Our Services

Mission and Values Alignment is essential for effective governance, ensuring that your church or Christian ministry is clear about its purpose and intentional in its actions. A well-defined mission and core values guide decision-making, shape strategy, and provide a framework for accountability. Heather Card, with her extensive experience in ministry leadership and governance, can facilitate a conversation with your board using five key questions to clarify your mission, reinforce your values, and bring alignment to your leadership. This process provides clarity and focus, helping your ministry move forward with purpose and unity.

Key benefits

Clarify Purpose and Direction

Heather will guide your board through reflective questions that help sharpen and clarify your ministry’s mission, ensuring that everyone is unified in understanding why you exist and what your ultimate goals are.

Increase Organizational Focus

By revisiting and refining your mission and values, your board will be better equipped to prioritize initiatives that are truly aligned with your purpose, avoiding distractions or mission drift.

Facilitate Healthy Conversations

Heather’s facilitation creates a space for open, respectful dialogue among board members, helping to resolve any differences and build consensus on the most important priorities for the ministry’s future.

This service is a crucial process that helps your church or Christian ministry reflect on how effectively you are accomplishing your mission. Rather than relying solely on traditional quantitative metrics, Heather Card facilitates thoughtful, in-depth discussions that lead to the development of key indicators, and a customized monitoring process that truly reflects your ministry's unique context and goals.

Key benefits

Holistic Assessment

Heather helps you move beyond numbers, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative measures to assess how well your ministry is fulfilling its mission.

Tailored Evaluation Criteria

By understanding your specific ministry context, Heather ensures that the evaluation criteria and indicators are relevant and aligned with your goals.

Enhanced Accountability

A clear evaluation process creates accountability, ensuring that your ministry remains focused on its mission and can adjust when necessary.

“I have personally appreciated Heather’s coaching related to how a CEO and her board “Move Mission Forward”, and what that practically looks like in a social profit enterprise.”

—Heather Janes, CEO Christie Gardens

We collaborate with your ministry leaders and board to create a customized board manual tailored to your church or organization. These manuals establish clear governance processes, define boundaries and limitations on executive authority, and implement intentional monitoring frameworks to promote accountability.

To ensure the manual is practical and effective, we also provide training for smooth implementation. With experience creating policy manuals for both large national ministries and smaller churches, we are confident in our ability to deliver a solution that fits your unique needs.

Key benefits

Clear Governance

Establishes well-defined roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes to enhance the board’s function.

Staff Empowerment

Sets clear expectations and reporting structures, enabling senior staff to lead with confidence.

Risk Management

Ensures key areas of ministry risk are addressed and that appropriate reporting and monitoring are in place.

Intentional Monitoring

Implements systematic review processes for mission progress, performance reviews, and board self-evaluation to enhance ministry performance.

At Five Smooth Stones, we help churches and ministries craft clear, actionable strategic plans that align with their mission, values, and unique context. Whether planning for growth, navigating change, or refocusing efforts, our collaborative approach equips your organization with a roadmap for sustainable impact and faithful ministry.

Our Process

Our approach begins by clarifying your mission, values, and priorities, ensuring they anchor every decision. We then assess your organization’s strengths, development areas, and the broader environment in which you operate. Together, we explore potential strategies and outline key goals, considering both short- and long-term objectives. To ensure success, we develop an implementation plan with clear milestones, responsibilities, and resource allocation. Finally, we help establish a monitoring and evaluation framework to measure progress and impact, keeping your efforts mission-focused and adaptive to change.

Key benefits

Mission Alignment

Ensures your organization stays focused on its core purpose, aligning all efforts with shared values for greater impact.

Clarity and Focus

Provides a clear, actionable roadmap, streamlining decision-making and resource allocation while minimizing confusion and inefficiencies.

Strategic Mindset

Fosters a forward-thinking, strategic approach among both board members and staff, empowering your leadership team to anticipate needs and act proactively.

“Working with Heather on our organization's strategic plan was a delight. She was thorough, professional and provided many key insights during our sessions that were invaluable in our process. Her experience working with boards like ours was really evident and I would not hesitate to work with her again sometime in the future."

—David Bone, Board Member, Hope in the Dark

We design processes for boards to regularly evaluate their governance practices, identifying key areas for growth. We create reflection questions around board responsibilities including biblical character, stewardship of mission, relationship with senior leader, and governance best practices. Whether developing a survey or facilitating a session, our goal is to help you celebrate what you are doing well and identify areas for future board development.

Key benefits

Continuous Improvement

Promotes a culture of regular reflection and ongoing enhancement of governance practices.

Stronger Performance

Highlights strengths and provides actionable insights to address weaknesses, leading to improved governance.

Board Development Ideas

Ensures board activities remain focused on the ministry’s mission.

“Your guidance has been so helpful, and I believe you have not only propelled us further down the road but have also set us up for self-development on into the future. You used the word today that would easily sum up the outcome of our work together… CLARITY!!” 

—Matt Maxwell, Lead Pastor, Journey Church Fredericton

We work with boards and ministry leaders to design Christ-centered, respectful performance review processes with clear evaluation criteria. Our approach encompasses mission-related criteria and assess how boundaries or executive limitations have been honoured. Additionally, we include a regular review of compensation and self care to support leaders holistically.

Key benefits

Talent Retention

A healthy review process ensures senior leaders feel respected and valued, which improves talent retention.

Strengthens Relationships

Fosters trust between boards and senior leaders through transparent, respectful dialogue.

Mission Focus

Keeps leadership reviews centered on faithfulness in advancing mission progress.

We design and facilitate customized, creative sessions and retreats tailored to your ministry’s unique needs. Possible topics include identity, values, stakeholder mapping, empathy maps, strategy, developing mission progress indicators, risk assessment analysis, board renewal and succession planning, board rehearsals, and generative discussions.

Key benefits

Tailored Solutions

Addresses specific challenges or opportunities unique to your board.

Team Building

Enhances relationships and fosters a shared understanding within the leadership team.

Focused Outcomes

Provides a productive environment for strategic discussions.

We provide for board chairs, CEO’s, Executive Directors, and Lead Pastors equipping them with tools for effective governance leadership.

Key benefits

Confident Leadership

Builds skills and confidence for leading board meetings, developing the board, and tackling difficult issues.

Strong Relationships

Enhances collaboration with the board and senior leaders.

Better Decision-Making

Equips chairs and senior leaders with strategies to handle complex issues biblically and effectively.

“Heather’s commitment to understanding and serving my organization and its mission was so evident in her preparation, facilitation, and follow up for our board retreat.”

—Heather Janes, CEO, Christie Gardens