The Shepherd’s Path Volume Two
The Shepherd’s Path to Church Strategy
How Jesus Planned His Ministry and How Your Church Can Do the Same
You know where the church is supposed to end up. What you cannot describe, in order, is how it gets there from this Sunday. That is why the same three initiatives keep starting, stalling and quietly disappearing. Planning deploys the resources you already have. Strategy charts a course backward from the future God showed you. Most churches only ever do the first, then cannot work out why they arrive nowhere.
- FrameworkThe Nine Passes
- StatusIn development · outline stage
- Written forPastors and church leaders
- IncludesTeam exercises throughout — it works as a team devotional
- ReadsStandalone · follows Vision in the series order
Not yet published. The list hears first.
The Problem
Why the plan stalls
This book is at outline stage, so the chapter numbers are not fixed yet. The problems it is being written to answer are.
Your Strategic Plan Is Next Year’s Budget With A Mission Statement Stapled To The Front.
A plan starts from what you have. A strategy starts from where you are going and works out what must be true along the way. They produce different decisions about money, staffing and order.
The Board Keeps Revisiting The Same Decision.
Recurring decisions are almost always a sequencing failure rather than a disagreement. Something earlier was never crossed.
You Can Name The Destination And Not The Route.
The gap between a fixed destination and this Sunday is the entire subject of the book.
Three Initiatives Are Running And None Are Finished.
Strategy is sequential and does not parallelise. A flock does not cross three passes at once; it stalls in front of all of them.
The framework is The Nine Passes. A pass is the one gap in a ridge low enough to cross, and they are taken in order, one at a time.
What This Book Argues
- The distinction that makes the rest of it work: church strategic planning deploys what you have, while strategy works backward from where God told you to go. Most churches only ever do the first and wonder why they arrive nowhere.
- The Nine Passes, the framework the book is built on. A pass is the gap in a ridge, the one place it drops low enough to cross. A flock cannot go over a mountain. It goes through the pass, or it does not go.
- How to identify which pass your church is actually standing in front of, instead of the one you would prefer to be solving.
- Why strategy is sequential and cannot be parallelised, and what happens to congregations that try to cross three passes at once.
- How Jesus planned a ministry with a fixed endpoint and a hard deadline: what he did first, what he deferred, and what he declined outright.
Who This Is For
- Pastors Who Have A Vision And No Route
- You know where the church is meant to end up. The gap between here and there is what this book is about.
- Leaders Whose Plan Is Really A Budget
- If your strategic plan can be summarised as next year’s spending plus a hiring decision, it is a plan and not a strategy.
- Boards That Keep Revisiting The Same Decision
- Revisiting usually means the sequence was wrong, not the decision. The passes framework is about order.
Not For: readers who have not settled the destination yet. Strategy is the route; Book One is where the destination gets fixed.
