Monthly Archives: October 2011

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Accountability – Step 5 In A Strategic Ministry Plan

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This is the final post in a series of posts on creating a Strategic Plan for Ministry in your business. At this point, you should have a mission statement with an eternal perspective. You should have a well-defined mission field as well as a set of action plans for ministry activities that will help you to impact that mission field. Now you need to lay out the accountability processes to ensure your action plans are executed and achieve the results you desire.

Accountability

Accountability Reporting Example

Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate my point. An easy example for our company is the CCA chaplain program (Corporate Chaplains of America). We have a chaplain assigned to our company as a benefit to the employees. By permission, this chaplain speaks to each of our employees face-to-face at least once per week.

He is on call 24/7 and 365. He will meet with employees after hours for extended care sessions in person or over the phone, according to their preference. He performs funerals, weddings, and hospital visits. He prays for the company and every employee on a regular basis.

On an ongoing basis, I need to know whether this program is achieving the results I expect from it. Fortunately, CCA provides their own reporting process as part of the program. They send me a report via email at the end of each month that details the activities of the chaplain. A report like this makes it easy for me to determine whether the program is working or not.

Here is an example of their report:

accountability

Your Accountability Reporting

Your reporting may look very different. It may not be as formal or it may be more so. The format is not important. The accountability is. While each ministry activity will likely present its own measurement challenges, try to make sure there is some ability to track and measure the activities and the results (if possible).

You should have some sort of reporting for every ministry activity on your action plan. If you cannot measure it in some way, then you need to decide whether it is worth doing or not. This is not to say that you are not to do anything that you cannot measure – there are certainly exceptions. It is more about making sure that there is accountability built in to every part of your plan.

Too often, companies come up with a great idea, begin a process or initiative, and never build in accountability. Without a clue as to whether it is effective or not, they forget about it until something goes wrong or someone leaves. This is simply not being a good steward of your resources.

Measuring Ministry?

There are a couple of challenges I will note about measuring ministry. First of all, we are not able to save anyone. That is the job of the Holy Spirit. While we may count the number of times someone turns their life over to Christ during one of our activities, we certainly cannot take credit for that. We are simply celebrating!

Second, we cannot truly know the condition of any individual’s heart or whether that condition has improved in a measurable way. To attempt to measure life change or improvement is not something I recommend. I think you get it, but measuring ministry is very difficult.

As a result of these challenges, we will most often revert to simply measuring our activities in ministry. As an example, look at the chaplain’s report. We do not attempt to measure the effectiveness of the chaplain’s prayer for our company and individual employees. We simply measure the number of times he prayed. We do not attempt to measure whether his care sessions had the intended effect. We can only count the times he had them.

I think you get the idea. When dealing with the heart and spiritual matters, measuring is difficult. At the same time, we cannot just leave our efforts to chance! Therefore we do our best to discern the right activities, maintain our focus on the right purpose, and then measure our efforts. We leave the results to God.

Do you currently have any sort of ministry results reporting?

If so, do you review it as often and with the same intensity as you review your financial reporting?

I won’t ask a third question…that last one hurt too much!

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Action Plan – Step 4 In A Strategic Ministry Plan

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action planThis is number 4 in a series of 5 posts about how to create a Strategic Plan for Ministry in your business. So far, we have created an effective mission statement with an eternal perspective, identified our potential mission field, and had a brainstorm session about how we will do ministry in the course of doing business. Now we will turn our attention to the laying out of the action plan.

Best Ideas

Now, I am assuming you have already completed your brainstorming session from last time. Depending on your preference of using a smaller team of key managers or a larger group of employees, you need to gather your team together again. Taking the list of ideas generated in your brainstorm session, the group now needs to sift through and find the best ideas, making sure they are in alignment with your mission statement.

Ideally, those that are the easiest to implement with the greatest impact should come first. You can also consider which ones are the most exciting in order to get the most buy-in from the stakeholders.

Categorize the Ideas

Once you have narrowed the list down to those that are the best fit for your current circumstances, you probably want to group them according to which of the three facets of ministry is appropriate (Evangelism, Discipleship, Service), as well as which mission field category applies (Employees, Customers, Suppliers/Vendors, etc.).

While it is not necessary to evenly distribute your activities across these categories, it is good to make sure you are not ignoring any of them.

Create the Action Plan

So you have a list of your best ideas sorted into the appropriate categories. Now it is time to create the plan to actually do them! A typical action plan should cover three elements:

    Task– What will be done and by whom?
    Timeline– When it will be done?
    Resources– What is required for it to be done?

Once you have laid out the action plan for each of your ideas, set some goals for the results. Don’t be shy!

Measurement Challenge

At the same time, you need to remember that by definition, the eternal spiritual impact we are attempting to make is sometimes difficult or impossible to measure, making it tough to set goals. Much of what we are doing is actually just “sowing seeds” and pointing people toward God. We cannot save anyone. Nor can we change their hearts. Even if heart change is a goal, how would you measure it?

Because of this challenge, it is my recommendation that you lean toward setting goals based on activity. If one of your action plan items is to place small new testament Bibles in your waiting area, then just measure how many are taken. If you are teaching a weekly Bible study for employees, then just measure attendance. In this case, you could take it a step further and measure how many of those in attendance go on to lead their own study! Either way, be careful how and what you target and measure. Stay true to Scripture!

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Of course, you need to make sure your action plan goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals as well!

    Specific– Determine exactly what will be done, when it will be done, who will do it, etc. and write it down.
    Measurable– Make sure you can measure the activity. If you cannot, how will you know if you accomplished it?
    Attainable– This does not mean to set the bar low, but to make sure they are realistic.
    Relevant– The goals need to be in alignment with your mission statement. They need to be important to you.
    Timely– You need to have a time frame or a target date. Open-ended goals are soft.

Start Now!

One hint here…though it is not set in stone, this is great advice. As the leader during this process, you need to encourage the group to agree on at least one or two action items that you will start tomorrow. Don’t lose any of the momentum you have built up to this point. Do something! You will gain a boost if you will be sure to do this.

Once you have set these goals for each idea on your final action plan, you are ready to move on to the last step in this process – determining the accountability process of measuring and monitoring the results. See you next post!

Are moving through the process with me or are you thinking this might be something for next year? Or the next year?

If you are, how is it going so far? Do you have some exciting goals?

Are you inspiring your people in a way that excites them?

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Brainstorm Session – Step 3 In A Strategic Ministry Plan

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brainstorming

This is number 3 in a series of 5 posts that outline a process for creating a strategic plan for ministry in your business.

So far in this series, we have crafted a mission statement that states, from an eternal perspective, why our business exists. We have also counted the various categories of people that will come into contact with our business on some level and identified them as our mission field.

In this post, we will look at how we, in the course of doing business, minister to those in our mission field in a way that impacts them for eternity.

Buck Knives Company

Probably the best example I can come up with is the Buck Knives Company. For decades, they have integrated the Gospel message into the course of business by including a small, printed Gospel testimony (pictured below) in the box with every product. As a result of years of doing this, they have multiple vertical file cabinets filled with letters and notes from customers that were touched by these Christ-centered messages.

ministry in business

So the question you must ask is this:

What is the true product of the Buck Knives Company, the knife or the Gospel message?

Let me ask you this…which one will last longer?

Brainstorm Session

This example from the Buck Knives Company aims to impact customers. What about employees and their families? What about your suppliers & vendors or any other groups we came up with when we identified our mission field? Well, that is what this step is all about. We have some brainstorming to do!

It is time to gather your team. Depending on your preference, you can include a large group of employees or you can start with your key people (that are bought in to the mission and vision). Depending on your size, you might even break into several groups. Either way, the point is to engage the participants in a creative session to determine opportunities and processes to minister to others while doing business.

This is a time for free-flowing ideas, not critique. That can come later.

Taking the three-fold definition of ministry I gave you in the last post (evangelism, discipleship, and service), encourage the participants to come up with ideas for each of the categories. You also may want to list the various mission field categories we identified last post (employees, customers, vendors, etc.) to help generate ideas.

The participants need to feel comfortable offering any idea that comes to mind, without the fear of rejection. This is a time for free-flowing ideas, not critique. That can come later. Any and every idea needs to come out. While one idea may later be scratched from the list for some reason, it may generate another idea that is a winner. Let them flow!

Expand Participation

While this is certainly a simple step in the process, don’t overlook it. Even if you start with your key people, I encourage you to later bring everyone into the process. You will likely get some ideas that would never have surfaced otherwise. Plus, you get much better buy-in when everyone is involved.

Now that you have your list of ideas, keep them handy. We will look at what to do with them in the next post. If you are interested, here is a list of 101 ministry ideas from C12 Group that you can use as thought starters. Feel free to implement any of them as well, but don’t use this list as an excuse to skip your brainstorming session!

Have you done this before? What were the results?

If not, are you willing to try it now?

When are you going to schedule it?