Responsive Leadership: A Year-End Evaluation for Your Church

Responsive leadership is a process of becoming more attuned to what’s happening in your church so you can adapt and be more effective.

By Clint Grider

During Advent, many church leaders experience an interesting tension. The beautiful reflection and expectancy intended for the season contrast with the harried realities of ministry planning and holiday hustle and bustle.

Though this tension is real for many people, it also reveals a microcosm of the broader world we live in. There is an expectant desire for something more that God wires in people to draw them to Himself. But many often respond to that need with misguided approaches to work harder to “improve life” somehow on their own, not connecting to the One who brings true life.

As most ministry leaders recognize, busyness—even in church activities—doesn’t necessarily equate to widespread growth in missional disciple-making in your church. But in a fast-paced world, how do you know where you and your people truly stand and if what you’re doing is having as widespread of an impact as it could?

In the spirit of hope-filled expectancy, what if we as ministry leaders began to consider year-end as a season that focuses on the coming of our King, followed by a time to assess where our churches are and what more God may desire for us in the coming year?

For many pastors, the weeks after Christmas offer a great time to breathe and reflect. Using that time for an honest year-end assessment of your church’s disciple-making effectiveness could provide an important annual milestone as you consider ways to grow your impact. Our VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) requires ministry leaders to grow in their agility and responsiveness from year to year. So steward your reflection rhythm wisely.

“For many pastors, the weeks after Christmas offer a great time to breathe and reflect.” — @clintgrider Share on X

Listening to volunteer leaders

As I talked about in my mid-year assessment article on responsive leadership, pastors must identify the awareness gaps and connectivity gaps in their churches to reach greater levels of breakthrough. If you haven’t read the article and completed the brief Leadership Gap Assessment yet, I suggest you start your year-end reflection with that.

Then consider reflecting deeper on a topic that warrants special attention and offers an exciting opportunity to grow in the coming year: the way you’re communicating with your volunteer leaders.

Experiencing your next level of breakthrough means you need fresh ways to become more and more aware of what’s really happening in people’s lives across your whole church. Prioritizing this kind of relational investigation frees you to spend your time and resources on the most important things by adapting your focus toward the real-time barriers to living missionally your people are facing.

Realities of listening

As refreshing as this idea might sound, leaders sometimes find it hard to connect at this deep of a level inside their church. When pastors look for insight, they tend to go outside their church. They might go to a conference, subscribe to a podcast, or talk with people they know in other churches or in their network. Of course, external sources of information can be helpful to a leader. The problem arises when leaders try to borrow or copy ministry program approaches that are successful elsewhere and assume those “solutions” will also work within their unique context—which they rarely do to the same degree, if at all. Ever experience this?

Copying other churches’ approaches often feels like a shot in the dark or as one pastor described to me “a game of Whac-a-Mole.” This is very different from focusing on growing your leadership acumen in the new year—the way you think, gather information, and respond—to better design, evaluate, and improve your disciple-making system.

A lot of church leaders admit a big problem I see all the time: neglecting deeper insight from the best source of evaluative knowledge about their ministry context—the frontline lay leaders in their own church. If properly trained and mobilized, these people are a gold mine. They may or may not yet have insight into the big picture. But they have a wealth of insight into their small pictures, which is where senior leaders’ big-picture plans often get stuck.

“Problems arise when leaders try to borrow or copy ministry program approaches that are successful elsewhere and assume those ‘solutions’ will also work within their unique context.” — @clintgrider Share on X

Most pastors agree with this in principle and are even pretty confident they appreciate the input of their leaders. But we don’t seek it and embrace it as much as we think we do. I’m talking about something deeper, which is why an honest year-end reflection on the topic can be helpful.

4 communication modes with volunteers

Let’s face it. On one end of the communication spectrum are pastors in “assume-it’s-good mode” who rarely communicate with their leaders. Once a leader has been recruited and installed as a volunteer, they’re tacitly expected to keep quietly doing their thing. Other than an occasional voice of appreciation or brief celebration, they aren’t noticed until something breaks or they’re suddenly gone.

Many more pastors talk with their leaders but don’t learn much from the conversation. This is often because pastors live in “get-it-done mode.” They’re focused on the next event, initiative or rollout. And they’re just trying to relay the necessary information to pull it off. The only feedback they’re expecting from leaders is a few questions to clarify something or confirm they know what they’re supposed to do.

Other pastors spend time in “encouragement mode” with leaders. They care about their lives, ask them how they’re doing, even shepherd some of them spiritually. They might hear a good deal of what the person is thinking and feeling. But it’s mostly about that individual’s experiences, not much about anyone or anything else. Pastors engage in these personal conversations because they genuinely care but also because they hope to keep the leaders feeling good enough about serving that they’ll keep doing it.

Some pastors engage with their leaders in “coaching mode,” which is more substantial. They have regular conversations with their leaders to develop their competency and character and discuss how those relate to projects or ministries of the church. Through discussions like these, pastors may hear a lot more about what’s happening in ministry environments. But because the main focus of these conversations is the person’s development—not what’s happening in the lives of people the volunteer leader serves—deeper valuable feedback may not surface or be retained consistently.

A better way: responsive leadership

Recruiting, getting things done, encouraging, and coaching all are necessary when leading leaders. But none of these are a substitute for responsive leadership. Responsive leadership is a continual process of becoming more attuned to what’s happening in the lives of people across the church so you can adapt what you’re doing to be more effective. In a changing world, this paradigm will help you respond flexibly to unexpected conditions and unique differences in whatever missional context you’re called to.

“Responsive leadership is a continual process of becoming more attuned to what’s happening in the lives of people across the church so you can adapt what you’re doing to be more effective.” — @clintgrider Share on X

One helpful tool in responsive leadership is what I call a checkup loop. This relational tool is a two-way conversation between a staff leader and their circle of frontline lay leaders on defined topics and questions that emerge about spiritual outcomes that are or aren’t growing in people’s lives currently.

This goes beyond the lay leaders who help run your ministries. I’m talking about equipping those lay leaders to get a deeper understanding of why growth is or isn’t happening in the people they’re close to across your church. When approached with intentionality and grace, people generally share honest barriers to their personal disciple-making growth with those they are close to much more readily than with a staff member. Usually, these conversations happen best in the normal rhythm of meetings your lay leaders already have with groups of people in your church.

Learning this way helps you know whether your church’s current approaches are making the difference you intend throughout the body. Topics you investigate can range from growth in spiritual disciplines and sensitivities to missional living and disciple-making.

Engaging your lay leaders in checkup loop conversations with those they know helps them to be more invested in your church’s mission, vision, and expectations. Being invested means they’re passionately committed to shepherding people in your church’s desired outcomes of disciple-making.

5 steps of a checkup loop

Step 1: Focus

Prepare your lay leaders on a growth topic to investigate in people’s lives.

Step 2: Send

Dispatch your lay leaders to research the topic with those they know or serve.

Step 3: Synthesize

Capture themes from the information they bring back to you.

Step 4: Act

Use your findings to take the next step to improve your effectiveness.

Step 5: Evaluate

Assess results to plan your next move.

(Then back to Step 1.)

When you find out where people are spiritually and where your church’s approaches are and aren’t working to grow people, you can respond and experiment to make things better. The goal is to become nimble and adaptive in changing conditions—to be intentionally responsive to where people are in their journeys, to shepherd them well and to free you to achieve a new level of effectiveness.

For specific examples and to learn more about responsive leadership and checkup loops, check out “Mind the Gap: Leading Your Church to Agility and Effectiveness in Any Environment.”

For permission to republish this article, contact Marissa Postell Sullivan.