Church and Busines

This week I have been thinking about whether it is appropriate for the church to act like a business institution. There are at least two separate issues that I am confronting and I am afraid the interaction of the two is making my thinking somewhat muddled. I need to work it out. 1. Our church is moving through some longer range planning and considering a capital campaign. My involvement in business has included strategic planning, long term vision building and operational effectivness programs, so I am comfortable with this work. I really like the military planning model that says:

• Targets dictate weapons
• Weapons dictate means
• Means dictate costs

And so I am trying to push our session back to the targets (do we want to grow to be a large congregation or start another church, are we a leadership development engine or a center of worship excellence), instead of obsessing on the means (larger building, specific property, targeted hirings). This seems to be the best sort of business planning, providing clarity and focus to the directions and projects that are undertaken. I want to appropriate this model in the church. 2. A good friend took on a large project in a far away church group. After about 9 months the group found that his qualifications were not exactly the way they understood or expected. He had the words on his resume - but they meant different things to him than they did to them. This seems to have become a huge issue and escalated until last week he was fired. Their statement was "we need to get this project done, we don't think you can do it, we just need to find someone who can do it - thanks.." This sort of short sighted, mean spirited corporate "gear exchanging in the machine" is exactly what I hate about business institutions. My friend had been honest with his supervisor about struggles and questions, but had been performing well according to the targets laid for him. They simply were not willing to take what they saw as a risk to the success of thier investment. I want to completely reject this sort of investment model of church planning. This focus on success at all costs seems so unbiblical. (you can probably feel the anger...) But now I have two positions, and I wonder whether they are contradictory. I realize that the first is all about ideas and plans, and the second is about implementation and people. But is it acceptable to operate from that strategic investment model in long term theoretical planning and then try to switch gears and operate more personally and peacefully when it comes to supervising people who are working out the implementation of a plan. Is there a model that incorporates a biblical worldview to the entire planning and implementation process? Maybe what I am most angry about in my friends situation is that the expression of his weakness to his supervisor seems to have brought about the condemnation and rejection that quickly led to his firing. It seems that they had an ideal related to outcome, image, and return on investment and then essentially shoehorned my friend into it. When my friends falleness started proving that rough edges would create a somewhat different result in the outcome - they couldn't handle it. So - does a more personal, biblically informed model take the individual all the way back to the beginning? to the idea and planning stage? Should the model be:

• People have gifts, abilities and weaknesses given by God
• Asessment of these in the community of faith should produce vocational challenges - to the individual called to serve and to the community asked to support the challenge.
• Implementation is measured by faitfulness to the vocational challnege and not by success to some external imagined standard

I am thinking of the church at Antioch as a model here. A large mulitcultural urban presence, that asessed the vocation of two of its members, and challenged them and their congregation to send them out as missionaries. I can imagine a strategic planner saying: "Our target is transforming the city of Antioch, Our weapons will be the best leadearship possible, our means will be hiring Paul and having him preach at 5 services in 3 different locations every Sunday!" Instead, they saw Paul's calling to the world, and sacrificed the "success" of their institution for the good of churches throughout Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. This is the sort of thinking that we might be called to do. This might be what transforming our institutions in the mandate of biblical thinking might look like. Revolutionary - yes! Difficult - absolutely! Worthwhile - I believe so....