In this issue:

Tell Me About a Time

Do Our Assumptions Still Fit?

The Right Question

We demand little and expect much.

Rudy Rasmus

Tell Me About a Time
By Earl Creps

As I sat tapping on my computer keyboard in a Midwestern Starbucks, an unexpected event unfolded nearby. A manager sporting a green apron sat down at a table with a young man who turned out to be a prospective employee. The purpose of their meeting was a job interview—Starbucks style.

The conversation seemed quite practiced on the manager's end. She worked hard to help the interviewee feel comfortable while being questioned. Our tables were close enough to make the entire conversation public domain. As they talked, I had an impulse to type up the progress of the meeting and eventually produced something of a rough transcript, plus some impressions.

If you apply for a job at Starbucks (maybe while church planting), your interview will revolve around questions like these:

1. Why do you want to work at Starbucks?
2. Tell me about a time you have worked in a situation that required a dress code.

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Do Our Assumptions Still Fit?
by Lovett H. Weems, Jr.

Peter Drucker maintains that organizational problems are not the result of groups doing things poorly or even doing the wrong things. Organizations fail, he contends, because the assumptions on which the organization was built, and on which it is being run, no longer fit reality. Could our congregations be taking for granted some things that were safe assumptions in the past, but no longer fit? Consider the following:

• People in our communities are religious. The only religious preference that grew in every U.S. state since 2001 was "no religion."
• There are lots of "young families with children." Married couples with children under 18 living at home represented 50 percent of households in the 1950s; today, only 25 percent.

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The Right Question

Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

Two small-membership churches merged. As they prepared to break ground for a new building for the new congregation, they prepared a video in which they interviewed some of the older members using this question:

What is the legacy of faith that you want to leave
for the next generation?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution: Carol Follett