Momentum:
When you hear the word momentum what comes to mind? Excitement? Passion? Or maybe you’re like a lot of people and your mind goes straight to frustrations about why you can never seem to keep momentum going. The truth is, creating momentum is not an easy task, but once you get it, it’s worth the effort. We look at other churches and wonder why they have it and we don’t. The illustration of the flywheel and the loom explains it best for me. You crank the fly wheel over and over and over to raise the loom. It’s hard work and it takes enormous energy to crank the fly wheel in order to get the loom to rotate. But once the loom falls, the weight of the loom slings it around again, then again, until the loom is rotating very fast solely on the energy for gravity – THAT’S MOMENTUM. Once you get momentum going, it’s free energy that makes everything easier and more exciting. It’s speeds things up naturally. That’s how a propeller works.
We have all heard the statement, “Healthy things grow.” When the core of our church, volunteers and staff are healthy – it will unify us and ignite momentum. When people are in an atmosphere that is charged with expectation, we become a magnet that will attract people to experience God. When you think of magnets; they create a healthy tension that pulls the right things together and keeps polarized things apart. Momentum does the same thing for pulling people with the right vision together and keeping those who have opposite visions separated. It’s ALL in the environment we set from the time they pull onto our parking lot to the time they leave.
George Barna says, “An estimated 73 million adults are presently unchurched. When teens and children are added, the total swells to roughly 100 million Americans.”
Everyone wants to feel like they are apart of something great, something that’s moving forward and making a difference. When people feel momentum it propels them forward – it propels us forward! When guests are invited into our church we want them to experience God and can’t wait to come back the next week! That’s why it’s so important to have a team in place from the beginning of their experience to the end. Momentum is contagious and in the world we live in – people are looking for family, connection and something that makes them feel alive.
So what is momentum in the church? Simply put, it’s a series of small wins.
If a sports team wins several times in a row, they get fan momentum. So at church our teams have to win several times: the worship team, the hospitality team, the youth team, the creative team, the business team and so forth. These wins created an environment of anticipation. Several wins in a row creates a rhythm of expected winning.
There are ONLY 52 weeks in a year! When we commit ourselves to excellence each weekend and create quality programming for the weekdays, we create wins. We must pilot and strategize momentum! This is not to underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit to energize our efforts, but God expects us to do our best and He will do the rest.
