From Great to Good

Sixteen years ago, Jim Collins wrote Good to Great. Today, many companies that Collins saw as "great" are now out of business or on the decline. The Bible doesn't think too much of "greatness," but it has a lot to say about "goodness."

In 2001, business and leadership writer Jim Collins wrote the bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't. Collins conducted research on 11 companies that had "made the leap" and chronicled why "good is the enemy of great."

Business leaders and even church leaders gobbled up this book and had their organizations read it in order to move them toward "greatness." Collins defined "greatness" as "distinctive impact" and "superior performance" shepherded by a "level five leader."

It's no wonder the book was so popular. Americans love greatness. It's no coincidence that one of the major slogans of the recent presidential campaign was "Make America Great Again." We tend to adopt that language in the church as well. We often think that the measure of a church's greatness is in how "distinctive" its impact might be and its "superior performance" in all the metrics that business organizations measure: bigger, faster, stronger, richer and more famous.

The...