Do you really have clarity on your strategy?

Strategy is a word that gets thrown around and can be made much more complicated than it needs to be. Often, leaders will come up with a long and detailed written plan that they will refer to as their “strategy.” While it’s very important to have a written plan, you still may lack a clearly defined strategy for moving your ministry forward. 

I’m going to share with you 3 Core Components that really comprise strategy for a ministry.

First, I need to give you a bit of a heads up. Some of the terms that I’m going to use here may sound like “business” terms, and one of the things that we run into a lot with ministries is they’ll say, “Woah, hang on! This is ministry! This is not a business!” 

True. Yours is a ministry, not a business. But what we have to share with you here isn’t about introducing more “business thinking” into ministries. Instead, we are all about bringing effective thinking into ministry. If it works in business, it’s because it’s effective. If it works in ministry, it’s because it’s effective and based on Truth.

“Not Here!”

How many times have you listened to a tragic news story and heard someone proclaim, “I thought such a thing could never happen here” or “I never thought he could do such a thing, he seemed like such a nice person” or some variation of shattered expectations? Shattered expectations arise from naiveté regarding the nature of sin and complacency about people and the world around us. The uncomfortable truth is that violence and tragedy can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime, including in our Christian schools.

While violence is a real threat to our schools, we face a far more lethal, subtle, and pernicious danger. This danger arises not from the government, not from violent prone individuals or even from disgruntled employees or parents. This danger arises from within. The biggest threat we face is one that is mostly hidden until it is too late. I am referring to the threat of the small compromises made for good reasons. 

The First Steps of Drift and Decline are Small …

I have had the pleasure of meeting with hundreds of Christian school administrators this year at conferences and on their campuses. Our conversations often lead to a discussion of their biggest challenges, and I sometimes share the following advice on how to make positive changes. 

We live in an era of exponential change, and with every change comes an element of friction. Christian schools need strong leaders to meet changing expectations, manage new technologies, and confront elements of culture that conflict with a biblical worldview education (all within a finite budget). It is not hard to convince leaders of these facts. It is also important to affirm that some things should never change at a Christian school.

What are some of these ‘challenges’ that Christian schools are facing? Here are a few facing leaders in 2018 …

The expectation placed upon both you and me in today’s economy is this: do more with less.

To actually do more with less requires that you and I constantly reinvent ourselves and grow our own leadership capacity for our ministry organization. Here are four proven ways that I find always take me to the next level of effectiveness.

I never used to journal or “keep a diary.”

I suppose there are several reasons for this. Earlier in my life, I thought of journaling—keeping a diary—as “something girls do.” I probably came to that false conclusion because my early exposure to journaling was always limited to female examples, _The Diary of Anne Frank_ being one.

A second reason is that, sadly, reading and writing were not highly valued in my childhood home. My mother never went to college, and my father joined the military before graduating high school. They were good parents, but neither placed a premium on the development of the mind. The idea of voluntarily spending time as a teenager or young man writing in a journal without being forced to by a teacher was the farthest thing from my mind. I am reminded of the hilarious scene in Back to the Future when Doc tells the old men in the bar that in the future people run for fun:

Doc: In the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called "automobiles."

Barfly:If everybody's got one of these auto-whats-its, does anybody walk or run any more?

Doc: Of course we run, but for recreation. Fun.

Barfly: Run for fun? What the hell kinda fun is that?!

I would have said the same thing about journaling, albeit with different language!

I was wrong. History is replete with famous people keeping journals; Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Winston Churchill, to name a few. None other than George Washington kept a daily diary for much of his life, from his first surveying trip in 1748 until December 13, 1799, the day before his death.

The question is why? Why take the time and develop the discipline to journal? I believe there are at least six good reasons to keep a journal …

Prisoners of the Present

It’s not very complimentary but we need to face it: many North Americans are sheltered from reality by the all-encompassing present: the barren, boastful, tyrannical here and now. Our ubiquitous, highly entertaining technologies encourage us to speed through life in the superficial lane, with not much thought about where we’ve come from or where we’re going. Thanks to modern social engineering, coercive media and monolithic secular education, young people especially, have been indoctrinated with a highly intolerant and proscriptive set of contemporary values and attitudes – telling them what to think rather than teaching them how to think. And even when cracks appear in their thought control dam, they’ve been taught to respond to uncomfortable or unfamiliar ideas with pre-adolescent name-calling (bigot, hater, you-name-it-o-phobe) instead of with reflective reasoning and rational arguments. Insults, name-calling and bullying are weapons of the morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Stress has many causes. One cause is feeling overwhelmed with everything on our to do list, especially the ones in our head and our subconscious selves. The shear number of things to do can create stress. So can guilt when we don’t feel like we are getting enough done.

We can reduce the stress caused by being overwhelmed and by “productivity guilt.” I define productivity guilt as the guilt we feel when we don’t believe we got enough done or the right things done. Here are a few things you can do to get more done with less stress.