Nancy Ortberg Responds to Session 5
Nancy Ortberg, our next guest blogger, is the best leader I have ever worked with (and I've worked with a lot of leaders). Serving on her staff team at Axis here at Willow Creek was a graduate-level class on leadership that forever changed me.
Nancy was a teaching pastor at Willow Creek for eight years. Under her leadership, Axis included weekend services of 1,200-1,500 people in their 20's who worshipped together, served the poor, and participated in small group communities.
She currently lives in the Bay Area in California and is a founding partner of Teamworx2, a consulting firm that works with organizations to help leaders overcome the team dysfunctions that are obstacles to high performance and work enjoyment.
While she is a remarkable pastor, speaker, and consultant, I’ve always thought she would also make an exceptional CEO or indispensable board member for a corporation that wanted to do good in the world and succeed wildly.
Here is Nancy’s response to Michael Porter’s session:
What Michael Porter talked about this morning has the potential to turn our churches from a soft, benign presence in our communities to an unstoppable force in our world. Forcing us to think one level up and deeper at the same time, he challenges our flurry of activities with the question, “How do we do well at doing good?”
He hits the nail on the head when he questions, “Is more better?” And churches would do well to consider the possibility that our desire to do good is not the same as doing good. His definition of doing good, which is focused on results, is clarifying at both the philosophical and practical levels.
Taking seriously his call to not “switch off our strategic thinking” because we are a church is helpful as we consider what, among the 1000’s of great causes, will we focus our great but limited resources of time, energy, and money. In doing this, I think we create the possibilities of releasing those resources in remarkable and “not-to-be ignored” ways.
And while his teaching and questions guided us well into an understanding of the right road to creating an effective and sustainable strategy, I think the larger win was this: How often, in our churches, do we honor those gifted with strategic minds and invite them to the discussion?
It is so easy to pick certain gifts as more spiritual than others. Administration trumps discernment, shepherding beats administration, and teaching trumps them all. You could insert any configuration to figure out what your particular church values, and we play rock, paper, scissors…
The strategic mind that he has is as much a gift from God as someone who prays diligently from their giftedness. Great leadership invites them all to the table.
