Relationships. Equipping. Attitude. Leadership.
How would you define success?
I have heard many definitions over the years. Some I agree with. Some, I don’t.
In the world today, success is often defined as fame, wealth, and power. Let’s be honest. Who hasn’t had dreams of these things? When I was a kid, I either wanted to be an actor or an athlete. If I was successful at either, I just knew it would bring my fame and wealth.
In our video today, John C. Maxwell defines success a little differently.
Question: How do you define success?
Every pastor I know wants to be a great leader. Every pastor I know works hard. Every pastor I know wants to grow their church. Every pastor I know wants to “win.”
Having worked in a diocesan role, serving numerous diverse parishes, I’ve had the opportunity to see both thriving and floundering churches.
Although there are many elements that affect a thriving or a floundering parish, I’ve discovered that the leadership of the pastor is a key element. Having worked with hundreds of churches over the years, I have noticed some common strategies that many successful pastors employ.
Embracing these 4 strategies will help you in your role as the pastoral leader of your church.
1. Communicate the vision… over and over and over again.
When I say something once, I often assume that everyone gets it. The fact is that they don’t. As a pastor, you need to have a compelling vision for your church. What is your church all about? Why would anyone want to get involved in your church? You need to figure that out.
Once you do, you need to communicate that exciting vision again and again. My rule of thumb is this: by the time you are tired of saying it, people will just be hearing and understanding it. Do these three things:
2. Get the right people in the right spot.
When you take on a new church as pastor, you inherit a team of staff and volunteers. Just because you inherited them, doesn’t mean you have to keep them. I know this might be hard for you to hear, but if you have ineffective people on your team, whether they are volunteers or staff, it is your job as a pastor to transition them. If they are effective, by all means, keep them!
The successful pastors I know have spent a lot of time recruiting the right leaders to be in key roles on staff, on pastoral councils, on finance councils, and on liturgy councils. As a pastor, it is your job to actively look for and invite potential leaders to join you on your team to serve your church. And that does mean transitioning people off that do not help you fulfill the mission of the church. (Let’s be honest. “Transitioning” is code word for “firing.”)
3. Embrace change.
Change is inevitable. If your church is to continue to be relevant in the eyes of the faith community, then you need to embrace change as a regular and recurring reality of your leadership. What worked 10 years ago doesn’t work today. Yet, you know plenty of churches that are still employing strategies from 30 years ago. I know change is hard. If you are serious about your pastorship, then embracing and leading change is an essential strategy.
4. Help your team know what success means.
Leaders in ministry can define success differently. That’s fine. But until you tell your team what success means for you, they will have a hard time meeting your expectations. You have to measure your success. Once you can define success for you and your team, talk about it at every staff meeting and one on one. Include it has part of their performance evaluation. It is easier to finish the race when you know where the finish line is. That’s true for you and your team.
Question: As a pastor, what strategies have you used to help you “win”?
For more practical advice about being a pastor, read 5 Things A Ministry Leader Needs to Hear Their Pastor Say.
Not a pastor? Please forward this to all the pastors you know.
Talk to any ministry leader and you soon discover that each of us have one thing in common: it can be difficult to know you are succeeding in your ministry.
The 4th most important lesson I’ve learned is that I still need to find ways to measure my success in ministry. (To read about the lessons 1-3, check out my intro to this blog series.)
Tell me this doesn’t resonate with you:
I know I’m having a positive impact in my ministry. My pastor doesn’t see it. How do I articulate that we’re succeeding?
You can measure numbers really easily. How many people are registered in your program or attending your adult faith formation program? How many people are attending mass? Easy enough.
The problem with asking questions like that is that you cannot tell whether the program or event they attended had an impact on them. It’s tough to answer these questions:
Those questions have no easy answers.
If we are to keep our ministry jobs and keep money flowing into the program, we need to prove to people (and ourselves) that we are succeeding
Here are a few ideas to measure your success. You may have to get creative to collect the data, but nothing proves success like data.
1. How many came up to you letting you know that it was a good ___________________? (enter program/event name here)
Although many people that are positively impacted by your ministry won’t necessarily tell you, the numbers of people that do tell you are an indication of success. Record those numbers. If you see a steady and continual growth in positive comments via email, phone, or in person, this is a good sign. And they don’t have to tell you. They can tell anyone in your ministry. That’s a good sign! Measure it!
2. How many people were referred to your ministry program/event by another person?
The more people refer their friends, the more impactful and successful your ministry is. When I meet someone new in my ministry, I love to ask them how they found out about us. There are many times that they say a friend invited and encouraged them to come. Make note of how many people say that to you in person, on a comment card, or an online evaluation tool. You can even see this on social media like Facebook or Twitter. How many re-tweets or Facebook shares did you get about your ministry? The more, the better. Measure it!
3. Is your program steadily growing?
You didn’t think I was going to ignore the number of attendees altogether, did you?
Although numbers are not always the most important data in measuring your success in ministry, I will say that if your program is not growing, then it is not as successful as it could be. An increase in attendees is a sign that you are building a healthy community of faith who are encouraging their friends to come.
Don’t hide from this important data point. I have known a few ministers who refused to measure their numbers because they said that numbers aren’t everything in ministry. Most of the people that say this usually are not seeing growth and are trying to hide behind a false spiritual sense of success.
Question: What other creative ways can you measure your success in ministry?
Here is a summary of posts for the “The 7 Most Important Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned in Ministry” series:
photo by Mark Morgan Trinidad A
I’m at a loss.
Not the first time, and, unfortunately, won’t be the last time. The question I’ve been struggling with lately is one that has been asked before. I wish there was an easy answer, but, there is not.
The question: how do I measure success in ministry?
Some folks might like to say that it is about the numbers of people we see in the pews at church. What exactly does that measure? Maybe it is the attendance to ministry programs, or the amount of money that is pledged, or the number of sacraments performed. Again, what exactly does that measure?
Still, others might say it is about faith. If our youth, parents, seniors, dogs, and cats have faith, then we’ve been successful. Okay, how do you measure if someone has faith?
It is one of the biggest challenges working in the world of non-profit ministry. Like a for-profit corporation, we cannot measure our success based on dollars and cents and alone. Money is a resource, not a goal. We absolutely need money to do ministry, but the gain of money is not why our ministry exists.
My ministry team and I went for a day out of the office so we could focus on the next two years of ministry to determine our goals, and we struggled a lot with this question.
We named that our ultimate purpose for what we do is to create a vibrant faith in Christ and God that is rooted in a Christian community. By itself, that is difficult to measure. So we had to dive deeper down. How do we go about creating a vibrant faith?
Ultimately, we dove down so deep as to name indicators of what that success might look like. We put metrics to those goals and constituted a plan. We now have measurable goals. If we hit our target, good. If not?
Are we on target? I’m not sure. I think what we are doing is good, but I am still not sure we are measuring our success well. I don’t want my team to become so driven by numbers that we lose focus on our vision and mission.
This is a work in progress. It is one that I’m sure you have struggled with as well.
How do you measure success in your ministry? How do you know you have been successful in ministry?
We’re planning a new initiative for our young adult ministry and my colleague brought to me some numbers for a facility that we want to rent for this program. We’ve been talking about launching this initiative for some time. In fact, we have pushed the start date back a couple times to make sure that we had the time to do it right.
As he brought me the numbers, I found myself a little hesitant to commit. Not that we don’t have the budget for the facilities contract. We do. I couldn’t name my hesitancy at first. As an extrovert, I just kept asking questions in hopes that this decision would become clearer in my mind. And that’s when it hit me: have we really asked all the questions yet?
For me, the answer was no. Although the vision is clear for this event, my hesitancy was caused by ambiguity. There were too many unknown answers to the questions we had. What I noticed was that most of the questions I had were detailed ones. Where are we getting the equipment from? How are we hauling the equipment? What’s the flow for the event? How are we working out hospitality? The list went on. We are hoping to launch in January, however, I had to say to my colleague (and myself) that it would be okay to push back the start date (again) to make sure we get this right the first time.
What I learned today was simple, but important:
Does this mean that we are going to delay the launch of our ministry program? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that we need to double our efforts to make sure we get to the point of confidence that we need to move forward. Will everything be clear? No. Will unexpected things come up? Yes. But, the more questions we answer and have a plan for, the better off we’ll be. Good lesson for me.
I recently gave a presentation on “The Preamble to Recruiting Volunteers” to some young adult ministry leaders. It was a learning experience for me because I started to really evaluate what are the things that motivate volunteers to volunteer. I told this group of young adult leaders that I could go on to talk about steps and ideas that would help us recruit volunteers, like personal invitation, job descriptions, etc… Here’s the problem, though. The steps can change and shift on you as time changes.
Often times when I do blogs or workshops like this, I dive straight into the ‘what.’ What do I mean by that? I mean, we delve straight into the practical ‘how to’s’ to make whatever it is we want to happen… happen. And that’s okay. But we always need to talk about the why. Why do what we are doing? In this case, the question is as follows: why would volunteers even want to get involved? This needs to be answered before we go into the practical steps of ‘what.’ The ‘what’ can change. The ‘why’ is constant.
In my experience, the two best ways to get volunteers to volunteer are…
1. Have an exciting vision about the future of the ministry
Proverbs 29:18 says, “Without vision, the people will perish.” Now maybe that is too dramatic, but maybe it would be better stated: “Without vision, the people don’t volunteer.” People get excited about a vision that speaks of a future that’s awesome. The problem is that we often start asking for volunteers before we have a clear sense of the vision for ministry. If I can’t show people the future, why would they want to jump on board? As a leader, it is our job to be the keeper of the vision. It needs to excite and motivate people. John Maxwell says, in his book 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, that “Leaders usually have the role of capturing and communicating vision. They must see it first and then help everyone else see it.”
Every vision should have the following:
2. Have some success under your belt
This is all about evidence that the vision is working. Early on, people can begin to sense victory. When that happens, volunteers begin to give more then they normally would. They sacrifice to succeed. Impending success is a huge motivator. On the flip side of the coin, volunteers can begin to sense defeat early on. When this happens, they give as little as possible and look for excuses.
Sure, we can talk about all the practical ways to recruit volunteers. However, if we have these two things in place, people will more likely say ‘yes’ to you and me.
I was recently watching a video of John C. Maxwell talking about personal growth. He speaks about how much Today Matters (which is the title of his book on personal growth) in which the thesis states that the secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda. Now we can spend time defining success, but that is not the important issue. The important issue is what am I doing today to achieve my version of success.
This idea really hits home for me. What can I do each and everyday that will help me be successful? There are a few things that I have determined to do everyday. I have made these choices, and now my job is to be disciplined enough to follow through:
I have no doubt that all these actions have helped me to become a better husband, minister, friend, and follower of God. There is probably more I can do, but these are the few things that I have chosen to be very intentional about.
What have you decided to do each and everyday that helps you move closer and closer to success?
