How Do You Judge Whether a Job is Done Right?

In a recent article in Christian Century magazine a pastor had his board of deacons estimate how many hours he should spend on some categories of ministry he gave them. I believe when it was totaled up it about to about 114 hours a week. I bit much to ask of your pastor who some folk think only work one hour a week.

When I was in my first church nearing a half century ago I did a similar thing with my session (local government body of a Presbyterian Church). But I asked them to list the things a pastor should be doing while serving a church, not a preset questionnaire. Then I asked them to put into the next column how many hours a week I should be doing those tasks (similar at this point to the article mentioned) with similar results. After a talk about more realistic expectations about those hours I then asked them to grade me from A to F on how well they thought I was doing those tasks.

It is a very informative and I think a very helpful exercise that helped them understand where a pastor has to put in his time and how that time can be best used as together we provide leadership for a congregation. A note, lay members always underestimate the amount of time a pastor spends in sermon preparation.

I don’t think that exercise should be limited to ministry; it can be applied to almost any work environment. When we look more realistically at what other people around us are doing I think we become more tolerant of each other’s workload and more empathetic about the tasks each other’s do.

Most of us have unrealistic concepts of what politicians do, we don’t walk in their footsteps and we don’t realize the impossibility of they doing their job fully and well. This leads to the dilemma we have we lobbyists, because they lessen the workload of the members of congress and their staffs, but that comes at a high cost. What is lacking is a listing of the importance of each task a congressional leader is supposed to do and then give an appropriate grade based upon an informed understanding of what their work entails. The way it works now days, is judging them upon certain key issues we want or are interested in, and not their overall performance of even areas of performance.

This is not meant to let the congress of the hook. They spend way too much time and money on getting reelected and cater to those who can best get them elected – the rich. This we have the mess we do.

The problem is we are not very informed voters who can understand the process well enough and overly influenced by rich power brokers who lead us down the garden path resulting in an unjust system.

I see inklings of progressive conservatives and liberals beginning to look at issues from the perspective of the common good. We need to pay more attention to those folk. They task is to become informed enough to know who they are.

The same thing can be said of bankers who have become investors instead of bankers. Their job description has run amok. A business is to provide a good or service the public needs. That is its primary purpose but business schools today seem to teach it is the “bottom line that matters most” therefore we have a lot of bad businesses. With better criteria Wal-Mart is a bad business and Costco is a good one. And this list goes on.