For a few years I served on the board of an international non-profit incorporated in North Carolina. The board chair had an attorney come can tell the board members what North Carolina law says about the duty of board members. He said that the primary duty of a board member is loyalty and that all other duties flow from that duty.

By loyalty, the law means that board members have to do what’s best for the organization. They can’t be loyal to themselves and use the organization for personal gain. Nor can they be loyal to anything else to the detriment of the organization on whose board they sit. If they find themselves in such a conflict of interest, they have to declare it and if necessary recuse themselves.

As board members we had to put the interests of the organization first in all our deliberations.

I have been writing in the paragraphs above about the duty of loyalty to the organization, but the attorney said that the board’s loyalty was not to the organization, but rather to the mission of the organization. All non-profits exist for a purpose – they have a mission. If that mission can best be accomplished by dissolving the non-profit organization, for example, then the board members must make that decision. They cannot be loyal to the organization itself above its purpose or mission.

That made sense to me. In fact, it caused me to realize, belatedly, that putting my loyalty to purpose/mission ahead of organization had caused me problems in the past, especially when I assumed that others automatically see the difference. A person loyal to the mission can be perceived as disloyal to the organization.

It’s easy for a missionary to become loyal to certain people, to a place, or to their organization, even when one of those loyalties starts to undermine the mission’s very purpose and spiritual life. Some people even become loyal to a methodology whereas loyalty to the purpose/mission of the organization demands that outdated and less effective methods be replaced. I have seen all of these loyalties and some of them recently again. I have seen them all compromise the purpose, the effectiveness and sometimes even the existence of Christian organizations, and occasionally even a person’s loyalty to our Lord. Missionaries are as susceptible to misplaced loyalty as anyone.

I used to think that loyalty was hard, but it’s easy. In fact, it’s natural. What’s hard is knowing when to put aside lesser loyalties, and most importantly being loyal to the right thing and especially the Right Person.

If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26 NLT)