Staff Core Values: Loyalty

Loyalty

We protect each other.

{…All believers were of one heart and mind. –Acts 4:32}

   Chances are you grew up with at least one sibling. There’s nothing quite like the relationship between siblings! You may have a lot in common, or you may be polar opposites, but one thing is always true: you’re family, and you protect each other. If someone tries to mess with your brother or sister, you will go Jack Bauer on that person! You will go straight up ninja on them! I don’t think so, bro!! No one messes with MY brother or sister!

Isn’t it true?!? If someone threatens to cause our family physical or emotional harm, we will protect them without hesitating. Why? Because we are loyal to them, and, frankly, it’s not because they did anything to deserve our loyalty. It’s because of who they are – family. And we protect family.

In the same way, at NLC we view our staff as a family and our fellow staff members as brothers and sisters, so when we become a part of this staff, we are committing to protect one another, REGARDLESS of if we feel that the fellow staff members have done anything to deserve our loyalty.

This is so important because if we fail to be loyal, it will give way to disunity. Disunity and moral failure are two of the main things that can hinder what God is doing at NLC. Our commitment to loyalty provides unity.

Here are four ways we define loyalty:

1 . We speak positively of other staff members.

At NLC we do not speak negatively of other staff members. We have to be very careful about that. What we might think of as just “venting” could potentially do serious damage. Dave Ramsey defines “gossip” as discussing anything negative with someone who can’t help solve the problem.

Just as parents have to be united and not divided in their parenting, so we have to be united as a staff. Nothing breaks down loyalty like gossip or speaking negatively of others. Instead, we should be positive and life giving when we talk about other staff members.

2. Our loyalty is up – to our supervisor and to the vision of the church – not down to the people we lead.

This is key. Being in ministry, our tendency could very easily be to feel like we need to protect and defend our volunteers or our department. No – loyalty is UP. If our loyalty is down, it leads to resenting the vision and the leadership. Our job isn’t to be loyal to our volunteers; our job is to accomplish the vision of the church.

3. We give staff members the benefit of the doubt and defend them to others.

True loyalty means always giving each other the benefit of the doubt… always. Chances are that at some point or another, you will be in a situation where a church member comes up to you in the foyer and tells you they are upset about something another staff member said or did. Whether the story makes sense to you or not, give that staff member the benefit of the doubt. Our response to the church member in that situation can be, “I don’t know why that decision was made, but I know that their heart was right. Let’s go talk to him/her.” We always, always, always drive people toward having conversations with the person they have the issue with.

When it comes to decisions made by other staff members, we won’t always know the “why” behind it, but we can assume that the heart was right. If you are having an issue trusting another staff member’s heart, go and talk to them about it.

4. We believe that the leadership of the church has our best interest in mind.

    There may be things that the leadership decides that we may or may not completely understand. Even when we don’t understand why a decision was made, we can always know that that our leadership bathes decisions in prayer, seeks wise counsel, doesn’t make decisions lightly, and makes them for the best of NLC. As leaders we need to use the health and well-being of staff members as one of the biggest filters in the decision-making process. They are not just employees to us. They need to know that we care about them!