What Airline Competition Can Teach Us About Being Church

We had a fascinating set of speakers at our Annual United Methodist Conference in Indianapolis this year.  One of them talked about changing the culture of the businesses, organizations (and churches!) that we are part of.  She had done quite a bit of consulting with Southwest Airlines and talked about three principles that set the tone for the culture within that company.
    Southwest Airline employees were expected to have/develop:
          A Warrior Spirit
          A Servant's Heart
          A Fun-luving Attitude.
It's not the principles I might first expect in a commercial airline, but Southwest is not your typical commercial airline.


I immediately wondered how we would go about changing the culture of our congregation at St. Andrew.  Could we and should we develop:
         An Apostle's Spirit.  The entrepreneurial sense of the great big world out there and a mission to meet the needs of that world with the grace and transformation of Jesus Christ. It's a frontier, wild west spirit that says, I don't care about the odds, I don't care about the response I may receive, I'm too excited about my commission to get out there and claim my world for God, to heal my relationships with forgiveness, to challenge the self-centeredness and incivility of the business world with truth that is shared in love, to dig down deep and start doing all the things I promised God I would do if I had the time, the money, and the opportunity.  The spirit of an Apostle could revolutionize the way we come together at St. Andrew.
         A Shepherd's Heart.  We talk a lot about a servant style of leadership--after all we are  a bib to apron congregation.  But a shepherd's heart is to look at the people around us and see them as our unique flock--our responsibility, our charge, our circle of influence.  A shepherd goes to great lengths to protect and provide for his sheep.  If we could relate to one another within the church--and learn to extend that care beyond the church to our families, workplace, and neighborhood--think of the witness we would have!
        A Joy-loving Attitude.  I think we're pretty much there with this one.  We're a congregation that loves to laugh at ourselves and tease one another good naturally.  We can probably step it up a bit and be a little less thin skinned with one another at times, but to know Jesus is to know Joy:  it is to know that life is a gift and we are about as lucky as can be to have this faith and one another to relish and cherish that gift together.


There is a lot we can learn from the world around us.  We can even learn how to relate to one another and our world from the way a rogue start-up airline thinks about who they are and how they want to pull together.  I thought it an interested conversation anyway. It was interesting enough that I continued that conversation with myself as I left the convention center last Friday.  Hopefully, you'll consider it a conversation to pick up and share as well.