Two questions for readers:
I’m interested in your feedback.
In response to my post “Asking the Radical Questions,” Nate Spencer of The Jesus Paradigm commented with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of the patron saints of Cerulean Sanctum) that I wanted to expand:
If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community.
I think this can be distilled into a generalization that always works:
If you love the vision you have for {desired ministry outcome}, you will destroy {desired ministry outcome}. If you love the people around you, you will create {desired ministry outcome}.
We live in a Church age where the visionaries of the Faith hold increasing sway over how we do church. These are usually people on the national stage who have successful churches and are always on the leading edge of ministry. Smaller or less successful churches often try to latch onto the vision promoted by these leaders, but the outcomes inevitably fall short, and everyone looks around and wonders what happened.
What happened is that Bonhoeffer’s warning came true: The church loved the vision more.
I don’t believe that this is ever a case of not loving God enough. I think that any movement in the Church that aims at a new vision begins from a love of God.
Where the Bonhoeffer warning comes into play is when the vision fails to love people as much as it loves God or loves the vision itself.
If you look closely, I believe you can find numerous examples in the American Church of the love for a vision overwhelming the love for people.
Take the way we worship, for example. It’s easy to fall in love with worship as an event. We may even go one further and do a good job of loving worship because to worship is to love God.
But how easy is it to have a vision for worship that actually excludes a love for people? And in contrast, what does worship that loves people look like?
I’ve been involved with worship as both a worship leader and as a supporting musician. I have planned worship, led worship, managed playlists, played and sung music, written new worship songs, and so on. I have a bit of expertise.
One thing that I see continually is that forgetting to love people leads to worship that
1. Reflects only the favorite style of music of the worship leader or musicians on the worship team
2. Contains powerful, anointed music that, unfortunately, the ordinary people in the seats find difficult, if not impossible, to sing
3. Fails to incorporate what have been past favorite songs of the people in the seats because those favorites do not match the current vision for worship
4. Mimics the worship style of whatever “famous” church the local church is trying to emulate, regardless of the past worship history of that local church
5. Fails to consider what leads nonmusicians into worship
I don’t mean to pick on worship alone here, but the worship wars are a continual topic online and worship is readily witnessed in our churches.
The reality is that any vision for doing ANYTHING in our churches that does not prominently uphold a love for people as much as it does a love for God or for the vision itself will ALWAYS produce lackluster results—or worse, heartache and burnout.
I’ve mentioned before my career in camping ministry. A surefire vision for burning out camp staff is
God first
Campers second
Staff third
Frankly, you can sink any kind of ministry with a vision that puts frontline workers third. As they are the people with whom most ministries have the deepest connection, 
they need to be higher up on the priority list and need to be loved almost as much as God. I’ve worked in ministries that got this right and ministries that didn’t. Let me say that any ministry that puts its staff third is a terrible place to work, a place that pours out staff until the vessel is empty. And the opposite is true: A ministry that loves its staff will see ministry come from the carefully cultivated overflow of staff’s hearts, never running dry.
There’s not a person reading this who doesn’t have a horror story of how a vision for ministry steamrolled simple love for people. Isn’t that sad?
Truly, any life-changing ministry that continues to produce results comes down to loving other people more than the vision for the ministry itself. Why this is so hard to see is one of the most maddening mysteries in the modern American Church.
In the end, one of the things the Lord is teaching me goes back to what you and I learned as Little Sunbeams (or whatever your childhood church used to call preschoolers): Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It seems so simple, yet we tend to forget it when it comes to ministry. The question remains though: Does the vision for ministry take into account the Golden Rule?
When I led worship, I tried to always ask the question of what best leads the people in the seats into worship because I genuinely desired to love those people. And that end result didn’t always lead to my favorite kind of music. Many times it was simplistic songs or hymns everyone knew word for word, the two or three classics I’d been trying to move beyond for years.
But it wasn’t about me or my vision; it was loving God and loving people. Everything else proceeded from that mentality.
This isn’t so hard, folks. Yet if we fail to heed Bonhoeffer’s warning, it always will be.
One major lesson learned from the economic meltdown is that far too many people in American business today are morally bankrupt. And it seems the higher up you go in the corporate org chart, the more malfeasance one finds. The post-Enron push made by companies to hire more ethical workers has been shown for the farce it is. We continue to hire and promote foxes for hen-house guard duty.
With allegations of fraud dogging Goldman Sachs, and with further indictments and allegations (thankfully) coming to others behind this debacle, the question is: Are we going to learn anything about the bankruptcy of the American soul from this?
I want to pass along a story on CNN written by Bob Greene. It details a transaction that goes on many thousands of times in this country each day, though this transaction has a slight, but important, twist. Greene tells of his encounter with Mark Dalton, the owner of a mom-and-pop bookstore, after purchasing a used book online:
In 2008, I found a book I was looking for on that Amazon marketplace, and submitted an order. The price was more than reasonable: $6.95 for the used hardcover. Used books are not shipped by Amazon itself, but by the local booksellers.
A week or so after I placed the order, the package arrived, from High View Books in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The book seemed to be in good shape. I was pleased.
But with it was a personal letter to me. It said:
“Thank your for your recent book order. I have enclosed a check to you for $2.95. The reason for this is that this book is only in ‘Very Good’ condition, while I mistakenly described it as being in ‘Near Fine’ condition in my listing. Please accept my apologies for the error. (Also, please note, the soiling that you see on the dust jacket is actually on the Mylar and not the dust jacket itself.)”
[Dalton] wrote that he hoped his apology and the refund were satisfactory. Sure enough, tucked into the book was a check made out to me, for $2.95.
Greene goes on to mention that the condition issue was beyond his ability to discern. Instead, he was surprised that anyone would go to the lengths Dalton did to ensure that the sale was completely up and up, especially for an item with such a small price tag.
As they say, read the whole thing (“A $2.95 Lesson for Wall Street“).
One of these days the business world is going to wake up to the reality of genuine customer service. But beyond that, I hope they finally discover whatever moral compass the owner of High View Books possesses.
The allure of money in our society, that “get rich quick by any means necessary” mentality that permeates our culture, may be only one of our many vices, but it certainly is the root of great evil. 
My brother had a CAT scan done recently and got a $4,000 bill for the procedure. That’s insanity for what amounts to a glorified x-ray, but I’m sure it reflects a “gotta get my cut” reality from a dozen different sources who stand to profit from that scan.
I don’t know about you, but I find that kind of pile-on mentality wicked. Yet it’s the norm anymore in America. It’s why an airplane ticket is more fees and taxes than payment for time spent in the plane traveling. It’s why gas prices are so high, why it costs so much to educate our kids in public schools, and why the answer to everything governmental seems to be a tax hike. It’s the Great Gouge. We’ve reached an era when sick people avoid the doctor not because of the fear of a cancer diagnosis but of bankruptcy!
But in a bookstore in Rhode Island, a man realized a $6.95 used book may not have been in the condition he described, so he refunded the purchaser $2.95.
In contrast, on Wall Street we have morally bereft con men who knowingly sold worthless securities because they could get rich, even if their jackpot ruined other people.
I say all this because The Wall Street Journal once featured an article that exposed the religious backgrounds of all the major players in the Enron, WorldCom, and other business scandals of the early 2000s. They found that almost all the people with the dirtiest hands were pillars of their churches.
I don’t know anything about the religious beliefs of the owner of the bookstore in Greene’s story. But I know that he had far more Christian character than church elder Ken Lay of Enron infamy.
The little things matter folks. There’s courage in sending back $2.95. God not only looks at our weights and measures, but He knows what we do in secret.
As Christians, do we conduct our daily business with God in mind? When there’s money to be made, do we join the pile-on, even if it ends up hurting people? Would we have sent back $2.95 because the book we sold was a fraction less perfect than we had described?
Honestly, if America wants to get back to greatness, a good first step would be for American businesses to fire the morally bankrupt (no matter how high up the org chart) and hire godly men and women who realize that the God they serve is always watching.
In ending, I want to help reward the courage to send a $2.95 refund. While I could not find an online link to them directly, I did find contact info and a means to order books directly from High View Books through Biblio. So the next time you want to buy a book, consider supporting High View Books. And let’s send a message that character still counts.