Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the idea of “process.” I work at a large church and have in my history a couple other large churches. The organizational structure of these places is relatively akin to that of a mid size corporation. Recently I was a part of something called the “Strategic Discernment Process” that aimed at developing a three year plan of vision and goals for the entire church. The “process” we went through was very good. Starting from large brainstorming sessions and ending up with final lunch meetings of wordsmithing documents. The “process” led us through a shared discovery of communal ideas of direction, vision and focus.
I have said many times that I believe God speaks to us in community. I have always surrounded myself with people who are free to speak the truth about ideas I come up with. I think God has used groups of people in my life to focus and modify vision.
Anyone who knows me realizes that I am very motivated to get things done. I like to see results and that’s probably why some of these processes are so difficult for me.
The Tension for me though is feeling like we are spending so much time in process that we expend a majority of our energy putting it all together and have little left for the actual end results of the process. Since I am I high “D” I am someone who likes to get the ball rolling on a project, delegate and move on to the next project. Part of what is difficult in this is that we always feel like we need to explain how we got to the end results and it takes so long to get everyone to understand how the page came together.
My prayer this week is that process and results can find a happy place together in my life.
