Mission Drift

Our training group in Barcelona

What do you do to fight ‘mission drift’ in your life? Whether it’s at work where you want to protect certain aspects of the culture of your office, or at home where you want your kids to value certain aspects of your family’s culture, mission drift is something we all have to think about and fight against because if we don’t, unfortunately it naturally just happens.

Just as ships at sea don’t stay in the same place unless they are anchored to something solid, people and organizations will shift in time unless they have been secured against the cultural tides.

Here at EMI, as leaders we talk about the potential for mission drift almost as much as any other single topic. We see it as one of the biggest future threats to our organization, which is why a couple of years ago we applied for and were granted a big chunk of money to carry out leadership training for 32 of our up and coming leaders from each of our 12 offices around the world.

In late April, we held our second of two in-person forums in Barcelona, Spain that wrapped up a year-long training program for the first ‘cohort’ of 16 participants. We’re pretty excited about this group, which included staff from 10 EMI offices and 6 passport countries, as well as 5 women (increased gender diversity in leadership is also one of our goals). We chose Spain as it was a central location that would help us keep travel costs down, but also because they have some of the most welcoming entry requirements for visitors from most other countries.

Training session

In this training, on top of a number of EMI-specific operational sessions, we covered such topics as:

·       * the Inner World of Leaders – how a leader’s own spiritual, mental, physical, and family health is key to their success as a leader

·       * Crucial Conversations – a course we purchased and facilitated, focusing on how to be successful in holding difficult conversations

·       * Delegation

·       * Good management and personal practices

·       * Maintaining a healthy work-life balance

·       * Maintaining healthy spiritual rhythms

·       * Courage and Humility, for under and over confident leaders

·       * Styles of leadership – from egalitarian to directive

·       * Cultivating healthy teams

This list represents less than a third of the overall topics we’ve covered during our training. This content certainly borrowed from many resources – books, videos, etc., but it was put together internally by a small team that included our CEO, myself, and our Global HR team. And right on the heels of the completion of this program for this first group of 16, in a few weeks we’ll begin the next year-long program for the second group of 16 young leaders at EMI.

I was excited to have Alisha join me for the second half of this trip. A number of the cohort participants brought their spouses, so Alisha and our CEO’s wife were able to spend time with them while we were in the sessions.

Free-time at La Sagrada Familia

So back to my question – what do you do to fight mission drift in your life? Do you have mentors and other trusted friends speaking into your life? At work, do you regularly talk about the things that are important to you, your co-workers, and the company? At home, do you regularly talk with your spouse and/or kids about those values you want to hold most dear? It’s easy to just move along from one day to the next and neglect to hit on bigger things - the important things are often the easiest to leave for another time.

Make time for those things. Your office, your family, our world – we all need the best version of you, so don’t allow yourself to drift into something less than that. Make time for your spiritual health so the full potential God created you for is reached. Don’t allow your family to drift away from what’s important by anchoring in those most important values. At work, be intentional about the best aspects of what’s important to your company and be a part of living them out.

You may see those of us who work at ministries such as EMI as an example of what missional living looks like. But actually, I would suggest that what I’m talking about here is the way all of us can live missionally. If we Christians would focus on this one small thing, it could have a massive impact on our world, our country, and our communities. Far more than fighting for any political cause or this or that law we think we need to have in place in our country of residence, the world needs us Christians to allow ourselves to be transformed by God into the best version of who we were made to be. And out of that internal process, we can then show compassion and care for others. That is the best way we can show and share our faith with a world that too often views us as agenda-driven. Amidst the swirling tornado of the culture war we’re in, it’s also how we can prevent our mission from drifting.