What Do You Think of When You See the Word “INTEGRITY”?
Typically, we default to thinking about it at a personal individual level. But organizations must have integrity…in a similar fashion that architects and engineers think about the structural integrity of their buildings. In this model for churches—what we call the Organizational Integrity Triangle—we find three critical structural components: Personal, Missional and Systemic Integrity.
The Personal Integrity point is simply about you as a leader. The health and effectiveness of any church and its mission is dependent on the spiritual vitality and vision of the leaders—healthy, focused churches require healthy, focused leaders because the soul of church is bound up in the heart of its leaders. Your church will invariably look like you. By personal integrity, I mean the leader’s personal wholeness. You can usually chart this by asking: How self-aware, authentic, and vulnerable am I?
Missional Integrity has to do with organizational self-awareness. In other words: are we really doing and being who we say we are? Are we really accomplishing what we say our mission is: does our church walk our talk?
Systemic Integrity is the unsexy work of how we get our mission done: processes, infrastructure, systems, and so on. A little over 20 years ago, NASA lost a $125 million spacecraft because they didn’t convert U.S. standards to metric. One engineering team used one standard and another one used the other. No one noticed the mistake for the entire nine months of the 140-million mile journey until the spacecraft disappeared on the dark side of Mars. This was a serious—and costly—systems breakdown. Systems are incredibly important: think about your own body. You have a digestive system, a respiratory system, a circulatory system, an endocrine system, a nervous system…all working interdependently to make sure you wake up and smell the coffee each day.
In the Organizational Integrity Triangle, all 3 of these crucial points are interdependent as well. If any one of these breaks down, your church or team will implode. Smart leaders pay attention to these three components on a regular basis!
Question of the Day: Which One of the 3 Points of the Triangle Needs the Most Work in Your Church?
Dave Workman | Elemental Churches
Did you know Elemental Churches offers one-on-one personal coaching for less than your cable bill? And seriously, which one is more important? Okay, that’s a rhetorical question!
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