Covenant and management practices

     Before going into seminary full-time, I worked for three years in an established DC libertarian think tank and I absolutely loved it. We had every life-style, political stripe, sexual expression, age and religion represented, and yet we worked together as friends in an “iron sharpens iron” kind of way. Every voice was heard. Somehow even I was accepted, with my ascetical, conservative, one husband, one religion views.

     Of course we’d have our all-out all-staff email battles about what issues we should be working on (I confess I started a few!) but we all helped each other and drank beer together at the end of the day. Our institute specialized in free-market policies and reducing poor government regulation, on which we all could agree. They became friends; and I even became Executive Manager for a while. (And contrary to the thought of most of our adversaries, we worked for peanuts.)

   The two management books I’ve draw the most inspiration from over the years are Tribal Leadership and Good to Great. It’s been a while since I’ve read them, but if I remember right I liked the idea in Good to Great that companies shouldn’t hire to a skill or position—they should hire the person and then move that person around as needed. (My Nashotah professor thinks this doesn’t take into consideration that people are called by God to certain vocations, so I may have to reconsider this.)

     Tribal Leadership presents the five levels of language that permeate a group’s structure. The fourth highest type of group in terms of language has a competitive language that exhibits the mentality that our tribe is great and we’re in competition with that other tribe. You could witness anger and ad hominem remarks in this group. The fifth type of group has a language that shows that they do not have an “us versus them” view, and so you don’t hear the same type of venom or competition you’d hear in a Level Four group. A Level Five group has a common evil they fight against, like cancer. We experienced this level five language in our institute. We were not against the Rs or the Ds or other groups in general, but we were for raising poverty levels around the world. Our chief weapons were facts and quotes and we fought against inaccurate statements and hypocrisy. We were for a level-playing field of  “a kingdom” with an economic market freed from corrupt players.

     Management practices may seem far afield of Theology of the Body and  our trip with our rector through the Bible,  but they relate in several ways. First, like the Good to Great principle above, God doesn’t hire us for what we can do for him. He enters into covenant relationship with us and he keeps that love towards us no matter how bad we mess up. Like the psalmist says (Psalm 139):

Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.

This love of God extends even as far as sending His Son to die so that our relationship with Him is maintained.

     Then also, like Tribal Leadership’s findings, for the Church to be able to love people and have friendships who those who have very different views than we do we’ll have to discover in dialogue our actual common enemy and our common goal to be able to find unity. His Kingdom with His sovereignty is greater than the principles that the world holds as highest, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work together for justice, equality, freedom, etc. We’ll just have to realize that there may be times when service to Christ will contradict these.

     So I really enjoy my friends that aren’t just like me. I even have a friend who is transgendered who I could probably go out to coffee with if I got my act together. They keep me from becoming insular and hard-hearted in my views. I love what the libertarian president of my institute said to me when I left to go to seminary: “We’ve had our employees go off to work in many other fields to spread our ideals, but never this one!”  He was in favor of it.