10 years ago I was writing the Introduction to my PhD dissertation. Stumbled on it this morning. I’m amazed how God has directed our steps. Here’s the first paragraph of what I wrote….

The area of inquiry for this dissertation is organizational change and program implementation in churches as organizations. The researcher investigated how and why effective organizational change programs differ from ineffective or failed programs in the nonprofit sector. This was important because current literature indicates that only approximately one third of organizational change initiatives succeed (e.g., Beer, 2003; Kotter, 1995; Miller, 2002; Senge, 1999). This appears to be the case without regard to sector, whether public, private, for profit, nonprofit, business, government, education, or health care (e.g., Strebel, 2000; Pluye, Potvin, & Denis, 2004; Yin, 1978). There is considerable literature that identifies implementation factors for organizational change programs. Current scholarly literature identifies at least nine major themes of organizational change: leadership, vision, people, planning, resources, execution, communication, resistance, and sustainability. Implementation factors for these nine themes will be explored in Chapter 2, “Literature Review.” An extensive literature on organizational change and program implementation exists; however a review of the literature reveals that factors for implementing organizational change programs in churches have been underinvestigated. Churches as organizations have not received much attention in management literature. The focus of this management research was to compare and contrast implementation factors in Protestant churches with effective men’s discipleship programs to churches with ineffective or failed programs. Implementation in this study refers to the entire process of program implementation as described in literature from initial implementation through sustainability (defined in Operational Definitions and explained further in Chapter 2: Literature Review). This chapter contains the problem statement, a background to the study, the nature of the study, the research questions and objectives, the purpose of the study, the conceptual framework, operational definitions, assumptions, limitations, scope and delimitations, and the significance of the study.

Until we reach every man…

Pat the PhD