Backward Planning

Backward Planning

"Backward" planning is what some civil engineers and others who design large projects need to do. Start by describing the "end", whether a string of light rail stations across the country or an association of reproducing churches.

Next, answer: What will have to happen before that? Maybe, a rail line in service or a cluster of new churches in each town. After that, answer: What will have to happen before that? Perhaps, acquire right of way across the country or send a church planting into each town. And so forth, till you have planned "backwards" to where you are today.

Forward planning starts with what one has today, projecting into the future. For example, today we have ten kilometers of track and two stations. Answer, What would it cost to have another station next year? Forward planning usually looks at costs and obstacles, rather than at what must be in place ten years hence.

Forward planning in churches ask, How can we get more money to keep on doing what we are already doing. That leads to slow growth, unusually in one place.

Thus, backward planning proves an exercise in faith that starts with a vision for a God-honoring future, seeking ways to make that vision a reality.

As a general rule, do your backward planning first, then it will be safer to do your frontward planning

Planning Activities in Advance for Opening a New Field
or Extending the Work in an Existing Field

Take a moment now to do some backward planning. Examine below the "backward" list of steps for mobilizing categories of people who may have to participate. As you work through the backward list, start with your final objective, then reason back to the present. Define for each step what must happen prior to it.

To help you think ‘backwards’ this list starts with final objectives and works back. That is why the numbering starts with 14 and works down to 1. Make a note of any items that require special attention.

Activities are listed in reverse order, starting with 14 and working back to 1, in order to help you to plan backwards.

Churches organize on a national or large regional level for fellowship,
inter-church projects and continued reproduction.

Ask yourself and your coworkers the questions for which you need answers before you can wisely plan details for this stage of the work. Verify before planning:

How will organization on this level happen?
Who will be able to take the responsibility for it?
What must happen first?

Reasoning backwards, strategic planners see what must happen prior to widespread church multiplication:

Workers prepare to serve with humility at a regional level
to coordinate inter-church cooperation.

Servant leadership on the regional or synod level requires that local leaders mobilize and humbly oversee newer pastors or elders. They will acquire this skill from their "apostles" who take personal, caring responsibility for their fruitful ministry, as the Apostle Paul did for his new workers. Otherwise, the first local leaders, lacking maturity for work at this level, might easily become grasping and demanding.

Verify before planning:

How will pastors learn to become regional servant leaders?
Who will model servant leadership for them?
How? Where?

Next, strategic planners envision what must happen first, to prepare regional level servant leaders as pastors of pastors:

Local churches mature and bring transformation
to their surrounding communities.

New churches grow in Christ and practice all vital New Testament ministries, being led by caring servant leaders. These new pastors not only shepherd their flocks with loving care but also mobilize other newer pastors for ministry. They acquire this skill on the job, not in classrooms. In new fields, it will be missionaries who demonstrate those skills to the first new leaders.

Verify before planning

How will we ensure that churches practice all essential New Testament ministries?
How will we make sure that their shepherds learn servant leadership?
Who will model servant leadership for them and how?

To prepare shepherds that will be servant leaders, strategic planners must first envision the kind of pastoral training that can ensure it:

Training must be made available for many new leaders—
as many as will be needed to continue church reproduction.

Older leaders during the first few years will guide the new ones while they still lack experience. Leaders will learn to shepherd their people with loving care and not just to preach and to enforce rules.

Pastoral trainers do not simply pass information on to their students. They train them to edify and equip their local body of Christ for ministry. To do that, trainers with the gift of teaching must work in harmony with others who have different spiritual gifts, as God requires in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13. Good leadership training requires balanced discipleship training that relates the Word to Christian work through loving relationships in the power of the Holy Spirit. Trainers in a new field, where new shepherding elders cannot neglect their flocks to go study elsewhere, must avoid requiring impractical formal institutional training. Youths hoping for a paid church job would eagerly go attend a school but, lacking experience in well-established churches, they would fail to assimilate the intensive classroom teaching and apply it in their minds to an active church body. They lack models of effective shepherding and cannot realistically relate what they learn to their future ministry.

Verify before planning:

How will we prepare the people and their future pastors to appreciate and understand loving servant leadership?
What kind of discipleship training will lay a foundation for it?

Strategic planners, reasoning backwards, see that we must model loving discipleship training first on a more basic level:

New Christians learn through caring, relational, discipleship training,
to exalt Jesus by obeying His commands in love.

Disciple makers must teach new believers to obey Jesus’ commands before and above all else. Jesus requires us to believe, repent, be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit; then to love, break bread, pray, give, and make disciples. You must avoid long indoctrination before obedience training; detailed indoctrination at this stage would stifle loving discipleship. Students learn to be passive hearers; later it would be harder to mobilize them for ministries other than for teaching. Building on obedience, the new believers will practice New Testament church body life, serving one another with their God-given gifts in the power of the Holy Spirit. They will observe their trainers forming the loving relationships needed for this type of obedience. They see their trainers make disciples in a way that they can imitate at once with their family and friends.

Verify before planning:

Who will give this kind of discipleship training to new believers during the initial stages of evangelism, when there are no new local leaders yet?
What kind of churches will provide the right environment for it?
How will the trainers learn to do it?

Strategic planners recognize that relational discipleship training requires that trainers spend time with people, especially right after they come to Christ. This requires a much more relational form of evangelism than what Western traditions offer:

Seekers take their first steps of faith with the help of a caring church body

When seekers repent and discover the new, holy, eternal life in Christ, their conversion must be confirmed by being added to a loving church body by baptism, as Acts 2:38-41 reveals. Help seekers see the crucified and risen Christ living in among you, as affirmed in 2 Corinthians 5:15. Model a sacrificial pilgrim’s life in a hostile world.

Verify before planning:

How will we assure that a caring church body will exist so soon in the church-planting project?
Who will lead the infant churches?
What will they do to lay a foundation for loving discipleship training?

Reasoning backwards, strategic planners will see that evangelism brings not only to God’s forgiveness but also health, peace of mind, relief from extreme poverty, and freedom from demonic oppression. This requires that we first form a church planting task group skilled in relational evangelism and discipleship training:

8
(Activities #1 -- 8 are strategic objectives for "outside" workers.)

Workers penetrating a new community or field
must identify with its social life and culture.

Workers from the outside must bond with the people and culture, and must learn the language. They will discern and use methods of evangelism and teaching that the people can afford, imitate and use without delay with others. They will focus on a specific people group and seek ways to penetrate it. They will use different spiritual gifts to deal with the diverse needs of the people group. They will ruthlessly screen out technology, equipment, and methods that are beyond the reach of the people, so that they can carry on the ministry model. They will recruit coworkers from among the people or from a very similar culture who can readily identify with the local culture.

Verify before planning:

Who will join a task group that can embrace the local culture?
How will they make sure they have truly bonded with the people and culture?

Strategic planners will see that they may need to arrange for a partnership with workers from another culture:

Task group leaders or mission agency leaders must arrange for workers from
the same or similar cultures to join the task group, at least during the
initial evangelism.

In fields having a very different culture you must partner with missionaries from churches that are culturally near to the people on whom you will focus, and who can relate readily to them. No amount of anthropological training to adapt to a new culture is as effective as being born in into or into a similar one. The most effective evangelists for starting the kind of churches that will multiply freely within a different culture, are those with similar background, politics, race, language, economy, social status, education, family size, rural or urban life-style and world view.

Verify before planning:

How will missionaries from churches with limited resources be mobilized?
Who will provide a bridge to the other culture?
How will you avoid forcing your culture and values on workers from another culture, and avoid making workers from a poorer society dependent on you?
How will workers from other cultures get training for service in fields with hostile authorities?

Strategic planners must see that workers first need training and deployment as bi-vocational "tentmakers" who, like Aquila and Priscilla, have two vocations. (Acts 18:1-3). One is church planting; the other is a job that is acceptable to local authorities:

Bi-vocational workers start businesses or other means of support
to reside in fields where authorities forbid people to enter as missionaries.

Today, only bi-vocational missionaries can reside in many of the remaining neglected fields long enough to bring about church multiplication. Like Paul, they need to get cross-cultural church planting experience, to form task groups, have a formal commissioning and find employment like a small business that will enable them to mix with the working class.

Verify before planning:

How will bi-vocational workers be trained?
Who will develop the bi-vocational work?
Who can help us do the things for which we lack experience?

Strategic planners must help sending churches to envision how to adjust their mission approaches and to prepare and send the kind of workers who can help churches to reproduce in today’s neglected fields:

Strategic Objectives for Sending Churches and Agencies

Workers must practice ministry skills and receive training in their
sending churches,
to prepare to help churches to reproduce in other areas.

The skills needed may include those required for bi-vocational work, language learning, 'incarnational' evangelism, small group worship, organization of a congregation for organic body life, training leaders behind the scenes and church reproduction.

Verify before planning:

Who will serve as model of the needed ministry skills for workers who are to enter other cultures?
Where?
How?

Strategic planners must recognize the importance of those skills for work on the remaining neglected fields and must make plans for the preparation of missionary trainers who can impart them:

Missionary trainers must learn to prepare workers in a way
that will transfer to fields where institutional methods are impractical.

Those who train missionaries must keep in touch with workers in the field in order to learn what skills the new missionaries need. They also get practice with non-formal training methods, cooperating with experienced trainers who will prepare leaders the way Jesus and His apostles did.

Verify before planning:

Who will train the missionaries?
How will those trainers be prepared?

Strategic planners must recognize that to train for specialized ministries is useless if a mission agency fails to implement them. Therefore, they must also plan to seek a working relationship with agencies that can deploy workers having right methods and right coworkers in the right fields:

A cooperating mission agency must deal realistically with today’s world
and its neglected fields, including those in which bi-vocational
workers must make disciples secretly.

By the time a mission agency is in a position to orient new workers, it is often too late to begin the training they need. The workers may have been exposed for years to methods and attitudes in a local church that hardly resemble those needed in the field.

Verify before planning:

How will sending churches cooperate with mission agencies to see that workers are prepared wisely?

Who will orient mission agency leaders who lack these strategic perspectives?

How?

Strategic planners see that, in order for an agency to develop an effective working relationship with sending churches, they will need preparation and a challenge:

Sending churches that embrace these guidelines must make their people
and mission agency personnel aware of them also when necessary,
and follow them to equip workers.

Churches must cooperate to prepare missionaries; many of the skills that missionaries need cannot be acquired in institutional classrooms. So, they cooperate with training institutions and mission agencies to provide experience that teaches needed skills.

Verify before planning:

What leaders in sending churches know and follow these guidelines, or are willing to learn to follow them?
How will these leaders in sending churches communicate these guidelines to missionaries and their agency leaders, without appearing to be telling others how to do their job?
How will these leaders learn to discern things that only experienced field workers in other cultures can understand, to avoid meddling in areas beyond their grasp?
Who will motivate and orient these leaders in sending churches? How?

Strategic planners recognize that much advice for missionary training and field selection comes from organizations and individuals who have an agenda that serves only their own organization. Therefore, they must seek unbiased mission career advisors. They must discern between mere mission agency "recruiters" and unbiased career counselors who have no agenda of their own for missionary candidates. Both kinds of advisors are needed, but unbiased coaching must come first in order to avoid workers being trained in wrong ways, getting lined up with the wrong coworkers, or being sent to the wrong place.

Unbiased mission career advisors help churches and missionary candidates
to think through their plans.

Mission counselors should keep in mind all fourteen of these ministry areas, so that they can enable potential workers to explore all options for serving to see where they might best fit in. Many counselors fail to do so; unwise career advice abounds. Good career counselors will prepare carefully, in order to honestly present the options. They will help workers keep their final objectives in mind as they examine their gifts, experiences, resources, plans and working relationships, in order to help them to plan for their future ministry.

Verify before planning:

Who will serve as mission career advisors?
How will they prepare themselves?

Strategic planners must train or serve as unbiased mission career advisors who can counsel church leaders and missionary candidates.

Please take a moment now to arrange to meet with your coworkers to plan strategically, keeping your final goals in mind, then listing the preliminary steps needed to reach them.