Today I want you to take a look at the post Dr. Thom Rainer shared on his blog recently, Seven Habits of Highly Effective Preachers. I want to use this list to address becoming more effective as women’s ministry leaders. I’ve re-worded the point and then addressed it from a different perspective of leadership.
- They give preaching or teaching women a priority in their ministries. You may not be the primary Bible teacher for your women. Your job may be mostly visionary or administrative in nature, but making sure that the Bible is central in your women’s ministry is essential for a strong healthy ministry for women.
- They make their messages a vital part of their prayer lives. How much time do you spend praying over what is taught to your women, whether you or someone else is teaching? Be sure that you bathe the teaching in prayer, listening to God’s direction in what and how to teach, praying for hearts to be open and soft to His specific message for them, praying anointing over the teachers as they share.
- They have a routine in ministry or message preparation. Do you plan for ministry or does it just happen? Of course some ministry will be spontaneous, but much will have to be thought out and prepared well. Do you encourage your leaders to spend more time preparing than teaching? It takes time for the Holy Spirit to mold each lesson or aspect of ministry. Put in place some expectations for your leaders as they prepare to lead.
- They constantly seek input about their messages and ministries. If we don’t evaluate and ask for fresh input in our ministries, it will be easy to become routine and then irrelevant. Always listen to the women for ideas and new directions. Then pray over each one before jumping into something new. Sometimes the ministry only needs a tweak to make if more effective. Other times it needs to be eliminated so something better can be developed.
- They stay committed to a specific ministry length. I am not sure this will always be true because as we said earlier, spontaneous ministry can’t be organized and planned ahead of time. But for you ongoing small groups and meetings, make sure you have a realistic start and stop time. Be sensitive to available time frames for women to be involved in spiritual growth, fellowship and serving. You might have to start with small do-able time slots and increase as women want to go deeper or serve more.
- They put the majority of their efforts into one message a week. As a leader you may be trying to give your all to MANY ministries. Ask God if He wants you to pare back and spend more quality time with one or two areas. Ask who He might want to raise up to cover the void filled by your NOT doing it all anymore. Your role as a leader is to raise up others to do the ministry with you.
- They are constantly looking for ways to improve their communication skills. Working with others can sometimes be a major challenge when it comes to communication. We say something and it is taken wrong. We want to share a vision God has given us and yet don’t seem to be able to get others on board. Learn good communication skills and share them with your team. Also seek try to improve your speaking skills so that as you have opportunity to speak for Christ in any setting, you will do so in a way that does make a different in lives.
Perhaps you might share this list with your team to see if they have other habits to add to this list. Here are some more lists of habits I blogged on last September:
Best Habits of a Highly Successful Women’s Ministry
Best Habits of Highly Successful Women’s Ministry Leadership Teams