{"id":7069,"date":"2026-08-03T19:35:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T19:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/?p=7069"},"modified":"2026-08-05T15:49:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T15:49:17","slug":"by-their-fruit-human-performance-improvement-as-the-shared-labor-of-church-and-workplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/by-their-fruit-human-performance-improvement-as-the-shared-labor-of-church-and-workplace\/","title":{"rendered":"By Their Fruit: Human Performance Improvement as the Shared Labor of Church and Workplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

[1] We like to imagine greed as the key to success in business: the CEO must be strong and decisive, must move fast and break things, and above all must turn a profit. But success is like holding a fish. Grip it too hard and it shoots out of your grasp. When businesses fail, it is often because their people are failing. It is a common misconception, especially among leaders, that employees are just along for the ride. In truth, businesses find more success when they commit to the success of all their employees, especially their lowest-paid employees.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

[2] Human performance improvement and religion are usually treated as two different worlds, the first belonging to organizations\u2014mostly profit-driven corporations\u2014and the second to the sanctuary. My goal here is not to condemn profit as a goal, but to offer another goal as well.\u00a0 Jesus offered a better test for judging any enterprise: we will know them by their fruits, for \u201cevery good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit\u201d (Matt. 7:16-18).[2]<\/a> The fruits, in this case, are the myriad of people who depend on these organizations for both their physical and spiritual livelihoods. When we find success in our organizations, the people in them thrive in every way.<\/p>\n

[3] The work of human performance improvement and the Christian\u2019s daily work of growth and service to the neighbor are connected to our human vocations: masks through which their divinity reveals itself in our world. If we can embrace that view, that we are all priests in service to our neighbors, we can improve the performance of our organizations, strengthen our relationships, and lead more fulfilling lives.<\/p>\n

What Business Management Theory Teaches<\/strong><\/p>\n

[4] This is actually good for businesses too. Let me explain. In an early semester in the course of my studies for a Master\u2019s in Instructional Design and Human Performance Improvement, I had to take a management class. Being the unruly individual contributor that I was at the time, I rolled my eyes. Time to learn how to avoid giving raises with a pizza party,<\/em> my jaded mind offered, partially from lived experience. I had spent almost a decade at a company that was traumatic in how little it respected its employees; one of the owners lived in fear of coming across as weak, and all of us suffered for it.<\/p>\n

[5] So it shocked me to read in the prescribed text for what was essentially Management 101 that only a weak management refuses to hear feedback from its employees. The prevailing wisdom teaches that leadership\u2019s job is to build an environment where staff can succeed. The established knowledge behind managing people is surprisingly kind. I had blamed the wrong party, I realized: the fault lay with the practitioners I had known, not with the discipline itself. This would be something that I would later learn to call a gap, or the difference between what should be, and what is. So, what caused the gap? If management is an empathetic discipline, why do we so rarely see that empathy? Why do cruelty and dominance seem to be the expectation for business leaders?<\/p>\n

What Lutheran Ethics Teaches<\/strong><\/p>\n

[6] That question followed me as I began learning another discipline that manages an organization of people: religion. I grew up more spiritually curious than religious. Studying European history in high school did not improve my opinion of it, given the strife and hypocrisy that trailed Christianity across the continent. I rejected organized religion as a result. It wasn\u2019t until almost 20 years later that I would find a church and begin the journey of learning what it is to be a Christian, and to see how religion can improve lives and communities. A parallel can be made between the science of management and Christian religion in that their texts are kind, yet their teachings can be expressed in unkind ways. It seems like something in us reaches, again and again, for structures of power in place of systems of order.<\/p>\n

[7] Luther\u2019s answer begins with vocation, or Beruf<\/em> (calling): the conviction that everyday work is a place where God serves the world through human hands. We live out our vocations, letting God work through us, not only by serving those above us but by serving those who report to us and freeing them to follow vocations of their own. We do this not to impress God with our good works but to help our neighbors; as Luther put it, God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.[3]<\/a> When we act as a mask for God by serving our coworkers, we free them in turn to serve theirs. Luther saw nearly all our relationships as relationships between neighbors, calling each of us, in every direction, to serve one another as priests. This is how we most truly serve God: not directly, as the monastics sought, but through our service to our neighbor, all of us acting as masks of God.<\/p>\n

[8] Before God, the CEO and the newest hire stand on equal ground, equal in faith rather than rank. On earth, though, hierarchy is not the enemy; it is how we work together. It ought to exist to divide the labor, not to diminish the people at the bottom of the chart. Someone gifted with their hands may not be skilled at demonstrating that work\u2019s value to the owners, and in turn the person who explains a worker\u2019s value well may not be the organization\u2019s most skilled worker. Yet we routinely promote the most skilled worker into leadership, often with disastrous results, because leadership is not the same work done better. It is a vocation in and of itself.<\/p>\n

[9] When leadership bends toward ego and power over others, it perverts vocation as Luther understood it. This is sin in the plainest sense: such leaders fall short of serving their neighbors, and though they are forgiven, the damage to them and to their organizations is real. Those choices sicken the tree and spoil its fruit.<\/p>\n

Leadership as a Vocation in the Workplace<\/strong><\/p>\n

[10] A manager\u2019s ability to make people glad to come in and do their best work is a gift with great value in of itself\u2014even though it produces no product directly. But a company made only of leaders would have no one left with the vocation of making the thing it sells. Hierarchy, rightly held, is how we find our vocations. When it is mistaken for a ranking of each person\u2019s worth, we lose the chance to help our neighbors find their vocations and to serve them in ours. Leadership gets treated as more important than manufacturing or administration, when every one of these offices is a mask of God\u2019s presence in the world.<\/p>\n

[11] It may surprise a new leader that when closing a performance gap, a new training is rarely the answer. Yet many executives request one by default. The trouble is that such a leader arrives with the solution already chosen, when a needs analysis should begin solution-neutral\u2014an empty cup we fill with data. Some insight comes from leadership, but never all of it; after all, if they had every answer, there would be no gap. So, we work the way a detective does, gathering before concluding.<\/p>\n

[12] The problem is, assigning training without a gap analysis quietly lays the blame on the people with the least power to fix the problem. To say workers need training is to say the gap is caused by their lack of knowledge rather than to seek understanding of the real cause of the gap by trusting workers to communicate this.<\/p>\n

[13] Let me give you an example.\u00a0 A senior leader at a company that sells heavy equipment found that an important piece of equipment had arrived with a note taped to it that it still needed to have a quality assurance check done.\u00a0 The leader stormed in and, insisted on a new training for quality assurance checks for all employees. To his understanding, the fact that equipment was shipped before a check had been done proved the workers needed training on how to run QA checks. But, if they had run the check and failed at the task, this would have been indicated. Clearly, they never had the chance to check it at all. Why? That day\u2019s order was unusually large. In a culture that blames staff and lets leaders dodge accountability, people are caught between doing the job well and shipping on time. But, a workforce secure in the pride of its vocation would have asked for the time to do it right. So I asked what feedback those employees ever received about their performance and their importance in the business, and the answer was none: just an endless stream of equipment vanishing onto a truck.<\/p>\n

[14] Exploring this with the leader went nowhere; he was certain a training was needed and would not consider explanations that might implicate other root causes. But, because trainings cost time and money, his request was denied by those higher up than either of us, and so nothing was done at all. A simple feedback process could have closed the gap and strengthened the business. Before assuming his workers needed training, this leader might have asked how to equip his team to succeed. Scripture casts leadership in exactly those terms, describing its gifts as given \u201cto equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ\u201d (Eph. 4:11-12).<\/p>\n

Equipping the Saints in the Business World<\/strong><\/p>\n

[15] This is where I find hope in human performance improvement, the field I work in when I am not leading our music team in worship on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. It studies how to move from a current state to a desired one, and it finds, again and again, that front-line workers\u2019 characters are not at fault when a business falls short if they were never given the environment and tools to succeed. We do the same thing to ourselves, blaming our own shortcomings rather than examining what we need to succeed. Indeed the grace of God tells us that the space between our current and ideal selves is exactly where God meets us.<\/p>\n

[16] That space is the performance gap, and life is full of them. We want more income, deeper relationships, more peace. Businesses, too, measure the distance between current and desired performance. What human performance improvement adds is a methodical way to close that distance, using surveys, structured brainstorming, interviews, and data in place of gut instinct. Before I had these methods, persuading a confident leader was my word against theirs, and their title outweighed mine. Data is the great leveler. It sets ideas on equal footing and lets reason and pragmatism prevail.\u00a0 It takes away the power structure for the sake of power and replaces it with order for the sake of flourishing.<\/p>\n

[17] Luther writes at length about the law, and there is a parallel here to our business models. The law is God\u2019s standard, and in wanting to improve we reach for it. The business model is the law by which we judge the organization–the mirror that shows us as we actually are, for \u201cthrough the law comes the knowledge of sin\u201d (Rom. 3:20).<\/p>\n

[18] I use the image of a mirror deliberately, because it shows the danger of handling the desired state carelessly. We are proud of our vocations; they are who we are. To tell someone their work is not good enough, and to stop there, can be devastating, and it can hinder the very vocation they were trying to fulfill. This is the training reflex again: here<\/em> is the problem, if only you knew more, <\/em>we say. That approach is all law and no grace. Grace is what waits in the gap, if we let ourselves find it. Grace says: here is the gap, and because we want you to succeed, we will find the way to close it. Notice that no solution has been named, only a shared desire to serve one another better. The solution will come later in the process.<\/p>\n

[19] If our hearts are truly set on the organization\u2019s good, we let grace into our decisions. This does not mean letting people grow lazy and fail; there is neither law nor grace in that. It may even mean a hard conversation with someone who is underperforming, which opens another gap, and with it another place for grace. This is not only sound spiritual practice; it has proven to be sound business practice as well.[4]<\/a> Meeting an employee in that gap\u2014the middle\u2014is critical to the success of the organization.<\/p>\n

Relationship is Always Part of Vocation<\/strong><\/p>\n

[20] The real danger of vocation comes when we grow so absorbed in our own vocations that we stop seeing our neighbors\u2019 needs, a habit the corporate hustle rewards. James condemns the far end of that road\u2014outright exploitation\u2014warning the rich whose laborers\u2019 wages, \u201ckept back by fraud, cry out\u201d to the Lord of hosts (James 5:1-6). We still see it, especially in the upper reaches of large companies, where an executive may go months without laying eyes on a front-line worker. But most of us act without malice, just on bad information. I think the leader who demanded training bore no ill will; he was simply too far from the floor he meant to serve, and where information is absent we fill the void ourselves, so he may well have believed he was helping. In retrospect, I was filling a void of my own as I pushed back, assuming an arrogance in him that was not there. He lacked information about why the process failed; I lacked information about what drove his request.<\/p>\n

[21] These divisions form easily, especially as organizations grow and responsibilities scatter. He did not control those workers\u2019 processes; that was the quality assurance manager\u2019s role. Yet he was the one who answered to the client for the mistake. This is among the strongest cases for grace in business, and for how human performance improvement, practiced well, embodies that grace: seeking to understand rather than to judge by the law, and restoring the connection between people the org chart has pushed apart.<\/p>\n

[22] In a way, this is the vocation of the human performance improvement specialist: to help others serve their neighbors better. We shepherd an organization\u2019s people patiently, hearing every voice and weighing every possibility before concluding, because I believe we all want to do well in our vocations, as employee, spouse, or friend. Closing an organization\u2019s gaps usually turns out to mean helping its people succeed as individuals as well.<\/p>\n

[23] This is what let me see the likeness between our spiritual and working lives, though Luther saw it long before I did. Like an organization, each of us has a current state and a desired one. Even forgiven, we have things to work on: patience, anxiety, the people we love, the neighbors who need us. These are personal gaps, and it is in them that we meet God. And if spirituality has this much to offer performance improvement, perhaps the favor can be returned, and the burgeoning field can also help our churches serve their people better.<\/p>\n

[24] A church and a business are alike in at least this: both are made of people working toward a common cause, and people are people, whether in a church meeting space or a business office. Why would we not measure their gaps with the same tools?<\/p>\n

Equipping the Saints in the Church<\/strong><\/p>\n

[25] When I became the music director at The Hearth, a small ELCA congregation in Orlando, the role came with a caveat: knowing my background, they asked me to help improve our little organization\u2019s effectiveness. That thrilled me, since I had always believed these ideas fit any organization, not only corporations. But I had also seen how hard it is to draw honest criticism from a congregation; the world is harsh, and on Sundays people want peace. When a need goes unspoken, though, silence does not make peace. It only blocks the pastor\u2019s vocation to tend the flock and the congregation\u2019s vocation to worship as one body. Sometimes a hard truth is the kindest gift, given with care. A secure, anonymous channel lets people say the uncomfortable thing without feeling they are picking a fight, and it lets the church see where it might grow.<\/p>\n

[26] One might guess the opposite, but a church is a harder test of this idea than a business. A company runs its needs analysis on the clock, with participants paid to take part, and it can motivate participation with compensation. A congregation has none of that. Those who come to The Hearth, and especially those who answered the survey, exercise their vocations for no reward beyond the joy of serving their neighbors, and if their needs go unmet, they can simply leave. We know their dedication is real because nothing else compels it. They are not only providing their opinions on the direction the church should go but also reaffirming their own commitment to the organization\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

[27] That is what we set out to do. The point of this case study is not the results themselves but the process of designing and running the survey, offered to encourage other leaders to survey their own congregations and to keep watch for the gaps in their communities and members.<\/p>\n

[28] We built the survey to be answered anonymously, since honest answers depend on trusting that a response cannot be traced back, all the more important in a congregation where everyone knows everyone. We split it by how often a person attends, so that regular members, occasional attenders, and those who had drifted away each had a set of questions that pertained to them. At its heart is a gap measurement tool: for each part of our shared life, from pastoral care to music to the venues we meet in, we asked both how important each area is and how well The Hearth currently provides it, and the distance between those two answers is our finding. Open-response fields caught what the ratings missed, and a set of belonging and contribution questions tested whether members feel known and equipped to use their gifts, which is the heart of vocation. The survey link was sent out through our mailing list for one week, Sunday to Sunday, and at its end we invited participants to contact us and participate in a longer, anonymous one-on-one interview, giving us stories to help give the numbers meaning.<\/p>\n

[29] A single survey is a snapshot, not a verdict, and the hardest voices to capture are always those who have already drifted away, which any church attempting this should expect. What follows is process and reflection, not findings.<\/p>\n

[30] More than any number, the survey showed a healthy tree: a community that is, on the whole, doing a great deal right and truly serving its people, with a few areas worth attention. That is worth saying plainly. A congregation that invites honest scrutiny and finds good fruit earns a steadier confidence than one running on assumption.<\/p>\n

[31] Just as valuable was the candid feedback in the written responses, the kind we would never hear amid the pleasantries of a Sunday morning. Anonymity gave people permission to say the harder thing, and a few did. Those comments are gifts, not grievances, and now we can weigh how to act on them.<\/p>\n

[32] The deeper question is not what we found but how we decide what to do with it. The temptation, in a church as in a company, is to steer by feeling: to judge a service by how engaged the room seemed. But those feelings mislead. In one controlled study, students who learned more through active instruction felt they had learned less than their peers in passive lectures. Their perception was the opposite of reality. Judging the teaching by the students\u2019 impression of it would have rewarded the worse method.[5]<\/a>If our read on engagement can point exactly the wrong way, a congregation steering by the mood of the room may drift from what actually serves its people.<\/p>\n

[33] The alternative is to change by reason and evidence, and then to measure again. We intend to act on the few areas that need it and to run the same survey in six months. If the gaps narrow, we hold course; if they widen, we reconsider. Because we make changes deliberately rather than all at once, we can tell which change did the work, something that is impossible when everything moves together. It also lets us weigh the church\u2019s future on evidence rather than on competing visions or the imitation of other churches, which matters for a community like ours that has never much resembled them.<\/p>\n

Conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n

[34] We expect a church to support our spiritual lives but rarely test its performance in doing so; we expect a business to be efficient and profitable but rarely hold it to moral duty. Human performance improvement does the surprising thing in both directions, asking the church to measure and the business to love. Both are improved in their vocations by doing so.<\/p>\n

[35] If a volunteer congregation, where no one is paid and everyone is free to leave, owes its people this much care, then an employer who holds a person\u2019s livelihood owes at least as much. Both houses are finally known by the same fruit: whether their people are freed and equipped to serve their neighbors\u2014to act as masks of God in our world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits<\/em> (Boston: New Harvest, 2014).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg
\nPress, 1957).\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/004057365901600124<\/a><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> James K. Harter, Frank L. Schmidt, and Theodore L. Hayes, \u201cBusiness-Unit-Level
\nRelationship Between Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement, and Business Outcomes:
\nA Meta-Analysis,\u201d Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 2 (2002): 268-79.\u00a0https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/record\/2002-12397-006<\/a><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin,
\n\u201cMeasuring Actual Learning versus Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged
\nin the Classroom,\u201d Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 39 (2019): 19251-
\n57.https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.1821936116<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[1] We like to imagine greed as the key to success in business: the CEO must be strong and decisive, must move fast and break things, and above all must turn a profit. But success is like holding a fish. Grip it too hard and it shoots out of your grasp. 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