In the previous posts, we covered some leadership basics and foundations, the need for leaders on the missions field, and how to discern if you are a leader. In the next two posts, we’ll try to answer the question, “I think I might be a leader – what do I do now?” In this post, we’ll cover a potential pathway towards leadership and general ways you can develop and prepare as a leader. In the next post, we’ll provide a tool that we use on the field for self-evaluation that helps you to create a personal development plan.

Pathway towards Leadership

There’s so much that a team leader needs to think through and plan in order to lead well on the field. Things like teaming, development plans for yourself and your team, location, strategy, investigation, language plans, visas, and recruiting; we’ll continue to address all of these topics in this blog. But for this post, we want to give aspiring team leaders, either who have already launched or have yet to launch, some of the broad categories that you’ll need to think through and engage in for the next 1-2 years as you clarify your calling and begin taking steps of faith towards becoming a leader in the future. As a reminder, we’re talking specifically about team leaders and sub-team leaders.

If you’re already feeling God affirming a calling to team leadership, there’s 2 categories that we’d encourage you to focus on in your pathway towards leadership – development and planning/preparation.

Development

The first category is development. Again, there’s so many things that a TL needs to develop in, but we’re focusing more on the next 1-2 years. 

• Character – Character, and your personal relationship with Jesus, is the most critical component of development for leaders. Speaking broadly, we think a TL should be shooting for a high level of character like what we see in 1st Timothy 3. This is a list that Paul prescribes for Timothy in selecting elders of the local church, but we think it is a great list of mostly character attributes that team leaders should also exhibit and develop in. Another grid is looking at your life and how it’s bearing the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. Do a self assessment – which of these am I strong in? Which of these am I weakest in?
  
  You can also do something that’s called a 360 assessment to gain more feedback about your character and leadership – asking your leaders, peers, and those you lead (generally 3 from each category) some simple questions. The most basic three questions would be: What’s going well with my leadership? What’s not going well with my leadership? What’s missing from my leadership? Beyond those, you can add others that you want to gain feedback about: What are my strengths and weaknesses? Where do I need to grow? How do you experience my leadership? Where do I need to focus my time, and what should I stop spending my time on? And from that feedback, create a development plan around how to grow in certain areas.
  
  It’s important that an aspiring team leader have solid foundations in abiding, spiritual character, relational health (singleness/marriage/family), freedom from bondages, and good emotional health and awareness. Of course, all of these are critical for cross-cultural goers, but can be even more high stakes for leaders, as weaknesses in these areas are where the Enemy tends to attack in high stress, high spiritual warfare environments. Additionally, team leaders that don’t have solid foundations in these areas would have a hard time helping teammates and national partners to develop in these ways.
  
  
• SHAPE – Another aspect that you can develop in is your SHAPE. SHAPE stands for Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Aptitudes, Personality, Experience. It’s basically a grid to talk about the way that you’re wired and the experiences you’ve had that make you who you are, and help you know your strengths and weaknesses. I (Steven) didn’t know what my spiritual gifts were when I was in a training group preparing to go overseas until we went over some spiritual gifts assessments. I had never learned about APEST in Ephesians 4 – apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers – and found myself in the apostolic group without much idea of what it meant. But discovering my own gifting was a helpful grid for me to understand how to lead in the strengths God has given me, and where I need to set rhythms or recruit and delegate to others that will cover my weaknesses. Lead out of the SHAPE and strengths that God has given you, and also try to develop in your weaknesses and recruit people to your team who can balance you out!
  
  SHAPE Guide – This is a general tool we’ve found online that helps people discover, understand, and evaluate their SHAPE. If this one doesn’t feel helpful, a quick google search will show several similar guides. For each section of the SHAPE, you can also use different tools to evaluate. For example, under spiritual gifts, we prefer the Clinton Spiritual Gift Assessment (below); for Abilities, we’ll use StrengthsFinder; for Personality, we will use Meyers-Briggs and Enneagram. Each tool will have pros and cons – you don’t need to align your identity with a personality test, but take what’s helpful to bring further self-awareness into the ways that God has shaped and created you so you can further develop and serve in those strengths. After each teammate goes through the self-assessment, we will hold a SHAPE retreat to talk about how teams can work well together according to their SHAPE. If you’re interested in learning more about how to hold a SHAPE retreat with your team to figure out roles and working styles together with your teammates, please contact us!
  
  Clinton Spiritual Gift Assessment – This is the best spiritual gifts assessment that we’ve found. Robert Clinton is a former professor at Fuller Seminary who was focused on Biblical Leadership Development. His book, The Making of a Leader, is one that has really helped us understand how God develops leaders over a lifetime.
  
  Style of Influence – There’s so many personality tools out there, but we’ve found this to be one of the best in helping leaders to understand how they lead and help teams to understand how they work together. Here’s an example of what those assessments look like.

• Personal Development Plan – It’s critical for people who want to be leaders or who are leaders to pursue their own personal development! Having a personal development plan to evaluate, set goals and rhythms, and stay accountable to the plan is a crucially important aspect of prioritizing personal development. On our team in Thailand, we have each of our team members do a self-evaluation annually, and then go over it with their leader so they can receive feedback. From that, they’ll generally pick one character / abiding type of development goal and one skill / competency type of goal, and make a plan for the year for their development. Our next post will cover this PDP tool, how to use it, and how to lead others through it.

• Take Opportunities to Lead – Another way you can develop is through leading! It doesn’t matter if it’s the tear down team on a Sunday, or leading a disciple making team, as long as it is a place where you can be receiving vision from God, to influence the people of God, towards the purposes of God. Take opportunities to lead if you think you’re a leader! And remember – leading is serving. Ask leaders and mentors in your church where there might be opportunities for you to serve and to lead.

• Study Leadership – Studying biblical leadership and learning lessons from what leaders did well and not well can help us learn what we should aspire to and what we should be cautious of. Consider leaders like Moses, David, and Deborah. What kinds of attributes did they have? Look at how God raises up leaders in the Bible or in history and see if there are marks of that in your own life. Again, Christ-like character is the first prerequisite for leadership. Doing Bible studies over the lives of leaders in the Bible can have some of the most impactful lessons. Biographies of missionaries or ministry leaders can be helpful – one of our favorites is Through Gates of Splendor about Jim and Elisabeth Elliot. There’s also a ton of helpful leadership resources out there, like Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders which focuses on high biblical character, or The Making of a Leader by Robert Clinton that we mentioned above. And although there are helpful books from the business or organizational leadership world, we can’t emphasize enough – the leadership example of Jesus is Philippians 2. According to Jesus, leading is abiding and listening to the Holy Spirit. It’s being a humble servant. In the West, we too often equate business and organizational leadership values with biblical leadership, and many times, that isn’t true. We’d encourage you to take helpful things from business / organizational books, but to not let it become primary over the Word and spiritual leadership.

• Find Mentors – As you work on developing yourself and try to grow in areas where you might have weaknesses, be quick to look for mentors and to ask for help. There are so many people in the body of Christ who have experiences and giftings that we can learn from. For example, I (Jenn) am not a very naturally gifted shepherd. When people on our team had problems, I looked to our counselor for help and wisdom on how she would handle the situation. If I had been trying to figure it out myself, I would have made problems much worse. We also found mentors to specifically help us grow in our marriage and to speak into things like team dynamics as well. I think that sometimes we can get a little shy about asking people from help. But I want to encourage you, don’t be afraid to ask people for help – most people who are leaders WANT to be able to pass on what they know and would be honored to receive an ask from you! 

• Learn to Hear from the Holy Spirit – And lastly, as you work on developing yourself, learn to hear from the Holy Spirit. The truth is, no matter how well you prepare, life on the field and particularly leadership on the field is incredibly difficult. There are no obvious right answers and the stakes are very high. In light of that, team leaders MUST know how to walk in the Spirit and how to listen to the Holy Spirit actively. He is our source of guidance, comfort, wisdom, help, and fruitfulness. If listening to the Spirit and asking for his guidance in your decisions almost daily is not a normal rhythm for you, I would encourage you to start practicing – add listening times to your quiet times. A good book to read is Spirit Walk by Steve Smith. One of our friends in our organization has a great workshop on listening prayer that we’ll publish in the form of a blog post in the future.

Preparation and Planning 

Another aspect of a pathway towards leadership is preparation and planning. There will be a lot of categories here, which can feel overwhelming. Our advice is to set small goals and slowly make progress on 1-2 things a week. And it’s OK if some aspects are very open ended or still have a lot of question marks at the end of your preparation – things will begin to get clearer as you gain stability on the field. Lastly, we’d highly recommend for you to find mentors as you go through this process – other TLs that have gone before and can give wisdom in these areas. If you need help or consultation with any of these aspects, please reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d love to help you!

• Get Pre-Field Training – In order to be a healthy and effective team leader, it’s important to have the foundations and skills to be a healthy and effective cross-cultural goer. We were trained in a 9-month training program in our church from Launch Global. It focuses on living in community, learning from field realities, and practical applications that prepare you for the field. We’d encourage you to get cross-cultural training like this in order to engage in healthy practices, rhythms, and foundations that will help you in becoming a solid goer in order to become a good team leader. Check out the website to see if there’s a training group in your city.

• Investigate / Vision Trip – Once you’ve discerned where God is calling you, try and investigate as much as you can. Find resources online, read books, connect with leaders / goers from those places, take a vision trip, and try to learn as broadly as you can. Ask questions to local believers, goers, and local people that you meet. The more information you can gather, the better you can prepare as a TL for a variety of things.
  
  Before we launched to Thailand, I (Steven) read books about the history of the church in Thailand, we talked to Thai students at the Thai student club in Austin, and we connected with experienced goers in Thailand. I prayed for one of the 85 UPGs in Thailand every morning during my quiet time and just worked down the list in Joshua Project. It took me just 5-10 minutes a day, but through that, I also learned a lot about the people groups in Thailand. We took a vision trip and learned about demographics, culture, society, religion, and visited a bunch of different ministries like red-light district ministry, college ministry, orphanages, and church planting ministry. We knew we wanted to pursue CPM but wanted to gather as much info as we could about what God was doing in Thailand so that we could join with him in that. We’ll post about how to have an effective investigation / vision trip in the future as well.
  
• Recruiting – At some point in the process of being a TL, you’ll have to learn how to recruit others to your team. Recruit like-minded people who want to go where you want to go and do what God is calling you all to do together. Find people that fit well with you and who respond well to your leadership style. Whoever you recruit should be called and able to do the actual ministry work, but it can also be helpful to recruit people that can fit different roles on your team – people gatherers, servants, administratively gifted people, teachers/trainers, worship and prayer leaders, etc. Multiple roles can be filled in one person; they don’t all have to be different people. And most importantly, if you’re going to launch as a team leader, recruit a sub-team leader that can balance out your weaknesses and become a leadership plurality together with you! It helps so much!
  
  Some of our favorite parts in our time in Thailand were times with our sub-team leaders over the first few years. We’re not particularly strong at administration so we recruited a couple that are amazing with admin-type things and they basically saved all of our lives through helping us find insurance and visas and preparing crisis plans. We’d meet for hours with our sub-team leaders every month, debriefing all the ministry and team issues, praying and planning for the future, and then we’d de-stress by ordering McDonalds (not recommended) and watch reruns of Friends together. Through leading and doing ministry together, our sub-team leaders have become some of our closest friends, in part because there are certain things that only other leaders will really be able to empathize with.
  
• Strategy / Vision – As you discern and investigate, start writing down and forming vision statements and strategy plans for your team and ministry. It provides clarity for you and your team in what you’re shooting for and what God’s calling you to. Here are our posts on Strategy – what it is, and how to write a Strategy Plan.
  
• Logistics – Lastly, there’s a ton of logistics and administration that comes with not only moving overseas but with leading a team overseas. Finding an organization, finding mentors / coaches, support raising, visas, packing, apartments, language learning plans, writing a strategy plan, and writing an MOU to name just a few. We have developed a lot of resources around this (or should I say, our admin leaders that we recruited have developed resources) but it’ll be different for each team and context. Like we mentioned above, our recommendation is to find an agency with mentors that you really connect well with who will help you through all these things! In the process of investigating agencies and teams, look for demonstrated competency. That means, don’t only ask them questions about things that you value, but ask them how they do those things through their time and how they invest in it. For example, if you really want to find an agency or coach that will help you with having healthy rhythms and abiding – ask them how they’ve done that before, what it looks like in their lives, how they’ve helped other people in those areas – not just if they value it or not.

Again, with so many things to think through and prepare for as a team leader, the task list can feel overwhelming. As a TL, the list of things to oversee and accomplish will only increase as you launch to the field. In our own strength, no leader can possibly accomplish all of the things needed to lead a successful team. We are NOT saying that team leaders need to be experts in all of the areas that a team must consider. The role of a leader is to hear from the Lord and help their team towards what He is asking.

We’d encourage you to focus on discerning from the Spirit what he is calling you to be faithful to today, and to be obedient to that. If He has called you to be a leader, He will provide the strength, wisdom, people, and resources to accomplish what He has asked you to do. Invite your teammates into these areas and lean on their giftings and capacity, and find mentors and coaches that can give you guidance on how to engage each of these areas.

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

Proverbs 16:9

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.

“Strategy” is a frequently used word in missions leadership, maybe because of the parallels between missions and military situations. It’s often expected that team leaders would be ‘strategic’ in their ministry plans and leadership of their teams. For some leaders, they hear the word ‘strategy plan’ and they get really excited. Others might hear it and think, ‘that’s overwhelming, I’ll never be able to create a strategy and I don’t even know where to start.’ 

This is a two-part guide for how to write a Strategy Plan for your ministry. In this first part, I want to just define a few things about strategy and some of the information that needs to be gathered before you write a strategy plan. In the second part, we’ll have a step-by-step guide for how to write a Strategy Plan.

This guide is intended primarily for field team leaders pursuing movements among the unreached, but I think it can be adapted for many different ministry contexts. This was developed when we expanded from one team that Jenn and I led into 3 teams in early 2020, and we needed to help our new team leaders create their own strategy plans. I had to switch from thinking about strategy more intuitively and instead think of how any team leader, regardless of their natural aptitudes, could create a basic strategy plan for their ministry and their team.

Vision vs. Strategy vs. Tactics

The dictionary definition of strategy is – a plan of action designed to accomplish an overall goal within certain conditions. It’s important to distinguish vision (the end goal) from strategy (the plan) and tactics (the actions you do to fulfill the plan). Your vision (e.g. multiplying movements among this unreached people group) should be heavily prayed over and considered even before you launch to the field – it should very rarely change unless something very drastic happens or God speaks in a very clear way. You should be confident, clear, and committed enough to the vision God has given to you to be willing to give your life for it.

Strategy is the plan that you use to get from where you are to the vision that God has given you; it should be revisited and reworked probably 1-3 times a year to get a big picture view of how it’s going and how to plan to move forward. Tactics are the day-to-day and week-to-week actions that you do to accomplish your strategic objectives, and can change just as frequently.

What Strategy Is and Isn’t

Before we jump into the step-by-step guide, I wanted to bring some clarity to what I think strategy is and is not. Strategic thinking can quickly go from helpful tool to unhelpful pitfall if we’re not careful.

• Strategy is not primary. Even though I personally love strategy and my mind is drawn to it, I think we can assign far too much value to strategic thinking and strategy plans, particularly for Westerners. Give me a leader with godly character who is able to listen to the Holy Spirit and is humble to learn, over a strategic thinker without those things, every time. The best man-made strategies cannot compare to a godly leader obedient to the Spirit.
• Strategy is not meant to be perfect. The goal should never be to have a perfect plan. Ministry is messy because ministry involves people, including you and me! Therefore, we should hold our plans relatively loosely, and not get upset when our strategies don’t end up working out. But going through the process of thinking and planning can help you to understand what’s going well and what isn’t working, as well as other important aspects (more below). From experience, our plans have never really worked out how I originally thought it would, but we’ve seen God more often than not fulfill the goals and objectives that He was giving us. It feels like He is simultaneously reminding us that He is in charge, and showing His faithfulness to do what He leads us towards!
• Strategy is not as simple as copying someone else’s. You cannot carbon copy someone else’s strategy. This is a pitfall for a lot of people working towards CPM: they think, ‘well this strategy or training worked there, so it’s going to work here!’ The place you’re going to is unreached because of the difficult barriers to the gospel and to multiplication. Each context is unique because people groups and cultures are complex, so having a cookie-cutter approach between different contexts rarely works. It’s fine to mimic some of the things you learn from other places – most of the tools and lessons we use in Thailand are totally ripped off from other places in the world.

Strategy is not primary, won’t be perfect, and shouldn’t be copied, but it’s still a powerful tool when we have the right perspective:

• Strategy is important. Even though strategy plans won’t be perfect, it’s still an important endeavor and a helpful tool in your ministry. It’s the pathway for how you want to get to the vision God has given you, and it helps to create good expectations for your team. One of the questions we got the most from our teammates was, “Are we doing the right thing?” Crafting a strategy plan helps you and your team to move forward with focus, to thoughtfully learn from and adjust to your mistakes, and gives you clarity in what you’re asking God for in faith-filled prayer. 
• Strategy is doable. You don’t need to be an amazing ‘strategist’ in order to create a basic strategy plan. It shouldn’t be overly complicated or it will cease to be helpful. If you’re willing to learn, to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to put in some of the time and effort to write things down, a strategy plan will be a helpful tool for you and your team.
• Strategy requires continued learning and adapting. Whether a new team leader or an experienced one, you will never have all the information you need to create a perfect plan. There will always be mistakes, missteps, and places where you’re downright wrong, and a good leader will learn from failing forward. God’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8-9), and that’s good! If you’ve learned from the actions you’ve taken, then you’re well on your way to figuring out what will work. And, there are others that have gone before that can help you – learn from them!

Information Gathering

Before we jump into the steps for writing a strategy plan, there’s two areas that require some learning and information gathering: principles and context.

Learn the Principles

Ministry principles are the building blocks for your ministry plan. A principle is something that is true regardless of context. Our ministry philosophy and strategic plan uses CPM principles.

As much as possible, we try to adhere to these principles and keep these in mind when we’re forming our strategy plan and tactics. When making ministry decisions, we’ll ask – is this simple and reproducible? Is this in line with Scripture? Are we sowing broadly?

For movement practitioners, it’s essential to know these principles and study the different ways these principles can be applied in different contexts. The more you can learn from others that are doing or have seen success in a similar ministry as you, the more you’ll build your database of knowledge and be able to form strategy appropriately.

Principles are different from applications – this is an important distinction in strategy. For example, broad sowing is an important principle for multiplication, but the application of broad sowing can look different in different contexts.

For us, 3 Circles is a gospel sharing tool that we learned and used in the US. In our first training group with Thai disciple-makers, we trained them in how to use 3 Circles. After 3+ months of going onto the college campus as a team and sharing 3 Circles over 200 times with almost no success, we asked our Thai partners, ‘is this a good tool for sharing in Thailand?’ They told us, ‘No, it isn’t!’ There were too many differences in worldview for 3 Circles to make sense to someone from a Buddhist background, so we needed to pick an application that was more contextually appropriate.

It can also be helpful to learn from and use different ministry models to guide your strategic planning. We use this Multiplication Cycle adapted from other models with our partners in Thailand, but there are many other models out there like 4 Fields or the T4T Three Thirds Process. There’s a ton of resources out there, and you can find some of them on our Resources page.

Investigate your Context

Now that you’ve studied and understood the ministry principles and models that you want to use – here comes the hard part! How do I apply this in my context? What are the best methods, practices, and rhythms of training, coaching, evangelism, discipleship, and church planting among your people group?

Before you launch, and as you’re there, learn as much as you can about your context and people. In the 2 years before we launched to Thailand, I had Joshua Project opened on my computer and Operation World on my desk, and I prayed through a different UPG a day in Thailand before we ever moved there. Learn about the culture, the gospel barriers, the history of Christianity in that country if there’s anything. Try to identify where the major barriers and opportunities are. Meet people from that country and ask a ton of questions about their upbringing and culture and context (ethnographic interviews can be a helpful tool to ask good questions). Try to meet other like-minded goers that have been there for a while, even better if they’re movement focused as well.

It’s difficult to create a strategy plan with the right applications when you haven’t learned the principles and the context. Again, you won’t have perfect knowledge, so ministry strategy requires experimentation and innovation. Ultimately, none of us as outsiders will have the cultural understanding that an insider will be, so partnering with national believers can be one of the most effective approaches in cross-cultural ministry – we call this ‘Being Barnabas’ and will write a future post about it!

Write your Strategy Plan!

From there, you can start to write up a strategy plan (part 2!). It’s a good practice to write a strategy plan before you even launch, but just hold that loosely because there’s so much you learn just by being on the ground there. When you get there, you want to learn as much as possible and write down what you learn. We had our team brainstorm 50 questions in 10 different categories that they’d try to ask different types of people over the first 2 years – some of the categories were about religion, culture, Church history, barriers to the gospel, spiritual environment, urban vs. rural, etc. 

It’s a good idea to revisit the strategy plan after you finish language school and before you start to jump into full-time ministry engagement, maybe 1-2 years after you’ve been there, depending on how long language learning is for you. Then probably evaluate your strategy plan once again after your first season of ministry as you’ve tried some stuff out.

Strategy is a tool that can help bring clarity, but it doesn’t determine your success. No one ever got to movement because of perfect man-made strategy; God alone determines when and if movements start. And the Holy Spirit is the driver and the guide – if you look at Paul’s journeys in Acts, you can clearly see some strategic aspects of how Paul operates – like going to synagogues before engaging Gentiles (Acts 17:2), or the way he sets up local leaders versus leaders in his apostolic team (Acts 19:22). But you should also go and count how many times his ‘plans’ get changed by the guiding and direction of the Holy Spirit (Acts 16:6), like getting the dream of the Macedonian call (Acts 16:9).

In Part 2, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan, but ultimately, our plans need to be given to us by the Spirit – and he will do it!