In his book “Leadership Gold,” John Maxwell challenges a long held personal development assumption. He writes, “What I had been taught all my life was not true: experience is not the best teacher! Some people learn and grow as a result of their experience; some people don’t. Everybody has some kind of experience. It’s what you do with that experience that matters.” Maxwell, like many other students of leadership development, believes experience is not the best teacher — but evaluated experience is. Leadership growth and development happens when we evaluate our experiences with thought-provoking questions.
Here are five questions that may prove helpful as you evaluate your ministry leadership from this past year.
1. What went well? Look back on 2024 and try to find the wins. Did you have a great family vacation? That’s a win. Did you see more baptisms in your church, or at least as many as the previous year? Did you drop a couple of pounds or find consistency in an exercise routine? Did you read through the Bible or hit your book reading goal on Goodreads? Discover the wins and celebrate how God helped you be successful in these areas.
2. What did not go well? As important as is celebrating wins, analyzing losses is equally important. No team wins every game, and no leader chalks up successes uninterrupted. What plans did you have for the past year that did not turn out as intended? What well-intended project or conversation bombed? What visionary idea was shot down before it ever had a chance to launch? Figure out where your plans failed and why, and resolve to learn from those failures. This exercise will propel you forward as a leader.
3. What should I continue doing? Every Christian ministry leader, whether vocational, bivocational or voluntary, has more to do than can be accomplished in a year’s time. Some things we do, however, make a bigger gospel impacting difference than others. What do you need to do more of in 2025? Where has God gifted you to make the most significant impact in your ministry context and can you invest more time in that area next year? If so, put it on the calendar and do the work that matters the most.
4. What should I stop doing? Christian ministry leaders need to stop doing some things, or at least do them less next year than we did this year. These are activities that are not essential to our work, and not effective for fulfilling our God-given mission. We need to stop doing those things, or at least do them less, and invest that time elsewhere. Use your discretionary time where it makes the biggest difference to the mission.
5. Celebrate what God did and trust Him for the year ahead. Christian ministry leadership is about leaning hard on God in full dependence on His guiding and sustaining grace. The Lord will always call us to ministry assignments that we are unable to complete without His help. The good news is, He is faithful and will help us as we look to Him in faith.
May the Lord bless you and direct you as you look back over His faithfulness for this current year and look ahead to His promised grace for the year to come.
This article originally appeared here.
