I’m back! Had a rough day yesterday. Won’t go into details, but let’s just say I was out of commission and under the weather, but not really sick. Call me and I’ll tell you about it. Don’t have my number? Sorry….

Anyways, I’m going to continue my debrief of the Leadership Summit materials. It’s been really good typing out summaries and kind of going through them again.

If you’re ever able to go to any kind of conference or event that emphasizes leadership GO FOR IT!!

Session 5 “Strategy & Leadership” - by Michael Porter.

Overview: this was one of the most challenging sessions. Michael really challenged the church from an outsiders viewpoint. I’m not really sure if he is a believer or not, but I really got the feeling that he wasn’t. Either way, he was very impressed with the efforts of the church to “do good” in the community, but at the same time very constructively critical of the results of those efforts.

Dan Kimball, whose writings are often focused on designing worship services that include creative and artistic forms of worship, says this about sitting through this session,

As for Michael, he truthfully shared that his talk would feel like a business classroom lecture. So, I framed listening to him through that grid, as I do when I personally read all types of non-church leadership books. I am screening them through a biblical lens and also screening them by asking the questions of what it means for our church and in that context. But, as a pastor, I love learning from sources of all types where truth can be used to further the mission we are on.

I really wholeheartedly agree with this perspective. It was very obvious that Michael Porter, an academic focused on management and economics, was definitely at home in a “business school” classroom setting. So, trying to be a good learner, I buckled down and went along for the ride.

The 2 questions that really framed the entire session were:

1. How do we do well at “doing good” in our communities?
2. How do we serve our communities well?

Basically, the answer given to these questions were this:

• Shift our mindsets from charity/giving (philanthropy) to delivering a social service (product). Basically, striving to get the most bang for your buck. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that I felt like he was advocating turning giving into a business, but I do sense that his motives were all about making the giving that we do participate in actually produce results.
• Make our “giving” more about the recipients than the people “giving” - A lot of times people within the community of faith give because it makes them feel good and checks off a spiritual requirement from a religious checklist, NOT because it makes the recipient feel good, or changes the recipient’s social situation.
• We must track results. Basically, if we’re doing a bad job of helping the homeless in our area, but someone down the street is doing a great job, we should give them our resources to use to be more efficient. (Although, I didn’t agree with everything Porter said, I do think that being more aware of the results of our efforts is a good thing).
• LESS IS MORE: Sometimes it makes sense to pick one area of social service and do it extremely well, than to spread ourselves thin over several and do each of them in a mediocre or bad way.

Another point that really jumped out at me was this:

One of the pitfalls we can get trapped in is trying to contribute to the thousands of worthy causes that are out there. We should probably just focus on one or two and then be excellent at those.

Strategies:

• Figure out where to serve based on, where you can add the most social value. If it costs $40 a plate to run a soup kitchen (when all is said and done) and the people across the street can do it for $10 a plate, maybe it’s better to give them the resources and reach more people. “Where can we do the most good with the resources we have?”
• What are the most pressing social needs of the congregation? What are the most pressing needs of the community around us? What other organizations already exist that might meet both sets of those need can we support? The answers to these questions will determine HOW we serve our communities.

Lastly, we should do things systematically to create structure to deliver the most value. I know that we should all at the very least be trying to meet the needs of our families and friends and those who are connected to our faith community. But in a city-wide/global sense, we should also be doing what we can with the resources we have to help bring about change in people’s lives as well. How can we connect ourselves to organizations, or how can we create organizations that have inherent structure built in to them that deliver solutions to community problems?

I will say that as a non-academic, but a thinker, I was really challenged by this session. There was a lot of “classroom” information, but when I really sat and thought through a lot of it, it was definitely a challenge to be a better steward of the resources God has given me. Not only individually, but also in our faith family.

I really appreciated Porter’s challenge to the church to continue doing well, but to do it in a more efficient and strategic manner to maximize results.