Ministries and Churches come up with catchy "purpose" or "mission" statements all the time. They think that if they make these fancy statements that the ministry will take care of itself, and volunteers will gladly follow the purpose and there will be no issues and everyone will be in unity. I know of ministries that are struggling, and they decide to come up with one of these purpose statements and they are excited to do a sermon series based around their purpose because they think it will solve the problems...but in three months, the pastors are just as frustrated as they were before.
Why are the pastors still frustrated, after all, didn't they come up with a great purpose statement? The reason why these leaders are still frustrated is because the ministry is doing the exact same things as it was before. The only thing that has changed is now they have a fancy purpose statement on the wall. They have a great purpose statement but they have no clearly defined process on how to fulfill the purpose.
In seminary and even my first few months on staff at a church, I was the one who thought that the purpose/mission was the means to the end, and once the purpose was clearly defined, the ministry will take care of itself. Don't get me wrong....the purpose (the what) is important, but we cannot neglect the process (the how)...and this is where ministries fall miserably short.
We have created our nice statements with never clearly defining how we are going to fulfill the purpose. How do we know this to be true? Because nothing has changed, we are doing the same exact things we were doing before the purpose statement was ever written and we are seeing the same results.
It is time to create the process, because the process (the how) is more important than the purpose (the what)!
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