Why a Better Strategy Won't Fix What's Actually Wrong With Your Team
by Doug Parks
I'll be honest — when Bart and I started Intentional Churches, we thought the problem was strategy. Churches were stuck, and we were convinced that better planning, clearer vision, and sharper execution were what they needed. That's what we set out to help them build.
What we found when we got in the room with teams was something different.
The strategy usually wasn't the problem. Most of the churches we sat down with already had a plan. A good one, sometimes a really good one. And it still wasn't working. What kept showing up underneath all of it was that the team around the strategy wasn't aligned. Not because the people were uncommitted — most of them loved Jesus and loved their church — but because they were working from different understandings of what the vision actually meant.
The statement they all voted on six months ago meant three different things to three different staff members, and nobody knew it because nobody had asked.
You can usually feel it before you can name it. Meetings that take longer than they should. Decisions that keep getting revisited. Ministry areas that quietly operate like separate organizations with their own priorities and budgets. A general sense that the team is working hard but not quite together. That's not a strategy problem. That's what misalignment feels like.
The thing that changed how I work with churches is this: you can't lead your team into alignment — not by vision-casting, not by a better org chart, not by another off-site. Alignment has to be discovered together. The team has to sit down, look honestly at where they are, and name what they see. That conversation — the one where a leader finds out his team defines the mission differently than he does — is the one that actually moves something.
If you want a starting place, try this. Pick two or three phrases your team uses constantly — the vision statement, a core value, whatever language your church runs on — and ask each person to write down what it means in their own words before anyone speaks. Then go around the room and have each person read what they wrote. Before they do, tell the team: "We're not here to judge right or wrong, we're just listening for the gaps. The gaps between our definitions are where alignment is leaking."
If you want a more structured way to do that work, the Radical Alignment Assessment (alignmychurch.com) gives your team a common framework to rate where you actually are — together — before you talk about where you're going.