Everyone Leads by Chris Lowney

Author:Chris Lowney [Lowney, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

How Do You Know You’re Successful?

An Accountable Church

How do we know that we are succeeding in our mission?

Responsible organizations ask and answer that question, all the time. They celebrate and quickly replicate successful initiatives; they fine-tune underperforming efforts out of a deep commitment to serve their mission well. And, as soon as disastrous missteps become apparent, they take immediate remedial action and learn lessons from failure.

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of accountability. We expect it from quality organizations, whether they are manufacturing widgets or educating high school students. Parents would be deeply dismayed if the school principal didn’t even care whether children were succeeding in their math class. But merely caring about the job is insufficient; we expect principal and staff to manifest their care in deeds, by monitoring evidence like testing and benchmarking data to confirm whether things are going well or poorly. A commitment to the highest professional standards, therefore, is fundamental to accountability. So too is a healthy dose of transparency: we parents would expect access to some of the testing and benchmarking data, enough to understand that the school was delivering high-quality outcomes against its mission.

Like the school or widget manufacturer, our church has a mission, which we articulate in varying ways, depending on the context. We are here to make disciples of all nations, for example, to make the name of Jesus known and loved, to lead others to the faith, freedom, and love of Christ, and to be good stewards of all the talent and treasure that has been entrusted to us by the Lord.

How’s all that going for us? Are we as successful as we should be at fulfilling our mission? For the most part, we cannot answer these questions. We have no systematic way of explaining to ourselves, much less to the Lord, whether we have been good stewards.

But it’s even worse than that. By way of analogy, recall that medical doctors, even before they consider the lofty ideals of their healing mission, are expected to honor a more basic human duty: Primum non Nocere, that is: First, do no harm.

Our church failed at this most fundamental human duty. The most vulnerable of all humans, defenseless children, were harmed in our care. Not only that, it took outsiders like the media and legal system to render our accountability failures transparent to us and to spur us to implement the building blocks of greater accountability going forward.

Here’s a sad irony: “accountability” should be a beautiful and important word for us Catholics, because accountability is intimately linked to our vision of what human dignity entails and indispensable to living out our calling to be good stewards. Yet, at least for the moment, it has become an ugly word. One Catholic media outlet publishes an ongoing “Accountability” report, which concerns only one topic: the global church’s ongoing responses to its sexual abuse crisis.

We will become more accountable, not only for those who will be entrusted to our care going forward, but in everything that concerns our mission.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.