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Resources for Endowed Parishes - Take Two!
Capital Campaigns: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Affinity 5: The Challenges of Downtown Churches
Affinity 4: Small Groups in Big Churches
Adversarial cultures do not create the Kingdom of God
I am not a fan of Mutual Ministry Reviews for many of the same reasons that Edward Demming gave 50 years ago after he left the American business consulting world in disgust and went to Japan and helped create total quality management and radically transformed the quality of Japanese products.
Why the Church wants to continue to import failed consulting technology into its life continually confounds me.
What we need to create is cultures of ministry excellence that rely on continual improvement rather than on annual reviews. What is important here is not the review process but the underlying culture. We live in a competitive, adversarial, punitive, culture and strategies based on that culture have limited the ability to build sustainable cultures of excellence. The path to the future must be consistent with the future we desire.
Adversarial cultures do not create the Kingdom of God.
The alternative to the adversarial culture is the learning culture (see Peter Senge's work on Learning organizations) that is characterized by curiosity, wonder, empowerment, and excellence. Sadly, most review processes, because of the underlying adversarial culture, don't empower as they (in Demming's words) "rob the worker of their essential dignity".
Adversarial cultures focus on punishing failure,. Learning cultures focus on discovery, and will celebrate failure as one more step on the path to knowledge and excellence.
The challenge isn't to come up with a better review process. The challenge is to create the culture that could benefit from a review.
I have reviewed a number of tools, including some 360 leadership assessment tools for leaders, and generally, they are inappropriate for a Mutual Ministry Review. They tend not to look at the congregation's ministry - only the lead clergy. In addition, putting such a tool in the hands of untrained people means it can be usee as a weapon to bludgeon the leader.
At Clergy Leadership Development’s training program, our Mutual Ministry Valuations have two foci: creating an appreciative culture focused on excellence in ministry and building the ego strength of leaders so they can explore failure from a place of curiosity and wonder rather than fear.
Is your Church really interested in creating cultures of excellence? Or are you simply interested in punishing failure and cloaking it in fancy sounding language? If you really want to change your culture, try appreciative inquiry.
Robert J. Voyle, Psy.D., Director, Clergy Leadership Institute
For Coaching and Training in Appreciative Inquiry
Author: Restoring Hope: Appreciative Strategies
to Resolve Grief and Resentment
503-647-2378 or 503-647-2382
Austin, TX 78701
