It’s easy to chart what you need to do to improve your church. It is exponentially harder to actually accomplish it. On paper it may look easy to hit those milestones and measures, but when you throw in the personalities and agendas of all involved, things can get quite messy.
At this point, you’ve probably learned nothing you didn’t already know. In stating the obvious, we need to look at what makes the difference between a church that is doing a lot of “good things” versus one that is making great gains for The Kingdom.
Define the purpose of your meetings. Are you having meetings simply to schedule the next meeting? Are you forming committees for the purpose of having another committee? Most of us have been in those endless meetings that have plagued our workplaces with equally endless and vague names and processes. Please don’t make us endure that at church too. We already have too mant of “those meetings” on our calendar.
Define the purpose of your ministres and programs. In college, I went to a church that had an “Old-School-Texas-Fundamentalist-Pastor (in that order)”. He had an awesome statement that defined what the church did and didn’t do – “Aim at Nothing, Hit it every Time!” We often have those meetings where we start (or copy) a “program”, not entirely being sure what it’s supposed to accomplish or how it fits the overall vision of the church. Bottom line is this – if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do, it might not be a good idea to start doing it…
Define who you really are. You are not Saddleback. You are not Willow Creek, LifeChurch, or any other Mega Church. That’s ok. Be the church that God has called you to be in order to reach His people in your area. Stop trying to be a copy of someone else that God has designed to reach a different group of people in a different context. Note that it does not give you a free pass from being excellent in striving to do great things to impact the world and show them God’s Glory.