Over the past week, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to meet with most of my High School Small Group Leaders (these people truly are the hands and feet of Jesus!).

The purpose of this meeting was to evaluate the health of our Small Groups and invite feedback concerning the student ministry. Below, I’ll share with you how I elicited feedback.

“Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.” – John C. Maxwell

To systematically evaluate our Small Groups and ministry at large, I used the SWOT analysis. According to Wikipedia, no one knows who created the model, but it’s been around since the ‘60’s. SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

These categories are pretty straightforward, but given the fact that I’m in youth ministry, I like to change the “threats” category to “training.” Side Note: If you can think of actual “treats” to your youth ministry…focus on those before every evaluating your ministry! Ha!

Since we shouldn’t have any “threats” to our ministry, I changed the “t” to “training” and asked leaders where they would like to grow, where we could train them.

If you want to know the health of your ministry, the best thing you can do is meet with your leaders and ask them. You will be blown away by the response. Not only will you get valuable feedback that you can begin to take action on, but you will empower your leaders and remind them that they have a voice. If you trust leaders enough to invest in students, you should trust them enough to speak into your strategy and approach.

Will some of the feedback hurt? Absolutely. Do you need to hear it? Absolutely.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

However, the feedback you receives will not only be negative. I felt like a million bucks leaving each meeting. My leaders were so encouraging and reminded me why I do what I do. They reminded me that true ministry is happening, that our Small Groups are working.

My encouragement to you is to set up a meeting with all your youth ministry volunteers this coming week. When you meet with them, fill out this SWOT Analysis. You will be blown away by the positive feedback, constructive criticism, and ideas that your leaders have!

Once you have all of that feedback, you know exactly where your time and attention need to go and you’ll be able to grow your ministry.

 Get my SWOT Analysis

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David Hanson: Texas native, Texas Tech Red Raider, M.Div. at Truett Seminary, husband to Ashley, father to Ava, Ben & Madelyn, Student Pastor at The Fellowship in Round Rock, Tx, table tennis (ping-pong) extraordinaire, addicted to coffee. For anything else…you’ll just have to ask.

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