Once you have established the mission of your movement this will determine what goals you set, what activities you engage in, and how you manage yourself and your ministry. Your Mission, plus Momentum, Multiplication, and Management make up the essential components of ministry. Regardless of which of these areas you are strongest in, make sure you give adequate attention to each of them if you want to have a healthy, vibrant movement.
Management─Serving the Movement
You can have incredible momentum building on your campus and a growing number of students who really want to minister, but if you don’t take the time and effort to organize and plan, it could all collapse. For the worker that doesn’t feel gifted in administration, this management component can appear to be just “busyness”or simply a “necessary evil” they must endure. Either we control our schedule and “to do” list or it will control us. If you find yourself responding all the time, it could be you need a crash course in personal and ministry management.
Effective management always begins with the person we look at in the mirror each morning. Setting and carrying out personal goals in our time and relationship with God and family, sleep and physical exercise, financial stability, etc….are examples of top tier priorities that require our greatest attention.
Momentum management can feel overwhelming if there is a weekly large group meeting or succession of retreats and conferences on the horizon. Getting the upper hand here means doing a lot of advance planning, recruiting of leadership, specific delegation, and the empowering of students. Ideally, you are technically not doing anything, but simply managing others who are carrying out their pre-planned responsibilities. Along with organization, ongoing communication and evaluation will help define and refine future activities.
Managing the multiplication in your movement will be one of the most mentally and emotionally draining exercises you will perform. Spending time filling out a “Strategy of the Week” on each of the students you want to meet with takes prayer, time, and fore thought. The key is to ask yourself three questions of each evangelism, establishing, and equipping appointment you’re planning: 1) Where is this student spiritually?, 2) Where do they need to go?, and, 3) What is the next step?
Paul telling Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2 to entrust himself to faithful men who will be able to teach others shows us that the apostle was committed to raising up a strong third and fourth generation of believers. If we are going to do the same in our ministry, it will demand of us a week after week, hour after hour praying and planning of not only how to help our key students, but to equip them to win and disciple others too. This is our mission, and to complete it means creating momentum, funneling it into deep multiplication, and supporting it all with solid, ongoing management.