Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches

good view of what happens to organizations over time Covers things that are never discussed in most businesses.

There is a crisis that faces every church and every charity. Peter Greer and Christ Horst address this crisis in their book, Mission Drift. The authors present the purpose of the book in advance:To name and illustrate the causes of Mission Drift.To help clarify the mission of a given organization.To equip organizations with safeguards to reinforce and protect them.To bolster their claim, Greer and Horst advance several principle-centered propositions that serve leaders who cast vision, guard the values, and carry out their respective mission:Mission Drift is a crisis facing all faith-based organizationsMission Drift is pervasive, but it is not inevitableMission True organizations believe the Gospel is their most precious assetMission True organizations make hard decisions to protect and propel their missionMission True leaders assume they will face drift and build safeguards against itMission True board members have clarity about their missionMission True leaders set the cultural tone for the organizationThese are just a few of the propositions that the authors include. The book contains a wealth of information that is based on solid research that is recent and relevant. The authors provide several examples of organizations who maintain their mission as well as one's who drift. The conclusion is that Mission True leaders stand "unwaveeringly upon the Truth of the Gospel." These leaders are unwilling to compromise. These leaders refuse to capitulate. Mission True leaders have what it takes to carry out the mission that God has placed before them. Mission Drift is simply not an option!

Mission Drift is an essential summary of how organizations drift quietly away from their missions, that is compelling, easy to read, and well organized. I'll be recommending this to anyone who has influence on mission, and will use this book to help become more "mission true".

I got this book because I was interested in getting specific ideas about how faith-based organizations can protect against mission drift. I was disappointed because this book doesn't really saying anything particularly interesting about that topic. The book is a collection of anecdotes/parables about organizations that experienced or resisted drift followed by a cursory discussion of the management principles that explain this difference. While the interesting historical stories do a good job of illustrating the points, all of the actual ideas are explained better and more in depth in standard management books about organizational governance, strategy, and culture. This book just rehashes that information at a very cursory level.The general thrust of this book is not all that surprising. If you want to avoid mission drift, you need to have a clear statement of the organization's mission, a governance structure that keeps the mission under constant focus, and a strategic process that translates that mission into operational reality. Furthermore, you need to deliberately build and reinforce an organizational culture that integrates that mission by recruiting and training donors, board members, and staff who are fully behind what the organization stands for.As far as implementing this stuff goes, you are better off just consulting mainstream management books. I at least expected that this book would include some insights about how to adapt and apply that stuff to the specific context of a religious non-profit, but I was sorely disappointed. The book goes out of its way to bring up some extraneous mention of Christianity at every turn, but none of those mentions are directly relevant to the core ideas and many feel like they were inserted for marketing purposes.Ultimately, this book doesn't actually say anything substantive and insightful about how to adapt the mainstream solutions it proposes to the context it is dealing with. Moreover, there's not enough substantive material in this book to even get you started or to help you orient yourself in the broader management literature that you'll need to reference to actualize the principles the authors put forward. So, if you are interested in dealing with the problems this book is supposed to address, you'd be better off just reading books dealing with, e.g., Carver's Policy Governance Model, the Balanced Scorecard, and Shein's work on organizational culture. These books go beyond high level statements and actually teach you how to put your ideas into practice.The only use I can see this book serving would be as a soft introduction to the very idea of mission drift for people involved in organizations that don't currently have the structures in place to prevent it. If they aren't initially open to making the necessary changes, the stories and general principles may sway them if they are already aligned with the authors' general religious and cultural inclinations. But if you already accept the reality of mission drift, the book won't advance your knowledge or help you gain skills needed to combat the problem.

The primary focus of this book was on Christian charitable organizations with a warning about the dangers of drifting away from the orginal purpose and mission of the organization. The danger of mission drift is common to all groups and individuals. Greer and Horst outlined key issues that must be addressed aggressively and intentionally by both leaders and supporters of these organizations. Each issue is illustrated with at least one story of an organization that drifted and one that did not. The issues to be addressed are: functional atheism, gradual drift, building safeguards against future drift, clarity about mission, enlisting the right board members, organizational culture, hiring first for character, true partnership with like-minded donors, measuring the right things, excellence, rituals and practices that undergird the culture, bold affirmation of central values, partnership with the church. Best chapter was chapter 11, Measuring What Matters. Though less useful for (Baptist) congregations, teams, and individuals, there are many of the principles that either apply directly or can be adapted.

As someone heading up a missional team in our church, this book is a crystal clear primer in staying on track that I will be rolling out and teaching on across other missional teams in our church.

Interesting read

This is a useful book for key leaders in churches, nonprofit agencies, and social service agencies. The author's unrelenting emphasis on identifying and staying true to core purpose is a message often overlooked in the pursuit of smaller aims. Greer provides examples of organizations that have either drifted or moved consciously away from their original core purpose. His urging is to be both aware of and thoughtful about drift; he also recognizes that change in core purpose can and perhaps should occur in some cases. Greer's argument is especially relevant for churches, which often lack safeguards of reflection and prevailing focus and may be especially vulnerable to influences antithetical to reflection and the preservation of relevant organizational memory and practice.

Mission Drift was I book I picked up from a display at our Church library. The book is well written and really a quick read, with plenty of examples of organizations that have publicly drifted from the vision and intent of their founders to others that have remained true to their original mission. The chapters end with a series of questions or observations and ideas that can be put into place to help guard the mission of the organization.I am involved with the board of a camp and ended up purchasing a copy for the other board members to read. My big take away was that drift can happen almost without knowing it so if things are good now, now is the time to put policies and procedures in place to identify and prevent drift.Well recommended.

Mir wurde das Buch empfholen und ich muss sagen, genau das was man benötigt um Fehlentwicklungen in Organisationen zu vermeiden.