The Values Gap

I am currently participating in Equipping Leaders, Vantage Point 3's Year 2 of their Leadership Program. So far, it is going pretty well and this week we are focusing on our values. Our first exercise was to pretend we were away from work for two months and were asked to write a letter to the person who would be overseeing our work- what we would tell them to do, what would be important enough to write a letter about and to make sure they remembered while we were gone. It was a pretty fascinating exercise. It’ll be more interesting as we’re forced to examine what our personal values are, and how values are not ideals (things I want to see in my life), but how values are behavior, what I actually do in my life. This kind of thinking was one of the major pieces that led to the Wednesday Night Service. We wanted to provide a platform for our church to live out our values. I think most Christians and churches, when asked or polled, would say that they value serving others- in fact, it would almost seem to go against the tenets of the faith to not affirm that! But when we looked around Hillcrest’s landscape last year, we felt that while the Reveal had done well in moving Hillcrest back into the community, our opportunities were limited to Cleveland school- if you weren’t a mentor or a reading buddy, you were excited at what Hillcrest was doing, but more so from a ‘fan’ perspective and not from a ‘player’ perspective. We realized we had a values gap (valuing one thing, doing another) and expanded our presence into the community to now include Wednesday nights. Doing this freed people to serve outside of a school day schedule, but also aligned our programs (our behavior) with our values (or our ideals). If we say we care about others, if we say that we are seeking to love God and love others, then we ought to be doing something tangible about it.