Leo Endel
Springfield | Association leaders from around Illinois gathered at the IBSA building August 5-6 to talk shop and collaborate on ministry. Leo Endel, Executive Director of the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention shared how he leads churches and associations through a fairly simple planning process to set goals and redirect future ministry activities.
Associational Mission Strategists (AMS) talked freely as the sessions unfolded with Endel as well as with IBSA Executive Director Nate Adams. Many IBSA staff members made presentations and shared in breakout groups to encourage networking with associations for ministry advance.
“We were able to rub shoulders with other association leaders,” said Brent Cloyd of the Greater Wabash Baptist Association. “I found a lot of help from Leo Endel’s sessions. It was simple planning strategies that most small churches can buy into.”
Endel called his planning process “Where Do We Go From Here.” He has published a book with the same title.
Illinois has 33 associations of local Southern
Baptist Churches. While most had full-time staff leaders as recently as 15 years ago, today the majority are led by volunteer moderators and Associational Mission Strategists. IBSA Zone Consultants also serve 10 regions across the state.
As a pastor in Missouri and Iowa, Endel said he was leading smaller congregations that did not have the time, patience, or affinity to do much in the way of strategic planning. Endel had an academic background in financial and business management but was called to ministry soon after completing his MBA. So, he led his churches to plan and set goals. But he found most Christian books on strategy planning were too difficult to use in small church settings.
“What I discovered frustrated me,” Endel said. “There were very few processes available. The ones I found were so detailed and tedious that they would have baffled a Fortune 500 company. Fifty pages into one book, I wrote in the margin, ‘I don’t know a single pastor who would do this.’”
After moving to lead the Minnesota-Wisconsin convention, he put together a simple process to help churches take stock of their ministry situation, gather input from leadership, and write two or maybe three goals.
This gets them started in planning in one three-hour session. They can revisit the process in succeeding years and continue the planning. This gets them out of the seven-day cycle of planning from Sunday- to-Sunday.
Associational leaders seemed to resonate with the presentation. There were sessions led by IBSA’s Scott Foshie to tweak the process for both churches and associations.
Tom Rains said, “In Bay Creek, we don’t do a lot of things but we do ‘some’ things. Our churches for the most part are about 95% active in doing things together. We see spiritual fruit in that. An example is our camp. We have six churches, most are very rural. But we had 80 kids at camp, and 15 campers made professions of faith.”
Rains said the churches are united and the pastors and wives are like family.
Cloyd said he believes the future of the local Baptist association is still bright, despite what some reports seem to indicate. He said it appears the trend is for associations to mostly employ part-time or bivocational association strategists. Illinois Baptist leaders were pointing out that there are only six full time associational strategists currently employed in Illinois. Most associations now have combination positions with pastors who also serve as associational leaders.
Cloyd believes associations that employ part time AMS leaders are forced to do so because of financial constraints. He said the AMS has to develop strong relationships with pastors and have connections with church leaders.
“I sense that any revival or renewal in the life of the association has to start from the ground up as a grass roots movement,” Cloyd said. “I do not think there is much you can do to shape that from above. There is a real danger that efforts from above to shape the movement would kill it because the people and structures on the top are so accustomed to the way things are that they try to fit the new movement into the old paradigm.”
Endel told the group that an AMS or a state convention leader in a small state has to be a “generalist.” He called himself a “jack of all trades” in his ministry setting. In their convention, they only have a few state staff members and all their associations employ part time associational staff. He has to be able to consult and train in many arenas of ministry. He doesn’t see that changing in the SBC setting.
“The key thing is close connectivity. As an AMS you are in a position that no state or national level leader can get as close to the local church,” Endel said. “You know the names of the pastors and the church leaders.”
As the association leaders left Springfield, they took back a renewed sense of cooperation and a tool or two to help them plan, do evangelism, care for pastors and lead their associations and churches into the future.
Richard Nations is associational mission strategist for the Sandy Creek Baptist Association.