Yet another great article at Christianity Today talks about Defining Business Success. At a time when so many churches are trying to “succeed” by adopting a business model or using various business strategies, its message is a breath of fresh air.
Stan Guthrie interviews John D. Beckett, 68, chairman of the privately held R. W. Beckett Corporation in North Ridgefield, Ohio. Beckett has written “one of the leading books on living out Christian faith in the marketplace, Loving Monday (InterVarsity, 1998).” Last year the sequel, Mastering Monday: A Guide to Integrating Faith and Work (InterVarsity, 2006) was published.
What strikes me most about Beckett's words on what makes a business successful is that they also ring absolutely true for a church, or for the individual Christian. Of the late Ken Lay and the Enron scandal, Beckett says,
But frankly, like so many of my peers and contemporaries, I think he [Lay] separated his work world from his faith world. Enron had a code of four values. Three are very close to my heart, because they're identical to the ones at our company: integrity, excellence, and a profound respect for the individual. What happened to these [values]? People close to it told me that they basically set them aside. They breached their own integrity for the sake of doing these deals. Apparently, this happened at the board level, and it happened with Ken Lay. We don't know the extent of his guilt, but I cannot absolve him for failing to stand up, pound the table, and shout, "We're violating our core values by going in this direction." He didn't; nobody else did.
I wonder, what would this look like in the church? Can we really stand up at a church meeting, pound the table, and shout out a violation? Can we call out the sin of another Christian, saying, "hey, you're violating our core values -- your core values, here?" I think in general, such action doesn't go over well. It's considered shocking, even scandalous -- a violation of social mores. But does this mean it shouldn't be done?
I believe that it should. If we are working together to serve God, then we must help keep one another on track. Not for the good of "the company," but for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven, as well as ourselves.
In light of what happened at Enron, Guthrie asks what good core values are. To which Beckett replies,
That's the question. I don't think they're any good—in fact, they may be counterproductive—if they're not worked into the fabric of the organization.
He says that business formulas have a tendency to become substitutes for “being sensitive for the Lord.” As can any “Christian” formula:
I can't love a person as a formula. Formulas may get you part of the way, but ultimately they break down. Unless a person's heart has been transformed, you'll just never get there by pushing levers and turning dials.
Beckett’s definition of success?
If success is never losing a customer or having a bad product go out the door, or never having a failure in your organization, whether it's moral or financial or whatever, it just doesn't work that way. But if success is honoring the Lord, if it is being faithful to him, then we can go through mountains of success and valleys of failure and still come out serving the Lord.
Amen.
(I know I’ve practically quoted the whole interview, but go ahead and read it anyway. And pray with me that this model of success would manifest in the church.)
