In order to improve product quality, enhance customer relations, regain market share, and improve the financial bottom line, many businesses have adopted programs to motivate employees to improve the work processes they perform. The idea is for every employee to examine on a regular basis every process the employee uses in the performance of his or her job and look for ways to improve those processes.
To promote the idea among employees, one of the companies I worked for created a new department called “Continuous Improvement.” I know what you’re thinking – ‘That’s just another gimmick to get more from employees. And like government, business has to create a new bureaucracy to count beans and shuffle paper.’ There is, no doubt, some basis for that thought. But given the widely-held opinion that many American workers are lazy and are not interested in producing a high-quality product, it’s not a bad idea to place a new emphasis on improving the way all of us do things on the job.
There is also a widely-held opinion among unbelievers that many church leaders and church members are not that serious about doing work for God. Many have the impression that church-goers attend church to be seen or to maintain a social network. It is important, therefore, that we who believe continuously examine the way we do whatever it is that we do. We need to examine our attitudes toward other believers as well as unbelievers. We should look closely at the way we interact with our spouses and our children. Our prayer, worship, and study processes need to be evaluated. Our performance on the job and off the job is under scrutiny by unbelievers to see if we practice what we preach. So, it is urgent, if we haven’t already done so, that we develop the habit of continuous improvement in our daily activities.
Getting in the continuous improvement groove doesn’t come naturally. We tend to get in ruts and continue to do things the way we’ve always done them. The implementation of continuous improvement requires an awareness of the need to improve, a willingness to improve, an active thought process, and the determination to make it happen.
God has that idea in mind, don’t you think, when He talks about growth and maturity in the lives of His children. In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul writes about Jesus choosing some among us to be evangelists, pastors and teachers “…to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13 NIV) It is His purpose that our goal will be to approach perfection in our walk before Him. The probability of achieving that goal can be greatly enhanced by implementing the practice of continuous improvement.