Accurately Evaluating Your Ministries - November 3rd, 2008
Now is the time when many churches and church leaders evaluate the year to date and discuss ministry needs and goals for the future. A growing trend in churches is to simplify their ministry offerings using the mantra, “Less is more.”
When this chant begins to gain momentum, the conversation typically results in discussing the various ministries a church offers and inevitably someone asks the wrong question: What ministry or ministries can we eliminate without any significant negative feedback from the congregation so that we aren’t doing so much?
This question misses the mark in many ways. The starting point in the discussion should not be centered on ministries we aren’t particularly fond of or ministries with a small number of participants or ministries that can be eliminated without negative feedback.
The right questions to ask when evaluating your church and its ministries are:
- What are the measures of success at our church?
- What marks of discipleship are we aiming to produce in each Christ-follower at our church?
To answer these questions honestly and completely it will require some concentrated effort and time. If you rush through these questions you will never know which ministries should be stopped or started to achieve your ministry goals.
Once you have answered these first two questions, the logical follow-up question is: What ministries need to be in existence at our church to realize the results we want?
To answer this question you must evaluate and filter every current ministry—its purpose and results—based on your measures of success and marks of discipleship. Doing so will effectively clarify which existing ministries at your church need to be stopped and which new ministries need to be started.
Ministries should be viewed as strategies that enable your church to accomplish its goals. Too often, church leaders get the order reversed. Ministries drift from being strategies that accomplish a goal to becoming the goal themselves. Tragically in some circumstances a ministry can even shift from being the goal to being a god that is worshiped and becomes sacred—the ministry you better not mess with as a church leader.
Every ministry in the church should serve as a strategy to accomplish the goal of making and/or building disciples in the church and if it doesn’t, then it should be eliminated.
As you chart your church’s course for the future, slow down long enough to review and evaluate your mission and vision to determine if they still reflect the direction your church needs to go. Then once they are reaffirmed, determine the ministries that will best create the momentum and traction necessary to leverage the life change that results in discipleship.