Nine M's

Curriculum administration studio

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Pastor Lee ReviewPreview printed effect

Nine M curriculum version 1.0. Wording prepared by Allan Bell - CPA, CMA, MBA, and the Nsites team. Nine M methodology, content, exercises and deliverables by Pastor Lee Jenkins.

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One place where the curriculum itself is owned, revised and released.

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The Nine M curriculum is stored as structured content, not fixed page copy. Pastor Lee Jenkins or an authorized administrator edits lesson wording, Scripture framing, exercises, worksheets, evidence requirements, rubrics and scoring here — no developer and no rebuild.

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Work moves through review states from draft to approved and published, with version history and an audit trail of who changed what. Publishing freezes a version so workbooks already issued to churches never change underneath them.

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Current version 1.0, last edited by Curriculum administrator (demo). Only Pastor Lee Jenkins or an authorized administrator may move a version to Approved or Published.

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Welcome the team and let them know this session asks a deceptively simple question: why does this church exist. Explain that most churches can answer a version of that question quickly, but the answer they give is usually true of every church in the country and does not actually help anyone make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon. Today's goal is to separate three things that get blended together constantly: the universal purpose every church shares, the distinctive local mission this specific congregation is called to, and the long list of activities the church currently runs. Tell the room plainly that confusing these three is not a moral failure, it is the default condition of almost every church, and today is about naming the difference on paper.

Ask leaders to resist the urge to reach for polished language right away. The most honest first draft of a mission conversation is often a little messy, and that is fine. What matters this session is getting real answers on paper before the group starts negotiating a shared sentence.

Name at the outset that this session sets the trajectory for the entire Mission module and, in fact, for how every future stewardship, staffing and ministry conversation in this program will be evaluated. If this room cannot name today what the church actually exists to do in its specific context, later modules addressing giving, staffing and communications will inherit that same fog and multiply it. Encourage leaders to treat the next seventy-five minutes as foundational work rather than a preliminary formality to move past quickly.

Introduce the first distinction: universal purpose. Every Christian church, regardless of size, location or tradition, shares the call to worship God, make disciples, and love neighbor. That is true and it is worth saying, but it is not distinctive information. If a mission statement could be printed on the sign of any church in the country, it has not yet done the work of local mission.

Local mission narrows that universal purpose to the specific expression this church is called to live out, in this place, with these people, given this church's particular history and gifts. A church in a fast-growing suburb with many young families will likely express the same universal purpose very differently than a small rural congregation surrounded by retirees and multigenerational farms. Walk the room through two or three quick contrasting examples, then ask each leader, silently and in writing, to draft one sentence describing what they believe this church's local mission actually is, before anyone speaks aloud.

Give the room a diagnostic test they can reuse going forward: read any draft mission sentence and ask whether removing the church's name and neighborhood would change anything about how it reads. If the sentence survives that removal untouched, it has stayed at the level of universal purpose and has not yet done the harder work of naming this congregation's particular calling. Hold every future draft, including the one produced today, to that same simple test.

The second distinction is between mission and activities. An activity list is everything the church currently does: the Sunday services, the youth group, the food pantry, the men's breakfast, the annual mission trip. Activities are not the mission; they are, at best, expressions of it, and at worst they are inherited habits nobody has evaluated in years. Ask the group to name, out loud, five to eight current ministry activities and write them on a visible list. Then ask a harder question: for each activity, can we explain in one sentence how it serves the mission we just drafted? Do not let the room rush past activities that get an awkward pause or a shrug. Note those honestly; they are valuable data, not embarrassments.

This is often the moment leadership realizes some long-running ministries exist because they always have, not because they serve a clearly named mission. Naming that gap out loud, without assigning blame, is real progress and should be treated as such.

Encourage leadership to notice a second, subtler pattern alongside orphaned activities: ministries that technically connect to the mission but consume a wildly disproportionate share of volunteer hours, calendar space or budget relative to how central they actually are to the calling just named. An activity does not have to be purposeless to be a problem; sometimes the issue is not whether it belongs but how much of the church's limited attention it is quietly absorbing compared to everything else competing for the same resources.

Now introduce the core exercise of the session: seven Mission Clarity questions each leader will answer independently, without conferring, before the group compares notes. The questions probe why the church exists, whom it serves, what makes its approach distinctive, what would be lost if it closed its doors, what its current activities actually accomplish, where leadership disagrees today, and what one sentence best captures its calling. Independent answers matter here because group discussion too easily produces polite consensus that papers over real disagreement. The Leadership Alignment Map this exercise produces is only useful if it reflects what leaders actually believe, not what they think they are supposed to say in the room.

Walk through why the specific ordering of the seven questions matters. Beginning with why the church exists before asking whom it serves keeps leaders anchored in calling before drifting into logistics. Ending with the one-sentence synthesis question forces each leader to compress everything they just wrestled with into language simple enough to say out loud to a stranger. Remind the room that a leader who cannot compress their answer into one sentence has usually not yet finished thinking, and that struggle is useful information in itself, not a failure to be embarrassed about.

Before moving into discussion, take a few minutes to name plainly what staying vague actually costs a congregation over time. Vague mission language does not stay neutral; it quietly shifts decision-making authority to whoever is loudest or most persistent in a given budget or staffing conversation, because there is no shared standard anyone can appeal to instead. Volunteers serving in ministries no one can clearly justify tend to burn out faster, sensing correctly that their effort is not connected to anything the whole church has agreed matters most.

Staying vague also makes it nearly impossible to say a faithful, confident no to a well-intentioned new idea, because without a specific mission to weigh it against, every proposal sounds equally plausible. Leadership teams that skip this kind of clarifying work often find themselves approving new ministries out of guilt or social pressure rather than conviction, and then lack the shared language to retire ministries later even after everyone privately senses they no longer serve the church well.

Once every leader has completed the seven questions independently, bring the group back together and begin comparing answers question by question, starting with where the room agrees. Agreement is worth celebrating and recording. Then move deliberately into the places where answers diverge, and resist the instinct to smooth these over quickly. Ask leaders to explain their reasoning rather than simply restate their answer more firmly. The goal of this discussion is not to force a single sentence today; it is to see clearly, and record honestly, where the team's understanding of the mission currently lines up and where real work remains.

Close this discussion by asking each leader to name, out loud, one assumption about the mission they walked in holding that the exercise just complicated or overturned. This is not about assigning correctness to any single leader's original answer; it is about making the room's collective learning visible and shared, so that the humility required to revise long-held assumptions becomes normal practice rather than something leaders quietly work through alone.

Exercise / workshopRequired evidenceFacilitator notesDiscussion prompts (one per line)

Suggested minutes

Optional video fields remain disabled for this build. Text lessons are the complete teaching medium.

Scoring-rule editor

Dimension names, weights and red/yellow/green thresholds.

Dimension	Weight	Current rating

Red belowYellow belowGreen at or above

Version history

Draft preview and rollback.

0.9.0-draft2026-09-16
Seeded all nine modules, lessons, exercises and rubrics.
Curriculum administrator
0.8.4-draft2026-09-08
Revised Money Lesson 2 wording on pastoral sensitivity.
Coach — Pastor Lee Jenkins
0.8.1-draft2026-08-29
Added Leadership Alignment 80% threshold to Mission.
Curriculum administrator

Audit trail

2026-09-16 14:22 · Curriculum administrator — Changed Mission Lesson 3 exercise wording.
2026-09-16 14:05 · Curriculum administrator — Set status to Pastor Lee Review.
2026-09-15 09:31 · Coach — Pastor Lee Jenkins — Added coaching cue to Magnification Lesson 2.