This coming year I am defining our Summit pastoral team "core values." Core values, for us, are different than our mission–our mission (Love God, Love Each Other, Love the World) describes what we do as a church, these core values describe how we do it. These are the characteristics that we desire for our work environment–first among pastors, then among our unpaid staff (volunteers) and then our congregation at large.
What we do is name the value (e.g., Humility, Excellence, Empowerment, Generosity, Audacious Faith, etc etc.) and then identify how we put it into practice in our "workplace." Our focus is not on how we express a particular value in our personal lives, per se, but how we express it in our policies, programs, and overall work ethos.
We are writing them as we go, and the list won't be final until next year sometime. Here is our first one… please add insight.
Humility//Prov 1:7:
- We believe collaborative efforts lead to better products.
We make use of "ideagoras," whereby we put our "ideas" out on "the marketplace" and get feedback. No one should plan a major ministry initiative "alone;" we will brainstorm our ideas with other team members. We do this for every major initiative in the church. While it is painful to have "pet" ideas shot down, we believe collaborative brainstorming on the front end produces a better "product."
- We regularly give and receive both encouragement and critique.
We are confident that 20% of what we do is wrong, we just don’t know which 20%. Rather than overanalyzing every decision, we err on the side of taking action, and then learn from our mistakes by openness to candid feedback. (thanks to my brother-in-law Sebastian Traeger for this one).
We critically evaluate all major events and initiatives.
We take the initiative to invite feedback and strive to receive it well, giving the person who gives the critique the benefit of the doubt in their motive.
- We spend time doing good research.
The best ministry ideas (usually) come not from creativity alone, but from discovering the creativity of others and improving upon it. We believe a failure to research demonstrates either laziness or extreme arrogance.
- We invest in professional development for our pastors and volunteers, allocating time and resources to books, conferences, and strategic friendships.
I think this is fantastic, J.D. A lot of churches think they are next to perfect, and they risk never discovering their errors because of it.
I’m not sure about the “20% wrong” number. For all I know you all could be 20% right. I know that James says we all stumble in many ways (James 2). The context there isn’t about sin, but rather about unintentional human error in teaching. If we collaborate and open our minds to each other’s ideas, then, with guidance from Scripture, we can come to make better decisions about what we teach and what we do. This is of course assuming we are all stumbling in different ways, and that one of us has it right.
Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and that means the light you see and the light I see everyday. He looks like our spiritual light. He tries to fool us into think he is God’s light. He is so very good at it, with thousands if not billions of years of practice.
The only way for us to tell the difference between God’s light and Satan’s darkness (masquerading as light) is to get into the Scripture apart from any traditions we have ever been told about it. Jesus always came back to Satan with the Scripture (Matthew 4), and constantly condemned the deeply ingrained and age old traditions of the Bible teachers. Even Paul himself praised the Bereans for checking Scripture against what he himself was telling them (Acts 11). Paul loved the fact that they understood that even though his own teachings looked like spiritual light, they first had to check them against Scripture *alone* (apart from Paul himself!)
May God give you wisdom and peace,
sorry, that’s not Acts 11 (Bereans), that’s Acts 17:11
“We believe a failure to research demonstrates either laziness or extreme arrogance.”
I must admit that I have been guilty of this before and your diagnosis of the problem is accurate. I have to be constantly on guard about settling into a “maintenance” mindset where instead of trying to break new ground I seek rather to maintain the status quo. I am convinced that Jesus is not pleased with such an offering.
Thanks for posting this!