Jun 26, 2019
By Katrina Goodrich
With so much focus on outreach and discussion on different ways to be involved in your community, I think it’s important to take a small step back and look at our individual church and community situations because not everything that has succeeded in one place is going to work in another. We need to be mindful of the fact that just because something works well in one community doesn’t mean it will work in another. Furthermore, even if a particular sort of outreach works for your church, is it truly working in your community or is it an inreach?
Make no mistake, even in “inreaching” there are many important things that we do together as a church family. It is super important to have that sweet fellowship together. However, it is a problem when inreaching is mistakenly identified as outreach. Both things are very important to the ultimate health and stability of your church. In fact, forming relationships with the members of your church is critical for both women and men, it becomes a problem when that is all a church ever does. Most importantly we cease to fulfill our call to the Great Commission if there is no outward movement. If our purpose is not to carry out the commandments of Christ, then we should seriously consider revisiting this propensity we have for calling ourselves Christians.
OK—so the last paragraph is pretty harsh and extremely uncomfortable for me to write. People in glass houses should definitely not be throwing stones. But I did it and I’m getting ready to reload.
We need to be mindful of the goals of our outreach and critically assess the effectiveness of those goals. How uncomfortable did that sentence make you feel—and when exactly did that feeling start?
If it began at the word “goals,” my questions for you are: Does your church have goals for your outreach program? Are the people involved in outreach aware of these goals? What about short-term vs. long-term goals? What about SMART goals?
If you started getting antsy when the phrase “critically assessing the effectiveness” appeared, you might have goals made—but are you looking at them and using them when your outreach team gets together? Are you making sure that those goals fit your service and time frame?
Having goals can be scary because you can fail to meet them. But goals increase effectiveness by making sure everyone is moving in the same direction with purpose. And when failure happens, a goal prepares you to try again with new information in hand about how you can change what you are doing to meet it. Without a goal, that process is a lot more difficult to manage.
Failure is not something to be afraid of, especially in this context, because failure doesn’t always mean that something is a lost cause. This might have to be my mantra going forward because I have an extreme aversion to failure. I really don’t like it when plans don’t work out, but that happens often and frequently. So what! If one thing you tried didn’t work out, try something else to reach that goal. Check to see if there was growth even though you didn’t do exactly what you wanted. Partial success is still success even if overall failure occurred.
Growth isn’t always steady and it certainly isn’t easy, but setting goals can give us a place to start and a purpose to reach for when things get difficult and failure occurs. Find your purpose. Set some goals.
