Check-Up Time: 8 Questions to Ask Every Year

by: Dan Reiland

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It’s easy to get so busy doing ministry that you don’t take the time to evaluate your ministry.

But evaluation is how you get better.

It’s like your annual physical. No one wants to get a check-up, blood work, and maybe a test or two, but that’s how you learn what you need to know.

Then, of course, you need to act on what you learn.

The 4-point plan to get better:

• Ask the right questions.
• Give honest answers in a group process.
• Determine the best-prioritized plan for improvement.
• Take action.

It starts with asking the right questions.

8 good questions that will help your ministry get better:

1) How is the unique culture of your church helping you make progress?

Sam Chand wrote an excellent book titled Breaking Your Church’s Culture Code. He states that more than vision, programs, money, or staff, culture has the greatest impact on your church’s future.

How would you describe your culture? Is it what you want? Is your church culture helping or hurting as you pursue God’s purpose for your church? What changes do you need to make? If the culture is healthy, what practices are in place to stay healthy?

2) How would you describe the overall morale of your church?

Are the people happy with your church? That question seems very subjective but is surprisingly easy to answer.

Do they trust the leadership? Are they fired-up about the mission? Are they passionate about following Jesus? Is there momentum? Are problems solved with relative ease (without significant resistance? You get the idea.

Morale and culture are closely linked. If you are struggling and the culture and morale are not ideal, I urge you to pour your leadership energy there first.

3) What is your approach to spiritual formation in your church?

Is there an overall sense that people are pursuing God? It’s not about perfection, but do you see progress? What factors do you consider important to help assess spiritual maturity?

Consider things like prayer, serving others, obedience, and financial generosity. How about the fruit of the Spirit like love, joy, and peace, etc.?

Do you utilize small groups? How is community developed? What priority does biblical truth hold? A great overall approach to assess spiritual growth is to gather stories of life change.

4) Are you developing new leaders?

Next to the favor of God, everything rises and falls on leadership. Do the leaders in your church demonstrate a strong spiritual depth and a servant’s heart? What is your plan to find and develop new and better leaders? You will not realize your potential as a church without a serious dedication to this process.

Here’s a great plan to start with.

5) How would you describe the strength of your volunteer teams?

Are your volunteers part of vibrant and productive teams or a struggling band of survivors? Much of that depends on how you select, train, encourage and empower your volunteers. Do you recruit to a vision or just to get a task done?

All churches face the pressure of needing people to volunteer to serve, but how you build teams makes a significant difference. How would you rate the overall esprit de corps of your volunteer ministries? What is the first best step to strengthen your teams?

6) What are the financial indicators telling you?

It is relatively easy to measure results when it comes to money. The weekly offering defines reality. At the same time, one of the largest challenges a leader will ever face is successfully inspiring the people to trust God with their finances and remain faithful to generous giving.

Are you bold in your teaching of God’s truth about money? Do you offer practical training about money management? Do you personally model generosity? Where are you stronger regarding money, faith or practice?

7) Are you on mission?

You must first be clear about the purpose of your church. What is your mission/vision – exactly? Does your congregation have a good sense of what it is? Are you acting on that mission?

It’s essential that your leaders become and remain aligned together in that mission. It will always feel like you are swimming upstream if you are not headed in the same direction.

8) Do your people enthusiastically invite others to your worship services?

I have coached churches where the people had obviously lukewarm feelings about the worship service. They were not motivated to invite someone even if they had a friend they wanted to bring.

It’s not always the worship service, but it starts there. Is there anything about your church that would cause your congregation to pause about inviting their friends?

This is a huge evangelistic combination. If your people are committed to the vision enough to invite people to church, and your worship experience (from nursery to invitation) is worth inviting people to – that is the combination you work toward!

I trust these questions will be helpful to you and the health of your church.

I pray God’s wisdom for your leadership and His favor upon you!

> Read more from Dan.

Connect with an Auxano Navigator to learn more about asking the right questions about your church.

Tags: Dan Reiland, Evaluation, Questions

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Positive Learning from Negative Feedback

by: VRcurator

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Leaders in all sizes and types of organizations often face negative feedback and criticism – and many have problems dealing with it.

Maybe it’s time to blow criticism away with “TNT”.

Recently I was reading HBR.org and came across a great article by John Butman entitled “The Benefits of Negative Feedback.”

I recently gave a lunchtime “author’s talk” at Children’s Hospital in Boston and, although I thought the talk went well, somebody in the audience didn’t like it at all. On the evaluation form, the person in question wrote a single word in the comment box: CONFUSING.

Thank you, whoever you are. While everybody else gave me good marks and said nice things, which I appreciated, my critic forced me into self-examination. Was he the only one forthright enough to speak up, or was he the only one not paying enough attention to get it? What was confusing? The ideas? The presentation?

His thoughtful suggestions contained in the article on dealing with negative feedback reminded me of a simple but powerful tool that I use whenever I receive criticism.

It’s called TNT, and I learned it about twenty years ago from Sue Mallory, a training instructor for the Leadership Network. I’ve been using it in every shape and form since then.

Are you ready?

The Next Time.

That’s right – once something has been said or done, you can’t do anything about it – for good or bad! Why should you beat yourself up and let it drag you down?

But you can learn from it and apply that learning to The Next Time the situation presents itself.

Here’s a great example: I recently made a presentation at a national conference in Dallas TX. I was no stranger to the conference – I’ve been speaking at it since it began in 2005. The topic was not new to me even though it was the first time I had presented it in its current form. I had prepared adequately – or at least I thought.

As it turns out, I had mistakenly assumed that the attendees of this year’s conference attending my session would be the same as in prior years, and I neglected to gauge the makeup of the audience before I launched into the presentation.

Over half of the session’s attendees were from a technical background, when I had expected most of them to be from a church ministry staff background. The presentation was only 5 minutes old before the quizzical looks and a few responses to my questions made me realize a mid-course correction was required!

Fortunately, I have a background (albeit several decades ago) in the technical production aspect of church ministry, and I was able to shift on the fly to orient the presentation more in that direction. I haven’t received the formal evaluations yet, but comments with several attendees following the session seemed to indicate the midstream switch was a success.

Looking back, I could have avoided the situation by noting what other sessions were being offered at the same time (and thus gauging potential attendance) as well as taking a quick audience poll to see who was present (to adjust the presentation at the beginning).

But it happened, and I couldn’t change a thing.

There’s always The Next Time.

What about in your leadership position? How will you use the power of TNT in evaluating an event or lesson or sermon that got some negative feedback in order to provide a positive launching point for improvement in the future?

Don’t let the negatives get you down – instead, blow them away with TNT.

Tags: Criticism, Evaluation, TNT, The Next Time, Vision Room Curator

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6 Gut-Check Questions to Ask When Your Ministry Seems Stuck

by: Rich Birch

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We’ve all had ministries or programs in our church that aren’t going well. They lack critical mass to make the sort of impact we are looking for. They seem just a little stale and past their prime. Your people are “voting with their feet” and not showing up to the ministry like they used to. Rather than get bitter about this reality … our job as leaders to make things better! Here are some questions that you could use to evaluate that ministry you suspect is losing traction:

• Can you clarify the why? // People in your church need to have a clear sense of “why” this program or ministry is a vital part of their spiritual journey. When you communicate about it make sure to spend more time talking about the “benefit” of the ministry to them rather than just the “features” of it. Don’t just tell people that the student ministry meets on Sunday evenings and includes a great small group experience … explain to parents and students that your ministry is designed to help students wrestle with the issues of faith, make friends and be influenced by great adult leaders. People won’t engage with something if they are unclear how it will benefit them.
• Do you need to reduce the internal competition? // Don’t make your ministries compete for the time, resources and attention from your community. Make sure that you aren’t asking your people to do multiple things at the same time. Cancel everything else where people might be choosing that over the ministry you value. People get to the point of “ask fatigue” … you can only ask so much from them. Clear the calendar and your people’s “head space” to be available for your ministry.
• How can you listen to your people more? // Have you taken time to listen to your people about why they aren’t attending your ministry? Grab a few “opinion leaders” in the group you are trying to serve and take them out for a meal … people rarely refuse a “free meal” … and ask them why people aren’t engaging with the ministry. Send out a digital survey to the people you are trying to serve and ask them open ended questions about what they are looking for from your ministry. [Use tools like SurveyMonkey, Wufoo or Google Forms] Listen carefully to what people are saying … try not to prejudice them with your thoughts on the “what and how” of the ministry.
• Have you used enough channels to communicate with people? // How many different ways do you communicate to people about the ministry? Chances are you need to increase the messaging to your people. If people aren’t complaining that they are hearing too much from you … you aren’t communicating enough. If you are relying on just one or two ways of getting the message to them … you aren’t communicating enough. (Oh yeah … Sunday morning announcements doesn’t count as a communications channel … it’s a terrible way to reach your people.) Usually higher friction forms of communication get better traction. Gather a group of committed volunteers and call people to let them know about the upcoming event. Arm a group of people to “lobby surf” on Sunday to find potential candidates for your ministry. Good ole’ fashion snail mail still works … send them a snappy direct mail piece!
• Do we have the wrong leadership in place? // Would you follow the leader who is leading this ministry? Are they trained and equipped to do the role that you’re asking them to do? Sometimes in churches we have a tendency to just put in “available” people rather than the right leaders. You might need to switch the person leading the ministry to gain the traction you are looking for. Every ministry area needs to be lead by people who attract other people. At the most basic level … if people don’t want to be around the leader it’s hard for the ministry to gain traction.
• Is it time for a gut check? // Would you be a part of this ministry if you weren’t in leadership at the church? Do people you really care for “opt out” of the ministry and you’re okay that they are missing it? Are you having to generate a bunch of internal energy to convince yourself it’s worthwhile? Maybe the best thing to do is just to cut this ministry or program and find a new approach to impacting people?

Great churches are defined more by what they don’t do than by what they do. How have you gone about evaluating ministries in your church and whether they should continue?

Tags: Evaluating Ministry, Evaluation, Questions, Rich Birch

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4 Frameworks with 20 Questions for a Weekend Worship Review

by: Rich Birch

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Regular evaluation of your weekend services should be a normal pattern for your leadership team. For us it happens during a Monday morning meeting were we look at what happened the day before and we also settle on the services for the coming weekend. This is an important system that we have in place because it allows us to stay on the same page and helps us catch quality improvements at an early stage. If there is a tough Sunday we know that we’re going to be taking time on Monday to talk it through. Regular service review also keeps us focused on improving the experience for our guests … we want to honor God by bringing our best to the table for them!

Here are four different approaches to worship review and evaluation. As the needs of your church and leadership shift you’ll need to move around from one type of evaluation to another. Find one that seems to fit the needs of your church and make it happen!

• Autopsy Method // This approach attempts to diagnose what exactly happened during the service so everyone can understand it clearly. This can be particularly helpful when you are looking to address a number of issues that need to change. This approach requires a high level of trust among the team because it can naturally focuses on the negative of what took place.
  • Good // The team lists the things that went well during the service … it’s sometimes helpful to walk through the service order to make sure you are commenting on a wide variety of items.
  • Bad // Let’s get the junk out on the table! Remember to clearly articulate the problem with what happened and avoid attacking people.
  • Missing // Where in the service did we miss something that would have made it a better experience? In my experience this is the least used category but can often provide some stunning insights into where our services should go in the future.
  • Confusing // What happened during the service that didn’t make sense? How can we simplify an ask for the future? Did the language of a musical worship leader muddy up what we were attempting to communicate?
• Future Focused // This method attempts to extract learning from a service to apply to the future. This approach can be particularly helpful when you are coaching new teams of leaders because it helps translate what did happened into what should happen in the future.
  • Keep // What happened yesterday that we want to repeat again and again? What are the positives that we can see doing in future services?
  • Stop // What happened that we want to make sure never happens again? What actions took away from what we were doing through the service?
  • Start // What did we miss doing that could have made the service even better? What should we add into these experiences in the future to take them to the next level?
• Process Oriented // This approach attempts to focus on the systems behind services. These questions attempt to get at the “why behind the whats”. Because these questions don’t just focus on actions it requires a team that has been working together for a while.
  • Victories // Where were we “winning” during the service? The goal of this section is for the team to articulate what was happening in the lives of the people they were serving … not the actions taken during the service. This focuses the team on the impact the ministry is having in the lives of people.
  • Metrics // Balancing out the stories of individual life change … the metrics section is attempting to capture the overarching story of what is happening in the life of the church. The goal here is to move beyond just “numbers and noses” to metrics that articulate the spiritual dynamics of the church. (% of people moving into groups, % of first time guests attending)
  • Stucks // In this section each ministry area articulates areas that they are stuck in achieving their growth or development. Using the service as an illustration … the teams talk about the areas they need assistance or resources to get “unstuck.”
• Appreciative Inquiry // This approach attempts to focus the leadership only on what was positive about the experience. Over the last year I’ve become more acquainted with this school of thought in change management and I see it’s deep value for us in church leadership. Here are some potential questions you could ask using this approach.
  • What made the service an exciting experience?  What gave it energy?
  • What moments during the service where the best we could offer to Jesus and our guests?
  • What was it about each team member that made it great? How did you uniquely contribute? How did you see God use other people?
  • What is the common mission or purpose that united everyone on the leadership during the service?  How can this continue to be nurtured?
  • In your opinion, what is the most important aspect of your services that you can recall that best illustrates this spirit of “being the best? How can we build on that?

Read more from Rich here.

Tags: Evaluation, Rich Birch, Worship, Worship Leader

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