due to Covid but are consistent with other studies from recent years.

Coupled with the fact that people aren’t exactly beating down the door to go into ministry, the need for fresh talent is greater than ever. Many denominations report rapidly declining numbers of incoming clergy.3 This relates to the concurrent drop in general church attendance. The Church of England has been experiencing this decline for over a decade as over two thousand churches have closed their doors due to shrinking numbers and reduced income.4

On top of that, the world is changing at a head-spinning pace. And the rate of change is not showing signs of slowing down. Ray Kurzweil’s famous quote, “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)” sounds extreme—yet it is hard for most of us to imagine things changing faster than they are now.5

To illustrate, macro trends like population growth, technological interconnectedness, and secularization are changing cities from New York to Jerusalem in dramatic ways. Both have sizable ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and their birthrate is outpacing other communities around them, causing their neighborhoods to explode at the seams. Yet rabbis in these communities are losing a battle to keep their youth away from smartphones and the internet, and as a result a growing number of Hasidic youth are leaving the Orthodox community to lead secular lives.

Macro trends like these are changing the landscape around us in remarkable ways. This is creating new challenges for us to address as ministers—often before we have been able to solve last month’s problems! But if we don’t address these challenges promptly and proactively, our current program offerings will eventually become outdated and out of step with our key audiences. Rather than carve out the time to retool, build something new, or even just to stop and reflect on the situation in which we find ourselves, we end up running back and forth plugging holes like the proverbial Dutch boy trying to stop the dike from breaking.

BEFRIENDING CHANGE

I come naturally to the topic of change. I’ve always been interested in figuring out how things work. Much to my parents’ dismay, I was the kid constantly taking stuff apart at home. I remember disassembling my first PC so I could understand what each component did as well as how each part worked together to make data come to life.

That curiosity was cultivated in a milieu of diverse cultures, beliefs, and cities. As a third culture kid,6 my world leaned toward change and instability. We never lived in one home for more than a few years. On top of that, I was raised in an intermarried home—my father raised Jewish, and my mother raised Catholic; each brought a mixture of faith and tradition into my life. My friends would ask if I found celebrating both Hanukkah and Christmas confusing. I’d say, “What’s confusing about getting presents twice?” The hybridity of an interfaith family was all I knew.

Hungry for a deeper Jewish experience, my parents decided to move us from the United States to Israel. At fifteen years old, I was suddenly and completely immersed in Jewish life. We lived in an Orthodox settlement, and I attended a yeshiva—an Orthodox school for rabbinic studies.

At eighteen, I was drafted into the Israeli army, where my aptitude for tinkering and problem-solving was put to good use. I was trained as a technician on armored transport carriers and served in the 890 paratrooper unit. Unlike the well-equipped US military, we often lacked the right tools for the job, so we learned to improvise on the fly. We did what we had to do to get those transports moving, often under dangerous conditions.

After completing three years of service, I experienced a crisis of purpose and identity, leading me to pack my bags and travel for a year. That year turned into a kind of spiritual wilderness for me. With no job or anything tying me down, there was nothing but time and space to reflect and look inward. The deeper I looked, the more I realized something was wrong. I attempted to apply that problem-solving approach to my own condition. I was reading books ranging from Eastern philosophy to New Age spirituality when a friend suggested I read the New Testament. Immediately I realized there was something different about the Gospels and the Messiah they described. For the next few months, I immersed myself in the Scriptures. The more I read about Jesus, the more I was drawn to him. When God opened my eyes and I surrendered my life to him, I discovered new purpose. He changed me and gave me new lenses through which to view the world.

It became clear early in my faith journey that I longed to share the gospel with other Jewish people. I tried to talk about my new faith with people in Israel, which turned out to be (surprise, surprise!) incredibly difficult. It never occurred to me that there were other people trying to do the same thing I was doing until I met some team members serving with Jews for Jesus. After volunteering for a couple of years, I officially joined the Jews for Jesus staff in 1999 and have served with the organization in a number of different capacities.

I started my training in New York City and served in the UK, where I completed a BA in sociology and theology at All Nations Christian College. I’ve also worked in San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I’ve served as a missionary on the field, director of young adult ministry, director of recruitment, NY regional director, COO, and now CEO—all roles which have required me to lead teams through lots of perplexing situations. Each of these roles came with unique challenges, but all of them had one thing in common: change. The organization was facing a season of dramatic transition from who we were when Jews for Jesus first started in 1973 to who we needed to become as we moved into the new millennium. Change has been a theme in my life and also the one constant in my vocation. As a result, I’ve discovered that my long-standing curiosity about the way things work has led me to befriend change—personally, organizationally, and culturally. My trust in the unchanging character of God has been a strength as I’ve helped lead our organization through significant transition over the last few years.

The rate of change around us doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. If anything, the world is becoming more complex. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their book The Future is Faster than You Think explain it this way:

But now we live in a world that is global and exponential. Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later). Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today’s blitzkrieg speed of development. Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution.7

The communities to whom we minister are changing rapidly. How we minister to them requires fresh eyes. Emerging generations of young adults are being raised in a very different world than the one in which I was raised. And now as a father to three kids born in the early 2000s, I can see significant differences in the issues they care about and the way they approach the world. Deep down, at the core, every generation is in need of the same thing: a life-changing encounter with the risen Messiah. But the specific concerns,...