by: Jim Schlottman
2/1/2007

Now that you have begun the new year, are you meeting your goals?

To help you to look at 2007, I want to share with you some questions from Monday Morning Insight by Todd Rhoades. It is an excellent list of questions to help you consider or reconsider your goals for 2007.

1) Do you plan on staying in your current church position for the next 12 months? If yes, what’s the biggest reason you’re planning to stay? If no, what's the biggest reason you’re planning to leave?

2) Is your church planning on adding (or deleting) any positions during this coming year? If so, in what areas are you hiring and in what areas are you cutting back?

3) Dream for a second. What would you most wish for in the next year? (For example, a unified leadership, a new building, more staff, spiritual growth?)

4) What’s been the biggest change in your ministry in the past year? How will that affect you in 2007?

5) In the next year, what do you plan on trying in ministry that's totally new for you?

6) Do you feel fulfilled in your current ministry position? Why or why not?

7) Is your family happy that you’re in the ministry? If not, what can you do to help change this situation?

As I read this list of questions the first time, Todd’s third question jumped out at me. Dream for a second. What would you most wish for the next year?

My question to you - are you dreaming?

In Genesis, Joseph’s brothers make an interesting statement, “Here comes that dreamer!” They said to each other, “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” Genesis 37:19-20 (NIV)

The brothers were saying, “Kill the dreamer and kill the dreams.” H.B. London wrote that, "the dream never dies, just the dreamer."

Have you stopped dreaming? Has the dream in you died?

For your church you have the God-given role of the dreamer. Hopefully, you have others in your church leadership who dream along with you, but you are the one who is to be more than a dreamer, you are to be the visionary. You have to “cast the vision” in order for others to follow.

If you stop dreaming and stop casting the vision, and settle for things as they are, very soon your ministry will become mundane and ordinary. If you don’t set challenging, but achievable goals for the future, built on dreams, you will most certainly achieve nothing.

So dream on and take time to just look out the window of your office, if you have a window, and dream with God.