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8 Essential Questions for Your Church [and your blog]

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I feel like this blog is becoming a 37Signals fan site, but I promise that’s not the aim. I don’t work for 37Signals, nor do I receive kickbacks or incentives or whatever. Those guys (and a gal) are just plain smart.

They just posted an article covering the questions they ask themselves “before, during, and sometimes after [they] work on something.” These seem like simple questions, and they are. These are super-practical questions, and since I’m all about being practical, let’s take a look at them and see how they fit in your world and might be able to the help you with the decisions you make.

1. Why are we doing this? The “why” question needs to backup every decision you make. Scott Hodge wrote about this a while ago, but I can’t find the article, so take my word for it.

2. What problem are we solving? Yes, everything you do should be solving a problem. Problems aren’t always “problems” in the traditional sense. They can be needs, vision goals, or improvements, but they need to be solved.

3. Is this actually useful? If it’s only cool, then it’s not useful. A real pulpit is usually heavy on the adornment side and light on the usefulness side. However, a pulpit can be incredibly useful if your church is made up of folks that won’t take you seriously unless you’re behind a pulpit. Until they can separate their minds from that thinking, keeping your pulpit may be the one thing that gives the most credibility in the eyes of your congregation.

4. Are we adding value? I wrote about this a couple days ago, so I’m not going to rehash this here.

5. Will this change behavior? Holy Cow! What if everything we did was with the aim of changing behaviors? It wouldn’t take long to get behaviors in the right place. Of course, behavior isn’t the goal, but when you’re trying to corral 500 volunteers, proper behavior is key.

6. Is there an easier way? OMG! Please ask yourselves this question. It’ll save you and your people a lot of time and confusion and frustration.

7. What’s the opportunity cost? This question doesn’t just involve cash flow, although that’s paramount. It also involves other assets like people, equipment, time, and planning. My pastor constantly talks about ministries that are 80% effort and 20% return. He says we need to focus on the 20% effort and 80% return ministries. Of course, there are exceptions, but not too many.

8. Is it really worth it? This is the culmination of all the answers. Go back through your answers to the previous 7 questions and evaluate whether it’s worth it to move forward with what you’re doing.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive plan to run everything in your church on, but it is a good step in the process. Of course, start with prayer. Prayer trumps all answers to the above questions.

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