An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIV - Sola Scriptura

In the previous installment I brought up the concept of Apostolic Succession and how it related to the canon of scripture, i.e. the standard that determined what constituted The Bible. 

For centuries the leadership of the dominant Christian Church, the Catholic Church, insisted that the common people couldn't be trusted to even read The Bible, let alone understand it. They reserved that privilege for themselves, not permitting Bibles to be printed in any language except Latin, a language which no one spoke any longer. People were executed for translating The Bible into the local vernacular. Things changed when the Protestant Reformation started in the Sixteenth Century. The ostensive goals of the Reformation were twofold: to facilitate translation of The Bible into the local vernaculars — English, German, etc., — and to promote the idea that it was the text of The Bible itself, scripture alone, (sola scriptura) and not church hierarchy, that determined Christian doctrine and practice. On the first point it was successful, on the second, it's a mixed record. 

There's a belief among many people that "the patriarchy", or some other conspiracy, "changed" The Bible in order to advance their own viewpoints and prejudices. There's some truth in that, but only some,  it's not that simple. For several hundred years there was no "The Bible". As I discussed in the article about Other Christianities, there were several competing versions of Christianity as Jesus' message spread throughout the Roman world and beyond. Each of these "Christianities" developed their own leadership hierarchy, including the group that evolved into the Catholic/Orthodox Church. They each thought (or at least claimed) that they were the only ones who had faithfully passed on Jesus' teachings. In some cities the different sects competed for members, in others one Christianity predominated. One, the Catholic/Orthodox Church, got big and widespread enough, and was the dominant form of Christianity in the two capitols of the Roman Empire, Rome and Constantinople. 

Most of these sects, as far as we know, wrote gospels, epistles, treatises, apocalypses, and maybe even graphic novels, to bolster their version of what Jesus taught. Most of them were attributed to the original apostles since claiming such authorship tended to make them appear more authoritative. A lot of them, including the writings that made their way into The Bible, contain rebuttals of competing doctrines and attacks against competing prophets and teachers. Some writings couldn't definitively be traced back to any specific group, but were used more broadly. It wasn't until Marcion, the founder of one of the Christianities that has not survived until present day, put together his own canon of scripture that the dominant group attempted their own. 

Marcion's canon contained one gospel, The Gospel of the Lord, an edited and shortened version of the Gospel of Luke. It also contained edited versions of ten of the Pauline Epistles: Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, First and Second Thessalonians, Laodiceans (which may have been Ephesians under a different name), Colossians, Philemon and Philippians. But not Hebrews, Titus, or First and Second Timothy, which are all considered forgeries. Catholic/Orthodox leaders had over time begun to use most of the books that now make up The Bible, but it wasn't until 393 CE that the current 27 book canon was made official, although the Codex Vaticanus, which was printed in 350 CE has the complete canon. 

Were some books "taken out" that espoused ideas like the equality of women or fringe ideas about spirituality? No, because there wasn't anything to take them out of yet. However it's indisputable that the Catholic/Orthodox Church Council made deliberate decisions to include or exclude writings that they didn't think aligned with the doctrines that had evolved over three centuries. From that point on, other than the books that we know as the Apocrypha, nothing was removed from The Bible. (The Apocryphal books were removed from the Old Testament) And that's the way it remained for another 1200 years. 

Now we finally get to sola scriptura. 

The Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned earlier, had two main goals. Translating The Bible into the languages of the people was accomplished. But the reason for that was so that Christians would no longer be dependent upon church leaders, upon priests and popes, to tell them what The Bible said, to decide for everybody what God's will was. In theory, it succeeded at that as well. (A third aspect was the fact that European monarchs now had the option of disentangling themselves from The Catholic Church) But did it really succeed, at least in the way the reformers thought?

Indisputably we have The Bible available in virtually every language on Earth. Any literate person can pick it up and read it. Bible study aids are available to assist in comparing to the original languages. No one has to depend on the priests and popes. But do we really rely upon sola scriptura, scripture alone? I would argue that we don't. Foundational to my opinion is that the scriptura that we have available to us has been filtered through, first, the people who wrote the gospels and epistles in the first place. The very earliest is the first Pauline Epistle to the Thessalonians, written around 20 years after Jesus' death. You could argue, I suppose that Paul and the anonymous and pseudonymous authors of the rest of the New Testament were inspired by God, but as an agnostic, I don't but it. It's their opinion. Next, the men who decided what writings would comprise The Bible are an additional filter. Who knows if they left out inspired writings or included fraudulent ones? And modern day Protestants might be surprised that the scripture that they should alone depend on was decided upon by the Catholic Church which they think is unbiblical! During Luther's time there was spirited debate about whether several canonical books should be removed. It is well known among biblical scholars that several of the epistles attributed to Paul are in fact forgeries and were written by an unknown author or authors. It's not a secret that copyists made changes to the originals. Translators, no matter how diligent, add another layer of doubt. How can we say whether what we have today faithfully represents the originals, or even if those originals represent the hypothetical "God's will"?

We can't. 

The whole concept of sola scriptura is based on the false assumption that we can easily determine what God wanted to get across if only we could read it ourselves in an accurate translation.  Even if we assume that what we have is an accurate translation of a faithful reproduction of original texts that themselves represent the only written information that God intended humans to have, it certainly isn't clear throughout. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations based on the same text? 

On so many different subjects Christians disagree, all the while urging those with whom they disagree to "just read the Bible". 

Workin' Man - Part XXIV - The Misfits and the Consultants

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 B&R Corporate definitely viewed the stores hierarchically. The Super Savers were at the top of the pyramid, with the busier Russ's Markets in the middle, and the small and money-losing stores at the bottom. ALPS, and later Save Best, were below the bottom. Their idea was that the operational difficulty correlated with sales volume and square footage. The stores on the lower end of the continuum were viewed almost as training locations for Store Directors and department managers. The truth was that the smaller stores were in many ways more challenging than the larger stores. Part of this was the higher turnover in the smaller stores. Because managers were always on the lookout for better paying opportunities, the smaller stores always had a lot of managerial churn and unfailingly had the least experienced managers. This included the key position of Assistant Store Director (ASD). Despite the unwritten rule that Store Directors would "do their time" in a smaller store before being allowed to manage a larger store, this wasn't applied to Assistant Store Directors. Promising department managers wouldn't even apply to Assistant Store Director positions in a small Russ's, waiting for a Super Saver opening. This left the pool of applicants for Russ's assistant positions disappointingly shallow. Department managers were notoriously difficult to keep as well. They were often on the lookout for better bonus prospects. 

For some reason my first 18 months at the Van Dorn Russ's the management positions were pretty stable. Part of it was that most of them were happy with the small store and didn't want anything bigger. Part of it was that most of them had some kind of HR target on their backs that made them unsuitable for promotion opportunities. My Assistant Store Director, Tim, had been a Store Director for another company — he eventually moved on to a bigger store and later became a Store Director of a Super Saver, but for reasons of his own, never applied for promotion during my first two years despite there being several openings. While during my last 18 months corporate took several of my managers away in anticipation of closing the store and the expansion and remodel at 66th and O, I only lost one manager through corporate raiding during my early days. My Meat Manager was transferred out to a bigger store, and as usual, they didn't replace him — I had to run an ad and interview for one myself. I had a Bakery Manager quit after I was at Van Dorn for just a few months, but it ended up being an opportunity for a young assistant department manager to step up, and for me to hone my training and coaching skills. 

Alex had been the Assistant Deli Manager, but wanted to transfer out because he didn't get along with Kathy, the Deli Manager. (The corporate office Deli Director was adamant that we refer to the Delis as "Delicatessens". Of course this is the full name from which "Deli" is derived, but he insisted that in big cities like New York, no one called them "delis". As a native New Yorker, I did not find this to be true) We had an opening for Assistant Bakery Manager and Alex was transferred. Before he could get much training in Bakery operations the Bakery Manager left the company. 

Some positions in the company attracted people with a more generalist skill set — grocery, dairy frozen, general merchandise etc., but you really had to know something about how to bake bread and fry doughnuts to be able to effectively run a Bakery department. There were NO applicants. Eventually, with the agreement of the Bakery Director and Operations VP, I decided to promote Alex to the position, despite his lack of experience. It was a mixed experiment. There were definitely areas that were sub par — he really had no mentor to teach him the "ways of the Bakery" other than occasional visits from the corporate Bakery Director, but he did a good job of keeping the shelves full and the team motivated. 

A position that I lost before I even started was HR Coordinator. The previous HRC had been selected for an Assistant Store Director position, and left Van Dorn on the day I started. This was when the experiment of eliminating most of the HRC positions and turning over in-store HR responsibilities to one of two ASDs. This meant that many HRCs were applying for ASD positions who had no management or grocery experience. Donna, the corporate HR Director told me that she would fill the position, presumably by transferring someone in, but when I followed up with her a month later, she denied ever saying that. (Donna was a habitual gaslighter — she lied about personnel issues and pay rates on numerous occasions) I went through several months of sharing HRCs with other stores, but my store's needs were always secondary. Eventually I got permission to hire for a hybrid position: HRC/Front End Manager. I had a front end manager, so I had the difficult decision of telling her that we were eliminating her position. I had the more difficult task of telling her that while she could apply for the new position, I did not consider her qualified for the HR part of the job. (There are always extremely unqualified applicants for HR positions, since no one seems to know what they really do!) I had two applicants who I considered qualified.  Tim, who was a clerk in the corporate HR department, and Joe, who had been an evening grocery supervisor for me, but had transferred to another store. Tim, on the strength of his HR knowledge, was my first choice. When I offered him the position, he did not accept, stating that he didn't think he was ready. I never understood people who did this. I can understand when someone turns down a job because the compensation is too low, or there were requirements that did not come out in the interview, but why would you apply for a job that you didn't think you were ready for? Well, the reason was that Donna talked him out of it. She had talked him down in very harsh terms when I asked for her for her input. I was shocked that she would speak so disparagingly about someone on her team. I can only assume that she talked him out of it, although no one ever admitted it. So I hired Joe for the position. If I remember correctly he was in that position through the end of my second year. Joe ended up transferring to another store as an Assistant Store Director. 

One of the things I tried to look for in potential management hires was someone who liked managing and was good at it. It sounds obvious, but most people who apply for management positions do it only because it pays more. Of course, a bigger paycheck is a legitimate reason for wanting to advance, but without the skill and desire to lead people and the organizational skill needed to administer a department, you're not going to get a good manager. If someone applied to me for a management job I would not consider them if their only reason was a bigger paycheck. I remember a guy who I promoted to Assistant Produce Manager, mainly due to his familiarity with the department and his people skills. It didn't pay that well and he was submitting applications for management positions for various departments and other stores every week. I tried to get him to narrow his focus, to pick an area that he "had a passion for" and set his goals in a less scattershot way. The next application that he sent out, for a Deli Manager position, included the statement "I have a passion for the Deli". Sometimes you just have to chuckle. He was hired, but quit a few months later to take a better paying job outside the company. 

In a previous post I mentioned a management class called "Managing Management Time" (MMT). One of my projects that I initiated during my weekly department managers' meetings was teaching the principles that I had learned in that class. One of the key ideas from MMT was the principle of "Whose Monkey Is It?" A "monkey" was a task or responsibility. As a manager you had to recognize what things were your responsibility and what was someone trying to get you to do their job. As a Store Director, my job did not involve the scheduling or allocation of resources in each department, this was the department manager's job. Of course I could provide guidance, or assist in solving problems, but operationally the day-to-day running of a department wasn't my "monkey". This was part of an effort to foster independence, not only among the management team, but the non-management employees. Another principle was the five levels of supervision, outlined in this article. 

The Five Levels of Managing Subordinates:

1. Wait until being told before doing anything
2. Ask what to do before doing anything
3. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, but check with a manager before actually doing it
4. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, informing the manager after the fact what was done
5. Make independent decisions regarding what to do, routine reporting in only

#1, it should be fairly obvious to see, should only apply to brand-new people who barely know what their job is, let alone how to do it; although I have seen this behavior in people who had been in a job long enough to know the basics. Even the newest employee will quickly move to #2 and ask "What do I do now?" after completing a task.

#2 is where most entry-level employees spend most of their day. The boss gives them a to-do list, the employees complete the list and then go ask what to do next. This is why I have never been a big supporter of to-do lists, it limits the employee to a certain set of tasks and doesn't encourage them to think

#3 is where you want your employees to be fairly quickly. Rather than give them a list, give them a vision of how you want things to be when they are done. We had a position that was called "grocery clerk". These employees, usually high school students working their first job, were responsible for bringing in stray shopping carts, filling displays, straightening out the aisles, cleaning bathrooms and overall customer service. An "okay" clerk did the items on the list and then asked a manager what to do, or reverted to #1 and didn't do anything! A good grocery clerk knew that his job included all the aforementioned things and organized his time to get them all done, prioritizing as needed, usually checking with the manager if he was going outside or taking a break. 

#4 is the goal for your employees. To extend the grocery clerk example, a manager didn't need a great grocery clerk to check in except occasionally during a shift, and trusted the clerk to do what needed to be done without being repeatedly told. This is also where you want all supervising or managing employees to be. 

#5 is where very few people have the confidence to be, and what very few managers have the trust to allow. This is where true delegation takes place. Delegation is where an employee knows what needs to be done and does it, secure in the knowledge that they have the responsibility and the authority to get it done. Delegation from the manager's perspective is where the manager has done sufficient training and instruction for the subordinate and has enough confidence and trust in the subordinates ability to allow that independence. It is the opposite of assigning, which is what takes place in #1 and #2, and a little bit in #3.

I forbade my management team from operating at Level Three or lower, and directed them to shoot for Level Five. This was uncomfortable for some of them, some people just want to be told what to do. I believe this instruction had the effect of causing my managers to think before coming to me to solve their problems and to have possible solutions ready. It also motivated them to encourage their team to function more independently.  

B&R loved consultants. They brought in one guy who ran some Food 4 Less stores in California who walked around our stores insulting the Store Directors and referring to our "chicken shit" displays. Kelly C, a long time employee and manager, called him out in a meeting where he claimed to compare his prices to Walmart on all his prices. Mr. Consultant's bullshit became more and more obvious every time he opened his mouth. His suggestions were abandoned soon after he went away. Then there was the "Better Basics" guy. He had previously worked for another consulting company (I can't remember the name) from which he lifted all of their ideas and repackaged them as Better Basics. This guy was a bit more subtle in his condescension — no overt insults anyway — but he thought he had all the answers. I remember one time him telling me we had the "wrong" Greek yogurt, as if there was such as things as the "right" Greek yogurt. Like most consultants his main goal was to draw things out so he could get paid for more consulting. It took 18 months for his Better Basics Bakery team to change the recipe for hard rolls. His alleged sense of humor was misogynistic and crude. He made a sexually suggestive "joke" to a female member of the team at one of the meetings; complaints by her and a Store Director who were present fell on deaf ears, as did a childish response to the word "retard" (stress on the second syllable, in the sense of "inhibit", referring to an aspect of the proofing process). B&R, while coming down hard on employees who were accused of sexual harassment, tolerated it from vendors, salesmen and consultants, presumably because there was no legal liability if it wasn't an employee who was doing the harassing. (Refer to an earlier story about the HVAC guy, fired by his own company for making sexual comments to a teenage girl, but was subsequently hired by Jane Raybould to remodel a store). But the worst consultant of all was Harold Lloyd.

Harold did a lot of presentations on various grocery-related topics for managers, as well as for all employees. He facilitated conferences among similar companies from different areas who were not directly competing ("Share Groups"). He was a dynamic speaker. He knew how to get your attention and keep it. I learned a lot about how to present information in meetings from him. He also had a lot of practical ideas that were simple and obvious and easy to implement. The first time in a Harold Lloyd presentation was magical. You had dozens of new ideas to take back to your store, and actually felt smarter. The problem was that every Harold Lloyd presentation was almost exactly the same. The elements might be switched around, put in different order, but no matter what the topic was, fresh departments, sanitation, marketing — you got the same information every...single...time. A few of us had been sent out to Des Moines for a two-day seminar facilitated by Lloyd. A few months later a few Store Directors and Assistants drove out to Gretna for a short presentation by him. Dan, a fellow attendee at the Des Moines sessions, and I brought our handouts from the Des Moines seminar. Harold must have been fielding criticism about his repetitiveness and started out with a rant about people who criticized him for it. He used some profane, and frankly disgusting language to counter his critics. He then began his presentation...using all the same information that Dan and I had in our notes from Des Moines. 

This wasn't the last time I encountered Harold Lloyd. He had been facilitating a program whereby various committees would focus on specific areas in which to improve the company. A day-long meeting with the corporate directors and the committee chairs would be followed by a presentation for all the managers throughout the company in a movie theater. The day before the first meeting Operations VP Tom Schulte showed up at Van Dorn with Harold in tow and asked if they could attend my managers' meeting which was just about to start. I ran my meeting the way I always did. I always tried to keep my meetings short and to the point. Only items that applied to everyone were on the agenda, (and I always had a written agenda) problems specific to only one or two departments were handled "off-line". At the time I was also spending a few minutes at the end of the meeting teaching principles from Managing Management Time. The meetings tended to be 30 minutes, sometimes less — we all had things to do and some managers were the only ones scheduled in their departments that day. I always ended my meeting with "Does anyone have anything for the group?" rather than the more common "Does anyone have any questions?". I had learned this from a previous Store Director — "anything for the group" could include any contributions, not just questions, and often resulted in great insights from people. At the end of the meeting Harold asked if he could address the group for about ten minutes; I was a bit skeptical about what he could offer, but felt boxed in, so I agreed nonetheless. His contribution lasted well over twenty minutes and may have been close to half an hour and consisted mainly of criticisms of how I ran a meeting. He started with claiming that my meeting was too short, it should be an hour...at a minimum. I can't recall every other specific criticism, but I wondered how closely he had really been listening and not just regurgitating an oft-repeated speech when he said I shouldn't have ended my meeting with "Does anyone have any questions?" — which wasn't what I said. As I looked around the room I saw how uncomfortable my managers were with the attack. Once we were done I stalked out of the meeting room and headed for my office. Two of my managers followed me down and asked me if I was okay. I replied that I was going to leave the store for lunch to cool off.

When I returned an hour later Tom and Harold were still in the store. I encountered them in one of the aisles and Harold asked me what my problem was with his remarks (I was very obviously angry at his words) — unwilling to get into an argument in earshot of employees and customers I asked him and Tom to come to my office. Once behind the closed door he once again asked me what I was so mad about, and I responded that he was a guest in my meeting and started right out criticizing and attacking. His rejoinder, if I had been a few decades younger, might have earned him a punch in the face "Don't lie!" He said, "it wasn't the first thing I said", retreating into literalism (the literal first thing was likely something like "thanks for having me at this meeting). I stepped into his "bubble" and snarled "Do NOT call me a liar" and once again, he hid behind literalism "I didn't say you were a liar, I said you lied". (Why do people think that's somehow better?) There was a lot of shouting after that. Tom attempted to insert himself a couple of times, but decided to let us both blow off steam. Eventually, after I explained several different ways why how he conducted himself was offensive to me and insulting to my team, he aplogized. He offered to speak to my management team, but I refused his offer — I didn't want him anywhere near my people. I found out that he relayed this incident, without mentioning my name or what store it took place in, during the day-long meeting at the corporate office. He painted himself as the hero of the story, someone willing to admit his mistakes and humbly apologize. A few people figured out that he was talking about me and heard the true story from me. The following day, in the all-managers presentation he repeated most of the same stories and examples that I had heard at Des Moines, Gretna, and several other presentations. 

He was still full of shit. 

The funny part was after the dust settled, Wes, the Dairy-Frozen Manager asked me if I believed in the magic of taking something personal from someone in order to curse them, or something like that. I told him that I believed something similar. Wes smiled and said "I've got his pen!"

Start with Part I

Managers - Part XXIV - What Do You Expect of People?

A lot of attention lately has been given to workers walking out of jobs because they have had enough. Enough of abusive customers, enough of managers who don't support them, and enough of poor working conditions. I completely understand. Entry-level workers have been told for years that if they didn't like an aspect of their jobs they should just quit, so that's what many of done. The center of gravity in the employer-employee relationship has shifted in many situations to favor the employee. 

I have long said that while no job is perfect, every job is a balance between the good things about it and the bad. Where the fulcrum lies is going to differ depending on an individual's priorities. For some, a big paycheck might outweigh abusive customers, for others quality of life balance or a flexible schedule might be more important. When the bad outweighs the good, that's when an employee is going to quit. That's entirely appropriate — an employee has to decide what's best for them; everyone has to weigh for themselves what they are willing to do and what they're willing to put up with. 

As a manager in several different industries for most of my life, I hired (and fired) a lot of people. One of the things that I had to deal with in that role was people who, for one reason or another, did not understand what the job was and expected the very nature of the job to conform to their expectations. For example, if you were hired to work on a road construction crew, it would not be reasonable to be upset that you had to work outside. The nature of the job is outside work. It would be reasonable to complain if you were not allowed rest or meal breaks, were not provided with personal protective equipment, or were not paid on time. But you can't work a road construction job inside an air conditioned office. 

One of my early management positions was as a district manager for a newspaper circulation department. Delivering newspapers is not an easy job. Newspaper carriers are considered independent contractors, not employees. (This may have changed in recent years, but it was the case when I was in the business) What this means is that they don't have days off, they can't call in sick and have to find their own substitute if they get sick or the car breaks down. They don't get snow days; they are out working in the dark in all kinds of weather and on all the holidays. This was all explained in detail to every single person that we contracted to deliver papers, yet we would still get carriers attempting to "call in sick", or who quit suddenly when the first snowstorm of the year hit. It may have been a terrible job, but it was the job that you agreed to do when you signed up. 

Much of my management career was spent in various roles in retail grocery stores. While not as grueling as a job delivering newspapers, if you worked in a grocery store you weren't an independent contractor, but an employee, with all of an employee's legal protections. There were many things that retail employees put up with that are not intrinsic to the job, but can be found in many retail environments. Varying schedules, and abusive customers are two top problems. The companies for whom I worked were obsessed with "making labor". A budget was set for payroll expenses for each store and each department within each store that was based on a percentage of gross sales. Dividing that dollar amount by the average wage told you how many hours you could schedule. Problems arose when sales were inconsistent — for example if the sales at the beginning of the month were regularly much higher than at the end of the month, or holiday sales were much higher than average. An employee might find herself scheduled for 40 hours one week, 28 hours another week and 15 on a slow week. This made it difficult to plan ahead, to budget, or even have a second job. 

The biggest disconnect between the needs of the company and the expectations of employees was holiday schedules. Like in my newspaper days, we made sure that we explained our expectations to new employees. One very important expectation was that during certain holidays we were much busier than normal and that we couldn't grant vacation time off during these holidays. That didn't mean that there were no days off. Everyone still got their two days off per week, but you couldn't expect to take off from December 20 through January 5 — those were extremely busy times and we needed all hands on deck. There was also the issue of fairness: everyone wanted July 4th off, wanted Christmas Eve off, but someone had to be there. But every year we still received requests for extended vacations. People were naturally disappointed when they couldn't have the time off that they wanted, but that was the job. 

It might be argued that some of these expectations, independent contractor status of newspaper carriers or no holidays off for retail workers shouldn't be part of the job. And that's where the free market comes in. Many industries, food service and retail in particular, are having trouble filling positions and have had to change the way that they do business. Some have responded with higher pay scales. But if the problem is working conditions and not pay, they will still have trouble filling positions. If enough people stay away from grocery store, or other retail, jobs due to expectations like working all holidays, eventually some of these companies might start closing on holidays. Or perhaps some other creative solution. Agreeing to certain job conditions, like working holidays, but then complaining or quitting when asked to work holidays, is dishonest. Ask questions, find out exactly what the job requirements are; if the employer deviates, stand your ground. If the job conditions don't meet your requirements, go somewhere else, which is more efficient and less stressful than taking a job where you know that you'll eventually quit because you'll be asked to do what they said you would be asked to do. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXIII - Other Christianities

What most Christians don't realize is that despite what the Book of Acts might suggest the early Christian Church wasn't A Christian Church, but was a patchwork of numerous Christian Churches, or more descriptively, multiple Christianities. 

Consider the scenario. Evan assuming that the Gospels accurately describe the scope of Jesus' following, i.e. an inner circle of twelve (minus one) men, an outer circle of seventy and an unknown number of men and women of varying levels of commitment...if they truly believed what Jesus was preaching, they too believed that the world was coming to an end. Not at some nebulous time in the future, but before the people around them started dying off! If they were driven to continue Jesus' mission, they'd be attempting to get as many of their fellow Jews living right so that they could enter the Kingdom of God. (Yup. "Fellow Jews". You read that right, there is little indication that Jesus was preaching to the gentiles.) The last thing that any of Jesus' followers would be trying to do was to start an organization, a church. 

Nonetheless, that's what happened.

It's indisputable that something ostensibly based on the teachings of Jesus spread around the Roman Empire and even bordering nations within a very short period of time. How closely what got spread around adhered to what Jesus was teaching isn't so clear. 

There are several pieces of evidence that there were competing versions of Christianity in the first century following Jesus' death. Firstly there's the evidence within the scriptures that we have. Throughout the epistles there's repeated references to false prophets, false teachers, people preaching "another Jesus" and even those being labeled "antichrist". These weren't pagans, weren't satanists, they were other Christians who happened to have a different opinion about what Jesus taught and the meaning of those teachings, including what they were supposed to do about them. Then there's the testimony of Paul, who is very clear that he had doctrinal disagreements with other Christians, including Peter. We also have clear historical evidence of self-described Christian movements. The most well known and longest lasting were the Marcionites. Their founder, Marcion, taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus were two separate entities, with the Old Testament God being an inferior, if not evil, entity. He also rejected all the Gospels except for Luke. His movement survived for several centuries as a rival to the Orthodox/Catholic Church. (The Catholics, or Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox were one church through the first millennium, even if there were internal disagreements) Even in the Gospels, there is a difference between the Jesus being presented in the synoptics versus the Gospel of John, and differences in emphasis among the synoptics. . 

It's not surprising that there was disagreement. It would be surprising if there were not. Jesus operated in a backwater of the Roman Empire. Even in the more urban areas communication was far from instantaneous. Christian communities, even in the same province would be virtually isolated, with only occasional communication with others. Jesus' teachings would have spread exclusively by word of mouth in the early decades before epistles and gospels came to be written and passed around. Not only would transmission of "the Word" resembled a modern game of "telephone", but as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human nature. Charismatic local leaders would have put their own spin on Jesus' words. 

One competing Christianity is the sect we know as the Ebionites. These were Christians who saw themselves as followers of Jesus who retained their Jewishness. In the writings that have come down to us they were opposed by Paul, who insisted that one did not need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian. Earlier I mentioned Marcion. There were also numerous sects of Christian Gnostics who held any number of beliefs that we today might consider bizarre. Or anti-Biblical. But who wrote the Bible?

One of things that every group of the various Christianities claimed was that their beliefs were passed down from Jesus' original apostles. By the time the competition among the various sects came to a head, all the originals were safely dead and could no longer be consulted. That didn't stop gospels and epistles from being produced with the names of The Twelve tacked on to them. In addition to the books of the New Testament that we know from our Bibles, there were dozens of gospels, epistles and apocalypses being passed around. There was no standard. Different sects used different writings. There was no central authority to decide which were legitimate and which weren't. 

But eventually there was a central authority. Even though the Catholic Church claims that there is an unbroken chain through Jesus to his apostles to their successors up through modern day. It's more likely in my opinion that what became the Catholic and Orthodox Churches coalesced slowly over several centuries until they became the dominant sect of the various Christianities. When Constantine the Great legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire there were still competing sects: the previously mentioned Marcionites and Gnostics, and the Arians in northern and western Europe. A sect called the Nestorians found refuge in the Persian Empire. The Catholic/Orthodox however, emerged as the dominant among the various types of Christianity. Their power, backed by the Empire, enabled them to claim to be the one, true, church, and label competitors as heretics. 

Not long after the consolidation of power, the Catholic/Orthodox hierarchy saw the need to establish which writings were authorized — what constituted the canon of scripture. Related to this was the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. The Catholic/Orthodox leadership maintained that they were the successors of the original apostles and that right doctrine had been transmitted from one generation to the next through that unbroken lineage. This succession was both literal — doctrine was passed down, and spiritual — they inherited the spiritual authority of their predecessors. Referring to this authority, they decided what writings were authentic and which were not, destroying many of the alternate scriptures, although some copies survived into modern times. 

The process was somewhat circular. The Bible, once established, was what the winning contestant in the Church competition supposedly was based upon, but what constituted that Bible, was what the winners decided would be in it. More on this in a future article: Sola Scriptura.

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Workin' Man - Part XXIII - Van Dorn Store Director

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 I was at the Van Dorn Russ's as the Store Director for slightly under three years. The first 18 months went pretty well — I felt that I had the support of Operations VP Tom, Larry, who was in charge of the corporate department directors as well as Scott R, the District Manager who was my immediate supervisor. The last 18 months were a nightmare. 

One very important thing that I was not told was that the store was slated to be closed. It had been losing money for years. It was situated on a very busy road but was difficult to get in or out of. Hy-Vee had built a large store a mile south, which was impossible to compete with, and B&R had committed to expanding and remodeling the Russ's at 66th & O streets two miles north — more competition. Closing the store was a wise business decision, but they hid the fact from the staff and even from me. 

Because the store was losing money it was difficult for managers to earn bonuses, and anyone with any ambition had their eyes on bigger and more profitable stores. There were a few managers who liked the slower pace, and a few who had sabotaged their careers and were stuck there, but between corporate transferring out managers they thought had potential and others applying for positions in bigger stores after being trained at Van Dorn, it was a constant revolving door of managers. The ones that were left were, like me, kind of the misfits of B&R Stores. In a meeting that I had with Patrick, the outgoing store director (who I had trained as a Grocery Manager at Pine Lake) I was informed of the myriad problems with most, if not all, of my managers. My Bakery Manager had instigated an OSHA investigation over an accident in her department. She and her assistant manager also had been involved in a relationship — she lodged a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he disputed by revealing sexual explicit texts that she has sent to him. He was transferred out. My Scanning/Pricing Manager had been written up repeatedly for spreading rumors about other employees. The Deli Manager had recently been written up for having a multitude of out-of-date items on the shelves and was so difficult to work for that we couldn't properly staff the department. One of my shift supervisors wanted to quit during my first week in the store after running over her own foot with a pallet jack. The Cash Office Manager had suffered brain injury a few years before and was routinely rude to everyone in the store. I fit right in with this crew. 

Despite the difficulty in keeping qualified staff, I attempted to lead those who stuck around in focusing on being great at the basics and good customer service. The "basics" included obvious things like never running out of ad items and keeping the bathrooms clean. Good customer service included minimizing lines at the checkouts (this would eventually be my downfall). Several of us non-cashiers were trained to run a checkstand and would "jump on" a register when it got busy. This usually took up five minutes and virtually eliminated the lines. Saturday morning checking became a regular thing for me, which was unusual, since the only cashiering that I had ever done was when I substituted for the Save Best store director one week. I set up next to Bev, an experienced cashier, so I could ask her questions. 

One of the things that corporate management never seemed to understand was how difficult it was to properly staff a store with low sales. As I explained in a previous post, the labor budget for the store and for each department was based on a percentage of sales. You multiplied the budgeted percentage by projected sales to come up with what you could spend on staffing, then divide that by average wage to determine the number of hours you could schedule. The problem which never would be addressed was that it took a certain amount of labor hours to simply prepare a department for the day's business, even if the sales turned out to be $0. For example, in the production departments, such as Bakery, Deli, Smokehouse, you were making product, not just opening boxes and putting items on the shelf. This took time and people to do it. Even non-production departments needed employees to keep the shelves stocked.  

While it's always a good idea to evaluate your staffing needs — you don't always need as many people as you think you do — there's a limit to how much cutting you can do. One of the more ridiculous recurring budgeting scenarios was departments whose budget didn't even allow for one full-time employee, (not even a full-time manager) yet since product ordering, stocking and basic customer service still needed to be done, employees would be pulled from other departments. Week after week I would plug sales projections into the spreadsheet that I had developed years before only to see the depressingly low available hours appear. Some of the hours projections, if followed, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out our responsibilities. I made the decision to staff my store at a level that I believed was needed to be able to provide good customer service and meet the basic requirements to operate a grocery store. This meant that I was voluntarily forgoing any possibility of receiving a quarterly bonus for meeting the budgeted labor goal. But it also meant that my employees would not have their hours cut to achieve an arbitrary number. 

My immediate supervisor at the time, Vice President of Operations Tom Schulte, scheduled an appointment with me to "show me how to write a schedule". I welcomed the input, because I sure didn't know how to cover all the departments with the labor dollars available. His input, however, was a huge disappointment. He started reviewing with me the math needed to calculate available hours for each department, which I already knew how to do. My method of sales projections were always spot on, and the math for calculating hours was pretty simple. I told him that I knew how to do the math, but what I didn't know how to do was write a schedule that would enable me to properly run a store with those hours. He didn't know what to say to that, he just mumbled something about none of the previous store directors could make labor either. 

I have to say that my relationship with Tom during my first year as a Store Director was pretty good. Despite having made some foolish mistakes in my career, I think he was impressed by the efforts I took to prepare myself for the job. He was understanding about the reality that the store was losing money due to circumstances beyond my control (we were budgeted to lose money — but lost even more than what was budgeted) and focused on my efforts to improve the operational aspects of the store. Any time he stopped by for a "store walk" I received good feedback and no nitpicking when things weren't 100 percent. Company President Pat Raybould was another story. 

Pat had two idiosyncrasies that made his visits to the stores dreaded events. Whenever he was out of town he would bring back ideas that he saw in other stores and pushed for us to adopt them, no matter how inappropriate. After visiting a store in Texas that had a giant display of nopalitos (cactus leaves), he would decide that all of our stores need cactus leaf displays. On one trip where he stopped in a small town Casey's convenience store he noticed that the Casey's seemed to be the center of activity for that little town. From that, he came to the conclusion that we needed to make our stores the center of activity. To do this we were supposed to schedule "events" one evening a week. We started out with a kids' night that was well-attended, but didn't result in any measurable increase in sales, which was the whole point. Most of the stores did this for a few weeks and just quietly stopped, hoping that Pat wouldn't notice (he didn't). 

Pat's other bad habit was that he never forgot about someone's screw up. Another Store Director relayed a story to me about a visit from Pat on National Doughnut Day while he (the Store Director) was running himself ragged getting ready for the day's massive doughnut sales. Pat wanted to talk to him "upstairs" and brought up an incident from several years previous when the Dairy Manager was doing a poor job at rotation. According to Pat, this incident was evidence that the Store Director didn't have his head in the game. It didn't matter that this Store Director was a top performing leader, had taken action to solve the problem with the Dairy Manager, eventually firing him, and it was several years in the past. In my store he would get it into his head that certain people were problem employees. He saw one of my janitors get a cup of water from the Deli soda dispenser and became convinced that he was always slacking off. Our Evening Supervisor didn't notice that lines were forming at the check stands (and no one called him) and Pat became convinced that he wasn't doing his job, despite the Evening Supervisor having duties such as adding new items to the shelves and unloading the trucks that took them away from the front of the store much of the time. He would also quiz employees about areas of the store that they had no knowledge of and draw the wrong conclusion from that. 

One of my weirdest Pat encounters involved an odor that was detectable as you first walked in the front door. It was fishy, but not really that strong. (This was an old building with plumbing issues — there were always odors) Pat was on a mission to find the source of the smell. We ended up back at the fish case. We stood in front of the fish display and could not smell any fish. We went into the back cooler and found some fish where the paper covering the fish was askew. Pat determined that a fishy smell at the front of the store, which you couldn't detect right in front of the fish case was somehow caused by fish in a closed cooler at the back of the store. 

Fish...that reminds me of the stupidity of the full-service fresh meat and fish case. Hy-Vee was known for having a full-service meat case 24 or 30 feet long if I remember correctly, staffed by three or four employees all day and evening. In order to compete when Hy-Vee built a new store just south of us B&R decided that the Van Dorn Russ's needed a full service meat case. There were two problems. One was that our display case was a measly 8-12 feet long and we did not have enough staff to man the counter. In the evening we had one employee, who in addition to serving customers had to clean the back room. In a money losing store, this was a ridiculous addition. 

Another useless section that most Russ's Markets had was what we called Specialty Foods. It mainly consisted of "fancy" versions of mainstream products like mustard, or whole grain flour. Some of those sold well, but most of the specialty items went out of date before we could sell even half a case. It also included "international" foods. Some of those, like Mexican or Mediterranean foods sold well enough, but we also sold foods from the United Kingdom, a nation not known for their cuisine. One of these U.K. items was spotted dick. Spotted dick is a traditional British steamed pudding made with suet and dried fruit. I was at a conference in Florida with a several other Russ's Store Directors and Pat when I struck up a lunchtime conversation with a Store Director from another state about specialty foods. I used "spotted dick" as an example, and repeated the words "spotted dick" several times. Pat, with an uncomfortable look on his face, asked me if I needed to use that kind of language. I quickly backpedaled in my mind, scanning to see if I had dropped an "F-Bombs" or any other "bad words" — nope, I came up blank. It turns out that he didn't know what "spotted dick" was and thought I was referring to another type of dick. Classic Pat. 

Start with Part I

Managers XXIII - Why Do People Apply for Management Positions?

One of the common reasons why there are so many bad managers out there is that in most companies the only way to earn a higher wage beyond a certain level is to move into management. If you've read any of the earlier posts in this series, you know that I believe that being a manager requires a skill set that may be related to, but is generally separate from, the jobs that are being managed.

For example, Mary works for Widgets International as an apprentice widget assembler. After a year she moves up to journeyman widget assembler. Mary is one of the best widget assemblers in her section. She is fast and accurate and hardly ever has a widget returned for re-work. Every year she receives an increase in pay based on her annual review, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap for her position. She transfers over to widget design, which has a higher pay scale than widget assembler, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap again. What can Mary do to earn a higher wage? Well, there's a team supervisor position open. Mary, on the strength of her excellent record of assembling and designing widgets, is hired for the position. Good for Mary! She's now on the management track! But chances are Mary, within a year, will be viewed by either her subordinates or her superiors as a bad manager. How could this be? She was the best at all aspects of her job. But supervising or managing other people requires completely different skills than doing the job itself.

New managers who have no aptitude for, or have received no training in management tend to fail in one of several ways:

Many non-managers view their own managers simply has higher-paid versions of themselves. They decide that a manager is "good" based on how much time they spend "working", i.e. doing the same thing they did before becoming a manager. New managers often bring this world view with them when they assume their first managerial position. What ends up happening is that the new manager, partly to get on his subordinates' good side and partly because he doesn't know any better, spends all of his time doing things rather than ensuring that things get done. The result is that true managerial responsibilities, such as planning, allocating of resources and employee development, are neglected. The employees likely think that they have a "good" manager, but upper management just sees a highly paid clerk.

Some neophyte managers go the other way. Their opinion of managers was simply people who got to boss other people around, so when they become managers themselves, they make no effort to actually manage, but lord it over and bully their subordinates. Employees generally think that these managers are "bad", since they don't "work". They also tend to take whatever orders they receive from upper management and deliver them to their team without any filter, so the higher ups, at least initially, like them.

This isn't to say that effective managers can't come up through the ranks, or aren't often self-taught. But there are a lot of people out there who need to earn more yet do not have management skills, but end up being promoted into management anyway. In the various service and retail industries in which I have been employed I have seen people promoted into management for two main reasons: (1) They were good at the non-management work that they did or (2) They knew how to schmooze the hiring manager. Seldom did a job interview involve questions about leadership qualities or administrative abilities. People frequently applied for positions that they were unqualified for simply because they paid more. I can't say I really blame them. If there are no other avenues for financial advancement, why not roll the dice and try for it? Especially since it could be seen that other non-qualified people had been promoted.

In my retail grocery career, I saw an interesting phenomenon with job applications. At the store level there was a relatively flat organizational chart. There was a Store Director & Assistant Store Director at the top, department managers running the various sections of the store (sometimes with assistant managers) and clerks below that. In some of the smaller department the managers were doing a lot of the day-to-day work in addition to managing. When a management position opened up, there might be 3-4 applicants, depending on the size of the store, usually clerks who were already working in that department, or an assistant manager in another store. Sometimes there were no applicants. But when an Assistant Store Director or Human Resources Coordinator position was posted it wasn't unusual to see 12-15 applicants, 90% of them with no relevant experience. I thought it might be because no one really knew what the people in either of those positions really did, they thought it didn't involve any real work, and surely it paid a lot!

So what's the solution? There really are two problems: (1) Unqualified people being promoted into management and (2) No path for wage increases outside of management.

Here's a few thoughts:

Be clear regarding what precisely is expected of managers
Hardly anyone knows what managers are supposed to be doing. Making it known what managers do, other than "bossing people around", might motivate some employees to develop real management skills before they become managers. 

Set up training/education classes for prospective managers

This would be beneficial to any company that wants their managers to do what managers are supposed to do: ensure that things get done. When I worked for state government there was such a program, but people usually had already been promoted into supervisory positions before entering the class. 

Create a path for valuable, experienced employees to earn wages comparable to management positions
In some businesses this happens to an extent. When I worked for a newspaper, the unionized pressmen earned wages comparable to sales reps and some managers; pharmacists in grocery stores are often paid more than all other employees, including the Store Director. But this is rare. Most positions have a wage cap that cannot be exceeded, but there is no legitimate reason why someone who had years, or even decades, of experience can't be paid as much as a rookie manager. These people are often the ones who keep institutional memory alive, and are the ones who keeps the wheels turning. One of the companies where I worked was very explicit about it: they told people that if they wanted to earn more they should apply for management positions. 

Once companies understand that management is a skill in and of itself, separate from what is being managed

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIV

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXIII - Yule Edition

Let's interrupt our march through my cult years with a side visit to The Way's views on Christmas. It may surprise some people that there are Christian denominations that do not celebrate Christmas. In the early days of European settlement in North America Christmas celebrations were actually banned in some of the colonies. The Puritans in particular had problems with the way Christmas was celebrated. Their objections were manifold. On one hand they viewed Christmas as a distinctly Papist, i.e. Catholic celebration. This was in the era of religious wars between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and the Puritans were, if anything, ultra-Protestant. The other part of their resistance was how English Christmas traditions, especially among the working classes, had become a day off from work and dominated by fun and games. And drinking. A lot of drinking. It took a long time for the Christmas observances of non-English immigrants to make their way into American ways of celebrating Christmas; but even today, there are groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses who do not observe any special days, based upon the Biblical admonition in Galatians 4:10 not to be "an observer of days and seasons". 

The Way, at least during my involvement, talked a good game in regards to following the dictates of the Bible, but in practice found ways around their supposed standards. Christmas observance was no exception. 

It's no surprise to most people that the Bible does not give a date for Jesus' birth. It doesn't give a year either. Part of this can be attributed to the lack of a common calendar. The current A.D. numbering system was devised in what we now call 525 A.D., when Dionysius Exiguus came up with a numbering system independent of the regnal years of reigning monarchs. He calculated (although we aren't sure what he based his calculation on) that A.D. 1 was the first full year following the birth of Jesus, putting Jesus' birth in what we now call 1 B.C. (there is no Year "0" in this system). There's a lot of other theories regarding what time of year Jesus was born, ranging from the Spring to mid September, but none are definitive. The December date that was associated with Saturnalia and the birth of "The Unconquered Sun" eventually became the accepted consensus date. 

Not satisfied with the position that we don't know the actual date or year of Jesus' birth, Victor Wierwille, the leader of The Way, set out to prove that the Bible really does give us that information, and that you can discover it with some Biblical research and a little astronomy. In 1981 he published Jesus Christ Our Promised Seed which claimed to narrow down the time to a 90-minute window on September 11, 3 B.C.!

In the late 1800's a Church of England minister, E.W. Bullinger, wrote a book titled Witness of the Stars. The premise was that the constellations told a story—the story of the Bible, and that interpreted properly, you could trace the prophecies of the coming Messiah throughout the zodiac. His reasoning behind this was quite convoluted and somewhat technical, if not completely opaque and inaccessible to the layman, but Wierwille latched on to it and added his own theories. Wierwille made the assumption that the Magi of the gospels (nowhere are they called kings by the way) were the successors of the wise men of the court of Babylon who answered to the prophet (and lions' den guy) Daniel, which was why they thought a "star" heralded the birth of a king of a backwater province of a foreign power. This made sense, sort of, but like so much of Wierwille's "research", he took what was a plausible assumption and promoted it as fact. So what did he think the Magi were looking for? Certainly not a laser beam from heaven spotlighting the manger. No, based on the constellation Leo the Lion representing the Tribe of Judah, Wierwille looked for astronomical events that would have been visible in Roman Judea during the time period between when he calculated Herod came to power and his death (which was based on calculations that disagreed with virtually all those who studied that time period). I don't recall the details, but he came up with something and tied it in with the completely unrelated verses in Revelation 12 about a woman "clothed with the sun, with stars in her hair and the moon at her feet" to indicate when the constellation Virgo was visible between sunset and moonrise using astronomical software and came up with the incredibly specific time frame that if I remember correctly was an 81 minute (my memory is a bit fuzzy on the actual time frame) time span the evening of September 11, 3 B.C. It was assumption built upon assumption based on a crazy theory, but it was wrapped up in a blue book cover and presented as undisputed fact. "Teachings" featuring the claims from this book were highlighted every December, with all of us faithful Waybots telling ourselves how superior we were to regular Christians because we knew this completely irrelevant and worthless information. We were also pretty fond of changing the words of Christmas Carols to make them more "accurate" and telling everyone who stood still for a half minute that angels don't have wings. 

Even before this book came out, The Way had a split personality when it came to Christmas. On one hand they preached that we weren't to be observers of days and seasons (like Christmas) but on the other hand we did observe most of the cultural and secular aspects of Christmas. Somehow The Way's leaders thought that simply changing the name made it all okay, hence the Wayism: Household Holiday. (I'm not going to get into it in detail here, but The Way made a distinction between the family of God and the household of God, with the household being the more exclusive, special and blessed subset of the family). Even assuming that The Way was God's "household", what made December 25th a household holiday? No one ever had a good answer. What annoyed me personally though was how "Household Holiday" became "Ho Ho" and we would wish each other "Happy Ho Ho". Way employees, and those in their Way Corps training program, were given some time off during the "Household Holidays" in order to temporarily "relocate" off campus to visit family or friends (you know, just like people who did celebrate Christmas)—which was called (of course) "Ho Ho Relo". Yikes. 

Throughout my involvement in The Way I observed Christmas just like any other secular American. I had a tree, I put up decorations, I sent out cards, exchanged gifts, but I also engaged in smug superiority over all those poor, ignorant Christians who just didn't understand the "true meaning of Christmas". 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXIV