As we are rounding the corner of the midway mark of the year, many of us are beginning to thinking about preparing for the next year. Part of that preparation is assessing your ministry for what is working and asking the tough questions about what needs to be added, retooled, and taken away. In this article, we are going to look at a valuable tool you can use today to properly assess your church ministries.
A tool you can use for church ministry assessment today is a SWOT analysis. Used worldwide, the SWOT analysis is a proven tool for assessing the health and viability of any church or department. As a pastor, a SWOT analysis provides you and your leaders with stimulating strategic thinking to clarify the long-term effectiveness of any ministry area. This is accomplished by identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the ministry you are evaluating.
Why Assessment is Necessary?
In church ministry, things often move at breakneck speeds. In the weekly cycle of preparing and executing Sunday services, other events can leave ministry leaders just trying to keep up. Often times there isn’t available time to pause and properly assess how a ministry is performing. Even if you are able to find the time to do an assessment, it is hard to know where to even begin.
In my years of ministry, it has often fallen to me to carry out evaluations and assessments of staff, processes, efficiency, and performance. I found evaluating the performance of staff members was relatively easy when objectives were clear, and evaluating events was pretty straightforward when desired outcomes were determined beforehand. However, evaluating the overall performance of an entire ministry or department proved to be a bit more challenging.
The default evaluating metrics many pastors and ministry leaders use are attendance numbers and giving totals. Though these are good points of information to know, they are not good metrics for evaluating overall performance.
Attendance and giving are laggard metrics which means they are the end result of a combination of realities that mask what is really going right and what is really going wrong. You can have a well-attended and well-funded ministry that is unhealthy and causing more harm than good to the well-being of the faith community you are serving. This is why you need an evaluation process that is more objective and taken from many different angles. This allows you to see where a ministry is hitting home runs and where it needs to improve.
This is why the SWOT analysis approach is an invaluable tool for ministry leaders to use.
What is SWOT?
SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The distinction is in what the quadrants are focused on. The strengths and weaknesses are assessing the internal environment of the church, while the opportunities and threats are focused on the external environment. This distinction acts as a guard from only focusing on the internal factors or only the external factors.
By taking the time to explore both the internal and external environments of your ministry, you will be able to develop an effective long-term strategic perspective of where God is leading your faith community. This will allow your church to remain effective in an increasingly dynamic and spiritually diverse world.
It is vital you, as the pastor or ministry leader, are able to lift your head from the demands of today and see down the road into the coming future. By doing so, you will be able to develop a clearer plan, operate with strategic intentionality, and be more efficient with your time, energy, and resources. This is the key to guiding your faith community into the future, which is what makes the SWOT analysis so valuable.
Like other pastors and ministry leaders, you need to be able to lift your head from the demands of today and see down the road into the coming future. This will allow you to develop a clearer plan, operate with strategic intentionality, and be more efficient with your time, energy, and resources.
The SWOT analysis may be what tips you over the edge to living your dream life in ministry where you enjoy pastoring a growing church while also having more quality time with your family, and a greater sense of satisfaction in your ministry.
Assessment of Strengths
A vital element of a healthy church is a regular celebration of all the things that are going right. This is strengthened when these celebrations are genuinely grounded in reality rather than empty cheerleading and promotional spin.
The SWOT analysis begins with identifying strengths. Whether you are evaluating the church as a whole or a specific ministry, it is important to begin by identifying what is going right. Many times as ministry leaders we are focused on the fires that need to be put out, the challenges that are pulling us, or the looming conflicts we have to deal with. This can rob us of seeing all the things that are going well and the ways we are in alignment with God’s plan. Even the morale of a church staff can be greatly hindered by the constant focus on the negative rather than focusing on the positive.
As a natural problem solver, I know this all too well. In the midst of everything going well, I can have a tendency to see the one thing that is wrong, no matter how minute it is. This has been very frustrating to my fellow team members over the years and even discouraging when they share their ideas. It is why I have to consciously choose to celebrate the victories and wins, to guard myself and those around me against being pessimistic, contrary, and even cynical.
The SWOT analysis helps me with my natural cynicism by starting with the positive and identifying what is going right. What are the areas that are engaging people, bringing in new people, leading to spiritual growth, or guiding them towards salvation?
These strengths are the internal capabilities that give the church its effectiveness. It is how it serves the needs of members, attendees, and community and provides wins for them.
Now, it is important that in every step of the SWOT analysis an objective posture is taken. For instance, when listing strengths, if you or your team are unrealistically positive about things going on, it can skew analysis to show things are going better than they actually are. Just as taking an overly negative perspective will skew the results in the weaknesses section.
For instance, if you are evaluating your small group leader system and you list the training as a strength, how are you determining that? If the number of small groups is not increasing or the number of people attending small groups is not increasing, then it may be an indication that the training of leaders is not sufficient enough in the reproduction of more leaders or in the invitation of new members.
Assessment of Weaknesses
In the second step of the SWOT analysis, you will assess the weaknesses. What internal capabilities in the church or ministry being evaluated are ineffective or inefficient in performance or reaching desired objectives? This section can hurt a little bit because it will force you and your team to admit there are things not quite where they should be and someone will be responsible for its current state as well as its eventual turnaround.
The weakness section doesn’t just show what is going wrong, but it can also identify areas of limitation where objectives are being hindered. For instance, if attendance to your culture experience class has a high demand, but is limited to 15 people because of the room it is held in, then this isn’t a weakness, but a limitation. If this limitation was removed, then the culture experience class would have been listed as a strength rather than a weakness. Clear objective information and understanding are the keys.
Assessment of weaknesses also allows for clear alignment with your church’s mission, vision, and core values. Are your ministry efforts upholding these strategic pillars of your church or are things getting off course and losing focus?
An example of this is identifying how your ministry is serving a specific need of your faith community. Each church, including yours, had limited time, volunteers, and financial assets. No church can meet every need of the community, which is why it is important for churches to work together. But, how do you determine which needs to meet and which ones you don’t?
Your mission, vision, and core values provide that clarity, and in the weakness section of your SWOT analysis, you can determine whether or not you have picked up an initiative that is out of alignment with those pillars.
At the same time, it will point out which needs in the community fit within your mission, vision, and core values that are not being met. Identifying those needs in your SWOT will allow you and your leadership to make the necessary efforts to boost your focus on those needs.
Regarding Opportunities
When I perform a SWOT analysis, this is my favorite portion of the process. When identifying opportunities, this is a place to dream, imagine, and expand your thinking.
At this step, you are going to look at what conditions, or possible future conditions, might provide your church or ministry an opportunity to serve its members, attendees, or community more effectively.
Though this can be an exciting exercise to go through, the inevitable result of this step is change, and with churches, change can be difficult if the church has not built a tolerance for change into its culture. If you have built a church culture where change is accepted, then this is an exciting step, but if you haven’t then this can be a liberating process where new opportunities can invigorate you and your team to lead change.
Regarding Threats
The temptation at this stage in the SWOT analysis is to stop, ride the high excitement of all the opportunities you just identified, and be done. However, identifying threats is possibly more vital to the analysis than any of the previous areas.
In this stage, you will identify conditions and future conditions inside and outside the church that might threaten the sustainability and effectiveness of the church or ministry. The objective here is to find ways to minimize or avoid these threats before they make an impact on your church or ministry.
For instance, how will your faith community handle the move toward online worship? How is your church handling the growing competition with youth sports and busy school activities? What has your church learned since COVID to be ready for the next wave or a future pandemic?
Being able to identify these threats in advance will allow you and your team to plan a response to avoid or minimize the threat rather than reacting to it. Reacting to threats often leads to a greater loss in resources, loss in people, and increased stress and strain on everyone involved.
Hold Your Own SWOT Workshop
Now that you understand what each section of the SWOT analysis is focused on, now you are ready to perform an analysis yourself or lead your team through a SWOT workshop. The following steps will take the guesswork out of the process and set you and your team up for an incredible experience.
- Define the objective of the SWOT Analysis: what is it that you are assessing? You may be assessing a specific ministry department, an event, a service, or your entire church’s effectiveness. It is important to know what objectives you are measuring against. If there are not predetermined objectives, then this is a good time to quickly jot some down.
- Explain the SWOT procedure: use the previous sections of this article to bring everyone else up to speed on what each step in the procedure looks like.
- Create Individual lists: Provide everyone in the workshop with a framework they can use to list their own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It would be best to allow everyone to do a section at a time for a set amount of time, such as 1–3 minutes. The temptation will be to have a discussion about each section but help your team restrain from engaging in dialogue until later in the process.
- Combine responses: Now that everyone has their own individual SWOT frameworks filled out, it is time to come together as a team. Using a whiteboard or Post-its on the wall, combine a collection of everyone’s responses in the appropriate quadrant of the framework. This will provide everyone the opportunity to see what everyone else is thinking, identify where everyone is on the same page, and where there are differences in perspective.
- Engage in authentic dialogue: This is your opportunity to facilitate the dialogue of your team. Encourage them to be open and honest and really explore each section together. The goal of this is to come to a common approach regardless of differing perspectives. It is vital you as the leader become a facilitator of the dialogue rather than a driving force. If you have a dominant voice in the dialogue, then it will stifle the voice of the others in the room. In no circumstance should you allow yourself to become defensive. If you do, the effectiveness of the exercise will come to a quick end.
- Develop actions for moving forward: The key to a successful SWOT analysis is to use the information from the framework and dialogue and place it into action. This is where you as the leader begin to take more of a prominent role. Distilling the information gathered and turning it into action steps with a strategic approach.
Get Your FREE SWOT Template for Your Own Workshop
Conclusion
Objective assessment is always a challenge, and finding the time for assessment is an even greater challenge. The SWOT analysis can provide incredible insight into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of any church or ministry, and it can be done on a napkin if necessary.
Despite the simplicity of it, the insight gained is invaluable and can position you and your faith community to develop an intentional strategy to advance God’s Kingdom and make a lasting impact on your community.
Resources
Resources to go deeper into planning and anticipatory leadership.
(Some links in this article are affiliate links, sales links, or promotional links for Brandon Pardekooper Consulting, Ministry Hackers, and partners.)