“Future generations will be amazed that at one time, we actually thought it was a good idea to run a church like a business.”
“Now that you’ve finished your SWOT analysis, here are some key ideas from the classic business book Good to Great that will help you shift the culture of your church.”
-same people
One of the biggest things screwing up our public rethink of church is the need to market the book/article/consulting service to the sorts of people who can afford pricey resources: successful church professionals.
These people are never going to reform church away from the corporate model, for the simple reason that they can’t. Externally, their organizations and donor base won’t let them, and internally, they have a cultivated blindness to the flaws of the status quo. It’s like trying to market the Reformation to Lorenzo de Medici.
Corporate church culture is certainly doing something, but let us not confuse organizational “success” with serving Christ. By every biblical metric, corporate church culture ties up huge amounts of resources for a very small return–when there’s any return at all. It makes dependent members rather than disciples of Jesus, it barely remembers the poor, and it generally pretends like other churches don’t exist. These are not simply shortcomings that can be readily fixed; they are natural results of the design. Every organizational structure inherently incentivizes certain behaviors and discourages others. The structure we’re talking about is a small number of paid, expert professionals providing religious services for masses of consumers. That structure needs loyal consumers and the amenities that reinforce that loyalty. Those loyal consumers donate, and the structure needs to keep the money in-house, where it can fund competitive salaries for its small stable of experts (and more amenities for donating members). Being a church, of course, it also needs a certain amount of visible outreach and charitable ministry. (Locally, that usually also serves as marketing to bring in more members.) But routinely, the total resources expended on mission are dwarfed by building fund or whatever.
There’s no reason why that model should control what we think of as possible, plausible, or legitimate. And so it seems foolish, if not outright self-sabotage, to choose the scions of that model as our primary discussion partners as we seek to reform the church.
3DM has done exactly that (as have most of the other folks in the discussion). I think it may be their biggest weakness.
Full Contact Christianity 