The strategic planning process is designed to help you establish very practical milestones, goals, and objectives that are before you in the next 12 months. This process involves asking and answering three very basic questions. Number one: Where are you right now? Number two: Where do you want to go? Number three: What is your plan to get there?

Let's begin with the question: Where are you right now? This is the time for you to go back and review the ministry milestones for each of the lessons you have already completed in the church development courses to date. Take, for instance, the milestones from the styles lesson, a milestone like: I have written and revised my initial worship ministry style statement. It's one that you began in that lesson, but you may need to revise it as you become even more familiar with your unique situation. As you go back now, hopefully with a coach, and review all your milestones from each of the lessons you have taken so far in the church development courses, you will usually be able to get a pretty good idea of where you are now in light of where you need to be, and what you need to be doing over the next 12 months.

This brings us to the second question: Where do you want to go? Next you simply identify which of the remaining milestones in each lesson that you need to complete over the next 12 months and in what order. These strategic milestones then become your foundation or first draft of your 12-month strategic goals.

Now you're ready to answer the really practical question: What is your plan to get there? This involves simply three steps. First, go back and select three to four strategic goals that you believe should be your high priority focus for the next 30 days. Then make a list of the measurable task that you need to complete during the next 30 days to effectively advance toward the completion of these three to four strategic goals that you've selected. These tasks will become your 30-day tactical objectives. Then the way you implement this is you simply identify what you need to do next week, in the next seven days, in order to advance effectively toward completing the tactical objectives that you've set before you.

These items will be simply high priority items on your weekly to do list. Don't allow this planning process to be overly complex or complicated. Never do it alone. Instead, call on your coach to come alongside you or others who have strengths in these areas of planning. This is a process that can and should be repeated through your entire experience of being a church leader, week in and week out.

In this mission of God there are always advances to be made, always goals to be met, objectives to be accomplished, and always a path to help you get there. As we now draw this lesson and course to a close, it's time for you to begin compiling all the statements, models, and plans that you've developed so far into the church development plan. This plan will integrate all of your preliminary conceptual and planning regarding the development of this new church. This data is to be organized and placed in one document that will serve you in many ways.

For vision casting you can post portions of this on a church website, for planning, for recruiting. You can use this for support raising and for many other ways that you will discover in your ministry. But please remember that this somewhat large document is a master source document that is not normally distributed to others as it is, but is meant to be a resource for the development of several communication documents, such as an isolated vision statement, or a values statement, or a ministry plan. In this final lesson you will find a suggested outline for your church development plan that's based on the completion of all the lessons you have taken to date in the church development course.