Setting the Fundamentals

Ministry Mess Management is directed principally at Christian ministry leaders and presumes that Christian ministry leaders subscribe to biblically-based principles and Christ-centered management. It is our humble attempt to examine ministry failures and malperformance rooted in breeches of one or more of those biblical principles. We will demonstrate the close link between biblical principles and wise management, indeed a linkage based in God's reality. They go hand in hand. Necessary management decisions, including gritty and distasteful ones such as terminations, should be as much grounded in biblical principles as good management principles, not simply pragmatism or financial need. Furthermore, we invite you to think, and to frame, organizational behavior (and failure) within these values and wisdom.

We wish to encourage, even urge, Christ-centered boards and managers to discerningly understand, detect and courageously be able to expeditiously act, yet with grace, out of a sense of biblical necessity in an organizational context when danger signs based both in biblical and sound management principles are flashing warnings. Governing and executive leadership are sobering responsibilities with, we believe, transcendent effects.

To begin, in this first chapter, we attempt to present an easily understood and easily remembered framework for keeping these virtues in view as a leader and then their application to organizational leadership. We evaluate each of the following cases thereby.

Effective management isn't just about integrity and smarts. We have observed that a rich, interdependent constellation of values and the wisdom that grows from biblical principles and virtue must be brought together with a number of executive competencies involving thinking skills, people skills and domain expertise to create effective leadership in any given context.

Notwithstanding the fact that we have feelings and desires, our thinking and acting includes a value system at our core—a set of interacting values, commonly based in virtues that provide a grid through which we think, decide and select actions. It lies behind our worldview. While our beliefs regarding virtues and values are not determinative—we obviously do act against our values (or "better judgment") from time to time—our thinking does tug us in the direction of our values and subjects our decision-making to them. The clearer and more prescribed in our thinking they are, the more influence they have. In leading an organization, they are crucial to our impact on the organizational culture.

Over the past nearly four decades, one author sought to find a unifying construct for thinking about biblical virtues and their derivative values and then their application to leading an organization. This chapter first introduces this virtue-based values system to the reader and then discusses the related roots of biblical wisdom.

Virtue, Values and Wisdom in Organizational Leadership

Christian ministry leaders would be quick to agree that both biblical values and wisdom are vital to effective executive leadership and a healthy, effective ministry. Yet, the vast majority of ministry executives do not have a coherent mental model for formulating and inculcating biblical values into their management leadership, strategy and action or the application of wisdom to their leadership. They can articulate their values, but simply as a list of what comes to mind when asked or what they recently read in a popular book.

This chapter sets the stage for all that follows and provides a useful basis for both framing values and wisdom. We'll look at extremely powerful and useful virtue-based values, biblical construct and how grace is part of leadership. Then, secondly, we will take a similarly useful and powerful approach to looking at wisdom. Finally, we'll assess how the problems of the organizations discussed in the following chapters resulted, fundamentally, from a breakdown in these values and wisdom.

Virtue-Based Value He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness (Heb —hesed or ~ loyal love, ~devoted love), and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8 (NAS)

For any organization, the importance of virtues-based values and ethics and an effective construct or system that captures all the key ingredients of a values system useful in both a personal and organizational context cannot be overemphasized.

For example, as this chapter was being written, the CEO of IBM made business news because she chastised the IBM sales department in a video that was internally distributed (and leaked), particularly focusing on IBM's failure to land certain large opportunities. She noted pointedly that IBM didn't get back to customers in a timely manner, customers who had made requests for proposals. And, consequently, IBM lost the sale opportunities.

We readily agree that trust is absolutely essential to a healthy organization. Trust must permeate the entire organization. It must exist between management and employees, but it also must exist between the organization and its customers, its suppliers and, if a donor supported nonprofit, its donors. Trust is an extremely vital virtue to organizational survival. And, it is only one of many.

However, organizations, including ministries, undermine their trustworthiness routinely! Are their products reliable? Do they deliver on time? Do they pay their bills on time or before? Do they complete projects on time? Do they complete projects on or below budgets? Do they return phone calls or follow-through on promises? Do they get their receipts back to donors in a timely manner? Do they keep promises to their employees, such as espousing certain biblical values and then living up to them?

Trustworthiness must be present throughout and revealed in thousands of actions of the organization. For example, if management does not know how to create an organizational rigor in keeping promises, its credibility will deteriorate and so will its reputation. How do we, as executives, create an organization that has integrity and trustworthiness from top to bottom? And, trustworthiness is only one of many values that must permeate the organization!

Ethics establish the plumb line against which the organization measures its behavior and the behavior toward which it strives. Its desired behavior, in this context, determines its self-vision (what kind of organization it wants to be). Its vision of itself, coupled with its desired behavior, determines its style. Its...