I recently spent a few afternoon hours working on my laptop in a McDonald’s.  I had arrived early in a small town for a consultation.  I noticed that the McDonald’s offered Wi-Fi Internet access.  I cannot recall the last time that I was inside a McDonald’s.  It had been a very long time – probably years.  Wow!  This McDonald’s sure looked and felt different than the one that I remembered as a kid!  Vanilla café lattes, very contemporary interior design, upgraded restrooms – I was surprised.

I sat at a booth behind another booth that was occupied by two McDonald’s employees and one other person.  I didn’t seek to overhear their conversation, but it would have been very hard to avoid hearing it from almost any seat in the small restaurant.  I guess that there was some protocol or corporate policy that required them to hold this impromptu meeting in the public space of the restaurant.  I soon learned that the people at the booth behind me were two McDonald’s managers and a former employee.  The former employee had returned to discuss the recent termination of his employment.  The managers listened patiently to his monologue.  His speech progressed from a denial of doing anything wrong, to a complaint over a personality clash with a shift manager, to an emotional plea to return to work for the sake of his family.   

I was struck by the response of the managers.  They treated him with respect.  They reviewed the entire process that led to his firing.  This review sounded like a legal script from a human resources manual.  They told him that his termination was not reversible.  But here is what really struck me.  They claimed that he had failed to follow the core values of McDonald’s.  All employees apparently agree to abide by these core values.  The core values are “the principles that serve to mutually benefit the employees and customers alike,” said the general manager.  The conversation immediately shifted with this comment.  The former employee had challenged almost every other managerial comment made up to this point.  He had no response to the statement on apparently ignoring the core values.  He didn’t ask what they were.   He obviously knew them.  He didn’t ask how his behavior conflicted with those values.  Nothing.  He realized the discussion was over.  They exchanged a pleasant goodbye.   He walked out.  They returned to work behind the counter.

Core values are such an important foundation for any organization.  Does your faith-based organization have core values?  Do you know them?  Do they inform the daily decisions that your organization makes?  Core values provide a fundamental set of guiding principles upon which mission and vision are based.  They provide answers to the questions of: 1) who are we? 2) what do we believe? and 3) what is our behavior based on these beliefs?
An organization with well-defined core values is able to measure its ministry and outreach based on solid principles, rather than arbitrary targets.  Many communities spend all of their time doing.  It is so easy to be busy.   We become absorbed in programs, ministries, and activities.  However, if we fail to pause and to establish these core values, we may just be caught in a frenzy of activity that leads to a dysfunctional system.  Now is the time to stop and to establish biblical principles that will serve as the core values that drive your organization toward an even greater vision of God’s abundance.

I’m interested to learn the core values of your faith-based organization.  Let me know.