Factfulness: The Blame Instinct in Church Leadership

Are we sabotaging our church's growth by playing the blame game? Discover how falling into the trap of finding scapegoats can stifle creativity, growth, and unity within our church communities. Join me, Todd Rhoades, on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast as we dissect the blame instinct, inspired by Hans Rosling's "Factfulness." Through real-life stories and practical insights, we'll explore how this destructive habit manifests in our churches and what we can do to overcome it.

This episode offers a deep dive into fostering a culture of learning and growth. Learn how to create safe spaces for admitting mistakes, encourage collaboration, and share leadership responsibilities effectively. We'll discuss the importance of conducting thorough "autopsies" on failures to learn from them rather than pointing fingers. Equip yourself with the tools to build a more supportive, innovative, and unified church staff environment. Tune in and transform the way your church handles setbacks and challenges!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hey there, welcome to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name's Todd Rhodes, I'm your host and one of the co-founders of OvoChemistryStaffingcom. Today we're tackling the ninth instinct. We've been in this series based on the Hans Rosling book called Factfulness, and today we're talking about the blame instinct, and this instinct is the tendency to find a scapegoat when things go wrong, rather than focusing on understanding the underlying systems and causes.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Now in the church, the blame instinct can rear its head in a lot of different ways. When attendance drops, we might blame the worship team or the preaching, or even the culture at large. People are moving out of our community or our facility isn't good enough and anything. When a ministry fails to thrive, we might point fingers at the leadership, or the leadership might point fingers at the volunteers or the senior pastor might point fingers at the staff member or just a lack of resources. Individuals that are involved in these conflicts as troublemakers or divisive. The blame instinct can be toxic and it creates a culture of fear and defensiveness, where people are afraid to take risks or admit mistakes. It really stifles creativity and innovation, as people become more concerned with avoiding blame than with pursuing excellence and doing ministry, and it can lead to division and resentment as individuals and groups are pitted against each other. You might hear a little bit more somber tone in my voice today, and I think this is because of all the instincts that we've talked about so far and we've only got one more to go the blame instinct is one that I see that's. It's not in every church, but can I say that the blame instinct is pervasive in our churches today the ability to scapegoat and blame other people, other staff members, to blame our board, to blame our volunteers, to blame our lack of resources, to blame anything and not really solve anything. I'm a little bit more somber today because I've seen this a lot. It happens in. We hear different stories of this blame instinct in action when we talk, you know, we talk with candidates all day, every day, and we hear a lot of. This is what's happened to me, and there are always, you know, three sides to every story. But I know that the blame instinct happens a lot and the churches that I've been on staff at happen from time to time as well over the years.

Speaker 1: 3:03

So how do we overcome it? Hans Rosling suggests a few things he said. First of all, we need to resist the idea of finding a scapegoat. Because when you find a scapegoat, this means that you're shifting your focus from blame to understanding. You really want to try and understand rather than blame. It means looking at and this is difficult, right, it's so much easier just to blame somebody or something, but it means looking for the underlying systems or the structures or the causes that contribute to a problem, rather than just pointing your fingers at individuals or different things that take the blame off of leadership and onto somebody else. So in the church, that means fostering a culture of learning and growth. It means creating a safe place where people could admit their mistakes without fear of reprisal, and that just in a scapegoating church that doesn't happen. People can't admit their mistakes, partly because they don't have the opportunity to admit mistakes, because they're already blamed for something. It means encouraging collaboration. It means sharing some leadership responsibility. It means recognizing that we all play a role in success or failure of ministries. And it means looking beyond individual actions and examining again those systems and structures that might be contributing to some of the challenges or hindering the progress.

Speaker 1: 4:25

Now am I saying that it's not ever anybody's fault? No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that a lot of times our tendency when something fails isn't to, I like to say, do an autopsy. Why did that fail? And my approach has always been if something was a massive failure, do an autopsy on it, learn what happened. Maybe there was a system, maybe there was a structure failure, maybe it was a personnel failure, maybe it was a volunteer failure, maybe it was a planning failure. But do an autopsy on that puppy and see what actually happened there and then make your determination.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Are we going to try this again? Are we going to do this again? Is this worth trying again differently? Or maybe it just was a bad idea? If it was a bad idea, cool. That's one thing you can mark off your list. We know that doesn't work. If it can be improved, improve it. Iterate the heck out of the thing.

Speaker 1: 5:18

And maybe I'm making it sound easier than it is, but I'm telling you, when something goes wrong and we immediately point the finger to somebody else, nothing gets solved. So bottom line the blame instinct. Man, it is a destructive force and it can undermine the health and the vitality of your church. Matter of fact, it can be a cancer. So we need to resist the urge to find a scapegoat and instead focus on understanding and addressing the root causes of the problem. So what I want you to do today, every day, I'm asking you to think on these instincts as you go through your day Today.

Speaker 1: 5:53

I want you to think about some of the problems, and maybe you're dealing with some problems now. Maybe you've had some problems in the past, a couple weeks, last month or so, maybe there's going to be some absolutely new problems that come across your desk or in your ministry today. I want you to think first. What's my first reaction? Am I going to try and scapegoat something? Am I going to try and point the finger at somebody else just initially, without looking into the systems and the structures and everything else that may have contributed to this? Do I know the person that I'm scapegoating? Is it fair? Am I being fair? Really takes some. This is a hard issue, right, and this is something you really need to consider as you lead Today.

Speaker 1: 6:40

Encourage some open communication, some honest feedback and willingness to learn from mistakes and if it's, dang it. If it's your mistake, fess up to it. Hopefully, you've created a culture that you're allowed to make a mistake every now and then. If you made a mistake, don't try and blame it on somebody else, fess up to it, but do something different the next time. And really, as you start to do that and as your church starts to do that, you will create this kind of safe place that people feel comfortable admitting mistakes and you'll see that people start to take some risks because they don't fear the blame anymore and it's just going to be a better workplace and you're going to see some better results for the kingdom when the scapegoating is not a part of the equation. So this was a tough one. This was a tough one and maybe it brings a little bit of. It might be something that you really need to think about today.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Do I scapegoat? Does my church scapegoat? Do we blame and if so, what can we do about it? How can we turn that around? I'm always here to talk. If you would like to reach out and give some coaching or even some help with some staffing issues at your church, I'm here to help. That's what I do here at Chemistry Staffing. So if there's any way I can help you, feel free to reach out to me. I read every email that comes in it's podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. Reach out to me anytime at podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. I'd love to hear your story and if there's any way that I can help, I would love to be able to do that. Okay, tomorrow is Friday if you're listening, on the day that this is released, and it's going to be our last episode number of the Instinct series that we're doing. I hope you'll join us again tomorrow right here on the wholeeatrichcom. Have a good one.