Momentum is a powerful word. It’s all about oomph!
You may (or may not) remember the formal definition of momentum from high school physics. Momentum is a way of expressing something’s level of energy. I learned the meaning of momentum in a rather more direct way. When I was in college I was on a crew that mowed county parks and the median strips. One day I was standing by our truck when a huge self-powered mower rolled off the back of the truck before I could get out of the way. Believe me, when I put a hand up to stop it, I learned all about the concept of momentum! I only survived, because the handle bars were curved and created a space between the mower and the ground where I was trapped but alive!
So, one way to think about momentum is to ask, “What does it take to stop something?” Church programs that have been in operation a long time, much like long-standing personal habits, have a lot of momentum. They aren’t easy to stop or change.
The concept of momentum has a positive application in the world of congregations and of various ministries. A congregation in its entirety, or any individual church program such as a ministry to women or men or children, has some level of momentum, some degree of energy, and impact. Such a program or congregation may have an increasing momentum as it grows in magnitude of fruitfulness, a decreasing momentum as its energy slowly dissipates, or a constant momentum as it keeps chugging along.
I find it helpful to think of momentum in two parts: institutional momentum and transformational momentum.
Institutional momentum is the tendency of an organization to keep on going. Congregations have a tremendous amount of institutional momentum. Like the flywheel concept Jim Collins refers to in his book Good to Great, once it gets going it has a way of keeping going. Even congregations that are losing membership, dealing with aging facilities, and diminishing impact in their communities are hard to stop! Like the Energizer Bunny they just keep going and going- even if that “going” is a slow decline. Of course, healthy congregations that are growing and thriving also have an institutional momentum that helps sustain their work.
Transformation is all about change. A congregation with a positive transformational momentum isn’t static just doing the same things over and over; but it is developing with new initiatives, new approaches, new ideas even as it finds ways to show honor and dignity to the people and programs of the past and present. A congregation (or any ministry) with a positive transformational momentum is making a sustained impact in its community and world with the word and deed of the gospel.
Ministry is exciting when the momentum is growing - the degree to which our ministries increase in transformational fruitfulness (the degree to which we are making a helpful difference in people’s lives as they grow in the image of Jesus) and missional momentum (the degree to which we are reaching people in our community and world with the word and deed of the gospel).
By the way, institutional momentum can work against transformational momentum, and it can work for it. If the organization, be it congregation, individual ministry, or denominational judicatory, is stuck in neutral, committed to maintaining its present structure and approaches, then little that is genuinely transformational and missional in focus is likely to germinate. On the other hand, the institutional momentum sustains “transformissional” momentum once a ministry:
- embraces the transformational and the missional,
- has permission-giving leadership,
- desires to change lives,
- vision to engage its world, and
- the missional and transformational focus is part of the DNA of the leadership and structure of the organization.
Some questions to consider:
What is the nature of your ministry’s momentum - increasing, declining, staying the same?
What is the result of that momentum in the lives of people?
With Joy - E. Stanley Ott
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