"Knowledge, Action, and God"
Working hard to make a decision work is even more important than making the decision in the first place. One of the dangers is people making a decision, then thinking, 'Oh, that's it,' when the thing has only just started.
Lord Pennock1
Measuring the risk of difficult decisions does not guarantee our decisions will be good ones. Just as risk stalks our every action, so fallibility will always characterize the leadership we give our churches. We make mistakes.
Yet our mistakes need not consume us. We gain some comfort by knowing we are not alone in this human enterprise of making errors. Consider the record company that turned down the Beatles, the seventeen publishers who rejected the best-selling novel M*A*S*H, the editor of the San Francisco Examiner who told Rudyard Kipling his writing was "simply ridiculous." These monumental errors of judgment remind us that mistakes are inevitable. In a small way, that knowledge makes our misreading of a counseling situation, our failure to fully step up to the challenge of a difficult sermon topic, or our well-intentioned faux pas at a church social seem more manageable.
We cannot hide behind this knowledge of our fallibility, however. We may not be able to error-proof our ministries, but we can certainly improve our fielding averages. The thesis of this book has been that one good way to hone decision making abilities is to measure the risk element in each decision. Knowing when to jump into a tough situation and when to bide one's time and gather more information and support can make the difference between a good decision and a foolhardy one.
If our survey information is any indication, most local church leaders already make far more good than foolhardy decisions. Respondents told of ...
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