Why Organizational Health Is Faithful Work
Lencioni argues health is the greatest advantage any organization can have. For a faith community, that claim is either obvious or scandalous, depending on how we have been taught.
Patrick Lencioni opens The Advantage with a claim that lands hard for pastors. The single greatest advantage available to any organization, he argues, is health. Not strategy, not talent, not technology. Health. He goes further. Health is the first thing leaders should pursue, because everything else fails without it.
Tonight our Leadership Board meets to take up that opening case. I want to think alongside you about why a faith community would read this argument seriously rather than wave it off as borrowed business language.
The Word “Advantage” Sits Uneasily
Let me name what is awkward about Lencioni’s framing. The word competitive fits a market where organizations win at the expense of other organizations. The church does not operate that way, or at least it should not. We are not competing with the Methodists down the road. We are not in a market.
So we sit with the discomfort. Some words from another world will not translate cleanly into the church’s vocabulary, and we are right to notice. But here is what is true underneath the discomfort. Lencioni is naming something real. When an organization is healthy, when its leaders trust each other, when its mission is clear, when its work is reinforced, that organization can do its work. When an organization is unhealthy, the same work becomes nearly impossible. That observation does not stop at the office door. It walks straight into the sanctuary.
A church can have a beautiful mission and strangle it with internal conflict. A church can have gifted staff and burn them out through unclear expectations. A church can adopt a clear vision and undermine it through systems that point a different direction. None of that is unique to congregations, and none of it is solved by good theology alone.
Health Is a Biblical Category
Paul writes to the Ephesians about a body growing up into Christ, into maturity, into fullness (Ephesians 4:11-16). The metaphor is medical. Bodies grow well or poorly, and the difference matters. A healthy body can carry weight, do work, and adapt to stress. An unhealthy body collapses under conditions a healthy body could meet. Paul says the church is to be that kind of body. Mature, working, adaptive, joined together by every ligament.
That is not a side image. It is one of the central pictures of the church in the New Testament. The body of Christ does not exist in the abstract. It exists as a specific community in a specific place that either grows toward maturity or fails to.
Paul also tells the Corinthians, “Everything should be done with dignity and in proper order” (1 Corinthians 14:40, CEB). Order serves love. Structure exists so the love of God can move through a community without being tangled up in confusion. When we attend to the order of our common life, we are not stepping away from spiritual work. We are doing spiritual work in another mode.
Lencioni’s Four Disciplines, Translated
Lencioni names four disciplines that healthy organizations practice. Build a cohesive leadership team. Create clarity. Overcommunicate that clarity. Reinforce the clarity through human systems. Each one names something the church has been doing forever, in its own language.
A cohesive leadership team is what Acts 15 describes: leaders who can disagree honestly, decide together, and move together afterward. Clarity is what the creeds, catechisms, and confessions of faith have always offered, short, memorable, repeatable language for what a community believes and practices. Overcommunication is the lectionary, the liturgy, the Lord’s Prayer, the benediction. The church repeats. That is the point. Reinforcement is church order: bylaws, polity, practices that make our stated identity show up in how we hire, evaluate, schedule, and decide.
The four disciplines do not introduce something foreign. They name something familiar. Lencioni’s contribution is the sequence and the integration. The church’s contribution is the depth and the reason.
What Tonight Is About
Our Leadership Board sits down tonight to discuss this opening section together. The conversation is not about whether Lencioni is right. The conversation is about what these disciplines look like at McPherson First. Where are we already practicing them well? Where do we sense distance between what we say and what we do? What does it mean for us, for this congregation in this place in this season, to take health seriously as a faithful pursuit?
I will not share the specifics of what surfaces in the room. Names and details belong inside the meeting. What I will share, in the posts that follow, is what I am learning as a pastor walking my Board through this work in real time. Some of the learning will be hopeful. Some of it will be hard. All of it will be honest.
An Invitation
Notice your own church, or any community you are part of. Where is health visible? Where is it absent? Health does not announce itself; it shows up in ordinary moments. Trust between leaders. Clarity about what the community is for. Repetition of what matters. Systems that match the stated commitments. Look for those, and look for their opposites.
The next reading section is Discipline 1, building a cohesive leadership team (pp. 19-72). The Board takes that up June 24. Between now and then, two posts on Substack. The next one lands June 3, going deeper into trust as the church’s first faithful practice.
This series is not a critique of any church or any leader. It is a public reflection on the slow work of becoming healthier together.
Glad you are reading along.