One Thing I Learned from Serving on a Church Board – Have a Plan

For the last couple years, I had the privilege of serving on the Board of Directors for Calvary Chapel Jaco. Calvary Chapel Jaco is a church on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica planted and led by Pastor Mike Lawrence and family. Here’s one thing I learned.

 Win:

I was available.

I provided organizational advice when needed. I even managed to visit Costa Rica a few times. I was also able to host Pastor Mike and his family when they would visit South Florida. Being on staff at a growing church in Miami gave me tons of insight that I was able to share with the team at Calvary Chapel Jaco. Costa Rica is a beautiful place and the work that is being done by Calvary Chapel Jaco is awesome. It was a privilege to be a part of it.

Fail:

I wasn’t able to send long term missionaries to serve alongside them.

We sent ZERO long term missionaries to serve in Costa Rica. ZERO. I see that as a huge fail, my biggest failure. Looking back at it, I realized that I had no long term plan. My plan was just to expose people to ministry and missions, and hope that someone would want to go. I needed to be way more intentional than that. That was my fault. If I could do it all over, I would develop a pipeline like this…..

What I learned:

Have a plan. Serving on a Board of Directors means that you’ll need to get stuff done in your spare time. You can’t just sit around waiting for things to happen. You can’t be passive. If you have an ambitious goal then you need to be aggressive and purposeful in making that happen. Not doing that is my failure and now is my lesson learned.