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Blog » Realm Pathways: When Ministry is Stuck in Neutral

Realm Pathways: When Ministry is Stuck in Neutral

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Ever feel like your ministry is stuck in neutral? You have a vision. You have a plan. The problem lies in the execution.  It reminds me of a song called “Everybody Said (But Nobody Did)” by Acapella. Here is the chorus:

Everybody said that anybody could do,

The important things somebody should do,

Everybody knows that anybody could do,

All the good things that nobody did.

Recently, I was working with a church that asks each member to fill out in interest form each year so the church can help them find a place to serve.  When the topic was brought up everyone groaned.  I asked what the problem was, and they all said no one ever fills it out. A person who had been a member for years before coming on staff chimed in and said she was very disappointed when she filled out the survey the first year she was a member because no one ever called her.

Let that sink in for a second.  The church begging for volunteers never took the time to reach out to her and help her find a place in ministry. Why?  What was the purpose of the survey if they didn’t intend to use it?  After a little digging, we found that all of the results were tabulated into a spreadsheet that was then sent out. Which is great. But some ministry leaders never even saw the data because it was only shared with some of the main staff. As you can imagine, it was a huge sheet with lots of data and little direction.  Some ministry leaders looked at it, but only few knew how to translate it into ministry.

The next thing the staff member told us was even more disheartening. She told the group that since no one contacted her, she never filled out the survey again.

What was missing from the equation? The ability to execute.

If this sounds like your church, Realm® has tools to help you. Instead of making a spreadsheet, you can customize profile fields in Realm to track the information so all staff can view it with all the other information you wish to track. You can search on the profiles to find the people who match your needs and quickly email them about an opportunity to serve.  Even better, you can add them to a Pathway for follow up.

Pathways let you set up procedures to formalize ministry follow up. Realm enables you to assign Pathway oversight at granular levels, allowing you to distribute specific roles to the right people, while maintaining overall control, management, and insight. These step leaders, receive notice that a person has been added to the step they lead, and they are able to take action. They can follow up with the person, make notes about the contact, and mark the step complete.  If the step is not completed in the targeted time, it shows as overdue.

With Realm, you can have real time access to all of the ministry follow up happening at your church using Pathways. Most importantly, Pathways helps you take care of all the good things you want your church to do and helps you do it more effectively.

Learn more about how Realm Pathways can help your ministry here.

This post was written by Keith Hudgins. Keith is an Implementation Consultant with ACS Technologies and spends the majority of his time working with churches and helping them learn how to use and implement Realm.

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