Does your Strategy Clarify Opportunities or do New Opportunities Constantly Redefine your Strategy?

Ministry leaders can easily fall prey to shiny, silver objects. It is all too easy to be taken off track and derailed from a very critical strategy simply because a shiny object has appeared in the periphery.  When you begin to pursue this peripheral opportunity, you get yanked off track.

Think of your strategy as a die cast mold, set beforehand that determines your future outcome. With a die cast mold, liquid metal is poured in a predetermined shaped mold. The metal, once cooled, takes on the predetermined form of the mold itself. For ministry strategy to be like a die cast mold, you must predetermine where you want to go and what you want the outcome to look like. Far too many leaders have no strategy, so every random, seemingly positive opportunity automatically redefines where they are going. They are a leader who is jerking the wheel right to left, over and over, causing the passengers on the ship to get queasy and seasick.

One of the most important leadership principals is to create a strategy and literally stick with it. Be immovable. Seek the Lord. Seek counsel. Strategically determine where you want to go for the next three to five years. Be disciplined and immovable from that opportunity. That does not mean, however, that you are rigid, resisting any future opportunities.  Be open to future opportunities that may just crop up. However, having a predetermined strategy allows you to have a bias towards the word “NO.” You heard it right. Ministry leaders need to have a bias to say “NO.” There are far too many opportunities that will derail and dismantle a wonderful future by unnecessary rabbit trails and false starts.

A great leader once said “A wonderful YES can predetermine the next 1,000 NOs”. In other words, having a critical, prayer-based strategy automatically dismantles less quality opportunities that will present themselves to you. I think that having a bias towards NO allows you to have your greatest YES.

Does your strategy help you quickly determine YES or NO? Or does your weak and undefined, (or possibly non-existent) strategy make it open game for any and all opportunities to quickly derail you and cause you to essentially achieve nothing at all? At the end of the day make a winning strategy and stick to it. Don’t be tempted by every random shiny object in the right side of your field of vision.