Priorities for a church - how to write a mission statement together

Every church faces the challenge of what it should concentrate its efforts on as there are so many possibilities.

A church could be known for its social programme, its social outreach, its community work, its evangelistic programme, its support of missions, its cafe, its work with elderly, its shop, or its beautiful choir and music. No church can do everything.

Last Saturday at our elders conference I facilitated an exercise to see what the church should be concentrating its efforts on. This will help me plan and prioritise my time.

They way we did it was to split the group into threes and give each triplet a pack of 24 cards. On each card was written on aspect of church life. So there were cards with mission, evangelism, music, pastoral care etc.  - you get the picture. Then I asked them all to rank the deck of cards in order from the most important to the least important.

After fifteen minutes I stopped them and asked each group to hand me their bottom 12 cards. I then asked them to see if that altered the way they thought about the others. After a further ten minutes I asked them to give me the next eight bottom cards. Each triplet now had four cards. I them gave them five minutes to say which was most important in this grouping. I then went round the groups and asked for the top ranking card from each triplet. There were four groups and they all had a different top card.

The four areas of church life that were considered priorities were preaching, church growth, youth and children's work and pastoral care.

That selection seems a balanced way ahead for a small church, though it is interesting that evangelism didn't make it into any groups top ten yet church growth did. This will form the basis of our mission statement for the next year or so. It is a useful technique that got some good discussions going between people about subjects that they would not normally have talked about. And we have the basis for a mission statement that all the elders can claim to have been part of writing.