Avoiding Organizational Suffocation

One of the recurring questions I get asked by seminary students, pastors, and other church-folk is, "Can we use 'secular' resources and books without compromising our biblical and theological principles? And if we do use them shouldn't we use some sort of theological 'lens' to read them?" The question has come up again as I've been teaching a course at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (LSTC) - all day, every day this week! - called "Being & Doing Church in the X-Box Era."

I usually bristle a little, at first, at the question because I hear an implication (sometimes unintended by the questioner) that what's in "the church" is good and what's in "the world" is bad. This is not only terrible theology, it's unhealthy! 

We would be fools to ignore the wealth of resources available to us these days in the area of leadership development, community organizing, organizational development, and so on. Church leaders ought to be regular browsers and buyers in these aisles at their local book stores. A healthy system is open to new ideas, new energy, new direction, different perspectives. Without an inflow of these things, organizations - including churches - die. 

At the same time, the people who raise this question make an important point. Faith organizations do have a particular point of view. They are grounded in certain biblical and theological principles and these principles ought to serve as a lens for reading, evaluating, and using resources. But that's no different than it is for any organization. Your purpose statement and guiding principles are there to help you make decisions about what resources you'll use, which models you'll adopt, what changes you'll make as a result of things you've read. 

As foolish as it would be to not engage resources from outside your organization, it would be just as foolish to co-opt them blindly. You don't just swallow stuff whole, no matter what it promises to do for you or what miracles it says it can perform in your organization or how transformative it claims to be. 

Read this post I wrote about the mess one company made when it forgot to use its own purpose & principles to screen the "latest greatest" business model: A Call For Creativity. 

Invite in new perspectives or risk organizational suffocation. But the bottom line is: Your purpose & principles are your bottom line.

- Kelly Fryer