Godly Decision Making
Thinking strategically about your life and ministry
By Carl Jeffrey Wright
In 1982 I graduated with an MBA into an economy with a prime interest rate of 21.5 percent, unprecedented bank failures, and a tight-money, inflation-fighting Federal Reserve. There was no growth and historic inflation rates. It was clear that the airline industry I had left as a marketing analyst was not a place to return to with an MBA. The combination of the economy, increased oil prices, and price wars brought on by airline deregulation made it a very unattractive business.
I was well-educated, with both an MBA and a JD, but I still needed a career plan that would allow me to sustain a family and achieve some measure of success in a hostile economic environment. As a Christian, I was also deeply concerned that my career choice honor God. I needed a plan—a personal strategic plan. How could I assess what I had been blessed with and define the best place to work and move forward in my career?
Unfortunately, resources for making these godly plans and decisions were scarce. There were plenty of books on making money, finding good jobs (usually defined as jobs that paid good money), and gaining power. But I found few resources on how to make career decisions based on a plan that honored God and maximized personal gifts and educational achievements. This was complicated by the fact that my theology was primarily an "evacuation theology”: our time on earth was limited anyway, and our Christian responsibility was to recruit folks for the heavenly experience and not worry so much about careers other than doing as much good as possible.
I found and was able to apply a strategic planning model from a career development book by a former Episcopal priest, Richard Nelson Bolles. The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them laid out a basic methodology that is essentially the same formula for all strategic planning. His model was that what you are good at doing and what you enjoy doing are the best indicators for a preferred career strategy. This led me to identify an industry and a series of jobs where I succeeded and found tremendous growth and satisfaction over the next 15 years.
When I made the career switch from a large public company to a small private Christian publisher, the strategic planning challenge was similar. Few resources adequately addressed the process. The tension between what we do now for the kingdom and what we need to simply "wait on the Lord for” remained. But the essential questions were the same: How do we achieve organizational effectiveness? How do we get results, move forward in positive directions, and accomplish things that we can say for certain are kingdom outcomes?
Strategic planning begins with a definition of where you want to go—a vision or goal. Then you assess what it will take to get there and how to strengthen or supplement areas in which you don’t have what it takes. Then you soberly assess the obstacles in the way, usually accomplished with some form of SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). In essence, this was the model from Bolles’s book that I used in assessing my career move.
When I consider my experiences in building organizations in both spheres, I have found that the key for many Christian organizations in goal setting is to be clear about eschatology. What do you believe God wants you to accomplish in your lifetime or before the return of Christ? Christian organizations also need to follow the lead of our corporate citizens and over-invest in people. The tendency to accept mediocrity because "God loves everyone” and can use anyone is often an excuse for doing less than the excellent performance we should give the Master.
Finally, in using resources, we need to think of ourselves more as stewards. The wise use of resources requires that we have a return on investment—not just in our personal lives and gifts but also in our businesses. Jesus was pretty clear about this, and we should be too.
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Carl Jeffrey Wright has been CEO and principal of the largest independent African American religious media firm, Urban Ministries, Inc. (UMI), for the past 15 years (UrbanMinistries.com). UMI has been a leader in independent, nondenominational, urban Christian, and positive media content for 40 years. Wright has a JD from Georgetown University and an MBA from Columbia University, and his career includes more than 15 years of experience in Fortune 50 companies.
