How to Do Hybrid Church - Part 2

Find Where You Are, Then Move Toward the Middle, Pt. 2 of 4

This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4

Once you’ve gone back to your roots and re-centered your team around your mission, you’re ready to take on step 2…

2. Define the outcomes that would indicate you’ve fulfilled your mission.

How will you achieve your mission? When your mission is accomplished, what will that look like? If you didn’t know, YouVersion is a digital ministry of Life.Church. Here’s Life.Church’s mission statement:

“To lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ.”

Concise, direct, focused. It’s essentially a part of the Great Commission, just restated in more modern language:

“…go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded…”

‍MATTHEW 28:18-20

Both of these are clear and easy to understand. But neither one addresses the specifics.

That’s where God wants each of us to apply the gifts that He gave us.

At Life.Church, we believe that spiritual growth and transformation happen in the context of four main areas: serving, participating in small groups, giving, and consistent attendance. Obviously, “becoming a fully devoted follower of Christ” will require that a person engages in more than just these four things. These aren’t everything; they’re simply on-ramps we use to direct people toward a more powerful, but broader long-term objective: getting people in the habit of taking “next steps” on their faith journey.

There’s no tangible way we can measure whether a person is getting into that habit of taking next steps. But Serving, Community, Generosity, and Consistent Attendance are outcomes that we can measure. And, more importantly, when we look at all four together, they’re clear indicators that a person is actually moving in the direction of “becoming a fully devoted follower of Christ.”

If you begin with your mission, and then define your desired outcomes…

‍You can more easily identify practical experiences you can structure to lead people toward the outcomes you want.

Let’s say you start teaching on what the Bible says about giving. Then, a little at a time, you can tell that people are starting to “get it,” that they’re beginning to truly understand generosity. It would be a natural next step—both for them and for you—to create systems that will help them start putting biblical giving into practice.

Unfortunately, a win like this might lead you to think:

How can we re-create that same thing online?

When Life.Church started doing church online in 2006, that was our mindset. We treated our online experience just like a campus, trying to make it as similar to our physical campuses as we could. That was a mistake.

This line of thinking creates two of everything:

Two staff teams—one for physical, one for online.

Two lists of outcomes—one for physical, one for online.

And two budgets—one for physical, one for online.

How do we prevent that? We’ll talk about how in Part 3.

This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4

YouVersion for Churches is developing tools and resources to help you lead and minister in an increasingly Hybrid world.