Layers of Intentionality

As you've probably guessed by reading my blog, I like to be intentional about whatever I do. I like to start with a goal and do my best to read that goal. But what's better than having a clearly defined goal before starting a project? Having layers of intentionality.

I saw a great example of this yesterday at church. At the beginning of January, the Pastor of Youth and English Ministries had posted a survey on the new church website to see which topics students were most interested in. He had said that on the four Sundays in February he would speak about those four topics. I originally thought that this was a great way to attract the congregation to visit the new church website and to help the congregation get involved and take some ownership in the worship service by suggesting topics or voting for ones that others had suggested.

Although the survey did accomplish these things, he shared some more important goals yesterday. He suspected that the questions that people were most interested in were also ones that their friends may have been asking. The pastor wanted to equip the congregation with some answers to these questions. But more than just communicating content he also wanted to model for the congregation how to properly listen to the questions our friends ask and how to communicate the truth to them (not saying what you think; saying what the Bible says about it), and saying this in a way that they can understand.

Some would say that this is an example of having several goals, but I call it "layers of intentionality" for three main reasons:

1. Because the goals are built on top of each other. Some of them are foundational to others.
   
2. Because he had goals for himself (to communicate God's truth to the congregation) and for the congregation (to do the same with their friends).
   
3. Because he set goals for what to do (communicate content) and how to do it (modeling how the congregation could communicate God's truth to their friends).

Someone pointed out to me once, "Anything worth doing is hard". Sometimes I focus on the "hard" part of that statement, reassuring me that it's normal for worthwhile things to be hard, so I keep on going. But it's also helpful to regularly focus on the "worth doing" concept. If you have one goal for an event that probably makes it worth doing, but if you have several layers of intentionality, it will be very worth doing, and knowing that will help you stay committed to doing it when times get tough.