Our Structure - Bows and Arrows

After that long post about our direction, I would like to do a shorter post. However, the next piece of the puzzle to put in place is fairly complex. We'll see how it goes.

One thing that I have been learning over the past year is how critical it is for your organizational structure to match up with and support your direction. If you say that you want to be missional or organic, or that you want to learn and try new strategies, but organizationally all of your decisions are made from a centralized leadership... good luck, it's never going to happen. It's like trying to boat across a mountain pass. You've chosen the wrong means of transport. It might work in some situations, but it will only burden you in a lot of others. Now that's not to say a boat is useless, just that it's a poor choice for crossing mountains.

For our "year zero" launch, our national team developed and implemented a new structure to help us really be able to travel in the direction we wanted to go in Rome. This new structure allowed us to more faithfully live out our guiding principles and be more effective in seeing progress on our missional stepping stones. The analogy that we used to picture our new structure was a bow and arrow.

Arrows

The arrows represent missional teams, small autonomous teams with a specific ministry target. These missional teams are designed to be small and fast moving, to be released to go and penetrate their target, like an arrow.

The Bow or Arco (in Italian)

The arco represents a periodic gathering of the missional teams where we interact over our common values (The Scriptures, worship, fellowship, vision, etc.). The intent behind the arco is to be the source of strength and direction giving the Arrows the power and direction they need to penetrate their targets.

To start the year we had 2 arcos and 6 arrows. The beauty of this new structure was that we were really able to push the leadership out to the boundaries of the organization freeing up missional teams to make decisions and try new approaches, and allowing us to really learn and change.

Now it wasn't all good or easy. In some ways we weren't ready to fully make that change, and we didn't really implement the concept that faithfully. There were also a lot of issues that needed to be addressed, and it was difficult to know how to address them. However, it was a huge step in the right direction. For next year we will be more or less keeping the same structure in place just tweaking it to make it more faithful to the original concept.

Having written so much about vision and structure, I want to clarify that I do NOT believe that these things are what will give us success in our ministry. We will only see our vision accomplished as we seek the Lord and step out in faith to follow Him into His mission to redeem the world to Himself. What we have done in setting direction and organizing ourselves is just a small yet important part of being a good steward in that whole process.