Growing Your Ministry Through…Issues

Sometimes you can just hit a brick wall. Whether it is because you lack the inhouse skills to get something done or just a problems in your ministry that you can’t seem to overcome. That’s when you need to step back and consider some alternate solutions. Here are 2 examples:

An Issue of Quality

What would you do if your overhead engineers consistently have issues getting the worship song lyrics right during service? What about spelling errors or bad formatting? If you have issues like this, you might take several actions: add another task to your worship leader by assigning them the task, limit the slide creation to a single trusted volunteer or staff-member, or unnecessarily remove the volunteer from service.

Those sound like poor options. But, what if there was another option that hasn’t been considered? What if you modify the procedures by having them meet the worship team for practice? During that time, they work on changing the slides as the team sings and can make notes on special timings, as well as conduct quality control. You may even consider reworking your functional structure to make this a smoother process. This small change provides an extra comfort and familiarity to the engineer, builds a stronger sense of teamwork, and makes things more professional. Of course, this will also require you to grow the ministry more, as you’ll need to rotate your engineers more often due to the higher demands. This issue of quality may be an early warning of just such a problem anyway, so take advantage of it by acting on it early!

An Issue of Missing Skills

Sometimes teams inherit technology that “just works”, but when the first need to change it comes along, the necessary skills are missing to make it happen. In this case, it is a lack of Flash skills for updating a website. Your options to fix this situation may include: contracting someone to fill the gap, locating the skills from a neighboring church, or doing a sub-standard job by having someone with a less-than-optimal skillset make the change.

Instead, consider taking the opportunity to alter your approach. Ask if there is a way to continue to use what exists (assuming it still handles the job properly), but modify the usage through changing the structure or process. For this situation, it may be to alter the structure of the website, or by removing some existing content that is no longer needed. Possibly, the changes required start to show you that the updates really mean that a new front-facing website is needed to reach a new target audience. Finally, it could be a wake-up call that it is time to take the leap fo dropping the technology entirely.

Issues Create Growth

These were just two examples which may or may not be applicable to your situation. The end result, in either case, is to take a step back and assess the problem. Sometimes it takes a person outside of the issues and day-to-day procedures to see something new. These are often the ones that will give you a “why didn’t I think of that” moment.

No matter what, don’t let these opportunities pass by because you are focused on the immediate issue. Always be willing to allow issues to create opportunities to change your procedures while keeping your focus and vision. This is a key ingredient to any growing ministry!

[tags]church process, volunteering, volunteer management, ministry management[/tags]

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