Ministry Evaluation + Planning - October 31st, 2008

It is time to start developing your ministry plans for next year. One often forgotten, but key element in planning is evaluation. Spend time with your team reviewing your ministry events year to date and identify the “wins” you have experienced. In addition to the wins, examine the losses and determine what changes or adjustments could have been made to have avoided the problems.

Constructive evaluation is probably one of the most challenging aspects of ministry because so many church leaders and volunteers suffer from terminal politeness and are afraid to honestly share their thoughts and opinions. The result is an absence of both the trust and healthy conflict necessary to generate new thinking.

Too often in ministry, we shoot first and then draw the bull’s eye around our shot and declare the shot a success. To move from subjective evaluation to objective analysis that produces results, we need to establish our targets in advance.

When we evaluate our church and its ministries, we need to measure what matters, not just what’s easy to count. Aldous Huxley said, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Too many realities are ignored in the church during meetings and then talked about privately after the meeting which creates an unhealthy and unproductive environment.

Once you have evaluated your ministry progress, spend some time with your leadership team dreaming about future possibilities. To enhance the dreaming process, institute some “thinking rules” for your group. The first thinking rule is to dream as many ideas as you can for your organization as a whole and for specific areas or departments within the organization. At this stage, your goal should be to produce a large quantity of ideas. Don’t worry about the quality of the ideas now. Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

In their book The Flight of the Buffalo, Belasco and Stayer write, “Thinking incrementally is an American disease.” The second thinking rule is to consider how you will get where you want to be by managing backward from the future and not forward from the past. Stephen Covey wisely reminds us to “begin with the end in mind.”

The third thinking rule is to put up an “umbrella of mercy.” Suspend judgment, comments or criticism of ideas to produce an environment conducive to creativity and innovative thinking. You will evaluate the ideas later, not now.

Once you have evaluated your ministry and laid the framework for fresh thinking, consider your “target personas” that you are trying to connect to your church and ministries. Answer this fundamental question: How can we connect with our target groups in a way that is consistent with our mission?

To answer this question, you will need to consider the following issues:

• Who are our targeted personas?
• What are the needs of these groups of people?
• How do they want to connect?
• When do they want to connect?
• Where do they want to connect?
• Why do they want these elements?
• What are their motivations?
• What are their unmet needs?

Your evaluation process and honest answers will establish an effective framework for developing your ministry plans (your goals, strategies and action tasks) for the coming year.