I was listening to some older Andy Stanley leadership podcasts this last week. While I was listening, he said something that they sort of breezed over but it caught me by surprise. It got me really thinking about the ministries we are in charge of. Andy Stanley said this:

“We spend all of our time in leadership in leading a ministry looking how we need to improve certain things we do, but we do not look at what is working well and figure out why it is successful. If we figure out why it works well, when it breaks, we will know how to fix it.”

It is really true. We spend a lot of our time trying to evaluate things that we wish work better. So we spend energy in meetings and resources trying to improve it, but what about the things that are working well? Usually we just let those go on auto-pilot because, well, they seem to not need much of our attention.

What part of your ministry is working well? What if it started to fall a apart? Would you know how to put it back together? Or would you be able to figure out what were the parts that made it so successful?

The point we can learn from Stanley’s quick statement is we need to not only evaluate why things are not going well on an event, music, small groups etc. We also need look at what is going well and determine how it works.

Who is involved?

What are they doing?

How are they doing it?

What components are in place to make it successful?

If it fell a part, would you know what made it successful in the first place so that you can restore it to it’s successful state?

As I am going about a busy season coming up, I am going to make sure I am taking notes on what makes it tick well and make sure I know how to fix it if it were to all of a sudden stop working.