Practicum, Part 4 – Implementation

This series of posts – the series that discusses matters that affect ministry design — is nowhere near comprehensive.  On the other hand, it has included several important points for understanding the needs of the ministry (Part 1), identifying components that could comprise the ministry (Part 2), and finding the relationships between the ministry components (Part 3).

During our discussion of these three topics, we have often mentioned the need to implement or flesh out our design before we can begin to invite people to benefit from its ministry.  My purpose here is to discuss implementation.

By implementation we mean preparing the various parts of our design and putting them together so that the ministry is “ready to go.”  This might mean something as straightforward as preparing a talk.  In contrast it might mean performing additional design to understand the details of a particularly complex part of our ministry.  In particular, if we have created a component during our ministry design that summarizes or nests several related components, and if we are not sure how this composite component fits together, then we have a design problem we must solve before we can proceed to implementation.

A few more examples of preparation might be helpful.  For our homeless dinner we know there’s a meal.  Preparing for the meal involves choosing a venue, designing a menu, setting up and setting the tables, and the like.  Letting people know about the dinner means we must figure out where to make its availability known, how to make it known, and printing or otherwise distributing information to the homeless people about when and where they can come.  For our homeless audience word of mouth is often very effective.  If our design includes a time to share the Gospel or pass useful information on to our guests, then we need to plan the program, secure the speakers or videos, and make audio/visual arrangements.  These are all preparation steps.

You, the astute reader, have probably already observed that many of the steps I have used to illustrate preparation could just as well have been described as design. They amount to designing the details of the ministry.  This is virtually always true.  A key issue in design is to know when to stop.  My rule of thumb is to stop designing formally when those who will prepare know how to do the rest without further guidance.  Rarely would we have to tell a chef how to chop onions.

So, what can we say about implementation?  Well, the first and easiest is that every component of the ministry needs to be implemented.  The second is that the various components need to be implemented in such a way that they work together.  It’s entirely possible that making them work together would require either that they be adjusted a bit or that something needs to be added to the design to make them work together.  But, of course, a good design team would have anticipated this. (??!!)

Let’s add to all this one more observation, and that is that the hardest part of implementation is planning it; that is, determining the sequence in which the various components need to be implemented and estimating how long each of the implementation steps will take.  This work is known as project planning, and there’s plenty of literature on this topic, so we’ll leave it at that.

That’s it.  We have a design, and we’ve figured out how to implement it.  For our example, the next step is to feed the hungry, and that’s a worthy thing to do.