
Last week I got an email from an old friend in Seattle.
Jim Henderson was on staff with me a million years ago when I was pastoring. He sprung into the world’s consciousness in 2006 when he won the highest bid for Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist podcast/Substack), a young atheist who was “selling his soul on eBay”. Jim asked Hemant to visit ten evangelical churches and report his impressions on Jim’s “Off The Map” website. After all, if evangelical churches were all about “reaching people far from God”, wouldn’t it make sense to know how they are responding to their efforts? It blew up and became front-page news with big-time interviews.
More recently, Jim has a fantastic program called “The Three Practices.” It places people with wildly differing views on politics, culture, religion, or whatever, around tables and teaches them how to listen, respect, and engage. Genius. Blessed are the peacemakers.
Anyway, Jim sent me an email commenting on my last post. After some kind words, he wrote, “I think you should use bold less often. When everything is bolded, I get confused about which is the really important thing you want me to focus on.”
I had to laugh. He was absolutely right; I had hitchhiked into Boldapalooza. See for yourself here. I wasn’t even aware of it…or when I was, I was in denial. Oops. See?
The point is: when everything is important, nothing is.
One of the things we find church leadership teams struggling with is defining their core values. Core values are the most important principles that guide an organization’s decision-making and actions; they bring definition to how the organization operates.
For instance, years ago we defined the primary values at our church with the acronym SOWER. What we valued highest were:
Servant Community
Outward focus
Worship
Empowered Transformation
Relevance
That drove how we made decisions and what we prioritized. When a leadership team does the hard work of defining their core values (and no more than 4 to 6) along with their mission (what they do) and their vision (who they want to be), they are laying a foundation on which the organization can build.
The reality is that there is no shortage of good works a church can do, but it can’t do everything. Learning to define what is truly important is the work of leadership. And keeping that in focus is equally hard with all the curve balls ministry-life can throw at you.
But it can start with you: what’s really important in the organization you help lead?
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
What if you could identify and remove growth barriers? Empower your volunteers? Build passionate people? Make a real difference in your community? And what if you had church-tested tools for team-building and leadership development? The Elemental Pathway is a comprehensive holistic 6-month program combining online assessments, coaching, and action-learning, gamified tools for highly engaging, team-based interaction. See how it can work for you here!

Commentaires