“Missions and Momentum”

This chapter engages founders—aspiring, new, and seasoned—in a simple question: “In a city full of churches, why did we need yours? What’s your product?” Their varied answers to this question fall into three broad frameworks that characterize their assertions about their public benefit and their orientations toward their consumers. Those orientations—client-centeredness, comrade-centeredness, and convert-centeredness—serve as ideal cases for what they claim drives (or in older congregations drove) their belief that they could meet latent demands in their communities. The penultimate section of this chapter describes the difficulty founders have maintaining the vision and values they started their church with, a difficulty exacerbated by the religious ecologies their churches are embedded in and the changing priorities of their spiritually and materially maturing memberships. Like their secular nonprofit peers, churches are vulnerable to mission drift, vision hijacks, and vision stalls.