Mid-Year Check-In: 6 Questions to Assess Your Outreach Progress

Halfway there.

Six months ago, many churches with any kind of outreach strategy were doing what churches do in January — dreaming, planning, launching, casting vision, setting goals. And most of what you set out to do in January is still in the room somewhere. Some of it is thriving. Some of it is quietly not happening. And some of it changed shape so gradually you barely noticed.

That’s normal. It’s also why a mid-year check-in matters.

Faithful outreach requires structured evaluation, not just faithful effort. What gets measured gets managed — and what doesn’t get evaluated at the halfway point almost always drifts. Six months is short enough to still course-correct. But only if you actually pause and ask the right questions.

Here are six worth answering before you get any deeper into the year.

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QUESTION 1

Are we still working on what we said we were working on?

The most important mid-year question isn’t “how are we doing?” It’s “are we still doing what we set out to do?”

Pull out the Ministry Action Plan — or whatever version of a strategic plan your team developed at the start of the year. Look at the 3–6 primary strategies you identified in January. Now honestly ask: how many of those are still your actual focus?

Most churches discover something uncomfortable at this point. New opportunities have arrived. Emergencies have shown up. Someone had a great idea in March that captured everyone’s attention. The strategies you named as priorities in January are still on paper, but half your energy has quietly migrated somewhere else.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes the drift reveals a strategic priority that needed to change. But sometimes it reveals scope creep — the slow accumulation of unfocused activity, which can be one of the biggest threats to strategic effectiveness.

Either way, you need to know. If you’re no longer working on what you said you’d work on, the honest question is: are we changing our plan, or is our plan changing us without our permission?

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QUESTION 2

Are our goals still SMART — and are we tracking them?

Vague goals like “serve the community better” don’t enable evaluation. Real evaluation requires specific, measurable goals — the kind that make you either right or wrong, not vaguely successful.

If your goals for the year were written using the SMART framework — Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-based — this is the point where you check them.

For each 1-year goal, ask:

Where are we relative to the target? If the goal was “recruit and train 25 tutors by September 1,” how many are trained today? If the goal was “engage 15% of our congregation in community outreach,” what’s the actual percentage? Are we on track, ahead, or behind? Not vaguely — specifically. A number. If we’re behind, is the goal still realistic?

Sometimes the goal was right and the execution has been slow. Sometimes the goal itself needs recalibration. Both are valid outcomes of a mid-year review. What’s not valid is pretending the goal is still on track when the numbers say otherwise.

If you set goals in January that you can’t measure today, that’s information too. Fix the measurement before you fix the execution.

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QUESTION 3

What partnerships are thriving — and which are quietly struggling?

I personally prescribe to quarterly in-person meetings for every active partnership. If you’ve been doing them, you already know the answer to this question. If you haven’t, June is the moment to catch up.

For each active community partnership, answer three specific things:

Health. On a 1–5 scale, how would you rate this partnership right now? How would your partner rate it? (These are often different — and the gap is worth investigating.)

Volunteer engagement. How many people from your congregation are actively serving? How many have dropped off since January? Why?

Impact. What has this partnership actually produced this year? Real outcomes, not just activity counts.

The mid-year question isn’t only “which partnerships are working?” It’s “which partnerships have quietly shifted without anyone naming it?” Some of your best partnerships need to be celebrated. Some of your weakest need honest conversation. And some may be approaching the graceful ending we discussed last week.

You won’t know unless you check.

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QUESTION 4

Where is our volunteer capacity today — and how does it compare to January?

Volunteer engagement is often the single best leading indicator of outreach ministry health.

Where are you now?

If engagement has grown steadily, that’s worth naming and celebrating. If it’s plateaued, the question is why. If it’s declined, the question is more urgent.

Look at the specifics: which volunteers were fully engaged in January but are quiet in June? Have you experienced burnout, life changes, seasonal drift, or a communication breakdown? Are there volunteers whose gifts you documented but never deployed — the asset mapping database sitting untouched from your February refresh?

Volunteer engagement rarely fixes itself. If June’s numbers are worse than January’s, that gap will widen through summer unless you name it and respond.

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QUESTION 5

Are we celebrating what’s working?

This is a question most outreach leaders skip — and it matters more than they realize.

Effective ministry cultures include structured celebration alongside honest evaluation. Not a performative Sunday moment. Actual attention paid to what’s working, who made it work, and what impact it’s had.

At mid-year, ask:

What has genuinely worked in the first half of the year? Name specific wins with specific numbers.

Have we told our congregation about those wins? Not just once. Repeatedly, in ways that build ownership.

Have we honored the volunteers who made them happen? Personally, specifically, by name?

Have we told our partners what impact their partnership has produced?

Ministries that only evaluate what’s broken become discouraging places to serve. Ministries that celebrate real wins — while still naming the hard truths — become places people want to invest their lives in. The celebration isn’t fluff. It’s fuel.

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QUESTION 6

What are we going to change for the second half of the year?

The whole point of a mid-year check-in is to make different decisions than you’d make on autopilot. If you finish this review and everything stays exactly the same, the review didn’t do its work.

Based on what you’ve learned from the first five questions, name three specific changes for the next six months:

One thing to stop doing. What activity, partnership, or commitment no longer fits and needs to be released or wound down?

One thing to strengthen. What is working well enough that it deserves more focus, more resources, or more attention than it’s been getting?

One thing to start. Not to overload — the book warns strongly against expanding scope prematurely — but is there a single new priority that has emerged from the first half of the year that needs to be added?

Write these down. Put dates on them. Assign owners. A mid-year check-in that doesn’t produce clear decisions is just a meeting.

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The Larger Discipline

Ongoing evaluation is one of the pillars of effective strategic planning. Not because evaluation is exciting — it isn’t always — but because ministries that don’t pause to look at their own work with honest eyes drift toward whichever pressure is loudest in the moment.

Six months in, that pressure has usually built up. Somebody wants something new. An emergency has surfaced. A volunteer champion has moved out of state. Someone on your leadership team is quietly discouraged. The demands of the second half of the year are already lining up.

A mid-year review doesn’t remove any of that. It just gives you a chance to face it with your original priorities in hand — the ones you decided on when you had time to think clearly and pray honestly, before the fog of daily activity set in.

Those January priorities deserve one more look before the second half takes over.

Block one hour this week for a mid-year check-in. Walk through the six questions above with your outreach team. Download the check-in sheet here:

Mid-Year Check-in Worksheet | Outreach Answers

Write down your answers, name three specific changes for the second half of the year and put dates on them. The next six months will go somewhere. This is your chance to decide where.

Next week: “The Volunteer Who Changed Our Approach to Recruitment” — how a single unexpected conversation can rewire the way your church thinks about who serves and why.