Hope is not a strategy

What specific ministries does your church plan to do this year? Who are the people your church has developed specific plans to reach? What are the goals your church has for 2009? Without clear goals and a clear purpose it is likely you and your church will look back on 2009 and see little that was accomplished.

Most maintenance-minded churches open their doors each week and hope somebody comes. They take a shotgun approach to ministry and hope that something they do will touch somebody's life. After all, when you shoot a shotgun you don't necessarily need all the shot to hit your target. You just hope that the shot will be spread out far enough that some of it hits its mark. This is also the way many churches do ministry. They believe if they do enough things something will make a difference, at least they hope it will. These churches are usually very disappointed if they ever stop long enough to evaluate what they have been doing and see that very little of what they have been doing has impacted anyone's life. Hope is not a strategy.

If a church wants to make a difference in 2009 it needs to have clear plans of what it is going to do. It needs to have clear goals for ministry that comes out of a vision that is commonly shared by the congregation. Action steps need to be developed that will allow those goals to be achieved. I encourage your church to live 2009 with a purpose and a plan that will allow you to achieve far more than you will by merely hoping something good happens this year.

By the way, that is also how you need to live your personal life. I have seven goals for my life and ministry for 2009, and I have listed a number of action steps that must happen for those goals to be achieved. Every day I work on at least one or two of those action steps. Unless I am intentional about doing that the pressing issues of the day will take all my time, and at the end of the year I will have accomplished nothing that I believe God would have me achieve this year. This may sound rather regimental to some of you, but it enables me to live my life with a purpose and a focus. People sometimes ask me how I accomplish all the things I do, and now you know the secret! Structure, purpose, and focus are the key essential elements to accomplishing the things that are important to you.