The very Core of Ministry

“Ministry starts at the needs of people.”

Read the gospels with this focus and you will see Jesus/God repeat this over and over again.  Read on in the New Testament, you’ll see the same thing.  Even in the old Testament, God ministers to people the exact same way, through people’s needs.  This easy conclusion then is that ministry starts at the needs of people.

Implementing the Core of Ministry

You can’t implement without identification.  You can’t identify without immersing yourself in the people you are called to minister to.  If you don’t know their needs, you can form a plan to implement work with people’s needs.

Why do we define that people’s needs are what we say they are, rather than identify what they actually are?  Why do we end up trying to implement cookie cutter solutions to people and their needs with may not even need “a cookie”, rather maybe something else?  Hope you see where I am heading with this, because I’m going to make a very relevant, yet radical shift.

Why I hate the para-military organizational structure of Royal Rangers

Actually, I like it, as most boys do, for the whole G.I. Joe kind of thing.  I see in camps that patrol structure and that hierachy of servant leadership structure as a good thing.  So I am not reverse engineering and rebuilding those structural concept.

Why do we take the organizational skeleton that is handed to us and force it to work within our level of organization?  For instance, in Royal Rangers USA, we have 50 states, 8 regions, and who knows how many sections and outposts.  In Penn-Del, we have 12 section, a handful of medium cities and 2-3 major metropolitan areas, and a lot of woods & country area.

So what works in Penn-Del is not going to work in Tenessee, though some things will.  And within Penn-Del, some things will work great around Pittsburgh, yet not really around the forests areas outside of Williamsport.

So what are we working with?  What are the needs?  How do we take apart our organization, then put it back together again?  This is just a preview post of some things brewing in my head that I’ll go more into detail with.  I’ll share one nugget, then will close out this post.

Developing organization and administration to fulfill ministry needs

If you have “Coordinators”, they better be coordinating, not being a super grunt in charge of an event, project, and/or set of tasks.  This means you have someone that is working with people to get an event, projects, etc done working with people.

For instance, when I was Expedition Coordinator, I was attempting to build up dynamic Expedition Rangers staff that served as expert resource people, event organizers, and co-coordinators.  Since there is a broad range of advanced activities in Expedition Rangers, I developed in the staff structure “specialist” positions, to serve as the experts in a particular ER area.  For instance we had climbing specialists, paintball specialist, etc, etc.

As for cocordinating, I tried to move away from an all-power central coordinator to having more equal east and west district coordinators, along with including in all the sectional Expedition coordinators in on the Expedition staff structure.

Then I added the junior leadership part too, making use of Senior Guides, guides over certain areas, FCF scouts, etc, etc.  This was an attempt also to disciple these young men into future adult leadership position, so they could take over, if God so leads them to that kind of servant leadership.

Bottom line is that Expedition Rangers needs scalable, organic leadership and administration that is dynamic, is ready to fit the needs of the boys, spiritually, activities, and otherwise.  Due to high levels of activities, you need lots of support people and lots of experts in the mix.  You need those junior leaders for the organic growth peace, since they are your link to the soil and some will grow into your future staff, which actually they are your staff already.  Too many people are dumb and don’t get this crucial concepts, which is why have experienced massive decline in recent years in Royal Rangers.

Now I am not sure if those who took over what I built have continued to use this, even build on it, which I don’t see evidence pointing that direction.  That what is painful in stepping down over a year ago, not knowing that such administrative leadership structure is self sustaining.  The thing is such a scalable and dynamic servant leadership administrative structure needs to be a living, breathing, self sustaining structure, where someone like me can step away and others fill in the gaps, further building to fit the needs of the ministry.

Repeating failures in leadership and administration

As long as I see leader burn out, I see bleeding evidence of “break-fix”, and hear worn out leaders keep begging for leaders to step up, I know we don’t have such dynamic leadership administration in place, that is organic, living, and breathing with life.

Sometimes it takes a shipwreck.  Some times it takes a lot of unpleasant things to restructure and re-organize failed organization.  In the end, it is about having a team of active and dynamic servant leaders who are doing all the back-end and front end work to build and run a ministry that is designed through the Holy Spirit to fulfill the needs of people.

Much more to ponder, much more to write about such things…

Soak on some of these things and pray to God about them.

blessings,

Silent Eagle

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