A few years ago I (somewhat grudgingly) took the StrengthsFinder test for work.  Of the five strength themes, connectedness, empathy, and relator surprised me the least.  Input was a nice way to label what had become my renewed appetite for reading and learning.  It was the top theme, though, that struck me funny: strategic.  According to the debrief, those with this theme “create alternative ways to proceed.  Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.”  If this is a true strength of mine, it has only manifested itself in adulthood, primarily in my time as a teacher.

These last few years have led me to be something of a systems-thinker (small-town variety).  No real formal training in it.  More of a feel-it-as-I-go thing.  Of particular interest to me as a Christian, though, has been the way Christians relate and do (or don’t do) things in community.  This has been especially true as I find myself in different positions of “leadership.”  A few weeks ago, while digesting things from Augustine and the Gospel of John and a couple of other sources that I will cite over the next few days, I finally put together a theory about what often frustrates me most about the trend I see in relationships, cultures, and organizations.  I characterize it as a kind of unnecessary and damaging breakdown.  So four of this week’s posts will deal with the issue organizational dysfunction from a place of faith.

A few days after I shared my thoughts with some of my co-workers, I back-doored myself into a pertinent passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus that has new significance for me.  I was reading the passage because it is the source of “speak the truth in love,” which is something that I don’t do well at all.  Here’s the text, Ephesians 4:11-16 [ESV], which I’ll use as a “through-line” in my thoughts this week:

¹¹ And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers^{, 12} to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, ¹³ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, ¹⁴ so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. ¹⁵ Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, ¹⁶ from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Tomorrow’s title: Out of Order.  Some of it, probably most of it, you will have heard before and better.  But it’s definitely something I’ve been working through that I’d like to share.