Yes Bowman I do agree that Christian organizations should limit damage repair damage that is done and put in good practice..

However i understand there are some blurred edges in a multicultural society or a multi faith society. So in a society which we have now where it is illegal not to employ or give a fair chance of employment in a Christian setting to people of other faiths, moralizing is dead in the water, a moral compass cannot be used in employment. But a set code of conduct across all faiths in which ever setting can be, and many Christian centers dealing with a multicultural clientèle do adopt that code of conduct.

There are also blurred edges when it comes to whom is deemed to have authority. We are equal in Christ until the PCC or the Diaconate or Elders meet, where it becomes very evident that we are not all equal, and there are many interpretations of gospel implementation , and how it should be practiced..

Then we have "The holy spirit" where is the space for the practice of receiving the holy spirit into "mediation and negotiation" for surely if we take on board that the spirit leads us, then that includes the taking on of Managers and the Practice they implement.

Whilst i do not agree with foolhardy decisions, ie decisions that put other people physical mental social and spiritual wellbeing at risk, there has to be space for leading from the holy spirit. This concept has been abused though by managers, (you know the sort of thing if you disagree then you are the devil incarnate reincarnated.)

I stand by my long held view that if it destroys it is not of God. Even if people are wrong if managed with God people tend to make a transition from one position to another without distress, if many people are distressed on both sides then we have the classic "dis-ease".. But those who feel such "dis-ease" are not necessarily in the wrong, i recall saying to someone who said i was disturbed, which at the time i was , my answer to them  was "yes i am the day i am not disturbed is the day I'm dead" So we live in a world full of "disturbed people" people who long for peace for themselves and others, i am one of them, i despair at a humanity that has no care, and doesn't care if others are hurt or offended, that to me is not of God, Gods people may wrestle with the internal conflict of what they want over what God wants them to do, but that disturbance is not one of hopelessness.

I really don't want anyone to quote the passages of Gods wrath to me i am aware they are there, mostly in the old testament, i accept that, but Jesus brought us a new way. Managing the guidance of that is what good practice is about..Or in the oxfam words ( reinvented by me ) Preach the word at me and i may not hear it, share it with me and i will know it, from there i will feed myself and share it with others. That in my view is the heart of evangelicalism ..So Good management creates opportunities and values the world internal and external of the other.

Angela

P.S I really wish i had enough concentration to write books , but i am like at my best in short at the right time application.. I want to read Rogers books too.. I am just refreshing my Greek at the momento so between John H Dobson  and W.E.Vine and i was sure i had a workbook from Andrew Beasley Murray somewhere, cant find it because i want it though, hopefully i will get a real grasp of the tenses of the list Phil supplied(thanks for that phil).

I seem to recall that the might of Elrond is in wisdom not in weapons. Would that Rowan Williams would at the last follow through the wisdom of his Easter Sermon to its profound conclusion, as I tried to say in my 9 April post on that thread.

Phil Almond

Jon-- If you are still with us, the discussion might benefit from your choice of one reliable management practise that would improve youth or community ministries. It could be the hour you mentioned, more fully explained, or anything else.

Adrian-- Rudge was quite a pioneer, which is to say that there was much more to do after him. Glad you found a good chunk of it! I may misunderstand your abstract, but I think that you are saying that the values implicit in management will be the same as ones implicit in the way religious authority is recognised. So-- a Vedic priest will manage the orphanage of a Hindu temple by the customary values that guide interpretation of the Vedas; a Hasidic rebbe with a Lithuanian lineage running a Jewish orphanage will do so by values associated with his family lineage; a Pentecostal pastor and his wife will run an orphanage in Sao Paulo in accord with the aspirational "middle class" material values of upwardly mobile Brazilians which they as a couple exemplify. Do you suspect that a single religious group cannot support a distinction between teaching and service with some values more developed in each sphere?

Angela-- Yes, bad managers are bad managers. Do you agree that it is best for a Christian organisation to adopt practises that limit the damage they can do, repair it when necessary, and improve the odds of getting good managers?

To be clear, I find values as compelling and interesting as anyone, but I am wary of moralistic critiques without responsible accompanying solutions. On several boards on which I have served, I have seen that members who have made purely values-based critiques of management-in-general have dragged their feet when the rest of the board tried to set systems in place to correct or prevent problems. They were in that way responsible for much of the evil at which they protested. This is not a good outcome. Why did board members who tend to moralise (only) do that? Did they themselves see their inconsistency? That will be another post.

No offence taken Bowman, in and through the discussions with all on the forum makes me excercise my brain, i now know an outline of the lord of the rings.

In the way that Pluralist explains it Berger does indeed seem to be the nearest to Christianity. In a previous post i referred to the Greek translation and the meaning of Hypotasso being like the submission of the recipient to the invitation from Christ to accept him as saviour, In this Christ introduced the concept of us being our own mediators between ourselves and the father God and Christ himself, rather than going through the priest. Bergers interpretation of the "negotiator" is the paralell to Christ our "mediator" and ourselves "the mediator" in communication with christ.  So the routine of worship being acknowledgement of God as father , the invite for God to to meet us followed by our repentance and request for forgiveness, followed by our responsibility to forgive others this being our Co dependance if you like with Christ for Christ requires a responce and we require a Saviour, (honest pluralist we do need a saviour , usually to save us from ourselves). (Thats the delivery pluralist).. Forever and ever Amen We work with and for Jesus in the role of negotiator and mediator (Hypottasso).. The idea that as a mediator we are interdependent with God the ultimate manager. But the style of management can be taken from this Model .

Angela

Our leader in Canterbury...  I wonder if there is something of Elrond in his leadership style?

Yes, Dave, which is to say that it reflects Elrond's ring of power, ( "Vilya" < Quenya vilya meaning air), as distinguished from the rings that empower Galadriel ("Nenya" < Quenya nén meaning water) and Gandalf ("Narya" <Quenya nár meaning fire), to say nothing of the corrupting Great Rings or the One Ring. Unlike the sixteen rings of power that Celebrimbor forged with Sauron, which empower the individuals who bear them by binding others, the three rings that Celebrimbor made alone have some preserving power in the place around the ringbearers. Narya inspires resistance to tyranny and hopelessness, and hence, wherever he goes, Galdalf inspires and guides the struggle against Sauron. On the hand of Galadriel, Nenya fends evil away from Lothlórien, enabling everything made to last undimmed by time, so long as it is there and the One Ring exists. However, although Elrond wears the most powerful ring of the Three, Vilya, the scope of its power is never defined. Clearly, Elrond's domain of Imladris cannot know the endless summer that Galadriel's Nenya gives Lothlórien, and it has no tyrannny or despair to resist as Gandalf's Narya can do. If, as many speculate, Vilya's power is to preserve by healing and reviving then the leadership that it enables is necessarily reactive. Nevertheless, it may not be entirely unexpected that an epic by an Inkling would view this as the greatest power of the three, though one that would not last longer than the malicious power bound to the One Ring.

Bowman,

As you are doubtless aware, The Red Book has not been seen since the departure of an Inkling for the undying lands.  Thus we have to rely on his perhaps sensationalist rendition. As mere men their are models of leadership in Aragorn, war leader and protector of little people and Boromir in his return to the true way. Our leader in Canterbury has has recently issued a study in the lore of Narnia as recounted by another Inkling but I wonder if there is something of Elrond in his leadership style?

Dave

Peter Rudge in 1968 made associations between management types and theology, and so did I in my PhD between authority (management types) so that you have the Weberian charismatic, traditional, bureaucratic/ classical and then Burns and Stalker Systemic and then Mayo's humanistic. Rudge likened the systemic to the closest to Christianity, ie the correct view, whereas I said all views were present and I made the views relate to style and authority. Charismatic was authority of the correct people and interpretation of the Bible, thus the fundies and evangelicals; traditionalists existed for all kinds of sub-denominational traditions; bureaucratic was the managers of the Churches like bishops and chairpeople, particularly then orthodox liberal types, what Berger called 'the negotiators', systemic involved theologians taking on for themselves the basis of understanding the faith, particularly the so-called heterodox ones, and the human relations types were those like Unitarians and Quakers who set up their own democratic and equalitatarian bodies, essentially religious humanist in formation. So for me it was also a kind of authority from authoritarian through to increasing freedom.

Now Bowman most of this is lost on me as i was not a follower of the Lord of the Rings However i have established that i might like them as we have fulcrum orcs and mythical men and of  whom it says all men should be banned from the earth..or was that just the middle earth..

Personally i dont mind men so long as they are "managed well"   I am allowed to say that because TR Tolkien says they are only mythical..

I wonder if middle management are inhabitants of the middle earth..

Nanu Nanu Bowman

Angela

I must not distract though from the seriousness of the issue. I am truly concerned about what bad management does to those who are on the receiving end of it..The greatest being unemployment and abuse, followed by homelessness these are all the results of mis-management and bad management, it concerns me that the very thing which would go towards solving these problems is the same thing that causes them..It causes me to ask the question is it ever safe for anyone to go straight into Management without working with the public first, on equal terms, not on a project on a gap year. The mentality on a gap year project is different when dealing with difficult situation whether building financial social or medical. It is not wasted because of the practical skills and problem solving, however the issue of being able to manage whilst suffering personal crisis bereavement and financial problems personally is something else and can and does affect working practices and the decision making process..

Again I emphasize this is why "the we are all in this together" has to mean just that on equal terms..

Angela

Our discussion might be clearer if we resort, at least for definitions, to a classic text in management lore . , known to specialists as The Red Book of Westmarch after its best-known manuscript. Now, speaking of water and compassion and that, I suspect that Angela prefers the highly individualising management style of Galadriel. Alas, when Jon says "manager," she seems to hear the rumble of orcs in the distance marching rank and file under the eye of Sauron. Personally, I feel certain that Jon himself has the management style of Frodo in mind, since that better fits the actual predicament of community ministries that deal in risky ventures for no likely rewards with too few hands, scarcely any resources, and (usually) no training beyond competence in the Elvish tongues. He likely welcomes the zeal of staffmembers like Gimle, but sees limitations in the view that an axe and a will can solve anything without reflection or plan, and so he writes to counsel better. Dave quite rightly notes that since Kingdom values cannot be ignored in the right management of things, we need methods that could be used by Aragorn. Stephen might, in a similar way, favor the methods of Elrond, who after all chairs more meetings. As usual preferring the long view, I prefer the management principles of, say, Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, or Treebeard, but that's on other threads.

Some management loremasters focus their investigations on the pathological leaders (Sauron, Saruman, Theoden, Denethor) and counsellors of folly and evil (Boromir, Grima, Golum), since in life we more often compensate for the failings of the ill-advised managers we have than choose the ideal ones we want. That seems to me to be wise. For similar reasons, it is prudent to study those persons, often difficult, who "lead from below" by discovering and perhaps championing some insight unavailable to, or ignored by, their superiors-- Sam, Legolas, Golum, or Pippin. However further insight on this awaits a better understanding of the words descended from NDÛ and BEW, archaic roots (probably, but not certainly, from Primitive Quendian) that signify "subjection" in such Elvish tongues as Telerin, Old Sindarin, and Sindarin. Its nearest synonym in the Black Speech of Mordor is not etymologically related and will not be uttered here.

Hi Dave,

Yes I agree that we should not be duped by 'management science' - thats why I said this is not rocket science.  Most people management is hard and challenging - but often it is not complex in that kind of way.  People who make it out to be normally are selling something.  Churches and small organisations need simple systems which fit their context.

Also, just to clarify, in the article I suggested an hour of 1-1 time with staff per month - not every week!

Jon is doubtless correct is saying that there are many lesions that the church should lean from the world but we should not accept uncritically the lesions of modern management "science". The world too easily reduces people to resources or units of production to be exploited. The church should be better than that. It is a bit like a poor pair of bifocal glasses where the mid-range is a blur. The church is trying to adopt Kingdom values but has not worked though how to do so,

As regards the type of organization appropriate to the church size makes a difference. I trust that Jon is not holding up the perfectly organized yet largely ineffective organs of government as an example. Jon speaks of an hour a week of one on one time. This is a hopelessly optimistic view of what happens in the private sector.

Despite the title, I think Jon's article fits with a local charity better than the local church. I know of churches which may have a staff of over 50 judging by their website. A vicar is more likely to have to "manage" a curate, a secretary and a verger. Just how are the clergy, wardens, the PCC and the treasurer supposed to relate to each other and the bishop. checks and balances to stop things going wrong may stop anything happening.

Dave