Over the last 10+ years of congregational ministry, I’ve seen the continued struggle for ministries and churches to achieve sustainable ministry success. We’ve seen it ourselves right here at Westover. A new idea gets thrown out that captures people’s interest and excitement. The ministry effort sees early success. Then weeks turn to months and the passage of time brings with it waning interest. Volunteer pools dry up, leaders begin to rotate out with no replacement on deck, and energy for the ministry begins to dry.
On one hand, this simply reflects the natural life cycle of ministry. No effort will last (nor should last) forever. On the other hand, more often than not, ministries simply face growing pains. When ignored, growing pains in ministry lead to a debilitated or even defunct endeavor. Any person involved group or ministry leadership needs to be aware that every endeavor will face seasons of growing pains. These seasons serve as our opportunity to mature into deeper ministry that keeps pace with the ongoing movement of God in our midst.
Today I’ll introduce three key practices that ministry leaders can use to assess the nature of these growing pains and build practices that will lead through these seasons in ways that bring about growth. Over the following three weeks, I’ll unpack each practice in detail to help you establish some practice to see your ministry take on a dynamic tone that fosters growth and adaptation as circumstances, needs, and resources develop.
Evaluate
Every ministry endeavor begins with a plan that sounds perfect…. until day 1. As soon as our ministries hit the ground, we become aware of imperfections, false assumption, process errors, resource scarcity, and a host of other factors which might make our initial plans seem ill-conceived. Let me assure you, those pre-launch plans are not ill-conceived. They just haven’t yet had the benefit of real-life evaluation.
For any ministry to achieve long-term success, regular habits of evaluation are necessary. Without this ongoing evaluation, ministries tend to trundle along, blind to the ways of being that limit success, burnout volunteers, or miss out on meeting the actual needs of those we try to serve.
When we hear the word “evaluate,” we often have visions of some formal process that includes people sitting around a table asking generic questions. What I hope you’ll be able to discover looks much more like active and open-ended conversation about ministry activity and impact. True and effective ministry evaluation demands genuine dialogue between those serving and those being served. It requires open ears, a willingness to entertain creative perspectives, and a commitment to hold very lightly to our previously held ministry designs.
Adapt
Evaluation for its own sake is a fruitless exercise. When we talk about ministry evaluation, we should assume that any look at what we do and how we do it will exist in a symbiotic relationship with a commitment to adaptation of ministry activity. Human nature seems to dictate an overly significant interest in and commitment to forms. Our default as people is to find a way to do a thing and then hold onto that way of doing a thing for all we’re worth. This is why we all still eat turkey for Thanksgiving even though no one actually likes it!
I’m a firm believer that a working plan now beats the perfect plan later. None of our ministries ever begin with a perfect plan, and our efforts of evaluation will not empower us to create perfect plans in the future. If we start with a workable plan, practice regular evaluation, and hold a commitment to adaptation, then we have the ability to continually craft our ministry efforts in ways that put us on a trajectory of continuous improvement.
The other piece of adaptation that requires our attention is the paradox of “canoeing the mountains.” In his book of the same title, Tod Bolsinger, recounts the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which began as a canoeing endeavor and was built on the assumption that the Missouri river would take them across the continent. Turns out, there’s a big ol’ mountain range in the way. For the expedition to find success, they had to abandon their old assumption, tools, knowledge, and skill in order to rapidly acquire a new way of thinking and operating. And this all had to be done on the fly. Bolsinger draws immediate and profound parallels to the contemporary ministry environment as we cope with a wildly changing cultural context.
Often times our “creative solutions” to ministry challenges are really in line with saying, “Well why don’t we try paddling on the left side instead of the right?” The work of adaptation will require many of us to not just challenge our practices but dig into the assumptions that lie behind our ministries. While this never proves an easy endeavor, it’s always one that pays off in lasting and formative ways.
Excel
Success in ministry provides a challenging conversation. Are we successful because people show up? Not really, but if people don’t show up then we can never have the chance to be successful. If people do show up, how do we know if we’ve actually done anything? We all know people that have been showing up to our ministry efforts for years, even decades, but we can’t easily look at them and say we’ve experienced “success” with them.
The slippery slope of measuring success in ministry begins to firm up when we turn our measurements away from external outcomes and begin to take note of internal actions and responses. We may not be able to control the choices others make, and therefore we may not be able to measure success by the outcomes they display in their lives and behaviors. We can, however, identify the way our leaders, ministry volunteers, and ministry processes respond to events we face in ministry. As we identify our ability to respond in desirable ways, we start to get a sense for how our ministry can excel at the things most important to our ministry’s ideals and core commitments.
Land the Plane
We all know the ministries we involve ourselves in have a real purpose. And we know that we all have room for growth. We also know there are real challenges faced by our ministries. I’m pretty confident that if we do some work in our own ministries to engage in realistic evaluation, turn that evaluation into imaginative and innovative adaptation, and commit ourselves to excellence in the things we can control and in how we respond to situations, we’ll find long term success in the unique ministries God has laid at our feet.
Something to Think About 