Christian Leadership Alliance

Strategic HR Planning

Price: $12.50
Member Price: $10.00

See more …


What level of emphasis does your Christian nonprofit place upon employee development?

Take the poll

Ten Dangers

Pitfalls for Christian Organizations to Avoid
Ted W. Engstrom | posted 11/02/2007
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

Organizations succeed or fail for many different reasons. When they are young, and the future is bright and exciting, it is easy to miss some of the pitfalls that lie in the road. But the mature organization is not without its hazards. In many ways the dangers that it faces are more subtle. They are often the result of success rather than failure. In what follows, I have attempted to list 10 dangers for the Christian organization. You can use this checklist to help you discover whether you may be facing any of them and to determine a strategy for avoiding these pitfalls.

It has been well said that an organization begins with a person, becomes a movement that develops into a machine, and eventually becomes a monument. How do these things happen? Here are some clues.

1. Settling for the Status Quo

How easy it is for the Christian agency to be willing to settle for the status quo, to struggle to "keep things as they are." But it is impossible for any organization to stand still. It will either progress or regress. God's work demands that we move forward: This is true in our personal life and it is just as true in our organizational life. Once we settle for maintaining things as they are now, we at that moment begin to slide toward ineffectiveness, a slide that becomes steeper the farther we go.

One of the clues that we are settling for the status quo is that we have very little internal tension within the organization. This naturally leads us to the next danger.

2. Eliminating Creative Tension

The organization that "has it made" tends to resist creative tensions. They like to settle for peace and calm. Creative people have new ideas. They want to change things, to make them better. But new ideas bring them with a conflict of interest, and conflict of interest brings internal tension. When a new idea is offered, too often what we hear is, "You have done things wrong," rather than "here's a better way."

The result of eliminating creative tension is that we often fail to face up to the situation around us. An example of this might be how we handle the world economic scene with its increasing inflation. If we do not go through the struggle of creatively addressing ourselves to the tensions this is going to create in our ministries at home and abroad, many organizations will find themselves in deep difficulty down the road.

3. Not Planning in Depth

Almost every organization does some planning, but if we fail to plan our ministries in depth, as well as breadth, danger lies ahead. In other words, it is too easy for us to look for quality and quantity as a primary result of our planning, rather than quality and meaningfulness in the program and ministry God has placed before us. These need to be placed in priority. Quality is far more important than quantity. Size must always be secondary to the effectiveness of the ministry that we perform under God.

See also:

 biblical principles of leading, dangers for Christian organizations, leadership, organizational success