The Cambridge English Dictionary defines an evaluation as: “the process of judging or assessing the quality, importance, amount, or value of something.”

I am someone who has often shied away from the idea of evaluating something, for fear of having to cut off things that aren’t important or of value.  That is, until I came to Celebrate Recovery and began working through the 8 Principles and 12 Steps.

We find that the process of evaluation appears 6 times within the 8 Principles.  From Principle 1 we evaluate our lives and admit there is a problem, we evaluate our need of a Higher Power to help us recover (P2), before we begin the process of examining (or evaluating) our faults and deciding whether we are ready to be free of them (P4 &5).  We also evaluate our relationships so that we can work on forgiveness or making amends where we see there has been hurt (P6).  And then building on our recovery, we undertake to evaluate ourselves each day to ensure we are still in a place of surrender to our Higher Power and following His will for our lives (P7)

That process which, at times can be uncomfortable, has been very healing for me and has helped me to see not only the areas of my life in need of restoring and resetting with God’s help, but in doing a daily evaluation this ensures I can keep the forward momentum of growth.

In the same way that we evaluate ourselves to keep us on the right track, it is also important to evaluate our Celebrate Recovery ministries.  To evaluate the importance of the ministry is, for me, not in doubt, as I continue to see many people finding hope and healing in their recovery. 

What is important, though, is to evaluate the value and quality of what we are doing to ensure this remains fresh and relevant and that familiarity hasn’t led us into some unhelpful practices or taken us away from the DNA of Celebrate Recovery, and that we are still allowing room for God to do His work.

Some areas that we can evaluate in our ministries include: how people are greeted when they arrive (especially newcomers) to ensure they all feel welcomed; ensuring the structure of the meeting helps people to feel safe, such as starting on time, keeping to a consistent format, checking small groups are following the guidelines; the teaching is following the acrostic and scriptures in the Leaders Guide. 

There are many areas we can evaluate in our ministries, and as always, the key is to keep it honest – we have a wonderful message to share and so we want to be delivering the best ministry we can with the resources we have.  So, remember to keep it balanced – we are looking for constructive improvement, not perfection, and keep it regular – we want to be in the continual habit of seeking ways of building our ministry to see more people find freedom, hope and healing that we have ourselves found.   May God bless you as you endeavour to do His work.