The school year has come to an end and it’s time to look back on our goals to see what we completed. We may even evaluate our adult volunteers to see if they built lasting relationships with students. We will most likely think through parent participation in our program and consider what needs to be done to improve it. All that evaluation is good but will you take the time to evaluate yourself? Real effective self evaluation is hard and takes time. You need to get feedback from people you can trust and be willing to hear some hard things. If you want to do this take the following steps.

1. Ask three parents from different families to evaluate the youth ministry. Make sure at least one of the parents has been critical of you in the past. This will give you a clear understanding of how people who don’t just love you think about the program. Prepare 10 questions on a scale of one to ten and let them rate your performance. Create questions that will give you deep insight into your ministry. At the end of the questionnaire ask them to tell you one thing you could do better.

2. Give the same questionnaire to two other staff members at your church and two volunteers in your ministry. They will answer the questions from what they perceive and what they have heard.

3. Ask an elder or senior pastor to fill out the questionnaire as well.

4. Ask your spouse, if married to also fill one out.

5. Take the answers and look for common threads. Throw out the comments that don’t have companions, in other words if you don’t see it twice it’s not a big issue. Once you have two or three issues to work on make some goals for next your for yourself. It’s only be dealing with our struggles that we will grow as leaders and our leadership will determine our impact. So if we want more impact we need to grow our leadership.