Year End Evaluations

By Doug Franklin May 17, 2011

This morning I got to be a part of our church’s once a week staff meeting. For three hours every Tuesday morning the church staff sit in my senior pastor’s kitchen and hammer out everything: the kid’s ministry, the youth group, discipleship classes, Sunday mornings, and all church calendar items. They are a great group of people who love each other a ton, and while they may journey down a rabbit trail here or there, they accomplish what they need too while also spending quality time together.

Today spent a significant amount of time evaluating the last year of our small group program. This past year I jumped into leadership alongside our senior pastor to help bring some direction and structure to our small groups. We put some measures in place over the past year that really helped our program and our leaders (several small group leader meetings, weekly communication to leaders, and all the groups going through same material for the whole year). This morning we went through the following questions as a group to help us evaluate our program:

-What are the things we did well this year for Life Groups? (Take some time to examine everything that we did well in training Life Group leaders and the format we created)

-Where did we see God move? (The areas we got to step back and see God work in the lives of people)

-What areas do we need to improve?

-Action steps for these areas?

By taking the time to examine what we did well, we were able to celebrate the steps we put in place that led to our leader’s confidence. But growth does not happen in people’s lives simply because we made changes; that would be arrogant to assume. So much growth takes place because God chooses to act, and we need to celebrate and remember all the lives in which he had worked in the past year. On top of celebrating though, we also came up with a list of areas we needed to improve upon, and some pretty clear action steps for this summer in order to start our small groups off great.

Evaluation of our programs at the end of the year is always needed. It’s a great time to celebrate what God has done in the past year, but also to discuss the areas that need improvement. When you sit down to go through your end of year evaluations, what kinds of questions do you ask?