Assess Early and Often

Created: 2011-11-15 14:55:45

Planting more churches, more effectively requires finding more leaders more often.  Let me suggest one way of doing this – assess potential leaders early and often.

Many of the assessment mistakes I have observed begin by doing the opposite – assessing only a few leaders very late in the process.  This leads to two consequences.  First, there simply aren’t enough potential leaders in the process to discover the ones with high potential, so the less than ideal leader is selected because he or she is “the best option we have.”  Hint – if you feel like you’re settling, you probably haven’t found a high potential leader.  Second, there is too much already invested to say no, so assessment red flags get ignored because, “we can’t afford to start over.” You can avoid both of these mistakes by assessing early and often.

Assess Early - ELI’s Initial Screening Assessment was built for just this purpose and should be the very first thing you do before you meet or even talk to a potential church planter.  It’s tempting to say, “I’d like to meet them first” – but meeting them is where the problem begins because when you meet them, you like them and liking them has no correlation to their church planting potential.  Gathering data early will keep your conversation focused on real potential not just personal preference.

Assess Often - One of ELI’s partners leans on the Brothers Grimm to convey this idea in a memorable way.  He says, “you have to kiss a lot of frogs if you want to find a prince.”  Church Planter Profiles makes the process easy.  The ISA is under $20.  A full assessment is only $99.  It takes only a few minutes to review the data you receive.  Building a large pool of potential planters will increase the likelihood of finding a few with high potential.

How well are you doing at assessing early and often?  Here is a simple metric:

Determine the number of churches you want to plant (A) and the number of leaders who have completed the ISA (B).  Then ask yourself, are you confident that A out of B leaders you meet are potential church planters?  If not, then begin making it a priority to assess early and often.

If you’d like to learn more about using Church Planter Profiles in your assessment process, attend our December 8^th webinar, “Building an Effective Assessment Process.”

Register Here