Implementation

To move your ministry dream into a direction takes a particular strategy, and to carry your mission to the next step takes some managing. Implementing a plan for how you will go about putting your vision into practice is, as the late Peter Drucker put it, “the essence of effective strategy.” It will help to mobilize and support your staff and the members who are serving in your church, and that in turn will produce excellence.

Drafting a mission statement is one way to begin to strategize where your mission is headed. There are a few keys that may help you form your mission statement:

Make sure it is founded on prayer. 

Make sure it is focused on people, not process.

Make sure it forces you to do two things:

Invite people to serve.

Invest in their God-given S.H.A.P.E. 

Our ministry team’s mission statement is: 

To prayerfully invoke servanthood by inventing strategies that invite people to serve and invests in their God-given S.H.A.P.E. for life. 

You can now begin to come up with your strategy to carry out your mission statement. A few examples of strategy strengtheners are:

Senior pastor modeled: The senior pastor must champion and model the message of “every member a minister.”

S.H.A.P.E. focused: It is a “must” that you help members begin to accept and love exactly who God has made them to be. 

Simple to communicate: The easier your strategy is to communicate, the quicker it will be embraced. 

For Saddleback’s small group serving strategy, we use the idea of graduating steps: 

Crawl step: Ask the small group to simply recognize the needs in the group, through supporting and sharing.

Walk step: Ask the group to realize their strengths as a group.

Run step: Ask them to respond to the needs in the church family as a group. 

We hope these tips have been a help in leading you to implement a strategy that will bring direction to your vision for ministry. Rick Warren reminds us that “if you have a simple strategy, you can turn an audience into an army and transform spectators into fully equipped participators.”