Siburt Institute Values – and You!
Every week, in our engagement with congregations, Siburt Institute staff and consultants are in dozens of conversations with church leaders and ministers. Those conversations may be with a search committee looking for a new minister, ministers who are seeking a new church to serve, an elder group looking for advice and counsel, a staff minister looking for resources, or a preacher who is experiencing burnout. What serves the Siburt team in all those interactions is our guiding values. Those guiding values shape the programs we develop, the initiatives that we offer, and most importantly, every conversation we have.
And it is deeper than that: our values emerge from our commitment to faithfully embody the partnership in Jesus’s ministry to the Father by the Holy Spirit for the sake of the church’s witness to the world. We understand that our work emerges from our own calling to participate in God’s reconciling ministry in the world. What centers our work are a set of values. Though our work is distinctive in terms of our care and commitment to church leaders, these values serve well for all church leaders in their ministry to their congregations. So I want to name these Siburt Institute values for you in the hope that they might be useful as you imagine your calling.
The seven Siburt Institute values are:
Hope: Since God is active and at work, leaders in thriving churches embrace hope as a way of living out leadership.
Gospel: The gospel of Jesus Christ means that God is present and active in the church and in the world. Leaders look for and respond to God’s action.
Mission: From the conviction that God is on mission in the world, and that God has a preferred future for every congregation, leaders seek to participate in God’s mission in their local contexts.
Relationality: Since the Triune God models relationality and community, leaders in thriving churches value community and attend to a broad range of voices in the community.
Church: Because congregations are manifestations of the Body of Christ, and all members are endowed by the Holy Spirit with gifts for the edification of the church, leaders value community, attend to a broad range of voices in the community, and seek to draw younger generations and persons from the margins into their work in the Kingdom
Traditioned Innovation: Leaders recognize that imagining the future requires the best parts of a congregation’s past. To embrace innovation, leaders must blend the old and new.
Engaging Leadership: Leaders engage prayer, engage in discernment, and engage others for ministry. Theological imagination, surprise, and curiosity are important tasks for leaders.
The first five values—hope, gospel, mission, relationality, and church—are basic theological convictions that flow out of God’s being and doing in the world. In other words, the Triune God is constantly showing up in the world and is pursuing God’s mission utilizing local congregations to bear witness. This reality, God’s action, brings hope. Hope is the engine of Christian communities. The sixth and seventh values—traditioned innovation and engaging leadership—reflect the necessary consequence of God’s presence. If God is present and at work, then it is natural to believe that newness will also be present. And if God is present, then faithful leaders will prayerfully and attentively pay attention to what God is doing. Holding a curious and open stance, leadership will exercise a hopeful and imaginative stance to what lies ahead.
I share these values for two reasons. First, I want you to know what shapes our work in the Siburt Institute as we seek to be faithful to God’s call. These values are what you will experience when you read our material, come to our programs and initiatives, or reach out to us with your questions.
Second, I share these values because you, too, are seeking to be faithful to God’s call in your context. And I suspect that most of these values speak well to what you yourselves know are the hallmarks of leadership when we understand that God is actually the leader and God is on the job doing what God does best—restoring the world!
Blessings in your ministry!
