The Pursuit of Excellence

"Good is the enemy of great." - Jim Collins

Through the years of working and volunteering in churches, there's been a constant discussion about how to aproach the issue of excellence. This often comes up with worship leaders wanting to get more out of worship bands, sound techs, and media techs, but it's a really vital discussion for us to have in church leadership as well as leadership through living a Christian life.

It's recently come up at my current place of work. We've been doing a full 360 degree strategy and opterations process aptly called a Strat Op, developed by the Patterson Center, and it's honestly one of the best things if not the best thing we've done as a team here. However, there's an obvious tension regarding the issue of excellence. You see, the main reason we're looking at every single aspect of what we do as a department is because we all want to be a part of something more excellent.

It seems that everyone wants to be a part of something excellent - we all like to be a part of healthy companies and organizations; we'd all prefer to be a part of a healtheir family; we'd all prefer to be healthier and more excellent in our own lives. However, there sometimes seems to be a tension between the idea of pursuing excellence, upholding excellence in a place of leadership, and God's radical grace and living a life of humility.

When this issue arose recently, I quickly did a search and I found this incredible post from J. Hampton Keathley, III called "The Pursuit of Excellence." It's a part of his series "Marks of Maturity: Biblical Characteristics of a Christian Leader." I don't know that there's a way I could say any of this quite as excellent as he does, so here's a link to his article:

https://bible.org/seriespage/mark-11-pursuit-excellence

I hope his article speaks to you as much as it has to me. Let's continue to have this discussion - feel free to share this and comment below.