Unpacking Ideas

The idea of economics is not new. The word is taken from the Greek oikonomia, which in the first Century roughly meant “household management”. Today, while we are managing more than a household, the question is the same: How do we manage the limited resources available to us? I.e., How do we run our economy?

To lead with my center in a good conversation means I will care more about you and less about being right. To lead with my center in a good conversation means I might find myself following, or leading no one because we disagree. And what I might learn is that when I dancing or conversing if I lead with my center, whether my feet follow or not, I will still enjoy the dance. I will still enjoy you.

A good conversation is better than information sharing. A good conversation is like dancing. Linda and I are taking ballroom dancing lessons. Imagine the chaos. We are learning about conversation without words. When she and I dance, sometimes she knows where I am going, sometimes she doesn’t! Sometimes I go left and she follows, other times I go left and she goes somewhere else. This confusion of direction is usually not her fault because I am not very good communicating with her about where we are supposed to be going.I like good conversation. We all need good conversation, in every relationship, at home, at work, in government and across governments, and across cultures. I like good conversation and I have some hope because I like dance, even if I don’t know where we are going, and even if we do not end up in the same place.

Effective leadership watches over slow change carefully and patiently — without losing sight of the mission and the need for the change to continue. Effective leadership also understands the juggling act of watching over and nurturing individual change while also monitoring the entire organization’s slow progress toward accomplishing its mission. Mission-mindfulness and change are hard to maintain. They are hard to measure. They are even harder to measure if we care about the health and well-being of our individual members as well as the health and well-being of our entire organization — because the two are not necessarily the same.

How would a disciple of Jesus Christ behave in order to transform the world? Measure this. This is effectiveness. This is transformational effectiveness.

Here’s what I think: Regardless of a church’s size or growth rate, or programs, or worship style, mission-mindfulness is one of two essential and minimum requirements for being an effective church. What do I mean by “mission mindfulness”? It means we care about our mission with every decision, every conversation, every program or worship breath we take.

There are four (or more) ways to evaluate an organization’s effectiveness. Each approach comes with a set of questions – reflecting a particular set of values, what we might think matters most in an organization. We could call them effectiveness orientations. Each is a lens through which we look in order to evaluate the extent to which an organization is effective

How should we define “effective”? We can measure anything. But, what is the right thing to measure? Our struggle to agree on what it means to be effective congregation has been like trying to grab a slippery pig. We’ve tried, sort of. We’ve done a better job defining effective clergy or laity. But as I said before, developing effective clergy or laity is not the endpoint (a good means but not the end) and might even be a distraction if we ignore the more important end goal: To develop effective congregations.