Roxburgh Missional Network

The Six Challenges Matrix is a powerful diagnostic tool for judicatories.  It provides them with the   ability to assess where each of the churches in their system find themselves relative to a specific set of challenges.  This diagnostic assessment provides judicatory leaders with the ability to determine the kinds of actions and responses that best fit a particular church right now. 

The assumption behind the Six Challenges Matrix is that the cultivation of fresh expressions in missional life in a local church needs to begin where they are rather than where we want them to be.  The Six Challenge Matrix gives you the capacity to assist every local church name where it finds itself and, thereby, identifying the places where each can begin with actions that initiate transformation.

Each church will have set of challenges it has to address to move to the next level of missional innovation.  The various permutations and combinations of challenges any organization faces can be placed inside this matrix of six challenges.  The way these six challenges manifest themselves is unique in each local church.  What the Matrix does is give you a tool that shows how the people of a church identify their challenge at this moment and then a way in which they can begin to determine the next steps they can take to address the particular type of challenge they face.  As a judicatory leader the Matrix provides you with a way of inviting a local church to reflect on its own life and initiate simple steps in transformation

The Six Challenges

In our experience the challenges a local church needs to address can be placed into six categories or types.  These types describe the primary source of energy in a church at this moment in time thereby assisting you to determine the best place to begin a transformation strategy that has the best chance of success for a specific church.  

The Six challenge types are:

1. Developmental: A local church can begin a transformation journey if some of its latent abilities and skills can be mobilized in fresh ways.  The church is leveraged toward missional transformation when people have success making latent abilities work.
2. Activist: People won't face something that would enable change if addressed.  Specific actions are needed to provoke people to reconsider or modify their assumptions, values and priorities in order to embrace the reality before them.  This involves risk for the leader since there may be more resistance.
3. Transitional: For transformation to begin or move to a new level the church must transition from some current to a new set of values.
4. Maintenance: Improving latent abilities wont create transformation.  There are conflict issues, pastoral transition, lack of resources, or resistance to change from gatekeepers.  The challenge is to identify maintenance steps that ensure resources and values while current threats are dealt with.
5. Creative: A series of events in the church present an usual opportunity to break out of routines for a period of time to do something out of the box (a project) that it has never done before.
6. Crisis: The church faces a potentially explosive situation that could threaten its life or some part of its current life.  The situation is serious and time-critical.  People are anxious, confused and vulnerable.  The leader assists the church work in unresolved challenges that might move it toward transformation.

The Six Challenge Executive Report

The Six Challenge Matrix is designed to provide a denominational executive with a comprehensive picture of where each church identifies itself across the spectrum of these six challenges.  Every church is different so there is no one-size-fits all program or silver bullet that will connect with every church.  The shape transformation specific to each.  The process works as follows:

• Members of the churches in the system are invited to complete the questionnaire for their church.
• A comprehensive Report is created for the Executive that is a snap shot of their overall system in terms of the six challenge types. This report is a compilation of how all the churches that participated in the Questionnaire located themselves relative to their primary challenge.  The Report assists you to then identify you to customize a process of innovation within each church that engages them where they are.

What the Six Challenge Matrix Provides you:

• The ability to empower a local church to own the challenges it must address and name its own experience
• The capacity to listen to the people of a local church and begin where they find themselves at this point.
• Provide you with the ability to know where and how to engage a local church in transformation.
• A snapshot of the primary areas of challenge and energy across the whole system. This provides you with the means of assessing where your limited time and resources need to be directed.
• A tool for training teams of coaches and mentors within your system that serve the churches in transformation.
• Make transformation the work of the people rather than a response to some external program

To learn more about the Six Challenges Matrix tool, please feel free to contact us.