Lesson 2/4

Empowerment Leadership Model for Small Groups, Teams, & Families
Course 2, Lesson 4

Defining Goals Designed to Lead to
Accomplishment of the Purpose

what the group does to get started correctly

Note: Whenever "group" or "team" is used, it can mean "group", "team", or "family".
________________________________

After establishing the contract, that set of agreements with the leader and its group members, the group decides what goals will have the best chance of achieving the group purpose. Thus, the group will break the larger purpose down into goals that need to be accomplished for the purpose to be achieved. Usually this is quite simple for the kinds of groups we find in the church. In corporations and industry, as for church boards, it can be far more complicated.

Goals "flesh out" the purpose. Goals break down the overall purpose or mission into steps toward accomplishing the purpose. They lead to methods and activities that will reach the goals and take the group one step closer to the purpose.

Goals should be measurable, so that the group knows if it is truly moving toward accomplishment of the purpose or just spinning its wheels. When measurements are not established, activities to reach those goals may be inadequate or meaningless. What then happens is that churches decide they are successful just because they are doing something, short circuiting church progress.

Let's apply this to a group that has adopted the purpose to meet every other week to help one another live for Christ in everyday life as well as give Him what he wants when Christians meet in community. This group should set a goal that group members will learn from the Bible whatever is needed to help its members live obediently every day. Activities related to this goal can be measured as effective or not by whether or not group members can give helpful and necessary biblical guidance to one another. Another goal for such a group should be that there will be openness and honesty with one another out of love for Christ. This can be measured by how meaningful or superficial are requests for help, as well as the level of confession of sins and difficulties. This group ought to also make a goal of knowing our Togethers of Scripture so that they know how to deliver help and love to one another.

A church leadership team that adopts the purpose to give God what He wants of their church has a lot of work to do in creating the right goals. Unfortunately, most church leadership boards just carry on "business as usual" without much regard for whether the purpose, goals, and activities are aimed at anything other than organizational survival. Good leadership doesn't look for the easy way out. Instead the one who leads the church leadership team, often the pastor, needs to give the task of defining goals to the team, knowing that the task might take weeks. To skip this goal-setting process that will determine what actions are needed is disastrous in most cases.

Next, we will look at how the group needs to define an action plan based on the goals that will accomplish the purpose. Then the group will decide on specific actions to reach the goals.

click here