Center the Mission. Adapt the Method.

When something works, it's tempting to preserve it. After all, if a program has helped congregations become more faithful to their calling, why change it?

That's a question our Learning & Innovation team found ourselves asking as we prepared to launch the first bilingual cohort of Courageous Congregations Collaborate (C3).

For nearly five years, C3 has accompanied congregations as they practice discernment, adaptive leadership, and neighborhood-centered ministry. When we decided we wanted to offer a bilingual cohort, we could have just translated the participant materials into Spanish and called it good.

Instead, our facilitators spent nearly a year asking a different question:

How does this experience need to change so congregations can fully participate in the language, culture, and rhythms of their own community?

The answer was more than translation.

It meant adapting the pacing. The practices. The conversations. The way the cohort learned together.

In other words, we changed the method in order to remain faithful to the mission.

That may be one of the most important leadership lessons for the church today.

Too often we confuse methods with mission. We hold tightly to the way we've always done something because, at one time, it served God's purposes well.

But faithfulness doesn't require us to preserve every method.

It asks us to remain rooted in the mission while being willing to adapt the path that gets us there.

Watching four San Antonio-area congregations experience this bilingual C3 journey reminded us that adaptation that keeps us faithful to the mission is a sign of love.

When we're willing to change how we do ministry so that more people can fully participate, we aren't abandoning our mission.

We're embodying it.

Perhaps that's a question worth asking in every congregation:

Are we centering the mission — or just the methods we've grown comfortable with?

Courageous Congregations Collaborate (C3) is a Learning & Innovation initiative of Texas Methodist Foundation and Wesleyan Impact Partners. Thanks to a new Lilly Endowment scaling grant, C3 is expanding its work over the next five years, including new bilingual and BIPOC cohorts that help congregations practice discernment, adaptive leadership, and faithful engagement with their neighborhoods.

Learn more at: courageouscongregationscollaborate.org.