Lead With Purpose
What is the purpose of your church? For a long time, I had never really considered the purpose of our church. I just did ministry without much thought about it. We had programs, events, and special days and I just continued to do what we have always done at our church. That is a terrible reason to do anything! And I never really stopped to ask, “Why are we doing all of these things?”.
The first thing that we should do is figure out our purpose, and then decide what we are going to do from there. As I studied what the Bible had to say about what Christians were supposed to do, and what church was supposed to be, I realized that the purpose of GNBC was to make disciples who make disciples. Once I knew what our purpose was, I then could come up with a plan for us to fulfill that purpose. Until I knew what we were supposed to be doing, the result that I wanted was up to mere chance. And that is not something that I was ok with.
Now that I knew what the purpose of our church was, I could then come up with a process for how we were going to do that. The work that we have been called to do is to take people who are far from God and bring them into a relationship with Him through Jesus, lead them into becoming a disciple of Jesus, and equip them to make disciples of others who are far from God. That is a big job! And not one that is going to happen very successfully without a clear direction of how to accomplish it. To make it as clear as possible, we use three words to describe the three aspects of that purpose: Gather, Grow, Go.
Now that we knew our purpose, we could begin to evaluate all the programs, activities, and special events that our church had to offer and see if they helped us accomplish that purpose. If something doesn’t help you accomplish your purpose, then it is hindering you from accomplishing your purpose! So, we began to evaluate all that we do by answering these two questions. Does it help us make disciples who make disciples? Does it help move people through the Gather, Grow, Go? If the answer to those questions was no, then those things were hindering us from completing our purpose and they had to go. Not all at once. But little by little we began to eliminate from the calendar the things that didn’t move us in the direction that we wanted to go. Now instead of wandering around aimlessly, we were leading with purpose, and so should you. In my next article, I will go into detail about the process that we came up with to fulfill our purpose. If I can help you identify your purpose and help you establish a process to complete it, feel free to let me know. I would be glad to help you lead with purpose in your church.