What is Your Plan?

To further the mission of your church, there must be action today and specific aims for tomorrow. Yet planning is not masterminding the future. Any attempt to do so is foolish because the future is unpredictable.In the face of uncertainties, planning defines the particular place you want to be and how you intend to get there. Planning does not substitute facts for judgment nor science for leadership. It recognizes the importance of analysis, courage, experience, intuition - even hunch. It is responsibility rather than technique.

Effective plans have five elements:

• Abandonment - the first decision is whether to abandon what does not work, what has never worked - the things that have outlived their usefulness and their capacity to contribute.
• Concentration - concentration is building on success, strengthening what does work.
• Innovation - you must also look for tomorrow's success, the true innovations, the diversity that stirs the imagination.
• Risk taking - planning always involves decisions on where to take the risk. Some risks you can afford to take; some decisions carry great risk but you cannot afford not to take them.
• Analysis - it is important to recognize when you do not know, and therefore need to conduct an analysis of potential decisions.

What is your plan?

Asking questions of yourself and your organization is never finished. Leadership requires constant resharpening, refocusing, never really being satisfied. Perhaps the most powerful question of all is this: What do we want to be remembered for? It is a question that induces you to renew yourself - and your church - because is pushes you to see what you can become.

Go ahead - keep asking questions!