I noticed something recently in myself that was keeping me from realizing my potential. And it wasn’t just in me. It was in almost everyone around me. In fact, the people who it wasn’t in, well let’s just say they have a way of accomplishing way more than probably you or me. The difference between those people who make a big impact, and those whose impact is limited, is the first group has learned how to follow through, and the others have not.

Just think about it. Doesn’t everything come down to follow through?

You have two people who are trying to lose weight, so they start a new diet and exercise routine. One of them ends up losing the weight, and one doesn’t. What was the difference? Follow through.

You have two people who graduated from the same high school, and have similar backgrounds. They both go to college. One goes on to become a doctor, but the other is working on the line in a factory. The difference? You guessed it, follow through.

So, what does this have to do with church? Actually, more than I realized.

I noticed that our team would have great ideas and intentions in our staff meetings, but we weren’t getting the results we hoped for. As we started to evaluate what went wrong, each time it came down to follow through.

For example, we didn’t have as many people show up to our Trunk-Or-Treat event because we didn’t do a good job of advertising it on social media.

We had volunteers who wouldn’t show up to serve because we weren’t sending weekly reminders.

We had people receive Jesus in their lives but would drop out of church shortly there after. The issue, we didn’t have a follow up process in place.

Over and over again, we traced our ineffectiveness not back to our ideas, but back to our lack of follow through.

The ideas are the easy part. It’s the implementation and evaluation of those ideas that determines their success.

So, if you feel like there are some areas of your life or ministry in which you’re failing, before you give up on the idea, make sure you’ve done the work of following through.

Are you seeing this in your life or ministry? Tell us about it in the comments below. Let’s motivate and learn from one another so that we can all be better. If this is your first time here, make sure to subscribe to the blog to get my latest video, plus tips on church growth, leadership and more delivered to your inbox each week.