You Are What You Read

You've heard that oft-repeated line, "You are what you eat," right? Well, I suspect that's true about most things. We are a product of our environments, and what we devote our lives to becomes, well, our lives. I'm not one that thinks that playing violent video games necessarily makes a kid a school shooter (the rates simply don't support that) but as I see it, what we see, eat, and read does shape us--I'm pretty sure that major corporations wouldn't spend such obscene amounts of money on advertising if they weren't convinced that is true.

So the same is also true for what we read. Now, this is probably apparent during school--after all, my seminary experience was vastly shaped by the fact that at Duke we read, almost exclusively, the early church fathers in our theology courses. Barth? Who's that? Gregory of Nazianzus? What a stud.

But the same is also true of reading in our "real" lives (seminary always seemed a liminal phase to me).

I've faithfully followed the major Christian mags., evolving from Christianity Today to Christian Century and Alban's Congregations. Meanwhile though, strategist that I am, I found myself delving into the works of Malcolm Gladwell and business leadership writers. And I learned something. Many of the Christian leadership resources are simply business leadership stuff regurgitated (and in "churchy" language) two years later.

I finally put my foot down this year. I courageously stood firm in the face of an onslaught of e-mails from Alban inviting me to renew my subscription, and instead subscribed to the Harvard Business Review. Yes, I do have to do my own "translating" now, but I took a business class in college, so I can find myself around phrases like "emerging markets," thank you very much. No, the leadership wisdom isn't couched in Bible passages, but then, hey, I went to seminary, I can work that out. And yes, I do think that churches would be well served to adopt some (though admittedly not all) of the business world's best practices.



For example, it's not hard to see how you can apply the following guidelines from HBR to church life.

From the article this month "Making Social Ventures Work," we have these five rules:

1. What are you trying to do and what constitutes success?
2. How will you mobilize support and neutralize opponents?
3. What will eperging data teach you about your proposed business model?
4. How can you exit without leaving a large footprint?
5. What kinds of second-order effects, both negative and positive, is your venture creating?

Or, check out the list of Sever Deadly Sins of Setting Demands--from an earlier article but quoted in this month's article "Four Mistakes Leaders Keep Making":

1. Establishing too many goals.
2. Not requiring a plan for how and when goals will be acheived.
3. Failing to push for significant improvement for fear that people are already overwhelmed.
4. Not assigning clear one-person accountability for each key goal.
5. Signaling an unspoken "if you possibly can" at the end of a statement of expectation.
6. Accepting reverse assignments ("Sure, boss, I can get it done if you will see to it that...")
7. Stating goals in ways that may not be definable or measurable.

As you can see, this isn't rocket science, but honestly, I like the clarity of purpose of these articles. They don't try to give leadership guidance AND deep theological exegesis. They make me think, and they challenge me to provide good reasons why this good advice is often so widely rejected in churches. Churches have often become bastions of mediocrity, and that needs to stop. If only we could get more pastors reading HBR...