How to Write a Strategy Plan (2/2)

In Part 1, we discussed what strategy is and is not, and some areas for learning before trying to establish a strategy plan. This post is a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan for your ministry. Creating the strategy plan assumes you have received from God the end vision he has given you and your team. The examples in this guide are specifically for church planting ministry, but the broader steps can be applied to almost any ministry context.

1. Pray and Fast: This must be the first step – to look up and go to the One who Sovereignly knows and guides every plan. Start by surrendering and releasing all of your expectations and assumptions. Ask God for wisdom, faith, big vision; ask Him for a promise, theme, phrase, verse, image, and spend time waiting and listening. You may not get something specific immediately, but receiving a verse or phrase from God to guide your planning can be a strong foundation.

2. SWOT Analysis: This assumes you’ve done some homework on investigating your context. From there, do a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats, Opportunities) for your area. For how to do a SWOT, check out this short guide. Also, here are some helpful questions you might ask in a SWOT analysis. The SWOT Analysis gives you some insight into what opportunities and challenges may be happening in your area at this moment in time.

3. Shortened ‘Gap Analysis’ and Pathway: Gap Analysis is just a way of asking – where are we now, and where would we like to go? By clarifying the present situation and the end vision, it lays the foundation for how to create your strategy plan, which is how you will get from here to there. Take your ministry principles and / or model and list out the broad steps or pathway for how to get to your end goal. Our team uses this CPM Continuum as a guide for where we want to head, and for new teams, you would want to start at the beginning with things like Investigation and Partnerships. If you are further along and re-visiting the strategy plan, start where your current status is. 

4. Brainstorm the Questions: Now you have the general pathway and broad steps for how to get to your end vision. The next step is to discover effective applications for your context in each step. Start with brainstorming questions that need to be answered to discover effective applications. Below is a list of the sections and questions adapted from the CPM Continuum, CPM principles, and the Multiplication Cycle that are relevant to our ministry context. The questions below are just examples of what you might ask in each step; you would want to list 3-7 key questions under each to try and find appropriate applications in each step.

5. Answer the Questions, Establish the Applications: After you lay out the steps and the questions, try to write down various answers. Some answers will be obvious, and others will just be a guess. This exercise will help you understand your level of confidence in the application for each step. If you’re particularly unsure about a section, then spend more time in prayer and investigation about it. Then, list no more than 2 to 3 potential applications that could be used in that section. 

• For example, Gospel sharing or evangelism is an important step in our ministry process. After discussion, prayer, and investigation, our team listed out 3 different potential tools that we wanted to try in our context. We automatically eliminated the ‘Bridge’ diagram because Thailand was a fear/power context and not a guilt / innocence one. Eventually, after experimenting with a few different evangelism tools like 3 Circles, we decided to primarily use a testimony + prayer for needs approach that led to a simple, biblical gospel presentation that one of our Thai partners wrote. It took several years of iteration and experimentation to establish that application, and it was mainly picked after this church planter started seeing dozens of people come to faith!

6. Create 5-3-1 year goals: Now that you have the pathway and some applications, create your goals – what progress in your pathways are you realistically pursuing in these time frames? 3 and 5 year goals are going to be more vision level, but 1 year goals should have clear lead / lag measures to get to where you think God is calling your team to go. These can be easily changed as you progress forward depending on circumstances and timing, so don’t worry if you don’t feel rock solid in your 3 and 5 year goals. They are there as a benchmark to see where you are shooting at, and you want to work backwards from future vision to current actions. For example, a new team post-language school might have these potential goals:

• 5 years: Train and coach 15 church planting teams in our area; see 20 simple churches planted.
• 3 years: Establish at least one main national partner; Train and coach 5 church planting teams; see 30 Discovery Bible Groups started.
• 1 year: Investigate 5 potential national partners; pilot the first 5 trainings for church planters.

7. Establish your Wildly Important Goal (WIG): Our team uses the 4 Disciplines of Execution as our short-term goal setting tool. Basically, the premise of 4DX is that if you can focus on your 1 or 2 most important goals for success, you can achieve it, but if you have too many goals, you’ll be too stretched to obtain success in any category. So for our 1 year goals, we want to give extra thought and discussion with our teams to make sure it is the most important goal that will move us forward the most towards our end vision. Our teams will do a 2-3 day planning retreat to go through this entire strategy process, ending in a single 6-18 month goal. The 4DX process also gives some helpful tools for how to be accountable and how to track your progress in this goal with a scoreboard.

• Using the above example, the goal is to begin piloting trainings for church planters by the end of one year. In order to do that, we have to establish introductory partnerships with 5 potential national churches and leaders (lag measure – the outcome we want to see). Our lead measure (the critical activities that we engage in to affect our lag measure) would be to engage in a partnership development meeting with a potential partner at least 3 times a month (e.g. attend the church, visit a small group, cast vision with a leader, serve in some capacity to build trust, etc.). We believe that by faithfully acting on these lead measures, God will help us find the right churches and leaders He wants us to partner with.

8. Get Feedback: After you’ve given some time, thought, and prayer into your strategy plan – get feedback from others! This could be other peer leaders in your agency or country, mentors or coaches, your teammates, and your national partners. 

9. Additional Questions to Consider: These are some broader questions to consider along with the ones you establish in your pathway.

• How will we recruit, develop, and establish leaders at every stage?
• What are your top potential barriers / constraints / obstacles? How do we turn them into opportunities? 
• What knowledge, skills, resources, teammates, roles, partnerships, competencies will you need to achieve your strategic objectives?
• Would additional financial resources help you achieve your objectives? What are budgeting aspects to consider in your strategy plan?
• What rhythms of evaluation / feedback will you have? And how? 
• What might be some completely out of the box / way out of left field ideas that could spur innovation in your strategic approach?
• What support structures do you think may be needed in your strategic approach?

10. Jump In!: Once you’ve written your strategy plan, gotten feedback, and established your 6 to 18 month goals, jump in and do the work! Now that you’ve prayed, investigated, and discussed the different steps, applications, and goals, you can focus on the most important goals, while keeping an approach of experimentation, learning, and adjustment if your applications aren’t effective. Don’t be afraid to fail forward – even if your plan doesn’t bear the fruit you’re hoping for, it’s an opportunity to learn and innovate to move forward. There’s also a fine line between discerning when you should innovate and change something, or when you should keep persevering in a goal – ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom to decide. As a general guide, we have heard from CPM practitioners that you don’t want to say something ‘doesn’t work’ until you’ve tried it 200+ times!

On first glance, this may look like a lot of moving parts and complexity. My encouragement to you is to set aside 2-3 days and just start trying to follow the guide and fill in your plan. I’m confident that by the end, you’ll have at least the beginnings of a solid strategy plan for you and your team. Going through this process gives you and your team clear goals to focus on, an understanding of your ministry process, questions that you can investigate, and motivating vision for where God is leading you. To me, getting even a semblance of those benefits is worth giving a couple of days of focus, as opposed to you or your teammates waking up each day and not knowing what you’re supposed to do!

And as we said in Part 1, allow the Holy Spirit to guide and surprise you. If you sense him nudging you in a different direction, follow him with obedience and boldness! Most importantly, we submit all of our plans to him:

The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.

Proverbs 16:9

Lastly, if you need help either getting started or at any step in the creation of your strategy plan, we’d love to help! Please reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com.