Logan Leadership

I’ve been working with a few groups on ways to revamp their credentialing or ordination process– essentially, how to prepare ministers for ministry. This week on my blog I’m reflecting on some of my general thoughts in this topic.

Once you ordain, certify, or credential a ministry candidate, they’re done, right? Not so fast. You can see major quality improvement in your ministry leaders by investing on their ongoing growth and development after they begin their official ministry. You’ll also see your burn-out and drop-out rate decrease.

I’ve been working with a few groups on ways to revamp their credentialing or ordination process– essentially, how to prepare ministers for ministry. This week on my blog I’m reflecting on some of my general thoughts in this topic.

The first thing that’s critical is having clear outcomes. If you want to develop high quality leaders within your ministry, you need to first define what you want those leaders to look like. What do you want them to be able to do? What qualities do you want them to model and pass along to others? Identify clear, outcome-based competencies so you have a clear map of what you want your ordained leaders to be and do.

Craig Whitney of ELI Church Planting talks about the role of relational evangelism in planter effectiveness:

 “One of the four characteristics the ELI measures [in church planters] is relational evangelism. One of the things we asked in our research was what percentage of those attending a new church were previously un-churched. We discovered that the higher the ISA score in relational evangelism the higher the percentage of un-churched people in a new church – and this relationship was statistically significant.”

I keep a personnel file on myself.  I know that’s odd, but every once in a while it pays off. I recently had cause to look in that file and rediscovered a personal inventory I took a long time ago: SIMA: System for Identifying Motivated Abilities.