Build Structures to Serve Your Calling
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Welcome back.
00:00:05.120 | The weekend is over and we're back to work,
00:00:08.360 | back to work thinking about work,
00:00:11.120 | particularly how we can be most fruitful
00:00:14.160 | by leaning on strong administrative structures
00:00:17.120 | that we need in place.
00:00:18.560 | We've never talked about this angle of leadership
00:00:20.660 | on the podcast, so it should be interesting.
00:00:23.740 | How do we build the structures we need
00:00:25.600 | so that we can fulfill our calling in the world?
00:00:30.000 | The topic is relevant, of course, for ministries
00:00:32.080 | and relevant for Christian business leaders
00:00:34.640 | and relevant for healthcare providers too.
00:00:36.660 | In fact, today's question comes from a doctor
00:00:39.280 | who writes this, "Dear Pastor John,
00:00:41.880 | "I've greatly enjoyed Ask Pastor John over the years.
00:00:44.660 | "Thank you for blessing and strengthening my faith
00:00:47.120 | "in Jesus Christ."
00:00:49.400 | My question is this.
00:00:52.120 | I'm a doctor.
00:00:53.480 | I've tried to live and serve by 1 Peter 4, verses 10 to 11.
00:00:57.040 | However, I'm also the practice owner.
00:01:00.720 | My family and our two dozen employees and their families
00:01:03.760 | all financially depend on the profitability of our practice.
00:01:07.900 | Increasingly, I find my thoughts and efforts consumed
00:01:11.600 | by the profit-seeking aspects of running a business.
00:01:15.720 | Biblically, is there a way for me to reconcile
00:01:18.400 | a God-honoring attention to patient care
00:01:21.640 | with my responsibility as a business owner
00:01:23.920 | to generate a profit so that employees
00:01:26.720 | can provide for their families?
00:01:28.800 | Pastor John, what would you say to this doctor?
00:01:30.760 | Well, the answer to that last question is yes.
00:01:33.760 | There is a way to reconcile a God-honoring attention
00:01:38.760 | to patient care with the responsibility of the clinic owner
00:01:44.040 | to manage the affairs of the clinic in such a way
00:01:48.800 | that it remains financially viable.
00:01:50.920 | That is, remains in existence.
00:01:53.800 | It may be that you don't need to primarily talk
00:01:58.380 | in categories of care versus profit,
00:02:02.520 | but maybe in the categories of clinic existence
00:02:07.260 | and clinic care.
00:02:09.280 | In other words, perhaps the way to think of these two sides
00:02:13.440 | of the clinic's life is that there are two kinds of care,
00:02:18.440 | not care versus something else,
00:02:20.880 | but two kinds of care that one must attend to
00:02:25.600 | in order for patients to be helped.
00:02:28.520 | One is the immediate care of diagnosis and treatment
00:02:33.520 | for all the maladies that people come to the clinic with.
00:02:38.960 | And the other kind of care is to see to it
00:02:43.160 | that the very possibility of diagnosis and treatment exists,
00:02:47.100 | namely a clinic with doctors and resources
00:02:50.360 | that they require to do the healing work
00:02:53.200 | that they're called to do.
00:02:55.060 | These are really two forms of caring, aren't they?
00:02:57.880 | Now, admittedly, the one is more immediate
00:03:01.560 | and feels more like care because the doctor
00:03:04.240 | or the nurse is sitting face-to-face with a sick patient
00:03:08.600 | and talking about how healing might be pursued.
00:03:12.660 | But if there were no clinic to come to
00:03:16.740 | and no doctors and nurses and laboratory staff
00:03:19.680 | to follow through with, the diagnosis and the treatment
00:03:24.680 | wouldn't have any effect or they wouldn't even happen.
00:03:29.400 | So the more immediate care is dependent
00:03:33.060 | on the more general, broad, behind-the-scenes care,
00:03:37.600 | the business side of the clinic,
00:03:39.200 | which must take into account costs of rent
00:03:42.200 | and utilities and upkeep and sophisticated medical devices
00:03:46.400 | and receptionists and scheduling and insurance reports
00:03:49.960 | and computer support, et cetera, et cetera.
00:03:53.640 | One can feel why our friend would begin to feel submerged
00:03:57.960 | under that kind of demand,
00:03:59.920 | but they really are two essential forms of care giving,
00:04:04.920 | even if it's less direct in one way
00:04:08.940 | and more direct in another.
00:04:10.960 | If the clinic goes out of existence
00:04:12.660 | because of poor management, poor pricing structures,
00:04:16.560 | poor collections, poor planning for patient load,
00:04:21.400 | everyone suffers and care ceases.
00:04:25.100 | So let me say a word to the actual inner struggle
00:04:30.100 | the doctor is feeling as he wrestles
00:04:34.120 | with these two kinds of care.
00:04:35.840 | He says, quote, "Increasingly, I find my thoughts
00:04:41.040 | and efforts consumed by the profit-seeking aspects
00:04:45.540 | of running a business."
00:04:48.260 | Now, how many pastors, how many educators, teachers,
00:04:53.260 | how many leaders of, say, inner-city ministries
00:04:59.020 | have felt this very same sense of being consumed
00:05:03.060 | by the financial and structural demands
00:05:06.300 | that undergird a ministry?
00:05:08.300 | On the one hand, while they long to be doing
00:05:10.880 | face-to-face actual ministry or teaching or counseling,
00:05:15.480 | to people on the other hand, there's nothing unique,
00:05:19.000 | it seems to me, about a medical practice
00:05:22.360 | in that kind of struggle.
00:05:24.600 | This is true of churches, it's true of schools,
00:05:28.340 | it's true of all kinds of ministries.
00:05:31.080 | For example, a book was published some years ago
00:05:33.880 | by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne
00:05:37.100 | called "The Trellis and the Vine."
00:05:41.540 | The description of the point of the book goes like this.
00:05:45.120 | All Christian ministry, and you could say the same thing
00:05:48.120 | about a lot of secular service providers, I'm sure,
00:05:51.840 | all Christian ministry is a mixture of trellis and vine.
00:05:56.840 | There's vine work, the prayerful preaching,
00:06:01.860 | teaching of the word of God to see people converted,
00:06:04.780 | grow into maturity as disciples of Christ,
00:06:07.980 | and there's the trellis work,
00:06:10.500 | creating and maintaining the physical,
00:06:13.580 | organizational structures and programs
00:06:17.440 | that support the vine work and its growth.
00:06:22.440 | And then they ask, the authors ask,
00:06:25.660 | has trellis work taken over for you and your ministry?
00:06:30.860 | Has it begun to consume you?
00:06:33.000 | It does, they say, it does have the habit of doing that.
00:06:37.000 | Now in Acts chapter six,
00:06:39.200 | the apostles were about to be overwhelmed,
00:06:43.940 | consumed by the demands of trellis work,
00:06:47.820 | providing the personnel and structures
00:06:52.480 | for the distribution of the food among the widows
00:06:56.960 | when the apostles need to be giving themselves
00:06:59.860 | to the vine work of the word of God and prayer.
00:07:03.740 | And the remedy for that was the putting in place
00:07:07.660 | of gifted people who are really good at trellis work
00:07:12.660 | in order to free the apostles to do the vine work
00:07:16.380 | that they were called to do.
00:07:18.560 | I recall very personally when our church
00:07:22.060 | got to a certain size and I was about to be consumed,
00:07:27.300 | overwhelmed as the lead pastor,
00:07:30.220 | and we put in place for the first time
00:07:33.380 | in the history of the church,
00:07:35.540 | an executive pastor alongside me.
00:07:39.880 | And that resulted, I would say,
00:07:42.160 | in 20 more years of flourishing as a staff and church.
00:07:47.160 | And then eventually we put in place financial specialists
00:07:53.880 | who could handle all kinds of complex workings
00:07:56.200 | behind the scenes of a growing church and so on.
00:08:00.500 | All Christian ministry and even secular service providers,
00:08:05.500 | all of it is a mixture of trellis and vine.
00:08:11.960 | There's vine work, hands-on, face-to-face meeting
00:08:15.980 | of people's needs, and there's trellis work
00:08:19.580 | creating, maintaining the financial organizational
00:08:22.020 | structures that support the vine work.
00:08:25.720 | So maybe I could sum up my counsel
00:08:28.480 | to this beleaguered doctor with four statements.
00:08:33.480 | First, view both the trellis work and the vine work,
00:08:39.280 | the financial structural work and the diagnostic
00:08:43.880 | and treatment of patients face-to-face,
00:08:46.300 | view them as two kinds of love, two kinds of care.
00:08:52.920 | Second, put in place gifted people who are really good
00:08:57.920 | at the kind of business management your clinic requires
00:09:03.020 | in order to free up medical staff
00:09:06.700 | to do their more immediate care.
00:09:09.360 | This is right at the heart of what Peter was saying
00:09:12.680 | in 1 Peter 4:10, "As each has received a gift,
00:09:17.520 | "use it to serve one another as good stewards
00:09:20.620 | "of God's varied grace."
00:09:24.280 | The diversity of gifts for maintaining the viability
00:09:29.100 | of a clinic or a church or a school or ministry is crucial.
00:09:34.100 | Pray that God would lead really gifted people
00:09:40.080 | to do the kind of specialized tasks
00:09:43.380 | that a complicated clinic or business or ministry requires.
00:09:49.280 | Third, don't ever do evil that good may come.
00:09:54.280 | That's a quote from Romans 3, 8.
00:09:58.340 | That is, don't try to justify dishonest business practices
00:10:03.340 | because they will keep the clinic alive
00:10:07.940 | for the sake of love, for the sake of patients and employees.
00:10:12.140 | God will not honor the cutting of corners,
00:10:16.700 | the loss of integrity in order to do good.
00:10:21.260 | There's always a way to help people
00:10:24.300 | by doing the right thing.
00:10:27.000 | And finally, I would say God has promised,
00:10:31.480 | He really has, and He keeps this promise.
00:10:34.620 | In Philippians 4, 19, He has promised to meet all our needs
00:10:39.620 | according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
00:10:44.720 | Trust Him, trust Him to do that,
00:10:47.480 | and roll the burden that you feel
00:10:50.640 | for the complex side of this clinic.
00:10:53.560 | Roll that burden onto the Lord.
00:10:55.920 | George Mueller, who had to keep an infrastructure running
00:11:00.340 | to maintain thousands of orphans,
00:11:05.240 | used to say when people asked him about his peacefulness,
00:11:09.820 | I rolled 60 burdens onto the Lord in prayer this morning.
00:11:14.820 | I love that.
00:11:17.260 | I want to be like that.
00:11:18.940 | So God bless you for bearing the burden
00:11:23.040 | of a medical clinic that serves both patients and employees,
00:11:28.040 | both by its immediate medical care
00:11:30.860 | and by its trellis-like financial viability.
00:11:36.340 | May God give you the wisdom and the grace
00:11:40.400 | to put the people and the structures in place
00:11:44.100 | that enable you to do what you love to do,
00:11:47.840 | and so find everybody flourishing in that great work.
00:11:52.840 | Amen.
00:11:54.180 | Yeah, thank you, Pastor John.
00:11:55.480 | You speak from a lot of years in leadership.
00:11:58.800 | I appreciate it.
00:11:59.920 | And thank you for joining us today.
00:12:01.280 | You can ask a question of your own,
00:12:02.840 | search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast,
00:12:05.180 | all at askpastorjohn.com.
00:12:07.880 | On Friday of last week in APJ 1869,
00:12:12.480 | we looked at the terrible things that Satan can do,
00:12:15.380 | do even to us as believers.
00:12:18.280 | Satan brings physical suffering.
00:12:20.480 | He's behind much sickness.
00:12:23.200 | And we know Satan brought a thorn of physical pain
00:12:25.840 | into Paul's life.
00:12:27.720 | Satan can even throw Christians into prison.
00:12:30.360 | Satan is no joke.
00:12:32.980 | And yet, there's only one deadly,
00:12:36.640 | finally destructive weapon in the artillery of Satan.
00:12:41.120 | Only one lethal weapon he can wield over you and over me.
00:12:46.120 | Pastor John will explain what that is on Wednesday.
00:12:50.420 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:51.520 | We'll see you next time.
00:12:52.720 | (upbeat music)
00:12:55.300 | (upbeat music)
00:12:57.880 | [BLANK_AUDIO]