1. HONESTY

1. Honest People Are Open With God in Everything God says: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).

2. Honest People Don’t Lie or Cheat. The Lord Jesus said: “But let your communication be, Yes, yes; No, no: for whatever is more than these comes of evil” (Matthew 5:37). Revelation 14:5 also prophesies: “And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.” 

3. Honest People Love God in Their Hearts and Serve God Not for Their Own Profit. God’s words say: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Matthew 22:37–38). “If you are honest to the point where you know only to satisfy God and not to consider yourself or take for yourself, then I say that such people are those who are nourished in the light and who shall live forever in the kingdom.”

2. INTEGRITY

Here are several major key factors regarding integrity.

1. Be an honest man

A minister must be a man of his word. People will refuse to listen to those they do not trust. Therefore, a minister must make sure he has all the facts before he speaks. A key piece of advice was given by the Apostle Paul “Speak the truth in love”. Both aspects are important-being truthful and being loving.

2. Work hard

Nothing takes the place of hard work. A wise man once said, “it is amazing how lucky I am when I work hard.” It is difficult for a minister to live down a reputation of being lazy. The bivocational minister is usually not tempted to become lazy simply because he has too many demands upon his time to develop a lazy lifestyle.

3. Resist moral failure

Moral failure is probably the most difficult mistake for a minister to overcome. God may forgive you but the trust lost before people you serve is hard to regain. Paul’s advice to the young preacher, Timothy, was to “flee youthful lust”. It is a grave mistake to believe you are above temptation. Satan can design a trap just for you. Integrity is defined by who you are when no one is looking. Actually, the One who really counts is always looking.

4. Guard against the appearance of evil

A good reputation can be lost by what may be innocent but appears questionable. Everybody watches the minister. It is part of the territory of ministry. A minister would be wise to never get into a situation where his motives or actions are ever questioned. Something that helps prevent temptation and removes doubts about his actions is to make it clear to everyone that he loves his wife.

5. Be yourself

A simple but important part of having integrity as a minister is to be yourself. God made only one of you. Becoming all he intended you to be is your primary goal. Trying to be someone else will put you in bondage. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches” is true for everyone but especially for a minister.

3. TRUST

Here are some things that build trust on a team:

• Promises made and kept
• Intent, focused, and reflective listening to each person’s ideas and opinions
• Ongoing mutual concern for team members’ personal needs and families
• Remembering special occasions in your team members’ lives
• Straight and honest talk
• Loyalty to the team and team members
• Emotional honesty (When you are glad about something — let them know; when you are angry — let them know.)

Here are some things that erode trust on a team:

• Cloaked confrontations (Those times in which you really want to confront one particular team member, but instead, in the name of convenience or cowardice, you confront the entire team and leave everyone trying to figure out for just whom it was meant)
• Unnecessarily long team meetings (Wasting team members’ time because you haven’t planned out your own well enough)
• Delaying commitments
• Talking critically about a team member when the person is not present to respond
• Postponing decision making without good reason
• Unkept promises

Make no mistake. People deeply desire to work in an environment of trust. A team that wants to accomplish reasonable goals has to have the ingredient of trust. A team that wants to accomplish exceptional goals must have an exceptional sense of trust. Perhaps the most important question that team members, and potential team members, ask about their team leader is: Can I trust that person?

4. PARTNERSHIP

Partnership is like a bridge. It’s the great connector that joins those who fund the work of the ministry with the work itself, and it is upheld by the two pillars of prayer and financial support.
There are places the ministries need to go, things they need to do and say and we will not be able to do it without prayer and financial partners!

1. Financial Support:
A Partner commits to funding the work of the ministry with gifts, contributions, tithes and offerings. Philippians 4:17
”Not that I seek your gift, but I do seek and am eager for the fruit which increases to your credit, the harvest of blessing that is accumulating to your account.”

2. Mutual Prayer Support:
A Partner commits to pray for the work of the ministry.

5. EFFICIENCY

The words “efficiency” and “effectiveness” are often tossed around without much thought as to their meaning, but they refer to entirely different things.

Efficiency is a measure of how well things get done. It generally measures how much is accomplished in relation to the cost in terms of time, money or effort required. To accomplish a task in 30 minutes rather than 40 means you are using your time more efficiently. Buying some product for $4 instead of $5, means you are using your money more efficiently.

Effectiveness, on the other hand, is an assessment of how well some action accomplishes important goals and priorities. It’s not primarily a question of how long a task took, but whether that task furthered your objective. It’s not primarily a question of how much something cost, but whether that purchase helped you reach your desired goal.

Time management gurus have summarized it this way: efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right thing!

6. PASSION

Passion is that fire that God ignites in our bones and in our souls. It is like the fire in a furnace that gives heat to the entire house; or the fire in a steam engine that produces the power that moves the train down the track. Passion is ardent affection; a fervent, driving, overmastering feeling of conviction with an intense sense of urgency.

The ministry of John Wesley personified passion. Someone once asked Wesley why so many people came to hear him preach. He said, “I just set myself on fire and people come and watch me burn.”

Are you on fire for God today? Does a holy enthusiasm mark your ministry? If not — why not?

The number of people stepping down from ministry each year is staggering. Many are walking away from ministry because of spiritual, emotional, and physical burnout. They are intelligent, gifted, trained, and called, but they are calling it quits. And then there are those who hang on by a thread. They want to quit, but they can’t afford to. They stay with it because they don’t know what else to do. Somewhere along the way the passion that drives life and ministry was lost. There is a difference in being tired in ministry and being tired of ministry. If we are honest, most of us would admit that we get tired in ministry. The very nature of ministry is demanding; it takes life out of the minister. But it is quite another thing to be tired of ministry. This is a sign that passion is depleted and the spiritual wellbeing of the minister is in jeopardy.

Is it possible to have and maintain passion in ministry?

In 2 Timothy 1:6, Paul admonishes Timothy to stir up [rekindle the embers of, fan the flame of, and keep burning – Amplified Bible] the gift of God that is in you (NKJV).

The source of passion is God. Paul told Titus (2:14) that [Jesus] gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works (NKJV). The word zeal or zealous is a synonym for passion. Titus is reminded that this passion comes from God and that purity and passion are hallmarks of the Christian life.

Passion is a result of knowing God, loving God, and pursuing God. It is rooted in an awareness that we are totally dependent upon Him. A lack of passion for ministry can cause a minister to depend on the wrong things for success and effectiveness in ministry. A passion-driven ministry will always look to God. A passionless ministry will look to other men, organizations, and programs.

E.M. Bounds addresses this issue with clarity: “We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, and new organizations to advance the church and to secure enlargement and efficiency of the gospel. The trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than anything else. Men are God’s great method.