One In Jesus

I’m talking about — except I do know something about having employees. I have a few dozen. And there are certain principles that govern how you treat people who count on you for their living.

You may well have to lay off employees when the economy forces cut backs, but you do it with compassion and with fair notice and severance. You give employees who are failing training and another chance — unless it’s clear the employee cannot succeed. Then you let the employee go, but you do it on generous terms.

You don’t retain unproductive employees indefinitely – no matter how much you like them. And you deal honestly and kindly with employees — all the time.

And executive employees get more severance, because it takes them longer to find a new job — and many moved to take the job and may have to move to take a new job.

If an employee is a bad fit — tell the employee to consider a career change — and help him or her make the transition. You might even help the employee seek career counseling. Lying to an employee to avoid hurting his feelings isn’t kind to him or his next employer. You owe him an honest evaluation.

Finally, the goal isn’t to squeeze all the labor you can from an employee for the least possible money. You treat employees fairly — and expect them to work hard and loyally. You shouldn’t expect them to be more loyal to you than you are to them.

Let’s apply these principles to missionaries and church planters. Continue reading →

The Churches of Christ split 100 years ago over missionary societies. As a result, we’ve found ourselves with each congregation acting as its own missionary society. A deacon gets handed the task of overseeing a missionary or two with no training, no help, and nowhere to turn. And as a result, we often fail where we could have succeeded. And sometimes we invest a lot of money in an effort that someone with experience would have known had little chance of success.

The solution is to form organizations that gather up experienced people, who keep up with the literature and the mission field, and who can help us make wiser decisions.

I know of three organizations involved in domestic church planting within the Churches of Christ: Mission Alive, Kairos, and Stadia.

Stadia began among the independent Christian Churches but now works with the a cappella Churches of Christ as well.

Mission Alive and Kairos are both indigenous to the Churches of Christ. I happen to have much more experience with Kairos and think very highly of them. Continue reading →

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Why would we invest lives, energy, and money in church plant efforts that don’t have at least some of the characteristics described in the previous post? But that’s what Churches of Christ are doing all over the country.

We are investing untold lives and millions of dollars in church plant efforts that will either fail or else not succeed as well as they should because we invest our people and money in programs that are poorly designed by naively not bothering to check out the research. It makes no sense.

Here are some examples of bad plans —

Foreign missions

We used to be able to find a willing preacher school graduate, put him on a plane, and expect him to plant a church all by himself just about anywhere he went. You see, shortly after World War II, the United States was the most prosperous nation on earth — by far — and the most admired. Being an American was enough to gain an audience, and people wanted to have what we had. Continue reading →