Shepherding: Effective Methods On How To Build Your Ministry

Building a ministry may be easy but you need to ensure that it is successful and lasts long. As a church leader, besides a strong faith and belief, you’ll need to assess the needs and build an action plan to achieve your aim and materialize your vision. Know and incorporate these methods to successfully build your ministry and help more people. ~ Ed.

Are you one of your church leaders who want to build a ministry or to create a program that the whole congregation can be proud of and dependent on? 

If you’ve been having trouble doing that, there are ways to simplify the process and turn that vision into a reality. You will need a strong team you can heavily depend on when it comes to planning, and you’ll need other internal and external resources. 

Time and time again, ministries are built quickly, but fizzle out just as quickly. With no strong leadership in place, enthusiasm dwindled, a ton of work to be carried out without enough resources, and volunteers getting busy in other aspects of their lives, it is not uncommon to find ministries having a hard time in getting noticed in the work they provide. 

If zeal and enthusiasm were enough, this problem might not exist. But in order to build a successful and long-lasting ministry, there are effective ways to go about it. 

With a strong faith in understanding and believing that this is what you were meant to do, your new ministry can attract more followers, solve community problems, and help loads of people. Here’s how and what you need to do.

4 Effective Methods to Build Your Ministry

You can successfully build a lasting ministry if you carefully assess the need, build a precise budgeting process, and much more. Use these methods to strengthen your ministry and help more people.

Determine the Need

In businesses, hundreds of ideas, products, and services fail or never take off the ground because there is no true need for them. The same notion can be applied to building a ministry. 

If the ministry doesn’t address a true need of the community, it might fail. You can always find a few voices pushing hard for a need, but what about the rest of the followers? 

Is the ministry giving a solution to a real, existing problem? Is there another ministry nearby already offering the same or similar solution? Does your church have the necessary budget and resources? These are questions that need to be analyzed and answered beforehand.

Same Church and Ministry Strategy

A ministry that isn’t aligned with the overall strategy of the church won’t be successful. The ministry must truly be integrated into the church strategy because if it’s not, it can cause more rifts than unity. 

First off, alignment of ministry and church can help the funding of the ministry, because people will view it as an integrated part of the church and not a separate entity. Second, shepherding will weaken because of different ministries being run by different leaders. Each ministry must fit into the overall plan, and be on the same page with the church’s vision and values.

Budgeting

If you’ve gotten this far, there’s already a very good chance of your ministry achieving what it is meant to achieve. 

Failure to allocate enough money to your ministry is the area where many ministries come to a stop. But to do things differently, make sure you use software that will do several tasks all in one and do them more efficiently. 

For instance, when it comes to accounting, Aaron Martineaux from Iconcmo.com says that a common accounting error is to enter the wrong amount. This pitfall can easily be avoided when you use a double accounting software system as this method helps ensure accuracy. In double accounting, each transaction affects at least two accounts where the debits must equal the credits. It’s the only way to get accuracy on your finances.

A software system has dozens of other advantages, including keeping in touch with people through mass communication, alerting them of announcements and events, tracking and organizing donations, having child check-in to secure your children’s safety, and many more features that will save you an enormous amount of time and effort and make your ministry more updated.

Action Plan

The easy part is to say what the ministry is going to do. The difficult part is knowing how it’s going to do it. This is where you need to separate expectations from reality. The complexities of what can happen need to be as vivid as the opportunities to help others and the growth of your ministry. 

Your action plan must include the role of church members, church leaders, and small groups. These three separate groups have to work as a team and have easy access to information and resources. You need a structure in place because it’s simply infeasible to build on your own. 

Wrapping Up

The true growth of a ministry doesn’t begin with money. It starts with faith, understanding, and the resources within you.  

Your congregation and leaders also need to work together. When everything aligns with the teachings of the church, the values are then converted into a product:  the ministry. 

Your love of God and the people you want to help, along with a solid plan will bring in everything else you and your ministry will need.

Over to you

What steps do you take as a church leader to ensure your ministry grows and achieves its purpose? Share your tips and thoughts in the comments.