Context for discernment.
A strategic discernment process for leadership teams at churches, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations.
Why This Process
Before your team sets direction, you need clarity on three things — and most organizations skip at least one.
Not aspirations — an honest diagnostic of mission clarity, organizational health, leadership capacity, and the real tensions your team carries.
Strategy without discernment is just planning. You need a structured way to listen together — individually and collectively — before the system generates anything.
Five interlocking strategic choices that must be coherent with each other and with your calling. If one contradicts another, the strategy is broken.
The Process
Each stage builds on the last. Prayerful discernment, listening and reflection is woven throughout. This is a Spirit-attentive, human-led process. AI provides assistance with structure, prompts and synthesis. The wisdom and discernment always comes from people.
Strategic Intake
Honest diagnostic of where you stand: mission clarity, health, tensions, succession risk.
Facilitated Discernment
Your team listens together. Pre-work synthesis, work modules, Selah prayer pauses, and a Threshold before any AI output.
Strategy Formation
Five interlocking choices — from Calling to Sustaining Structures. Built from your discernment, not from a template.
Ongoing Intelligence
Your landscape monitored continuously: community shifts, funding, cultural signals, news and trends — connected to your open decisions.
The Cascade
Adapted from Roger Martin's strategy choice cascade, reinterpreted for the nuance, mission and calling of organizations grounded in faith. Each choice constrains the others — which is the point. The cascade must hold in both directions.
What does faithfulness look like for us?
Who and where, specifically?
How do we serve unlike others?
What must we actually be able to do?
What systems hold this together?
The greatest strategic threat to a church is not opposition — it is distraction. Good-hearted people see opportunities to help and let their scope broaden, doing more because they can, not because it strengthens what they are called to do. A strategy protects calling from the tyranny of the good.
Your Guide
Founder & Principal · First Domino LLC
A career built at the intersection of marketplace innovation and Kingdom mission. Investigating new ways for faith-based organizations to benefit from the same tools and rigor as the most innovative companies in the world.
Early career in youth and neighborhood ministry at a large church — working with students, families, and the overlooked parts of a community.
Missions Director and YWAM graduate — many years in cross-cultural outreach and discipleship.
Co-founded international 501(c)(3) providing aid and development to sub-Saharan Africa.
Understands how churches and ministries actually make decisions: the tensions between faithfulness and pragmatism, boards and vision, calling and capacity.
Director of Innovation at Newell Brands — led insights, ideation and innovation across global consumer brands.
NewNorth Center for Design in Business — Innovation methods practitioner and facilitator, teaching design strategy and innovation to C-suite leaders.
Founder of First Domino — a consulting practice helping leadership teams build strategy, unlock growth, and think differently about the problems in front of them.
Wayfinder is accepting a limited number of organizations for an early, facilitated beta experience. If your leadership team is ready for honest strategic discernment, we'd like to hear from you.