Lausanne World Pulse – Communications among International Christian Leaders
By Phill Butler
On standards of performance, the pace of the Christian sector seems considerably more leisurely than business. The demands made by dozens if not hundreds of market or industry analysts talking and writing about your company, your industry and where you stand are just not there. There is no pressure like “stockholder return on equity.” Or trying to explain why your stock is down when your profits are up. There is no Forbes or Business Week ranking your university’s MBA program. In business, science and education, you have to know what is going on within your industry—ready at a moment’s notice to compare and defend your performance with that of others. To do this, you need to be talking with and listening to others in the industry. The constant pressure for profits and the associated issues never go away.
Timelines and Vocabularies
This raises an interesting, less often discussed aspect of assumptions and standards that, in turn, motivates communication between leaders. What is the “horizon” or timeline by which you must accomplish your goals? There is often discussion if not debate on the short-term demand for profits in Western business vs. the longer-term perspective of the Japanese. Not a week goes by when some leader does not take over a troubled company and pundits predict how much time “the market” will give him or her to turn the company around. All the while, of course, the market will use those ever-present industry standards to judge the leader’s performance.
On the Christian front, debate erupts when movements like AD2000 and Beyond suggest specific dates and sponsor and share analytical data on the unfinished task to motivate and inform high levels of engagement and performance in world evangelization. They then convene working meetings to encourage new, bold strategies and goals. God’s people working to some objective standard of performance by itself is inadequate. Those objectives must always be accompanied by a timeline. The timelines themselves create further motivation for dialogue and discussion among leaders.
If in business stockholders motivate performance and industry standards allow leaders to judge their performance, it is a standard vocabulary about those matters that makes communications possible among the leaders.
When comparing secular and Christian leadership, one quickly finds that a big part of the problem Christian leaders face is that they lack the highly developed vocabularies found in business, science, technology and education. There are general and very specific business terms, reference points for each industry. Each specialization has its own additional, more technical language. Leaders in each sector are to be conversant in both the general and the specialized language. That is what allows them to communicate both within their own company or enterprise and across the industry and with the investors and analysts. That is what allows them to lead and to meet and communicate with other leaders. It allows them to compare how well they are doing. It makes the analysts’ reports meaningful.
Yet, what are the comparables in Christian ministry? In a local church, the number of membership, size of staff and budget are most often quoted. In missions, it may be the number of missionaries, countries in which you are operating and maybe your budget. In both cases, once you get past those numbers, the conversation between leaders suddenly goes “soft”—no standard vocabulary powers the conversation. Complicating the problem further is that, internationally, today’s truly global Church meets in the field—East, West, North and South. Southern and eastern leaders are crying to be heard. They want to contribute meaningfully to the discussion about the direction and mission of the Church. But often, here, the lack of common vocabulary dealing with assumptions, performance standards and historical contexts are even more diverse, making effective communication among leaders even more difficult.
Pages: ALL Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next