Forty Days of Doxology & Drucker: Integrity in Leadership

As an accidental and perhaps not a bit ironic Lenten discipline, I've recently been reading a new sort of "daily devo." It's a secular 365 focused solely on what we in the industry of ministry piously call "the jars of clay," ie the worldly, profane, administrative, managerial, financial, marketing, leadership, communications, and other business type aspects of the church. I have to confess that I'm throughly enjoying Peter Drucker's masterful and thoughtful guidance along this journey. After all, if we in church leadership are going to have to convey the "light of Christ" in these worldly "jars of clay" then we might as well have the best darn jars as possible lest we spil Christ on the floor! ;)

I am hoping that this blog post will be the first of many of its kind, and in this series I'm going to explore and extrapolate what implications Drucker's ingenious insights might have in a parochial setting. But enough prolegomena, let's get this thing started.

Doxology & Drucker #1: Integrity in Leadership
Drucker's eclectic compilation of aphorisms begins with a focus on the necessity of integrity in leadership: "The spirit of an organization is created from the top. If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great. If it decays, it does so because the top rots...No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates." Drucker goes on to argue that character in the highest ranks of leadership is not only of primary importance but also something that can't be faked and something that affects the entire organization from the top down.

Given that Drucker is correct, which could be debated, then there seems to be several imports for the contemporary church, but three jump out at me immediately.
          The first is that if your church's polity allows you to "call" your own pastor, then letters of reference and anecdotal testimonies from previous staff and parishioners about his/her character should weigh much more heavily on the considerations of the search committee than transcripts from seminary, or even the quality of his/her preaching (God forbid!).
          A second implication seems to be that if you are "Church shopping" then high on the list of your considerations should be your gut feeling towards the sr pastor and what your potential future fellow parishioners say about him/her. Perhaps then in addition to evaluating a church's facilities, worship style, extra curricular offerings, and music you should also schedule some one-on-one time with the leader to judge for yourself if he or she is a person of integrity.
         A final implication seems to be that if a Church's spirit is broken then one of the first places to start looking for the problem is in the pastor's office. Or to put positively, one way of preventing a Church from becoming dishearten would be to make sure that the pastor is also taken care of.

Those are all the thoughts I've got on Drucker today, what are your thoughts? Comment below and join in the conversation!