SMART Goals

Do you want to take your ministry to the next level? Are you unclear as to next steps? I have found the following process helpful for discerning and implementing strategic priorities that will help a ministry build momentum toward a desired future.

Proceed Prayerfully

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of bathing the entire discernment process in prayer. As you go through the following steps, take time to pray periodically and to practice (and encourage others to practice) a posture of listening to God’s voice.

Clarify Your Mission

In a previous blog, Six Steps to Creating a Compelling Mission Statement for Your Group, I describe a process for identifying your group’s mission. If you don’t have a mission statement for your ministry yet, I would encourage you to read the blog and create one. It’s difficult to discern meaningful strategic priorities without an overarching goal in mind.

Articulate Core Values

What do you think are your ministry’s core values (this is a good exercise to do with your ministry team)? What do you think that your ministry should value? Come up with a list of 6-8 current and desired values that you believe are foundational to your ministry. One way to do this is to have your team brainstorm adjectives or phrases that describe the current ministry. Then, have them think about their dream ministry and go through the same brainstorming process.

Discern God’s Vision for Your Ministry

With your ministry team, project yourself into the future. It is five years from now and you have, amazingly enough, developed the most incredible ministry. Now, it’s your job, as a team, to describe it - as if you were able to see it, realistically around you. Make sure that you use your ministry’s core values from the previous step. It’s also very important that your emerging vision aligns with your mission.

Identify Strategic Priorities

Now, that you are clear on your ministry’s mission, core values and vision, you can identify strategic priorities. What are the steps you need to take to realize your vision? Identify three to five big objectives (e.g. develop a mentoring approach). For each objective, come up with SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) goals that will help you make progress with each objective (e.g. hold a one-day training session on how to coach others on June 20).

Execute the Plan

Tis’ the season to think about New Year’s resolutions. As you do, I would encourage you to channel that desire for change into developing a personal growth plan for the next six months. Here are three important steps to develop a plan that will help you put feet to your desires:

1. Identify 1-3 areas of your life where you would like to see change

Where would you like to grow? It’s important that you are fairly specific. For example, you may want to grow spiritually over the next six months. That’s great! Yet, I would encourage you to think about a particular area of your spiritual life that you would like to grow. For me, I would like to strengthen my prayer life. At this stage, we are simply expressing good intentions. In my experience, most people stop here. The next step is critical to actually translating the good intentions into life change.

2. Develop 3-5 SMART action steps around each area where you would like to see change

As you think about actions steps that you can take to develop the area(s) you identified in step one, make sure that they are SMART: