The Monday Morning Debrief: The Challenger Tragedy & Ministry

I remember it very clearly listening on the radio.  My twin brother and I just turned 11 and we were riding home from our birthday party at the ice-rink with all our friends when my mom turned on the radio of our old 1985 Volkswagon Vanagan (Oh yeah, do you remember those beauties).  They were talking about the explosion on the Challenger.  We all just sat there and listened in disbelief that the space shuttle exploded.  Psychologists call it “flashbulb memory” when you experience a monumental event in your life or history.  It is at that time that you can remember exactly where you were, what you were doing and who you were with.  Another example of this is for the people who were alive when JFK was assassinate.  Ask any of them and most of them will be able to recall exactly what they were doing when they first heard the news.  The Challenger tragedy is one of my flashbulb memories in life.

Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the Challenger explosion and the AP did a 2 minute report on the lessons learned from the Challenger Tragedy.

According to this AP report (thanks for the clip AP!), a key lessoned learned from this tragedy was Communication.  A lot of the “lower level” people knew there was a problem but it didn’t get to the upper level management.  And because of the communication gap, a tragedy happened that probably could have been avoided.  If you recall, even after the 9/11 tragedy, one of the major criticisms was that there was a huge communication gap between all the intelligence agencies.  That is why the created the Department of Homeland Security.

So how does this apply ministry?  Just like this incident, communication is a key in ministry that can sometimes be broken.  For instance:

• as a minister you do not communicate enough to the people you are ministering to so they never really know what is going on in the program
• the communication flow from you, the head leader, to the volunteer leaders or support team can sometime be out of sync (i.e., they are not getting the appropriate information that will make them effective in ministry)
• the communication between you and your superior is lacking and you two are not on the same page in the direction of the ministry long term.  With this causes unnecessary stress and tension.

Making sure there are no gaps in communication is very important.  You can have the best program in the world, but if no one knows what you are doing and even why you are doing it, no one is going to show up.  It is vital to the health of the ministry that you communicate and that you use the many different forms of it to get your information out to the people – personal (telephone, leadership team meetings, face-to-tace), electronic (email, Facebook, websites, text) and paper (fliers, posters, ads in the newspapers).

With this in mind, TAKE A MINUTE and debrief this Monday morning on how you are doing with communicating to those around you.  Are they getting the necessary information in order to make your ministry as effective as possible?  If not, what changes need to take place.  If you are doing a good job with it, post a comment telling us what you are doing to communicate as well as you are so others can learn and benefit from that.