It’s easy to get so busy doing ministry that you don’t take the time to evaluate your ministry.
But evaluation is how you get better.
It’s like your annual physical. No one wants to get a check-up, blood work, and maybe a test or two, but that’s how you learn what you need to know.
Then, of course, you need to act on what you learn.
The 4-point plan to get better:
- Ask the right questions.
- Give honest answers in a group process.
- Determine the best-prioritized plan for improvement.
- Take action.
It starts with asking the right questions.
8 good questions that will help your ministry get better:
1) How is the unique culture of your church helping you make progress?
Sam Chand wrote an excellent book titled Breaking Your Church’s Culture Code. He states that more than vision, programs, money, or staff, culture has the greatest impact on your church’s future.
How would you describe your culture? Is it what you want? Is your church culture helping or hurting as you pursue God’s purpose for your church? What changes do you need to make? If the culture is healthy, what practices are in place to stay healthy?
2) How would you describe the overall morale of your church?
Are the people happy with your church? That question seems very subjective but is surprisingly easy to answer.
Do they trust the leadership? Are they fired-up about the mission? Are they passionate about following Jesus? Is there momentum? Are problems solved with relative ease (without significant resistance? You get the idea.
Morale and culture are closely linked. If you are struggling and the culture and morale are not ideal, I urge you to pour your leadership energy there first.
3) What is your approach to spiritual formation in your church?
Is there an overall sense that people are pursuing God? It’s not about perfection, but do you see progress? What factors do you consider important to help assess spiritual maturity?
Consider things like prayer, serving others, obedience, and financial generosity. How about the fruit of the Spirit like love, joy, and peace, etc.?
Do you utilize small groups? How is community developed? What priority does biblical truth hold? A great overall approach to assess spiritual growth is to gather stories of life change.
4) Are you developing new leaders?
Next to the favor of God, everything rises and falls on leadership. Do the leaders in your church demonstrate a strong spiritual depth and a servant’s heart? What is your plan to find and develop new and better leaders? You will not realize your potential as a church without a serious dedication to this process.
Here’s a great plan to start with.
5) How would you describe the strength of your volunteer teams?
Are your volunteers part of vibrant and productive teams or a struggling band of survivors? Much of that depends on how you select, train, encourage and empower your volunteers. Do you recruit to a vision or just to get a task done?
All churches face the pressure of needing people to volunteer to serve, but how you build teams makes a significant difference. How would you rate the overall esprit de corps of your volunteer ministries? What is the first best step to strengthen your teams?
6) What are the financial indicators telling you?
It is relatively easy to measure results when it comes to money. The weekly offering defines reality. At the same time, one of the largest challenges a leader will ever face is successfully inspiring the people to trust God with their finances and remain faithful to generous giving.
Are you bold in your teaching of God’s truth about money? Do you offer practical training about money management? Do you personally model generosity? Where are you stronger regarding money, faith or practice?
7) Are you on mission?
You must first be clear about the purpose of your church. What is your mission/vision – exactly? Does your congregation have a good sense of what it is? Are you acting on that mission?
It’s essential that your leaders become and remain aligned together in that mission. It will always feel like you are swimming upstream if you are not headed in the same direction.
8) Do your people enthusiastically invite others to your worship services?
I have coached churches where the people had obviously lukewarm feelings about the worship service. They were not motivated to invite someone even if they had a friend they wanted to bring.
It’s not always the worship service, but it starts there. Is there anything about your church that would cause your congregation to pause about inviting their friends?
This is a huge evangelistic combination. If your people are committed to the vision enough to invite people to church, and your worship experience (from nursery to invitation) is worth inviting people to – that is the combination you work toward!
I trust these questions will be helpful to you and the health of your church.
I pray God’s wisdom for your leadership and His favor upon you!
Many years ago I was hired by a company to turn one of their branches around. It had been losing money for five years. Within the first few days I interviewed every person individually. In about two weeks the company was brought even and in less than one year we had increased production and sales by 3.2 times. It all started with the people. During that time people would hang around to see how well we did for that day. One of the men began charting the daily sales. People began to do things to help the business become better. Just a few months after I started the company offered me a huge pay raise. That same week I was approached by an employee about that issue. When I told him that I requested it go to the employees he doubted that. Then when I told him that I would be happy to show him my pay stubs that ended any doubt of how much I cared for them. That year we became the fastest growing branch in the nation by a huge margin. During that time we did not have any more employees. It is the people who are more interested in success than we give them credit for.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Am blessed by this teaching. thanks very much
You are most welcome!
Would be interested to see how our leadership at 12Stone would answer all of these questions for our church.
Hi Jim, not sure what you mean here, but sounds intriguing!