One of the key responsibilities of church and ministry leaders is to make decisions—and usually lots of them. But even though it’s a daily occurrence, all leaders know learning to make wise choices is a life-long learning process. NBA coach Pat Riley says, “Leadership is defining the reality of the day.” It is being able to identify and understand situations and contexts, personalities and circumstances, and involves choices and decisions. Making these choices and decisions astutely is what tests the leader’s mettle.
For Christian leaders, making wise decisions requires some critical fixed reference points, or we’ll be prone to making foolish and catastrophic ones. Wise decision making involves knowing:
Who God is. Although God is absolutely sovereign, He is also interactive. He has a big picture plan, but desires for us to actively involve His participation as we ascertain that plan. Now, we all know leaders make large and small decisions everyday without the slightest concern about God’s purposes in the matter. As a result of this spiritual blindness, we see abuses in businesses, governments, even churches. When making decisions from the perspective that God does indeed have a plan, the Golden Rule becomes the framework for our choices: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Disregarding the God’s ordained rule brings distress.
Who I am. Socrates once wisely advised, “Know thyself.” When making decisions, we need to consider our own personal experiences, successes, and failures. For many, our decision-making pattern is to ponder the consequences of a decision without taking time to consider how our past life-lessons can guide us in the present scenario. Those experiences should have revealed our weaknesses and strengths to us. EQUIP’s CEO John Hall explains it this way, “All of us should know what size the shoes are that fit our feet of clay. Where are we vulnerable? Where do we need improvement? Where do I excel? What are my assets?”
How it works. A key part of making wise decisions involves acquiring the pertinent facts of the situation. This is not a passive process, but requires time and effort. The what, why, where, when, who, and what if questions need to be answered. A shortcut in this phase of decision making seriously raises the risk of making a regrettable decision. Mr. Hall gives us this example: “When Nehemiah had to make decisions on the job site when he led the reconstruction of the walls of the city of Jerusalem, he knew who God was: faithful and forgiving. He knew who he was: a man who was called by God to do a specific job at a specific period of time. And he knew how things worked: he built relationships, gathered facts, gathered funding, and rallied personnel.”
And as we know, the rest of the story is Nehemiah made some very wise choices in the midst of enormous opposition and criticism. Someone once said, “The choices we make dictate the lives that we lead.”
