The early church was known for their warm relationships with each other. Christ had foretold this when he commented, "By this they shall know you — that you love one another." I believe we need the kind of love in the church that C. S. Lewis describes "willing the ultimate good for the other person." This produces the atmosphere and the relationship which the world can see and define as genuine love.
They were not known for how they grew, nor even for a balanced budget. I have long felt that any success the church claims which can be stated numerically is non-scriptural. Yet we have borrowed from business the language of figures because it is so easy to define success by figures and so difficult to define it by relationship. I can take an inventory of your money, of your wealth, and give you a precise figure. I cannot take an inventory of your relationship with your wife and state it in numerical terms. Did you ever hear anybody say, "We have a marriage that I would rate about 76%"? Once I was foolish enough to try to put a numerical rating on the morale in our plants, particularly our non-union plants. We soon gave this up as totally impractical. We have to use terms like healthy, unhealthy, improving, or deteriorating, and I think in the church we have to add the adjective "scriptural."
When I was young I was almost totally production oriented in my life and I hoped for good relations but they were not primary. I think this was due to the fact that I was an executive and felt the organization existed for production, not for relations. I learned my relational lesson the hard way. When our son was married he asked me to be his best man. He profoundly complimented me by saying that I was his best friend. Immediately, I volunteered to spend some time with him explaining how to build a successful home and family, since we do feel our family is extremely close and loving. He replied obliquely, "But, Dad, I'm not going to be an executive. I'm going to be a professor." I was totally bewildered, and I asked him what that had to do with it. "Dad, if I was going to be an executive I would come to you because I think you have run a business well, but you always put production in front of relationships. I think that is correct in a business, but I am going to be building a home. And, frankly, I think our family is great in spite of you not because of you." I asked for a replay of this, being fully convinced that I misunderstood him, but it came out the same way the second time. When I pressed him for an explanation of such a weird idea he said, "Dad, you were president of the company and you came home and were president in the home. You used the same techniques for running the home that you did in running the business. You treated Mom like she was a vice-president. You took grievances from the kids after they had gone up through the chain of command and you tried to get us to use our time productively rather than relationally. Dad, what you never really knew was that relationship is the production of the home." When he said this I immediately knew that he was right and with intellectual integrity I had to do something about it. Therefore I got the family together and told them that I was going to try to change. If any of you executive fathers decide to do that, let me tell you it will be one of the most difficult things you ever tried to do in your life. Since that time I've heard some very funny stories of how the family operated around me. I must admit that I did have some feeling that there was something going on in the house that I was not connected to - it happened to be their grapevine. But he was kind enough to say, "Dad, we understood, we loved you because we knew you were doing the best you could." I was, and therefore I don't feel guilty about it. It has been an interesting and, I might say, exciting and occasionally frustrating experience to try to change at this age in life. The church is more like a family than a business. Relationships are more important than the production.
