Authentic and Aspirational Core Values

As I was doing research for the series on our core values, I read about a church that named one of their core values as being outreach. As they were looking for a new pastor, since they weren’t Methodists, they named that as one of the core things they wanted their new pastor to do: Help them welcome new people and grow. The pastor they choose said that he was passionate about reaching new people and was excited that they wanted to do the same thing.

When the new pastor got to the church he began making changes to help the church reach more people. It started with some changes in worship, then to the leadership, then to policies and procedures, and their faith development activities, and the changes worked. New people started coming, and staying, and the church was growing. And then reality struck. The members who had been there before realized that these new people were different. And even worse, they liked the changes that had been made and wanted to make even more!

And that’s when the truth emerged. They said they wanted to grow, but what they really wanted was for everything to stay exactly as it had been before, when, honestly, they weren’t growing, and get new people. They wanted new people, but only if the new people would change and become like everyone who was there before. They had articulated a value of outreach, but what they said and what they actually wanted was not the same thing. Their articulated value was disconnected from their reality.

There are two different types of core values: authentic and aspirational. Authentic core values are the ones we live every day, even if we don’t recognize them, and they are hard to change. That means we may also have core values that are negative, or that we do things that are different from whom we want to be. That could then lead us to create aspirational core values, values that state who we want to be, or what we want to be true, and begin to strive to make those a reality.

In the church above, outreach turned out to be an aspirational core value, but their true core value was safety and identity of the group. When their authentic value conflicted with their aspirational value, they wanted to stick to who they truly were and abandon outreach.  Aspirational values are great and important because they can cause us to change, if we are willing to do it. But authentic values are more often what drive us.

It’s also possible to have values that are both authentic and aspirational, and I think/hope that is what our core values represent. The One Board even had this conversation when we were naming them last year. For example, one of our values is that of being prayerful. I know there are some dedicated prayers in this congregation, who have that as one of their spiritual gifts, and I also know that there are some who rarely pray. We also do a good job of bathing a lot of things in prayer, but not everything. And so we are both aspirational and authentic in that value. 

We have also set an expectation that everyone will pray at least once a day, and as we approach making that a reality, I would expect that we will increase our expectation, and so then it becomes more aspirational again. And I think that is true for all of our values. These are not static things that have no movement. We should always be pushing to be better in all of them because there is always room for growth, or as John Wesley would say, we are moving on to perfection.

So, as we complete our series this Sunday, I hope that together we will hold these core values as being authentic to whom we truly are, and also as aspirational as to whom we want to become.