Values

In spring 2007, one of our FYI Advisory Council members, Toben Heim, helped our FYI leadership team identify the key values that we wanted to permeate our organization.  At that time, they were that we wanted to be research-based, practical, and warm/accessible.  While those are still largely true, we as a team are revisiting our values these days to see which have changed and which are still the same two years later.

Another one of our FYI Advisory Council members, Mark Maines, is helping us answer that question.  He shared with us a great quote from Margaret Wheatley from her book, Leadership, Values and the New Science:

The leader’s role is not to ensure that everybody knows what to do and when to do it, the leader’s role is to ensure that there is a strong, evolving clarity about whom the organization is and how it is expected to behave.  When the values are clear it serves every member of the organization.

As I heard this quote, I thought immediately of the importance of values for every ministry.  Do the volunteers on your youth ministry team know the values of your ministry?   Have you as a team figured out what you do that communicates those values and what you do that conflicts with those values?

When I was a youth pastor, I spent a lot of time teaching our team skills.  Skills are sure important.  But if we teach values, our team will know how to act even if we haven’t explicitly told them what to do.  Being leads to doing.  Our values drive our behavior.

Values are, well… valuable (sorry, I just couldn’t resist).

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute