Your values will fuel your vision. Values are those things that, whether you recognize them or not, will get you up in the morning, keep you motivated throughout the day, and help you assess where you’ve been and what you’ve done.

Think of ministry as a road trip. Your vision is like the destination — where you want to end up. The vision of your ministry is the picture God has placed in your heart for where your church is going and what it can become. If vision is the where and mission is what of ministry, then values are the why. Your core values are the fuel that drives your ministry.

Our values are more discovered than created. Our true values are more actual than aspirational. That’s because most of them are placed in us by God. He created you with certain gifts and passions, and those have a big say in what values you have. Your experiences also play a major role, but we all know that you rarely get to choose what happens to you.

Instead of choosing values, you have to uncover them. You need to dig deep and learn about your God and yourself. When you do that, you will be better equipped to use that fuel to drive your vision.

A Process With Purpose

Before you begin any discovery of values, you first need a process, and there are some things that will be essential for any process to be purposeful. First, it takes prayer. Spend some time with God alone just on this topic. Getting your heart in tune with His will clear your mind and focus your intent.

Next, get in touch with others. Find three or four people — or even more — who know you best. Choose some people from different areas of your life, not just church but your home life, your social life and even your free time.

Examine Past Wins and Losses

Look back at your whole life, and then map your ups and downs. Highlight your biggest wins and take stock of your worst losses. This may take some time and may not be fun, but the results can be transformational.

One of the best ways to find your values is by mapping out your life. Remember, you’re not looking to set goals or find some best practices. All you’re doing is finding those strong beliefs that fuel you. A value is a stated reason for doing something, for thinking a certain way or responding in a specific manner.

You may have been working this whole time without an awareness of why you do the things you do.

By mapping out your past ups and downs, you can begin to understand why you did something, reacted to some situation, or leaned in to another decision. This may not be easy. In fact, you’ll probably find some things difficult to relive. You may have scars from past hurts, but you can learn much by tracing the paths from heartache to victory.

The goal is to isolate the cause and effects of your ministry gifts. What role did they play in your greatest accomplishments? It’s also meant to reveal your biggest roadblocks along the way. As you examine these, you will begin to see what really drives you, what really matters to you, and what your true values are.

The last step is to write out what you’ve uncovered. Put down on paper all that you’ve just learned. Don’t worry about how long it is. Later, you will streamline this as much as possible, in as few words as possible, to really get to the heart of the matter.

What’s Most Important

If you’ve taken a long look at your past ups and downs, you should have a list of words, quick phrases and even longer sentences. Maybe it’s all in a big pile or listed out in a notebook. Are all of those your values? What you really need is to find the most important ones.

Take that list — it may be 30, 40 or even 50 items long — and start ranking each statement. What are the most important statements? List those first, and move to the next. It may be hard to put them in some sort of order, so think about the level of impact each event had on your life. How did you feel? And how does that compare to other events in your life?

Again, we’re trying to find those underlying values that have been there the whole time, and often those come out during the most challenging yet rewarding God moments.

Now that you have them ranked, pick the ones that are top on the list. It should only be about five to eight values. Anything more could be unmanageable. Turn those into full statements that are easily understandable. Something like, “I value strong interpersonal connections,” or maybe, “Personal evangelism is very important to me.”

Make sure they are short enough to memorize. If someone were to ask you for your values on an elevator ride, could you answer them before you hit the 10th floor? If you were talking to a friend in ministry, would you be able to see how your values differ from theirs?

Now that you have a better handle on what your real values are as a leader and minister, you can begin to go all in on them as fuel for your ministry. The next step is to share them with your team and implement them regularly. As your church grows in its values as well, you’re in for amazing times ahead as your mission becomes clearer and your vision is within reach.

The point is not to come up with some list of flashy sayings. These are the fuel for your vision. You may have been working this whole time without an awareness of why you do the things you do. Discovering and developing your values helps you identify what you are doing right, avoid what went wrong, and lean in to more successes in the future.

See also Part 1 of this series.