Deon K. Johnson: As America marks its 250th year, the church has a crucial role to play in accurately telling the nation’s story (long version)

Fifteen-minute read. A shorter version of this interview is also available. 

As an 11-year-old in Barbados, Deon K. Johnson — now the Rt. Rev. Deon K. Johnson — felt drawn to a sacramental life.

“Our parish church was always open, and it was just down the street from my school, so I was that kid after school who would find myself in the church standing behind the altar and acting what I saw on Sunday morning, so it kind of began there,” Johnson said.

A sense of call solidified during the process of confirmation, but Johnson still resisted for years, only to be encouraged forward by a village of advisers.

Since becoming the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri during COVID, Johnson’s ministry has come to include a practice of writing daily prayers that he shares through social media. And, as the diocese’s first bishop who is Black, openly gay and an immigrant, he has recently spoken publicly, including with NPR, about a traumatic year for his family. In 2024, his husband, who was born in Mexico but came to the U.S. as a young child, was separated from Johnson and their son and daughter as part of the federal immigration crackdown.

Johnson spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne about his ministry, life and family, as well as the crucial role the church can play as America’s 250th birthday is observed. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: Would you tell us about your call story?

Deon K. Johnson: Confirmation in Barbados takes about a year, because what they really want you to do is to make sure that this is what you’re committing yourself to but [also] to find out what your place in ministry looks like.

The priest at the time insisted that we had to go and be engaged in every single ministry of the church, because he really wanted us to figure out, Where’s your place in this faith community? I was an impetuous child that looked at them and said, “I want your job.” But in many ways, I also resisted answering this call.

It’s biblical in some ways. God calls, we say, “Yeah, yeah, not me,” and God wins.

That’s what’s happened in my life. I immigrated to the United States when I was about 14 and continued to just say, “Hey, church is important to me, but I’ll go get a job out in the world, and at some point I will think about this whole ordination thing.”

I went off to college, and it was there that I finally began to come out to myself. At that time in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we had controversy going on around banning gay marriage and everything, and the church was also continuing to wrestle with all of that.

I said to myself, “Surely this church does not want me.” Yet my priest at the time kept saying to me, “You need to consider going to seminary. I think that God’s calling you to something.” And I kept saying to her, “Thank you, but if God wants me to do this, God will figure it out.”

Her way of letting God figure it out is that she talked to the bishop, and she set up an appointment for me and told me, “Oh, by the way, you’re meeting with the bishop next Wednesday.”

In the back of my mind, I thought, “He’s going to say no, and I’ll just continue with how things are going.”

Strangely enough, I get to that meeting, and he said, “I see a calling.”

I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

F&L: Still trying to talk yourself out of this.

DKJ: I kept trying to talk myself out of it, every step, and at every step someone showed up and said to me, “No, this is what you need to be doing.”

I developed this practice that if people say the same thing to me independently three times, I need to pay closer attention to it. That has served me well throughout my ministry and throughout my life.

When it came time for ordination, I kept going, “OK, God, what do you want? You tell me.” And at every step people have stepped in and said to me, “We really see this in you.” Even when I fight it, they’re able to see it sometimes.

The same thing is true when I became a bishop. There’s a really funny story about allowing my name to go forward to be bishop. I had been in a previous search, and I had said to myself, “Yeah, no, I don’t want to go through that process ever again.”

[Then] one of my friends called me up and said, “Have you seen the profile for the diocese in Missouri?” Another calls me up and says, “Have you looked at Missouri?” I said, “I looked at it. The deadline is too soon. I do not have time to write the essays and fill out the application, because it’s a tedious process. Maybe if they extend the deadline.”

The next week she calls me up and says, “I’m holding you to what you said. Look online. They just extended the deadline until the end of the month.”

I filled out the application, sent all the things in, and this is how it ended. The gift is I’ve had people who at every step have said to me, “You need to respond to this.” It was ironic, coming from a village [in Barbados]; in the village, you think of what’s best for the community rather than what’s just best for me. It really is a community who discerns. It takes a community — it takes a village — to help us actually discern our call, especially when we’re trying, like Jonah, to run away from our call.

F&L: Your family has a history of immigration. You are from Barbados; your husband is from Mexico. You all have gone through a time of trial in this moment of a crackdown on people who have come here as immigrants. Can you talk about your family’s experience?

DKJ: This is a very difficult season no matter where you come from. It is focused on folks coming from the Latin American, Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s affecting everybody.

I am an immigrant, my parents are immigrants, I’m married to an immigrant, and this is our lived reality. With my husband, I have to repeat this often: We were doing everything right. He was brought here as a child, he was approved for DACA, was working, doing all the things, aspiring to that American dream.

We got married, and we filled out all the paperwork. I have advanced degrees, and I can barely get through figuring out the paperwork in English. We’ve done all the paperwork, and everything was filed, and we got a letter saying that we needed to go to Juárez in Mexico for our interview at the U.S. Consulate.

We went to the interview, and the interviewer said to my husband, “You’ve not lived in Mexico for a very long time. I think you need to spend some time there. You may not be going to the United States for a year.”

[Previously] everything had been approved. All of his background checks and everything said, “Here is a model person with children, family, trying to do all the right things.”

The response was, “You’re going to have to stay here for a year.”

We had to quickly figure out going from two incomes to one, [from] having one household to two, taking care of kids, distance. We had to try to figure out how to navigate all of that.

I recognized the privilege that I had in being able to afford to do two households, to be able to get on a plane and all that. A lot of our immigrant siblings don’t have that privilege. There was a lady behind us [at the consulate] from Oklahoma who had driven through a snowstorm to go for her interview, had just had a baby months earlier, and who was told, “You have to stay in Mexico for three years.” Can you imagine having a newborn that you’re not going to see until that baby is three years old? This is how our system is working.

It was a very difficult year for both of us, him being in a place where he had never lived for a significant portion of his life and us on the other side trying to navigate.

At the end of the year, he had to do all of the things [at the consulate] over again. The person who interviewed him said, “Why did you take a year to come for your interview?” He said, “Your colleague told me that I had to stay in the country for a year.” She looked at all of this paperwork and said, “That makes no sense.”

I have to keep emphasizing, I recognize the privilege that I have in being able to do what we did. I think often of folks who don’t have that privilege, whose spouse or son, daughter, brother, sister is in a country where a lot of them have no connection. What’s worse is the family that’s left behind isn’t able to actually go and spend time with those people who have been detained or deported. It was and continues to be something that I’ve been passionate and feel strongly about, just because this isn’t who we should be as a nation.

F&L: You had shared this story within the diocese as it was happening, but it was not widely known.

DKJ: I shared with the clergy. I had to go visit all the congregations of the diocese, and I still have to live out my vocation. I can’t stop being bishop for a year. I shared it with the clergy and with the instructions, “I ask you to pray for us. Please do not share this publicly.”

I didn’t want to put my husband in jeopardy of any kind during that time, and I also didn’t want to show up [and] the whole congregation to be, “Oh, we’re so sorry,” to kind of reignite the whole thing. It was helpful to me to have the clergy know but not share with everybody else. It was quasi-public, but not quite [public].

F&L: Since it has become more public, what has been the response?

DKJ: I’ve had people who reached out to both of us, sharing similar stories, or saying, “I didn’t quite understand that this is how the system works.”

I had somebody send me a message on social media saying, “If you all had just followed the process, none of this would have happened.” I had to respond by saying, “Do you honestly think that as a bishop I’m going to break the law to try to make this happen? Think about what you’re saying.”

I unfortunately read some of the comments on the NPR story, and some people [said], “They were just trying to game the system.” It’s kind of like I get the narrative that you want this to be, but the reality is very different than what you expect, not only the financial cost to families having to go through green card processes but the emotional toll that it takes.

We are still living with, if he is out driving somewhere, the possibility that he could just be picked up for no other reason than having a broken taillight or a flat tire or something. Who knows? That’s just the reality of living in this season in the life of this nation.

F&L: The way I became aware of your ministry is the daily prayers you write and share on social media. Could you talk about those?

DKJ: I became a bishop in the middle of COVID. I decided, “Let me just put out a prayer in the morning,” and I would pull a hymn or something that was meaningful to me or gave me comfort, just as a way of saying to people, “Look, this is happening, but we can still be deeply grounded.”

Every morning I’d start off finding a prayer from somewhere and just putting it out. Then I said, “This isn’t too bad. Let’s see if I can write a prayer occasionally.” So, I started writing. Occasionally, I would put out one or two among the others, and people were responding to the ones that I wrote more than the ones I was finding and sharing.

It continued to evolve, and I thought, “I’m just going to do this through COVID. I will just continue to write a prayer.” Once COVID is behind us, I would stop and continue doing the things that I was doing.

COVID came to an end, and I stopped for about a month. My inbox got flooded by people, “We didn’t get any prayer. We’re looking forward to your prayer.”

It now has become a part of my daily spiritual practice. A lot of the times the prayer that I’m writing is the prayer that I need to hear or the prayer that I need to be praying.

People will say to me, “Do you sit down and plan out a month’s worth of prayers or something like that?” Nope. Part of my routine has been getting up in the morning to get our son out to school. In the quiet between waking him up and him going to get dressed, I would sit, read the news, and something — like a word, a phrase, an image, something [while] reading the news or staring outside, looking out the window — would spark a prayer. That just continued.

I was on vacation last week, for instance, and we decided to go on a cruise, so I suspect that this week’s set of prayers is going to have a lot of water imagery. The prayer this morning was about a lighthouse because we sailed past a lighthouse. They’re whatever’s happening, sometimes what I’m feeling in response to what’s going on.

I love to write, so it’s a way for me to continue to write, to do something creative, because a lot of my time as a bishop is so challenging. [This is] some time to have a creative outlet. It has become now a foundational part of my own spirituality to write these prayers in the morning. It feels odd when I don’t.

There are seasons when the prayer is literally “Oh God, get me through this day.” And I recognize sometimes that if I’m praying that, it’s giving other people permission to pray the same thing.

Or — we’re seeing some terrible things happen. Being able to name those things in prayer and to live in that space of not knowing how to respond is prayer unto itself. I’m hoping that, because my prayers feel real in many ways, that they give people permission to be just real with God.

F&L: We are in a fraught season as the nation marks 250 years. As you consider past, present, future, the experiences of so many, what would your message be to the church in the most expansive sense?

DKJ: I think the message for the church is that we have to be the keepers of the story. In a season where we’re attempting to erase stories or to tell the stories, as the old people say, “from a slant,” I think the church’s role, especially as we look at 250 years of the American experiment, is to be the keeper of the stories, to tell the parts of the story that are not being told.

We hear of all the things that have happened in the last 250 years, going all the way from, even earlier, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to yesterday. There’s a lot that has happened, and unless we are able to reckon with both the past and the present, it dims the light for the future. I think the church is called into telling the story but also into naming.

In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church, the priest or the layperson, whoever was getting ready to baptize a baby, would lean into the godparents and say, “Name this child.”

It wasn’t just about getting the name; it was about God naming and claiming that child by name, saying, “This person belongs to God.”

In some sense, I think that is part of the role of the church right now; we have to name and claim the stories of those who are being pushed to the side. We have to be the keepers of those stories, of our Native American siblings who were displaced through genocide in our nation. We have to tell the stories of slavery and its atrocity and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and segregation. We have to tell those full stories and not just the cleaned-up versions that make it into textbooks.

I’m a firm believer that those individual stories really do make a difference in getting people to recognize that this isn’t about some event that happened. These are real people’s lives.

I’ve been doing some research on my ancestors, which, for most people of African descent who came to this country or to the Caribbean islands, etc., through enslavement, there is very little [documentation]. But the church records tell stories.

One of the stories that I found is I have a sixth-generation great-grandmother whose name was Eliza Hutchinson, who was enslaved. She went to the church to have her daughter baptized. Mind you, there was no father listed on the certificate; maybe that was the master, but she went to have her daughter baptized.

It’s the vital statistics; you’ve got the name, age, occupation, all the things, but in the margins the priest wrote, “Beautiful singing voice.” I know nothing of Eliza Hutchinson except that she had a beautiful voice to sing, but just that little snippet of my history, knowing that that’s the legacy that she had left fills out the story of what slavery was. That’s why I said that I think that the church is called to name and tell the story, especially in this season.

I think it’s the one place where we can help move this society closer to the dream of God. Unless we tell the truth about our past, we will always be entering into the future without having a full vision.

We have to name and know the trauma that slavery had both on the slaves and the enslaver. Name the trauma that our Native American siblings endured genocide. Call it genocide. When we say, “the displacement or the removal” — let’s name the thing. Let’s stop trying to make this sound as though it was, “Oh, they came and just simply moved a tent community.” There was intentional destruction and death, but until we actually are able as a nation to name those places, to recognize that the good pieces — and the bad pieces — of our history are what make us who we are, we will always be telling and living out only a part of the American dream.

F&L: Do you have any idea what your prayer on the Fourth of July will be?

DKJ: No. That was one I have been thinking about. I try to do a little bit of a reflection on the big High Holy Days. I have some little threads, but I have not woven them together yet. But I think it’s going to center something around the lines of what divides us does not define us.

I’ve been seeing the 250th anniversary all over the place, and I keep hearing about the division. I keep reminding myself, “The things that divide us really don’t define us.” If we look past our division, we are all compassionate. We all want mercy. We all want caring. We want to be seen. We want to know that our lives matter.

I think that those folks who just … Democrats that hate Republicans and Republicans who hate Democrats and independents who hate whoever they want, then we are letting the things that divide us define us, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Someone said America is a dream, and we get to shape what that dream looks like, if we can get back to the basics of recognizing [that] the things that keep us apart really do not define who we are as a people or as a nation. So, look for that line in one of the prayers.

The last piece that I would add to all of what we’ve talked about today, as someone who came to this country from another culture, [is] a recognition that we all come from someplace else. In God’s creative diversity, we make it work, if we can see past our own shortsightedness.

When people mention how they are sleeping, I perk up. They may be about to reveal something significant about their level of stress.

Yes, this could sound creepy. Inquiring about sleep habits is not part of my getting-to-know-you routine. I have been conducting interviews for several jobs lately. I don’t ask candidates how they’re resting.

When extending hospitality with event participants or guests in my home, however, I do ask. They might raise a concern about the environment — temperature or noise — that I can address. Most often, I congratulate those who are resting well and commiserate with those who are tossing and turning.

Outside of hosting and traveling, conversation about sleep is uncommon. But when the topic does come up, I start listening closely. I lean in further if people mention dreams. I am not a physician or a therapist, but when resting and dreaming come up, I sense that people are offering me a deeper glimpse into their lives.

Sleep patterns and dream narratives can reveal the depth of tension that a person is experiencing. A comment about sleep can reflect deeply troubling stress at home or work or church or in the neighborhood. It is a signal that I should be more attentive.

If I am the person’s pastor, I likely will ask questions about whom that person trusts to share dreams with.

If someone in the systems I lead is talking about disrupted sleep, I don’t try to interpret what is happening in that person’s soul. When my role is team leader, I listen for clues of the stress the person is experiencing. I explore what conditions are amplifying it.

If work is playing a role, I might offer suggestions on navigating the stress or offer to intervene in the situation. When I have leadership responsibility for the overall system, I consider the possible effect of what’s happening on everyone in the system, not just on the person speaking with me.

What clues do you monitor to gauge the level of stress in people in your areas of responsibility? Do you pay attention to when people are responding to emails or whether they’re accepting appointments during scheduled vacations? Do you notice when people don’t turn on their cameras in video conferences or are continually checking messages during meetings?

When you pick up signs of stress, what can you as a leader do? Sometimes, I am a primary cause of the stress. Change is stressful, but it also can be necessary. Seldom can I make the stress go away. But I can always listen.

If a person is sharing about stress, I try to listen carefully and deeply. I do my best not to defend the organization or diminish the person’s experience. I acknowledge the difficulty of the situation.

If the conversation is mostly about work stress, I might point out factors that the person is not considering. I might apologize for the effect on the person. I might pledge to make changes. I might acknowledge the challenges and indicate that I don’t see improvement coming anytime soon.

Later, I will step back to examine the situation. I will listen to others. What is stressing the team? What is stressing me? How might those stresses be acknowledged or mitigated for everyone?

I don’t know of any tension-free places to live or work. Paying attention when people are sharing about the intensity of their stress is not the same as accepting responsibility for fixing it. People under stress may not want to surrender their agency; they may just be looking for acknowledgment. They may want to feel less alone. They may not know what they want.

Responding to the stress in people’s lives is balanced by an organization’s mission and the responsibility to follow through with its commitments and priorities. Leaders are responsible both for the mission of the organization and for the morale of the people. The same actions rarely achieve progress on both mission and morale. In fact, aiming for progress on both with the same actions might result in progress for neither. Leaders need to have in mind a mix of actions. When signs and symptoms of stress appear, leaders should consider putting more energy into the morale-lifting actions that are likely to alleviate the stress.

In the stories in Scripture, Jesus displayed a finely tuned sensibility to the stress in people’s lives — from the death of a loved one to not catching enough fish to feed the family. He also challenged religious leaders to pay more attention to God’s purposes. Jesus was not leading an organization, but he was on a mission. He tended to people while making progress toward Jerusalem. The stories that we have indicate that he knew how to help people take their next faithful steps in living.

In a world where everyone is carrying plenty of burdens, I recognize that I cannot work solely on my task list but must listen carefully to the stresses behind the stories that colleagues and constituents share. Listening in itself is not enough, but without it, I will not appreciate what is happening and consider adjustments that I can make.

How are you sleeping? How are your colleagues sleeping? How are your participants and constituents sleeping? What clues might we pick up by paying attention, and how can we respond?

On a trip to celebrate a friend’s installation as president of one of the world’s most influential Protestant seminaries, I experienced a master class for those who are beginning a ministry assignment.

David E. Goatley is the sixth president of the 75-year-old Fuller Theological Seminary, which has its main campus in Pasadena, California. I had already witnessed David’s exceptional leadership over two decades at Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society. More recently, I had a front-row seat as he served at Duke Divinity School in multiple leadership roles under three deans, including recruiting faculty and inspiring students as director of the Office of Black Church Studies and as academic dean. I was expecting to learn something from both him and Fuller at his installation on Jan. 21. They did not disappoint.

In the 20th century, some experts advised that new leaders not make any changes in the first year; introducing the peculiarities of a new leader would bring change all by itself. In this approach, the new leader should not intentionally introduce additional changes while learning the organization, the community and all the personalities.

Almost equally common guidance from the same era advised that new leaders make as many changes as possible in the first year, treating it as a grace period, with no expectation of knowing history, tradition or past practice. Enacting a version of “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” the new leader, if confronted, could say, “I had no idea.”

Both approaches can work. The key to positive influence is not a particular strategy itself but how it addresses the needs of the institution at the time of transition. For example, if the institution is stuck in the past, then change is likely essential to moving forward. If the institution’s people are fearful, then building trust through relationships might be best accomplished with minimal change.

The best strategy does not come from the leader’s preference as much as it does from the opportunities and challenges facing the institution.

David takes the helm of a flagship seminary whose faculty and graduates have influence across the globe. Yet these are challenging times for nearly every school and for most congregations; standing at the intersection of academy and church, Fuller is thus buffeted on all sides.

Significantly, David is a newcomer to Fuller Seminary. Unlike his predecessors, he is not a graduate, faculty member or founder of the school. Much of the last 30 years he has spent traveling the globe with bases of operations on the East Coast of the United States. As a Black man, David is the first person of color to lead Fuller. In so many ways, he has embodied change from the moment he was elected.

The installation of a president often occurs months after the president has begun work. The associated pageantry involves so much coordination and support that many, many preparatory meetings are required. Yet I noted that Fuller chose to install David about three weeks after he started at the school. Such speed signaled something, but what?

When I arrived in Pasadena for my first visit to the campus, everything was carefully prepared. I had no sense that anything had been rushed. The smallest details were curated to communicate meaning. For example, the location of the ceremony was a church. That congregation had hosted the first class meetings of Fuller Seminary 75 years ago, in their kindergarten rooms. There had been a switch at the last minute from a building the school had prepared because of a delay in permits from the city. The congregation has held a significant place in the school’s life ever since.

The installation service was in a beautiful sanctuary that was well equipped to livestream the service to Fuller’s many constituents. Both the congregation and the school have matured and expanded over three-quarters of a century.

The service included expressions of faith and culture that make up the diversity of the Fuller community. Every move was filled with beauty and meaning.

David’s presence and words were most notable to me. He impressively embraced Fuller’s history and brought it to the present moment. In his address, he quoted from speeches given by all five of his predecessors, in several cases from their installation addresses. Rhetorically, he drew a through line from the commitments of all the presidents to his own priorities.

Doing such historical work is not very popular these days. But David was demonstrating that in the midst of a changing guard and the emergence of new leadership, he respected the past even as he was urging the community forward.

Some leaders believe that an institution’s history starts anew when they arrive. David demonstrated the art of learning the history so well that its telling can point to the future. He spoke the truth about the history in a way that was charitable and future-oriented.

Yet even as he named and honored history, he signaled a fast pace. The quick installation launched a tour across the country in which David met alumni and donors. Leaders often need to signal enthusiasm for the work by picking up the pace in the first few months. The goal is to connect with and bring energy to the system. Once connections are made, the leader can slow to a more sustainable rate.

I have found that the aftermath of lockdowns and social distancing has made many aspects of leadership more difficult. Shaping culture in an organization requires new strategies. At Fuller Theological Seminary, I witnessed an inspiring mix of classic tactics with a freshness and vitality that held promise for shaping culture. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from Fuller. God be with them and all those who are beginning ministry together in this season.

“Will I have a job in five years?”

“What will happen to this ministry in the long term?”

I hear leaders worrying about long-term viability, uncertain about how to plan for it.

Beyond wringing hands, some are experimenting by launching a new degree, starting a new worship service or selling a new curriculum. Others are begging donors for more financial support to cover expenses or provide scholarships to reduce fees. A few are exploring mergers with like-minded organizations to consolidate costs and expand ministry work.

Viability is tied to the services offered, the income generated and the related expenses carefully managed.

In a startup or turnaround phase, employees are asked to invest long work hours and offer their best creatively. When successful, such efforts generate more income and keep expenses low. This works for a season but is nearly impossible to maintain for the long haul. People wear down and eventually burn out.

At some point, we have to pay attention to the organizational capacities that undergird a ministry — things like the pay and benefits offered to employees; the hours of work expected; the methods of communication to constituents, donors and other stakeholders; the systems that store, manage and access data; and the skills needed by the board and the staff to operate year after year.

We know that such things are important. However, in an extended period of transition and related uncertainty, we often push off strategic decisions in order to accomplish the urgent. The donors, board members and other stakeholders can lose sight of the time and money required to keep the ministry functioning in healthy ways. The employees and volunteers grow so accustomed to working in overdrive that they may not even point out these longer-term needs.

Over and over again, I meet ministry leaders who have sacrificed the time and money necessary to provide for themselves and their families for the sake of launching and maintaining a ministry. They depend on pay and benefits provided by spouses and partners. They take risks with inadequate health care or borrowed housing.

They can make these choices, but should donors turn a blind eye to such sacrifices? Do those of us who have influence over resources question the decisions and their consequences for the people involved? Do we recognize the problems inherent in unsustainably low salaries and expenses?

Practically speaking, higher expenses require more revenue. Increasing revenue has consequences. For many ministries, the main sources of revenue, and the consequences of dependency on them, include the following:

• Fees paid by those served. Fee-based ministry serves those who have money and are willing to spend it. Even modest fees can exclude some groups from the services offered.
• Sponsor fees paid by those who have money in order to provide a service for those who don’t. Sponsors often determine whom the ministry serves. Sponsors also often have stipulations about how the work is done.
• Contributions from supporters of the ministry. Those who contribute again and again want to know the impact the ministry is making and how their donations are spent. Developing the initial connection that leads to recurring gifts requires a deep commitment on both sides. Ongoing fundraising often becomes a substantial part of the ministry’s work.
• Grants, usually one-time gifts for specific projects. Grants typically require reports to the grantors and are seldom renewed more than one time; the general expectation is that grants are a way to fund startup costs or launch experiments. With some notable exceptions, like government grants, ongoing grant funding is unlikely.

Occasionally, a ministry will have assets like property or endowments that can generate revenue. Such assets often take years to acquire as well as skills to manage.

The wisdom from 20th-century nonprofit work was that if 20% of an organization’s income comes from a single external source — a person or organization — then the organization is dependent on staying in alignment with that source’s expectations. Perhaps the percentage is different for your organization, but if the loss of a single source of income would require you to make significant strategic changes, then your organization is dependent. The governance structure might indicate independence, but the financial statement does not. For the sake of clear expectations, the board, staff and volunteers need to know the influence of any single funder on the ministry.

Another factor related to viability (and connected to revenue) is often labeled scale. What quantity of services can we provide that are both affordable and of good quality? This might be the number of congregations a consultant can serve or the number of people in a learning experience. Congregations have to discern the number of staff that can be adequately paid and what those staff members can accomplish. The questions about scale are specific to each organization, but the concern is across the board.

Our recent experiences with quarantines have changed the scale questions in so many different industries. For example, who knows now how much office space a business needs? Each business answers that question differently. Airlines are now cutting and adding flights continually to adjust to changing passenger needs while doing their best to fill up every flight. Congregations can no longer rely on counting the average in-person worship attendance as an indicator of staffing and services.

While capacities, revenue and expenses, and the scale of services are the most obvious questions to explore, the only way to get clear about long-term viability is to get clear about your organization’s mission and vision, along with your part in that mission.

In our work, we often use five questions based on the ideas of business theorist Roger Martin and former Proctor & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley to develop a strategy. These questions function as a cascade, the answer to each in turn providing structure for the one that follows.

• Why? What is the deepest aspiration?
• Where and with whom are we serving/transforming?
• How will we serve? What activities are needed?
• What capacities do we need to do “it”?
• What management systems are required to ensure that the capacities are in place?

If your organization gets stuck on any of the questions, back up and review the responses to the earlier questions. What has changed? How should that change affect answers to the other questions?

Too often, ministries stop after answering the third question. But when we focus on the long term, we also have to address questions four and five, which take us back to capacities. If boards and donors don’t encourage and support ministries in addressing these questions, then the employees have to answer them out of their own resources. That leads to exhaustion. Insisting that these questions be addressed is a great gift that donors and other stakeholders can provide.

Questions about capacities, revenue and scale are difficult, but those who care about our ministries must do our part to raise them with a view to the organization’s mission and vision. Long-term viability is important to all of us.