Working hard to make a decision work is even more important than making the decision in the first place. One of the dangers is people making a decision, then thinking, 'Oh, that's it,' when the thing has only just started.
Lord Pennock1

Measuring the risk of difficult decisions does not guarantee our decisions will be good ones. Just as risk stalks our every action, so fallibility will always characterize the leadership we give our churches. We make mistakes.

Yet our mistakes need not consume us. We gain some comfort by knowing we are not alone in this human enterprise of making errors. Consider the record company that turned down the Beatles, the seventeen publishers who rejected the best-selling novel M*A*S*H, the editor of the San Francisco Examiner who told Rudyard Kipling his writing was "simply ridiculous." These monumental errors of judgment remind us that mistakes are inevitable. In a small way, that knowledge makes our misreading of a counseling situation, our failure to fully step ...