Chapter 6

Have you ever considered how a ministry should end? Does it ever seem like churches or Christian organizations undertake the same ministry every year? Does it ever feel like the positive results that were accomplished from the last ministry or project have been lost over time? If so, you are not alone. Most people do not spend a lot of time considering how a ministry should conclude, and additionally, the positive results that have been achieved by a ministry tend to erode over time. This erosion undermines all the benefits that a ministry achieved and creates the necessity to "redo" ministries in order to recapture the benefits and results that they accomplished.

The focus of this chapter is to examine the issues that should be considered when concluding a ministry. First, we will consider ways of preventing the erosion of good ministry results and subsequently look at defenses that should be built in order to protect these hard-earned results. Second, we want to consider how actively gathering feedback from various sources plays an important role in a ministry's conclusion and ultimately in the health of the ministry. Last, we want to consider how a completed ministry acts as a building block or a foundation for future ministries.

Summarizing, we want to look at three issues in this chapter:

Ending ministries with future: Preventing erosion of results

Ending ministries with feedback: Incorporating feedback into the ministry

Ending ministries as foundations: Using completed ministries as the building blocks for future ministries.

Before we explore each of these elements, I want us to consider a more fundamental question: Why should every ministry come to an end?

Motivation for ending a ministry or project

All ministries should end . . . or at least pause. This may surprise you, but a purposeful stop is healthy for a ministry. Planned stops and pauses allow those engaged in a ministry to take a fresh perspective and evaluate its goals, direction, team, and the benefits the ministry is seeking to provide. Even when a ministry is supposed to span the rest of a church's or organization's life (evangelism or missions, for example), it is good to systematically stop and pause to evaluate the ministry. Let me build an example to help illustrate this point.

If a mission's ministry was undertaken by a church or mission group five years ago and the team has never stopped to evaluate the health, relevance, or direction of the mission, they may find that their mission has developed some unhealthy characteristics or become misdirected. Below is a diagram showing this ministry under two different scenarios. The first scenario shows no pauses or stops in the ministry over the span of the first five years, while the second scenario shows the ministry with deliberate pauses for ministry evaluation after each year.