What is Biblical Faithfulness?
// November 15th, 2007 // Christian Living
We are getting ready to leave today for the GCI Leadership Conference so I don’t have time for the usual long post. I’m reading Michael Fletcher’s new book entitled, How to Get Promoted: Keys to Getting Ahead in Life. When I’m done I’ll do a complete review of it, but I thought I’d throw an excerpt your way today.
A conventional definition of “faithful” might include thoughts like — dependable, consistent, a person who retains what they have been given, a person who shows up for work and does the same job the same way over a long period of time.
Using this definition, longevity plays a major role in getting ahead in life — getting promoted. And that is why we tend to promote people to their level of incompetence…. A biblical definition of faithfulness might be as follows: Use all that you have been given to improve the circumstances you have been handed.
Living to just “stay the course” and living to “use all that I have been given to improve the circumstances I have been handed” are two very different attitudes.
There is a reason longevity is the basis for the promotion to the level of one’s incompetence. Organizations are self-preserving. The higher a person rises within the organization, the more any given job has influence within the organizational structure. The safe and self-preserving logic is to hand these higher impact jobs to known and trusted entities. It is hoped they won’t mess up; if they do, it will be less significant; and these folks who have been around a while are more likely to be loyal to the status-quo. All these assumptions tend to be true.
Once someone has achieved a level above their competency, they begin to operate by rote and formulas that are proven to work within the system since they are no longer able to fully apply thinking skills, both inductive and deductive, effectively. Their creativity and the subsequent risks are no longer valuable to the individual as these represent making a mistake the system will not tolerate.
Both ends of the agreement, higher management and worker, are settling for safe opposed to thinking and innovation.
This explains how Truth suffers within groups. Since God’s ways are higher than ours, people and the groups they form tend to function within the limited perpsective of a current cultural bubble. The Truth of God consequently is compromised, if even ever so slightly, by men’s unilluminated perspective. As this faulty understanding becomes the status-quo and is passed on to a new generation, people will not take the risk to challenge the man-made parts. Both ends of the equation, the responsible leaders and the laity, settle for the safe understanding that has allowed the group to function successfully.
Clearly sound biblical teaching is always needed, but if all this be true, it is a clear call to understand hearing and seeing in the spirit. Only the Holy Spirit’s ability to lead us will deliver us from our desire for the safety of a man-made status-quo.
Yep, this is is primary point in the book I think. The idea that because we misunderstand the concept of faithfulness our organizations tend to stagnate and perpetuate the same problems years on end.
Turnover can be a good thing if it results in a fresh and creative approach to old problems.
This also brings up the wretched effects of insecure leadership, control, abuse of power, etc. In such an environment, maintaining the status-quo is the primary imperative. Fresh perspectives are dangerous to the insecure leader because it could result in a loss of control.