In order to prune your ministry wisely, you need to understand what resources you have and how they are used.

The first thing you think of may be financial resources, but money is not your most vital resource.

Time: Your number one, most important resource is time. You can get more of any other resource, many of which renew every day. But time only runs out. Worse yet, you never know how much time you have.

Attention: Attention is a limited commodity for both you and your audience. In other words, attention can be described as “mental energy”. As you well know, ministry leaders can only focus on productive ministry activity for so long. You can only pay attention in so many meetings, and you can only focus on ministry tasks for so long.

You audience also has a limited attention span. If you are going to use their attention, it’s critical that you channel it to the CORRECT things in your ministry. Wasting your audience’s attention resources is doubly negative for your ministry. Not only do you lose that opportunity to produce fruit for your ministry because you channeled the audience’s attention into something unfruitful, but you also lose future opportunities because your audience no longer trusts you with their attention (more on this later).

Energy: Energy is the amount of physical power you have. Think of it as your battery. Even if you start your day on a full battery (which you probably don’t, on many days) you’ll only have so much energy to be actively engaged in tasks such as helping, leading, etc.

Decisions: Believe it or not, your ability to make decisions is also limited! High performance people have a name for this – decision fatigue. Once you’ve reached the point of decision fatigue, you will no longer be able to process information in such a way that you can make rational choices.

Money: As you already know, money is a limited resource. This is the most commonly understood ministry resource. Counter to what many people are led to believe, this is one of the least important resources when it comes to growth. Money only acts as a tool to create more of what you already have. If you try to fix growth problems with money, it will only increase your problems instead of resolving them. Money is not what makes a ministry successful, which is why you don’t need money to create a flourishing ministry. If you are able to make a fruitful ministry on a tight budget, then your ministry will grow even more as the money starts to come in. As you learn to properly use your other ministry resources, you will also be able to properly invest your financial resources for the kingdom.