Navigating chaos: 7 key strategies for parish leaders
Updated January 16, 2025 |
I was teaching a middle school religion class recently and was reminded of three things:
- Middle school teenagers are chaotic, hilarious, and hungry to learn about the faith. You just need to engage them in the right way.
- The language and culture of Gen Alpha is so different. I need to ask questions rather than assume I’m still “cool enough” to understand.
- I always teach lessons about theology that apply everywhere else. I mean, that makes sense, right?
This day was no different. We played a chaotic game that had them laughing, and included one 7th grade boy telling the class he “had no rizz,” which I needed him to define later. I then went into the lesson, a bible study on Genesis 1—the creation narrative.
I began with a simple premise: God is not chaotic. God creates order out of chaos.
As we discussed the various movements of the Genesis 1 narrative, I emphasized that point. Everything is intentional in God’s creation. It all makes sense. It isn’t chaos.
At the end of the lesson, one of the adults in the room approached me and quipped, “That was good. You should tell my pastor about the ‘God is a God of order’ thing. I am pretty sure my pastor prefers chaos.”
I shared a sad, empathetic laugh with him.
It’s a lesson simple enough for middle school teenagers, but profound enough for anyone in ministry: God is a God of order.
So, ask yourself, is your ministry one of order or of chaos?
If you feel like you are floating just above the abyss, fear not. We will bring some order and light into your world with seven strategies that you can begin to implement in your parish, school, or ministry that will begin to align things.
1. Cast a clear vision of where you’re going
God creates light and darkness at the beginning of the creation narrative in Genesis 1. This is just the first step, but God has a bigger vision for creation. Unfortunately, many parishes don’t have a vision for the long term and remain in darkness. A vision statement is inspirational—how will the world be different if your parish succeeds in living out this vision? Where are you heading? I often compare a vision statement to the horizon; it gives us the place we aspire to move toward.
Suppose you don’t have a vision for your church. In that case, chaos will ensue, with many people, ministries, and initiatives doing their own thing and even competing. Bring light into the world and cast a vision for your team.
2. Start measuring your ministry
If we are moving toward the horizon, we are doing well. Still, we are doing even better if we have mileposts to track our progress. It is easy to avoid measuring success in ministry because they are uncomfortable; we know that churches with big numbers don’t always bear fruit and that small churches with no budget can be disciple-making machines. When we avoid measuring success altogether, though, we lose any meaningful data for how we could improve and serve more effectively. Resources (including time) are finite; we must know where to direct them.
Sit down with your ministry leaders and come up with one or two measurable items for their area and a frequency for how often those measurements are taken. Don’t make this the “end all, be all” for the ministry – but emphasize that these numbers will help them succeed. By giving each ministry a metric, we provide shape and clarity for those who serve and give a foundation to grow and improve. Without these numbers, everyone operates on their own definition of “success,” and the result is… well, pretty chaotic.
3. Get the right people in the right places
There are the right people for your parish and the right jobs for your parish. Ideally, you want the right people (the disciples who believe in the vision you are casting) in the right places (they have the skills needed to do critical jobs at the parish). Unfortunately, we sometimes miss this entirely. We keep people in roles they don’t have the skills for because we want to “be nice,” or we keep people around who can do a job well but don’t fit our vision—or maybe aren’t even living their faith.
Getting the right people in the right jobs can be painful, especially if you already have the wrong people in the wrong places. Once you make this alignment, however, you will find things are much more peaceful.
4. Define how you do things
Good processes are essential. I’m not talking about bureaucracy, which is a process for the sake of having a process. I’m talking about clearly defined pathways to get things done the most effectively.
Chaos surrounds processes when they are either present in ineffective ways (e.g., cumbersome room request forms, multiple-person approval processes, budget requests that don’t align with the speed of ministry, or different processes for different departments), or when there is no defined process at all (it’s the Wild West of ministry!)
Reigning processes take time and intentionality, but it isn’t something we can afford to skip over. Review the significant processes at your parish—are they consistent? Do they make sense? Are they needless or just too long? Ask a lot of “why” questions in this review; you may find that some things are done because of something that happened one time… twenty years ago.
Processes should work for your team, not the other way around.
5. Create fun meetings
Oh, did you cringe at that subheading? Maybe “fun” isn’t the best word to use here—there is no need to start your meetings with a messy game icebreaker or to buy a ping-pong table for your parish office.
“Creative, impactful meetings” probably rings more accurate, beecause if your meetings become impactful and effective, they will be a lot more fun than whatever you are doing right now.
Meetings must raise concerns, solve problems, create alignment, and communicate essential information. If they don’t do at least two of those things each time, then you shouldn’t have them.
And to be precise: You need to have meetings. They just don’t have to be terrible.
6. Be accountable to yourself and others
The hardest part of creating order out of chaos is accountability. In ministry, we make commitments to ourselves and to others in the form of goals, benchmarks, and “I can take care of that!” statements.
But sometimes we don’t. We drop the ball, forget the task, or don’t do it well. Sometimes, other people do those things, and then we have to have an uncomfortable conversation with someone else about where things fell short.
Or we don’t have that conversation—and sadly, that is where many of us end up. We justify why we missed the mark or why someone else fell short, and never bring it up. Without accountability, though, nothing else matters. We hope things go right, and when they don’t, we move on quickly. That’s a recipe for chaos.
Accountability doesn’t need to be confrontational or negative, but it does need to happen. If you are going to set goals and standards and communicate well, accountability holds it all together.
7. Please just rest
When we don’t know what we are doing in ministry, we replace our lack of vision with busyness. The result is exhausted chaos. Churches are filled with good people who work without direction, and eventually work themselves to burnout.
The world was created in six days, with the seventh day for rest. Yet, we often talk about the “seven-day creation” because we know that this day of rest—the Sabbath—is essential to our created purpose. In ministry, if we don’t take time to rest, reflect, pray, and refuel, we invite chaos.
God brings order, not chaos—our ministries should model that. Not only will it bring more life into your church, but it will also make things much more enjoyable and effective.
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