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Home » Managing Your Ministry

Taking Control

Submitted by James Higginbotham on July 15, 2005 – 2:11 pm3 Comments

In his blog entry, Control Freaks, Mike Clark mentions how he utilizes a common development tool called a source control server to store everything that is needed by a developer. This reduces the time to locate, download, and install each dependency, one at a time, to recover from a failure. I’ve used this technique since 2001, and it works great! A developer’s workstation or a test server can be brought from 0 to 60 in a very short amount of time, with the confidence that the same results can be achieved on the new environment as in all other environments, past and present.

So, applying this principle to a ministry or a church, I would like to pose this question for you to ponder:

How are you making your ministry reproduceable so that others can join up quickly, and feel that they can contribute, or even take over your ministry?

This may not be a question you ask yourself often. Why not? Because most of us get too close to the nuts and bolts and just assume that the next person can pick things up as quick as you. But, I would imagine that for most of us that lead a ministry or even a church, it wasn’t so easy in the beginning for you either. You might have started a new ministry or church, so no processes or infrastructure was in place. You might have even inherited a ministry from someone else, but retooled things or dropped things that weren’t necessary or needed to operate differently.

Here are a few things I would propose that you can recruit volunteers, making your ministry controllable and reproduceable, volunteers grow rather than shrink, and allowing you to move to the next God-given calling for your life without leaving a trail of disaster or difficulty in the wake:

1. Review your procedures – often

Sounds easy, but truly – are you making things more difficult than they should be? Are you doing things that, while they seemed to make sense some time ago, just don’t anymore? I’m reminded of a funny story:

He watched Ellen cut two inches off the end of the pot roast and placed the remainder into the pan. “Why do you mangle that cut of meat?” Stu asked. She laid the knife down and threw the small portion of meat into their dog’s dish. “Because my mom did it.”

“Why did your mom cut if off”, Stu asked.

“I don’t know, but when I see her again, I’ll ask”, she answered as she swung the pan into the oven. Several days later, Ellen’s mom stopped by, and she remembered her husband’s inquisitiveness. “Mom, why did you always cut the end off your pot roast?” Ellen asked as soon as her feet touched the carpet. A smile covered her mom’s face and she jumped upon the barstool. “Because my mom did it,” she replied. Realizing the mystery was not solved and Stu would keep wondering why two grown women engaged in severing nice cuts of meat; she knew she had to cover the groundwork for this thirty-year plus puzzle. “Mom, let’s call Granny and ask,” Ellen urged with excitement in her voice. “I have to know, Stu thinks this is expensive dog food.”

“Hello,” stretched across the phone lines and filled the silence in the kitchen. “Hi, Granny, this is Ellen. I need to know why you cut the end off your pot roast.” She dropped the phone into her mother’s hand and waited in silence. They looked at each other and yelled, “Because her pan was too small!”

Don’t do things just because that’s how you have always done it – look at new ways to do things, new tools to save time, and even evaluate if your ministry is no longer needed due to a change in culture, procedures, or people.

2. Make processes simple

As an “enterprise developer”, I’m used to requirements such as supporting hundreds of concurrent web sessions, integrating with ERP or CRM systems, and so on… When I then try to attack a solution to a church problem, I often draw on what I know. That means, I try to over-engineer things from the start (software or not), making things more difficult for both those that need to execute the plan and those receiving the execution. That’s just the way I am wired, but that is no excuse and will quickly leave you high and dry. Why? Because either people won’t understand or be able to execute the solution you put together due to difficulty or lack of a specific skill set, or it will scare them off that they are not “qualified” to serve. Make things simple, and be sure others can execute when you are not around

3. Make things repeatable

If you do not document your procedures, they are not repeatable. This is the biggest mistake anyone can make as a leader. Serving in a ministry, especially as a volunteer but even as a staff member, leaves you little time to repeat yourself. But often, it makes us lazy in documenting procedures or refining existing procedures. Ask yourself this key question:

If someone asked me today how they could serve in my ministry, could I give them a task that is documented and easy for anyone to handle, allowing them to serve the Lord with all their heart? If not, you have some work to do!

Remember:

Servants are being asked to give of their precious time and talent – don’t waste their time with old rules and regs, overcomplicated solutions, or adhoc procedures. Then, and only then, will you begin to see that more than 20% of the church will be offering up their time and talent to assist with needs that extend the Kingdom!

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