Work Too Important to Delegate-WHY MANAGING CULTURE IS A LEADER'S WORK" for Tuesday, 31 May 2016
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
"Work Too Important to Delegate-WHY MANAGING CULTURE IS A LEADER'S WORK"
I was sitting in the most beautiful office I'd seen on the seminary's campus. It was the last I would visit during my two-day interview for a teaching position.
As we sipped freshly brewed coffee, the president posed the only question in the entire process that surprised me. He wanted to know whether I would fit the culture of the place.
"Here," he said, "we shoot for no secrets, no surprises, no subversion and lots of support."
He taught preaching; of course he had to alliterate. "Are you willing to live that?"
The content of the question didn't surprise me; by then I was familiar with the specifics of the culture he was describing.
What surprised me was that the president of the institution would even have this conversation with a potential hire. Wasn't this a manager's job, not a leader's?
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT
BigStock / DavidArts
Managing the culture of an institution is a leader’s work, says a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He offers three suggestions to cultivate a healthy culture.
I was sitting in the most beautiful office I’d seen on the seminary’s campus. It was the last I would visit during my two-day interview for a teaching position.
As we sipped freshly brewed coffee, the president posed the only question in the entire process that surprised me. He wanted to know whether I would fit the culture of the place.
“Here,” he said, “we shoot for no secrets, no surprises, no subversion and lots of support.”
He taught preaching; of course he had to alliterate. “Are you willing to live that?”
The content of the question didn’t surprise me; by then I was familiar with the specifics of the culture he was describing.
What surprised me was that the president of the institution would even have this conversation with a potential hire. Wasn’t this a manager’s job, not a leader’s?
As a pastor hoping to teach leadership, I’d thought a lot about what a leader’s role is. Several years earlier, I’d been influenced by John Kotter’s classic article “What Leaders Really Do.”
The main point? Leaders and managers do different things. Leaders watch the future; managers attend to the day-to-day.
My wife and I had practiced Kotter’s theory in the church we co-pastored. By virtue of our particular gifts -- and my particular allergy to administration, spreadsheets and numbers -- my wife, Ginger, became the manager-in-chief. She supervised the staff, met with administrative committees and managed the budget.
I was the leader, and I tried my best to do what Kotter advocated: cast a vision, communicate the vision and inspire people to act on the vision.
Yet here I was on a job interview having coffee in the office of someone I hoped would become my leader, and it seemed to me he was dabbling in the work of management, messing around in the business of the day-to-day.
I now realize I was wrong. He was not at that moment managing the day-to-day -- administering a budget or performing a staff review. Other people had those jobs. He was managing the culture.
I have come to appreciate that there is one management task the best leaders won’t ignore: shaping the culture an institution seeks to embody.
This is something my co-pastor wife had tried to teach me once.
In order to have healthy conflict and function effectively as a team, our staff had decided to adopt a staff covenant, which I’ve written about before.
Ginger led our staff meetings. At the beginning of each meeting, we reviewed a portion of the covenant, seeking to hold ourselves accountable. One day I got impatient with the conversation and said something circumspect and subtle like, “Can’t we get on with things?”
After the meeting, Ginger pulled me aside (our covenant said we should have these conversations one-on-one) before I could scurry back to the “real work” of leadership. “You might consider yourself the leader,” she said, “but managing the culture isn’t just my job. You’ve got to do it, too.”
So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when the seminary president tried to do what I had failed to do in that meeting -- take a leadership role in upholding the culture.
As an academic (I got the job), I don’t lead an institution anymore, but I work in one every day. I watch leaders, and I read about them. And I’ve come to believe that there are three things leaders can do to help manage a culture.
First, leaders can create the space for a community to articulate the culture it strives for, how it wants to be and work together. Peter Block calls this work “leadership as convening,” and it’s an undervalued leadership opportunity. Leaders can summon people, creating the space to make progress on defining the institution’s culture.
Second, leaders can hold people accountable to that culture, and allow themselves to be held accountable. My wife held me accountable, and at the next staff meeting, I was obliged to tell them -- I hope I did -- about our conversation, apologizing for not taking seriously the work of our covenant.
Third, leaders can point out when the values and practices of a culture are being embodied well. Even if leadership scholar Barbara Kellerman is right that leadership is facing a crisis, people do still listen to their leaders, read what they write and take cues from them. Leaders are in the best position to reinforce a culture by highlighting when it’s lived well.
There is work that leaders shouldn’t do. When leaders get mired in management, attention to the future gets sidelined. But managing the culture is not the work of department chairs, division heads, supervisors and human resource specialists. It’s the leader’s work, work too important to delegate.
BigStock / DavidArts
Managing the culture of an institution is a leader’s work, says a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He offers three suggestions to cultivate a healthy culture.
I was sitting in the most beautiful office I’d seen on the seminary’s campus. It was the last I would visit during my two-day interview for a teaching position.
As we sipped freshly brewed coffee, the president posed the only question in the entire process that surprised me. He wanted to know whether I would fit the culture of the place.
“Here,” he said, “we shoot for no secrets, no surprises, no subversion and lots of support.”
He taught preaching; of course he had to alliterate. “Are you willing to live that?”
The content of the question didn’t surprise me; by then I was familiar with the specifics of the culture he was describing.
What surprised me was that the president of the institution would even have this conversation with a potential hire. Wasn’t this a manager’s job, not a leader’s?
As a pastor hoping to teach leadership, I’d thought a lot about what a leader’s role is. Several years earlier, I’d been influenced by John Kotter’s classic article “What Leaders Really Do.”
The main point? Leaders and managers do different things. Leaders watch the future; managers attend to the day-to-day.
My wife and I had practiced Kotter’s theory in the church we co-pastored. By virtue of our particular gifts -- and my particular allergy to administration, spreadsheets and numbers -- my wife, Ginger, became the manager-in-chief. She supervised the staff, met with administrative committees and managed the budget.
I was the leader, and I tried my best to do what Kotter advocated: cast a vision, communicate the vision and inspire people to act on the vision.
Yet here I was on a job interview having coffee in the office of someone I hoped would become my leader, and it seemed to me he was dabbling in the work of management, messing around in the business of the day-to-day.
I now realize I was wrong. He was not at that moment managing the day-to-day -- administering a budget or performing a staff review. Other people had those jobs. He was managing the culture.
I have come to appreciate that there is one management task the best leaders won’t ignore: shaping the culture an institution seeks to embody.
This is something my co-pastor wife had tried to teach me once.
In order to have healthy conflict and function effectively as a team, our staff had decided to adopt a staff covenant, which I’ve written about before.
Ginger led our staff meetings. At the beginning of each meeting, we reviewed a portion of the covenant, seeking to hold ourselves accountable. One day I got impatient with the conversation and said something circumspect and subtle like, “Can’t we get on with things?”
After the meeting, Ginger pulled me aside (our covenant said we should have these conversations one-on-one) before I could scurry back to the “real work” of leadership. “You might consider yourself the leader,” she said, “but managing the culture isn’t just my job. You’ve got to do it, too.”
So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when the seminary president tried to do what I had failed to do in that meeting -- take a leadership role in upholding the culture.
As an academic (I got the job), I don’t lead an institution anymore, but I work in one every day. I watch leaders, and I read about them. And I’ve come to believe that there are three things leaders can do to help manage a culture.
First, leaders can create the space for a community to articulate the culture it strives for, how it wants to be and work together. Peter Block calls this work “leadership as convening,” and it’s an undervalued leadership opportunity. Leaders can summon people, creating the space to make progress on defining the institution’s culture.
Second, leaders can hold people accountable to that culture, and allow themselves to be held accountable. My wife held me accountable, and at the next staff meeting, I was obliged to tell them -- I hope I did -- about our conversation, apologizing for not taking seriously the work of our covenant.
Third, leaders can point out when the values and practices of a culture are being embodied well. Even if leadership scholar Barbara Kellerman is right that leadership is facing a crisis, people do still listen to their leaders, read what they write and take cues from them. Leaders are in the best position to reinforce a culture by highlighting when it’s lived well.
There is work that leaders shouldn’t do. When leaders get mired in management, attention to the future gets sidelined. But managing the culture is not the work of department chairs, division heads, supervisors and human resource specialists. It’s the leader’s work, work too important to delegate.
Read more from L. Roger Owens »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT
Nurturing Creative Church Cultures
How can we nurture innovative cultures in our congregations and denominational structures? Here are three ideas from the minister who wrote "Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation."
Fauth & Leadership
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT
Nurturing Creative Church Cultures
How can we nurture innovative cultures in our congregations and denominational structures? Here are three ideas from the minister who wrote "Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation."
Fauth & Leadership
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION
Carol Howard Merritt: Nurturing creative church cultures
How can we nurture innovative cultures in our congregations and denominational structures?I overheard a governing body official say, “Why would we plant churches? We’re closing churches every year!”
Unfortunately, this sentiment can be prevalent in our denominational structures. It needs to change. Mainline denominations are in a crucial place. Many of us have small churches in rural areas with members who are over sixty. There’s nothing wrong with a small, rural, retired membership -- in fact, there are many wonderful things about that trifecta! Yet, when we think about our long-term future, we realize that our congregations were formed in a particular society to fit the needs of a specific generation.
When a church can’t make the transition to reach a new generation, it eventually comes to the end of its lifespan. In the next two decades, we’ll be revitalizing existing congregations, closing some congregations and planting new communities. We can use the valuable assets and resources from closed churches in order to start churches for a new generation.
But doing so demands a great deal of creativity.
Some of you might think mainline bureaucracies tend to squelch innovation more than foster it. Sadly, that can be true.
Yet as Christians, we know how to do this. We’ve been closing and planting congregations for the last 2,000 years. And our governing cultures have adapted in order to meet changing needs on the horizon.
How can we do that today? How can we nurture innovative cultures in our congregations and denominational structures?
Perhaps we should look to the tech industry. This article(link is external) might give us some clues. I’ll riff off a couple of points and translate them to our denominational structures, as we imagine what a fruitful ecclesial culture might look like.
We can allow freedom in the details. We’ve inherited rich traditions. And we’ve also passed along a whole lot of empty customs. What’s the difference? As Diana Butler Bass(link is external) points out, customs are the things we do year after year “in accordance with precedent.” In contrast, traditions have historical grounding. They’re linked to “a more ancient and universal source of authority and meaning.” Customs are the ways in which we cut our communion bread, what time the service takes place and what our buildings look like. Traditions are the act of receiving communion, gathering for worship and setting aside a sacred space.
As we develop innovative cultures, we’ll need to let go of many customs and allow freedom in the details. If we’re going to allow a new generation to form communities, a lot of our customs will need to be thrown out or changed. And that can’t be done if the innovator is subject to endless bureaucratic nit-picking.
We can encourage trial and error. My dad was a rocket scientist. At the end of his life he held nine patents and generated countless ideas -- including the trash compactor. He also left my mother with stacks of drawings detailing machines that never quite worked and a garage filled with failed invention models.
Was he a failure? Of course not. You have to allow for a lot of error in order to achieve success. Scientists understand this.
So do business owners. About 95% of small businesses fail in the first five years(link is external). Does that mean we ought to put an end to starting businesses in our country? Of course not. We understand that start-ups often fail.
Governing bodies berate themselves over failed church programs, but we should encourage more trial and error in our church structures. In our area, half of our intentional church plants succeed. So why not plan for that? We can start two new communities, encourage trial and error, and know that within a few years, we’ll have one.
We can pay attention to location. We might roll our eyes at spiritual communities springing up in young urban centers. “Hipster churches,” we snicker.
Yet, new generations navigate to these neighborhoods for good reasons: they have access to green transportation, richer diversity, stronger community, or an economy that can support two careers. These things also should be important for our churches as we think about where we start new communities and nurture innovative cultures.
We’re closing churches. But just because one body comes to the end of its life doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story. It just means that we’re heading into a time of great creativity. We need to start nurturing innovative cultures now.
Read more from Carol Howard Merritt »
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The Role of Church Culture in Congregational Growth and Decline
How can a church leader encourage a cooperative environment that is poised for growth? It depends on the size of the congregation, writes the pastor of Tualatin Presbyterian Church in Tualatin, Oregon.
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Ken Evers-Hood: The role of church culture in congregational growth and decline
How can a church leader encourage a cooperative environment that is poised for growth? It depends on the size of the congregation.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series exploring how the field of game theory can help church leaders navigate conflict effectively.
Two churches I know well sit just 5 miles apart. They belong to the same denomination. Their neighborhoods have experienced nearly identical demographic changes. Yet one church grew slightly, while the other lost more than 10 percent of its members.
Explanations for church growth and decline abound. Sociologists such as Mark Chaves, Robert Putnam and Diana Butler Bass offer powerful explanations for North American church decline, highlighting the significance of birth rates, demographic changes and other macro trends like the rise of the nones (which has always sounded to me like an action movie title).
Others such as Jackson Carroll, the author of “God’s Potters,” remind us of the importance of pastoral leadership. While church leaders need to pay attention to all these theories, none of them accounts for the vital role that congregational culture plays in growth and decline.
How much, and in what ways, does congregational culture affect membership and attendance? I used game theory to design a study to try to answer that question. Employing what’s called the “public goods game,” I looked at the level of cooperation in church leadership bodies -- a measure that I believe is reflective of the larger congregation.
Why the public goods game? The prisoner’s dilemma game discussed in the last article can help church leaders navigate conflicted relationships between individuals. Congregations, however, are rich and complicated communities.
To understand communities, game theorists look to the public goods game, a multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. The public goods game functions like a church potluck.
Church potlucks work best when everybody agrees to bring a dish and sticks around to help clean up. But the reality is that some people defect: they show up empty-handed or leave without pitching in.
When most people cooperate by sharing food and cleaning up, potlucks go well. When enough people defect, however, folk begin to grumble. Game theorists believe that the public goods game can help measure a community’s level of cooperativeness, which correlates with a group’s ability to thrive.
Here’s how it works. In a simple public goods game, players receive a set number of units for every round. Each player can choose to share these units -- sometimes actual dollars, sometimes units representing time or energy -- or to keep them.
With every round, each player must decide how many units to donate to the common pool. After all players have contributed, the units in the pool are multiplied by a small factor, often 1.6, and then divided equally and returned to all players.
For example, let’s say 10 players start with 20 units each and each player donates all 20 of his units. At the end of the round, each player will receive 32 units. When everyone contributes, everyone wins.
And yet it can pay even more to defect. Let’s look at the same group of 10 and imagine that nine players give everything but one player gives nothing. At the end, each of the 10 will receive a return of 29 units, so that the defector winds up with a whopping 49. Because of the defection dynamic, cooperation tends to break down over time in this simple version of the game.
More complex versions of the game allow players to reward and punish other players -- a dynamic that more closely resembles human behavior in community. Game theorists have different ideas about whether punishment encourages or discourages cooperation.
So how, I wondered, does this concept play out in the church? Under the direction of Duke University professors Greg Jones and Dan Ariely, I developed a study to find out.
I conducted a public goods game study of 98 elders (ordained leaders) in 11 PCUSA church sessions (governing bodies). I observed participants playing a simple public goods game, as well as one that allowed the ability to reward and punish.
Would congregational growth and decline correlate with the rate of cooperation, reward and punishment? Would leaders in declining churches be more inclined to punish? Would leaders in growing communities be more likely to cooperate and reward?
When I looked at all the congregations together, I saw a slight but statistically insignificant correlation between growth and cooperation and growth and reward. I found no correlation between growth and punishment.
The results became more interesting -- and more helpful for Christian leaders -- when I separated the results for churches with more than 100 members and churches with fewer than 100 members.
In larger-membership congregations, growth correlated strongly with cooperation, reward and the avoidance of punishment. This suggests that leaders in larger-membership congregations would do well to minimize punishment and work to find creative ways to reward members of the community.
A different picture emerged for smaller-membership congregations, where growth correlated strongly with reward and the imposition of punishment.
In larger-membership congregations, groups with the lowest punishment percentages, around 10 percent, experienced the most growth. One might surmise that if a low punishment percentage was effective, one approaching 0 percent would be even better. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
In smaller-membership congregations, the groups experiencing the most growth had about a 10 percent rate of punishment, similar to that of the flourishing larger congregations. But smaller congregations with the worst growth -- those experiencing steep decline -- hardly punished at all. Anything less than a 10 percent punishment rate correlated with significant numerical decline.
In “Give and Take,” business professor Adam Grant cites a study that might help explain this phenomenon. Researchers found that strangers competing against each other in a negotiation game fared surprisingly better at achieving joint profits than did dating couples.
The couples, more concerned about maintaining their relationship than being frank enough with each other to compete well, fared worse than the strangers, who were willing to be more straightforward. In a similar way, I suspect that the concern for maintaining relationships in smaller congregations, where it is hard for leaders to get away from one another, may help account for the lower punishment level in smaller churches experiencing decline.
Another fascinating dynamic that emerged from my study was inequality, or the gap between the players with the highest and lowest scores.
In larger-membership congregations, growth correlated fairly strongly with inequality. In other words, leaders of larger churches were more comfortable with some leaders having much higher scores than others.
Smaller-membership congregations, though, were uncomfortable with inequality; the more growth a smaller congregation experienced, the less comfortable the leaders were with some standing out from the others.
It became clear that in smaller congregations, players began to give and reward in ways that would equalize the points for all. If this play reflects reality, leaders of smaller-membership congregations need to be very thoughtful about how they protect leaders who excel. Smaller-membership congregations may tend to undermine, inadvertently, the leaders they most need.
What is absolutely clear from this study is that leaders should reflect consciously on the ways they reward and punish the people around them. Church leaders’ rewarding behavior is usually pretty obvious -- public thank-yous, for instance. But we may not realize the subtle, unhealthy ways we punish one another -- being slow to respond to emails or voice mails, using “distancing” body language in meetings, sitting apart from people we wish to discourage.
Leaders of larger congregations should exercise the greatest possible caution regarding punitive behavior, which can unravel emergent cooperation. Positive, rewarding behavior marks growing larger-membership congregations.
In smaller-membership congregations, positive, rewarding behavior is just as important as it is in their larger counterparts. But in these smaller contexts, leaders of growing congregations must also be willing to impose healthy discipline on members who are not contributing to the common good, speaking the truth in love when it may be easier, in close quarters, to keep one’s thoughts to oneself.
As important as social trends and pastoral leadership are, game theory underscores that church culture is every bit as important. The church already confesses the priesthood of all believers. The public goods game gives us a way of seeing this scriptural wisdom in action -- that all members of the community contribute to an atmosphere of cooperation.
We are left, then, with a question of newfound significance: What are you bringing to your next church potluck?
How can a church leader encourage a cooperative environment that is poised for growth? It depends on the size of the congregation.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series exploring how the field of game theory can help church leaders navigate conflict effectively.
Two churches I know well sit just 5 miles apart. They belong to the same denomination. Their neighborhoods have experienced nearly identical demographic changes. Yet one church grew slightly, while the other lost more than 10 percent of its members.
Explanations for church growth and decline abound. Sociologists such as Mark Chaves, Robert Putnam and Diana Butler Bass offer powerful explanations for North American church decline, highlighting the significance of birth rates, demographic changes and other macro trends like the rise of the nones (which has always sounded to me like an action movie title).
Others such as Jackson Carroll, the author of “God’s Potters,” remind us of the importance of pastoral leadership. While church leaders need to pay attention to all these theories, none of them accounts for the vital role that congregational culture plays in growth and decline.
How much, and in what ways, does congregational culture affect membership and attendance? I used game theory to design a study to try to answer that question. Employing what’s called the “public goods game,” I looked at the level of cooperation in church leadership bodies -- a measure that I believe is reflective of the larger congregation.
Why the public goods game? The prisoner’s dilemma game discussed in the last article can help church leaders navigate conflicted relationships between individuals. Congregations, however, are rich and complicated communities.
To understand communities, game theorists look to the public goods game, a multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. The public goods game functions like a church potluck.
Church potlucks work best when everybody agrees to bring a dish and sticks around to help clean up. But the reality is that some people defect: they show up empty-handed or leave without pitching in.
When most people cooperate by sharing food and cleaning up, potlucks go well. When enough people defect, however, folk begin to grumble. Game theorists believe that the public goods game can help measure a community’s level of cooperativeness, which correlates with a group’s ability to thrive.
Here’s how it works. In a simple public goods game, players receive a set number of units for every round. Each player can choose to share these units -- sometimes actual dollars, sometimes units representing time or energy -- or to keep them.
With every round, each player must decide how many units to donate to the common pool. After all players have contributed, the units in the pool are multiplied by a small factor, often 1.6, and then divided equally and returned to all players.
For example, let’s say 10 players start with 20 units each and each player donates all 20 of his units. At the end of the round, each player will receive 32 units. When everyone contributes, everyone wins.
And yet it can pay even more to defect. Let’s look at the same group of 10 and imagine that nine players give everything but one player gives nothing. At the end, each of the 10 will receive a return of 29 units, so that the defector winds up with a whopping 49. Because of the defection dynamic, cooperation tends to break down over time in this simple version of the game.
More complex versions of the game allow players to reward and punish other players -- a dynamic that more closely resembles human behavior in community. Game theorists have different ideas about whether punishment encourages or discourages cooperation.
So how, I wondered, does this concept play out in the church? Under the direction of Duke University professors Greg Jones and Dan Ariely, I developed a study to find out.
I conducted a public goods game study of 98 elders (ordained leaders) in 11 PCUSA church sessions (governing bodies). I observed participants playing a simple public goods game, as well as one that allowed the ability to reward and punish.
Would congregational growth and decline correlate with the rate of cooperation, reward and punishment? Would leaders in declining churches be more inclined to punish? Would leaders in growing communities be more likely to cooperate and reward?
When I looked at all the congregations together, I saw a slight but statistically insignificant correlation between growth and cooperation and growth and reward. I found no correlation between growth and punishment.
The results became more interesting -- and more helpful for Christian leaders -- when I separated the results for churches with more than 100 members and churches with fewer than 100 members.
In larger-membership congregations, growth correlated strongly with cooperation, reward and the avoidance of punishment. This suggests that leaders in larger-membership congregations would do well to minimize punishment and work to find creative ways to reward members of the community.
A different picture emerged for smaller-membership congregations, where growth correlated strongly with reward and the imposition of punishment.
In larger-membership congregations, groups with the lowest punishment percentages, around 10 percent, experienced the most growth. One might surmise that if a low punishment percentage was effective, one approaching 0 percent would be even better. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
In smaller-membership congregations, the groups experiencing the most growth had about a 10 percent rate of punishment, similar to that of the flourishing larger congregations. But smaller congregations with the worst growth -- those experiencing steep decline -- hardly punished at all. Anything less than a 10 percent punishment rate correlated with significant numerical decline.
In “Give and Take,” business professor Adam Grant cites a study that might help explain this phenomenon. Researchers found that strangers competing against each other in a negotiation game fared surprisingly better at achieving joint profits than did dating couples.
The couples, more concerned about maintaining their relationship than being frank enough with each other to compete well, fared worse than the strangers, who were willing to be more straightforward. In a similar way, I suspect that the concern for maintaining relationships in smaller congregations, where it is hard for leaders to get away from one another, may help account for the lower punishment level in smaller churches experiencing decline.
Another fascinating dynamic that emerged from my study was inequality, or the gap between the players with the highest and lowest scores.
In larger-membership congregations, growth correlated fairly strongly with inequality. In other words, leaders of larger churches were more comfortable with some leaders having much higher scores than others.
Smaller-membership congregations, though, were uncomfortable with inequality; the more growth a smaller congregation experienced, the less comfortable the leaders were with some standing out from the others.
It became clear that in smaller congregations, players began to give and reward in ways that would equalize the points for all. If this play reflects reality, leaders of smaller-membership congregations need to be very thoughtful about how they protect leaders who excel. Smaller-membership congregations may tend to undermine, inadvertently, the leaders they most need.
What is absolutely clear from this study is that leaders should reflect consciously on the ways they reward and punish the people around them. Church leaders’ rewarding behavior is usually pretty obvious -- public thank-yous, for instance. But we may not realize the subtle, unhealthy ways we punish one another -- being slow to respond to emails or voice mails, using “distancing” body language in meetings, sitting apart from people we wish to discourage.
Leaders of larger congregations should exercise the greatest possible caution regarding punitive behavior, which can unravel emergent cooperation. Positive, rewarding behavior marks growing larger-membership congregations.
In smaller-membership congregations, positive, rewarding behavior is just as important as it is in their larger counterparts. But in these smaller contexts, leaders of growing congregations must also be willing to impose healthy discipline on members who are not contributing to the common good, speaking the truth in love when it may be easier, in close quarters, to keep one’s thoughts to oneself.
As important as social trends and pastoral leadership are, game theory underscores that church culture is every bit as important. The church already confesses the priesthood of all believers. The public goods game gives us a way of seeing this scriptural wisdom in action -- that all members of the community contribute to an atmosphere of cooperation.
We are left, then, with a question of newfound significance: What are you bringing to your next church potluck?
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