Not to often in "serious graduate work" do I have an "aha moment" where something a little fuzzy in my own life gets suddenly clear. Here is a case of just that.
As the church leadership has "wrestled" with implementing our new vision and strategies we’ve been able to articulate what we hope to accomplish but sometimes floundered in articulating the difference between "quality control" and "quality enhancement."
Quality control in church programs:
"Quality control identifies and measures minimum acceptable results." In a church setting, this is simply "Is the Bible being taught reflective of our beliefs?" "Are people being led into a closer relationship with Jesus?" "Are our programs in a safe environment?" "Is the gospel being presented?" Things like that. These are minimum standards which are fairly easy to measure.
Quality enhancement in church programs:
"Quality enhancement focuses on excellence. That is levels of attainment well beyond minimums." This is what we’ve been doing for the last year or so but seen the biggest push in the last few months. "How can we create the best environment for Sunday morning worship?" "How can we best connect new people to the church?" "How can we best disciple kids, students, and adults?" "How can we effectively present Christ to the community we live in?"
Different standards…
Perhaps the hardest thing for us to communicate in the last several months is that the message of the church is not changing. In fact, we are trying to discover and ensure that our message is clearer and better understood than the way we were doing it. Oddly enough, most of our conflicts have been the result of individuals attempting to apply quality control standards to things that can only be measured in quality enhancement.
What?
Simply put… quality control is saying "This is what the Bible says the church is to do, are we doing it?" Most complaints haven’t had anything to do with this at all. Most complaints have come up when someone looks at what we are doing and says, "Since we’ve done this in the past, we have to keep doing it even if it is ineffective." That’s sliding something that isn’t the "minimum measurable" into a "minimum measurable status." For instance, when some have judged our services and said that since we don’t do altar calls we aren’t doing a church service correctly… they’ve elevated something that is a method to a status of "biblically commanded, enforced by church rule," when it is not.
Deep thoughts for the day…
Leave a Reply