Value Clarity 2: You Don’t Decide, You Discover
How do you decide your church’s values? You don’t. You can’t decide your church’s values any more than you can decide your height or whether you’re right or left handed. There are things that are true of your church, they impassion and guide your actions. Those are your values. Your values may not be very clear right now, you may have competing values, but you already have your values. Your task is not to decide, but to discover them.
It’s an important distinction. Because if you decide your values, and you decide on something that sounds great but isn’t truly one of your values, it will be like a right handed person deciding he’s left handed. He can decide that all he wants, but he’s still going to act right handed. And he’ll probably end up embarrassed of his declaration that he would live as a southpaw, or eventually just ignoring that decision altogether.
So if you’re a church without clarity on your values, start discovering them. How do you do that? I’ll talk about that more in some future posts, but just start by asking: What is true of us? What has always been true of us? And what should always be true of us?