In their podcast series entitled Practically Speaking, Andy Stanley and the leadership team at North Point Church near Atlanta Ga, give a lot of great advice. (Which is surprising since they pastor such a small church :P) While you could write an entire book on the stuff they talk about, why don’t you call it Seven Practices of Effective Ministry while you’re at it, I’m just going to focus on one of the practices that James and I have really been discussing lately.

The final practice discussed in the book is work on it. At first glance, it may seem silly to have to tell church leaders to “work on” their ministries. I mean, what does Mr. Stanley and Co. think we do throughout the week and on Sunday mornings? Sermons don’t write themselves! Rental trucks don’t unload themselves! Work on it, what else do we do? And that’s exactly the problem. We spend so much time involved in the everyday ins and outs of ministry, that we don’t spend time talking to each other about where the church is going. Not in a “let’s get all our ducks in a row” kind of way, but simply discussing. Dreaming, if you will. As church leaders and planters, these discussions of vision and purpose are what refuels our desire to press forward with all the stuff we have to do.

From a practical perspective (like that seg-way?), here’s what I mean. James and I have been burned out like crazy lately. Yesterday we had a difficult discussion in which we realized that we find ourselves spinning our wheels more often than not. As we tried to put our finger on the problem, we discovered that something was missing. We used to spend a lot of time dreaming. Somewhere along the way, we stopped. Not consciously. But we had stopped. Maybe we thought it was a waste of time? Maybe it just slipped our minds? Maybe we were too busy? Regardless of the reason, we haven’t had a good dreaming session in a long time. Now, you have to realize that we both have dreaming personalities. Neither of us are realists (which is why both our wives are), so dreaming comes naturally and we feed off of it.

So, take a warning from Andy Stanley, filtered through our experience, don’t stop dreaming about where you want your church to go. Trust me, it’s easy to do. There’s so much stuff that goes into leading a church, the first thing we tend to dis-regard is dreaming. Don’t make that mistake. Even though you can’t quantify the results, you won’t last long in ministry if you don’t have a dream.