Preparing for Easter – Part 2 by Cody Jones

In my last blog, I shared with you that I believe the best preparation for Easter begins with prayer and seeking God’s agenda for your church service. Once you feel like you’ve gotten the direction you need, you need to set deadlines for yourself so that others don’t have to set them for you. Take an audit of what you need, and don’t forget to ask your senior pastor and your church staff so that everyone can be on the same page about it. I always make it a point to get my pastor’s thoughts on how he sees the service going – even though I’ve been there for 13 years – because I never want to make assumptions.

After you’ve set personal deadlines and gotten on the same page as your pastor, you need to do probably the most difficult thing in preparation for Easter: delegate – and delegate well!

We’ve all been the leader who tried to do it on our own at one time or another, but it’s really striking to me that when Moses went up Mount Sinai in Exodus 33, he got this word from the Lord about how to build the tabernacle, the house of God, and the Bible explains that when he came back down, he passed those plans on to Bezalel and Oholiab, skilled artisans, and they disseminated the responsibilities to other people.

Did you catch that? God gave His leader a dream. The leader passed it on to two other leaders who were skilled. And they passed it onto those who worked with and under them. Just think how long would it have taken them to build that Tabernacle if it had just been Moses! Just Bezalel and Oholiab! The people wouldn’t have been as invested if these men built the tabernacle alone, and it wouldn’t have been what God intended for it to be. So finding intentional ways to delegate, even if you’re good at the task, will draw others into service and fulfill God’s plans.

If you’re bad at delegating, just start by picking one simple thing this Easter that you’re willing to delegate. It could be picking someone on your team to select the team’s dress code and emailing it out to everybody. If that’s the best you can be at delegating, start there and watch as some stuff begins to lift off of your plate. More will begin to be accomplished and you’ll probably have a better service as a whole because you released something that needed to be released.

The hard work in delegation is not teaching a person how to do a job but teaching them how you think. It’s teaching them the “here’s why we think the way we do” in your church or culture. If they can understand the “why” behind the decisions made, they won’t need to be told every decision to make. They will understand how the organization thinks, and that’s when you actually unlock creativity because they will know what your values are, why you do what you do, and that there is room for them to unlock their potential in your ministry.

Finally, once your Easter Sunday is over, the altars have welcomed new believers into the family of God, and church members have happily left the building, it’s important to schedule an after-action review.

We’re in a military community, and after one of our services, this retired Air Force woman who is a member of our team came up to me and said, “In your after-action review, I think we should put this.” I replied, “Well, to be honest, we don’t do that.” It’s kind of a Department of Defense thing primarily.

But I’m a huge fan of the after-action review now. We asked four questions: What did we intend? What happened? What did we learn? And what will we do differently? The beauty of this has been that I can go to that file in my computer next Easter as we’re preparing, and I see, “Yep, there’s every mistake I made last year,” or “There’s everything we did that worked really well,” and we have this starting point that’s so much better than the year before.

Consider doing this with your team because they’re going to catch some things that you’re not going to catch. Then ask your pastor – you don’t have to ask him all of the questions –  but ask, “What did you love, and what would you like to see different?” Write it down, especially if you’re creative. You’re going to do a hundred plus services this year. If you’re like me, you’re probably a little bit distracted. That’s why you’re so creative! So get it on paper before you forget, and then look at it as you prep for the next service. You can make it even better. How? Because you automated a process that will take a lot of the mental work out of it so that you can be even more creative.

Pastor, I want you to know that as a creative individual, you’re valuable, and what you’re doing in the local church matters. It matters more than you know. The problem with King Saul was that he didn’t know how valuable he was in the kingdom of God. Today, no matter your role in the local church, I want you to see the big picture of what God is doing in and through you. And may He give you the grace and the strength by His Spirit to come down the mountain like Moses and execute the plan.

(Created using content from webinar Preparing for Easter)