I am going through a required reading from my school on Andy Stanley’s Deep and Wide.

In one of the chapters of his book, he listed some questions every church leader should answer. It did make me think of how I lead the church. So here are the questions: (are you ready?)

1. Are we moving or simply meeting?
2. Are we making a measurable difference in our local communities or simply conducting services?
3. Have we organized around a mission, or are we organized around an antiquated ministry model inherited from a previous generation?
4. Are we allocating resources as if Jesus is the hope of the world, or are the squeaky wheels of church culture driving our budgeting decisions?

Some thoughts about his point in the book:

1. It is so easy for the church merely to meet. Once you have found a system on how to do your meetings effectively, you might feel like you have accomplished something already. The answer to the question should be – are we moving people to go and make disciples.

2. The church might have a full seating capacity but still fail to make a difference in our community.

In that case, we are introducing a consumerism mentality among our people just to come and see and not make any effort to go out and make disciples.

3. We also have to go back and ask why? Go to the heart of why we started. For Victory Greenhills, the church started because we wanted to make disciples in San Juan. And the primary way we make disciples are through small groups we call Victory Groups. I remember our founder, Pastor Steve, said that if there is a better way of making disciples, we will change to serve the purpose of the church. The way we engage culture and community with the gospel in the 90s (when I started doing ministry) is very different from how we do ministry now. Methods and models might change, but our message remains the same.

4. What are budgets for? As much as we want to save money to do certain things as a church, the primary goal for the funds that go to church is so we can equip and send people out to go and make disciples. So a good question we have to ask frequently is, “with this amount of money, how can we share the love of Jesus in the most effective and impactful way?”