CEOs or Shepherds?
Today I write with a sense of trepidation and thoughts of self-examination. I have been thinking about this for a while. I have come to realize that Church is big business. The more I become familiar with the issues of budgets and buildings, the more I realize that Church is big business.
A church planter friend of mine who has been pastoring his church plant(well over 500 people attending his worship services in a plant that is only 7 years old) told me that his church will be building their first building in the next few months. The cost $3 million. His is a small church project. I am excited about the vision of his church and he volunteered the first 4 years, prior to being paid for being pastor. His wife works and he supplements his income by writing and speaking outside the church.
We also are in the middle of a couple of large projects in my realm of influence. Each of them will be $3 million or more. I deal with well over 600 employees in my position. I am also responsible to monitor and work with budgets that total multiple millions of dollars. Church is big business.
I thank God for the opportunity of ministry. I thank Him that He has blessed the church and particularly our movement with resources, beyond what we could ever imagine. Yet, with all of this, it is increasingly difficult for us to avoid the "corporate" mentality in our movement and in the Church. In other words, we find ourselves often managing with worldly methods instead of heavenly weapons. I am not so foolish as to believe there should not be procedures or accountability. I am also realize that corporation protects me from legal issues and in a way provides me with a comfortable life. I am grateful for that.
I think what scares me is that corporate mentality has crept into the Church at large. There are pastors and officers who see themselves more as administrators and CEOs than shepherds.
Let me illustrate. One of the people I work with attended a very large church in our area. 20 years into her time as a member, she introduced (yes that is right) introduced herself to her Sr. Pastor at the church. They had never even shaken hands. While he is a great preacher and writer, and I assume a great delegator and manager, he missed out on the pastor part, because of needing to be a corporate manager. His church is very much managed as a corporation.
Fortunately, I work with a leader who is very pastoral. If he errs he does so on the side of relationship. He visits his flock. He gets to know people. He does think through the corporate side of things, but sees the corporate side of things as a way to empower his flock instead of a way to control or just manage the business of over 40 congregations. In many cases, the corporate mentality would tell him to wash his hands of an issue and move forward. He instead sees his opportunity to defend and work with the situation in a pastoral way. He has not been infected with a corporate mentality.
He leaves the day to day business of things to others (that would include me). He is a leader not a manager.
We do have a big business going on here. Yet, I think we can avoid corporate mentality which will cause us I believe to function solely as CEOs. I want to be numbered among the leaders too, not just the CEOs.
I think corporate mentality has a way of watering down mission. I also think that when we become corporate in our thinking that we become more concerned with measurable results than being patient and prayerful about what the Spirit will do. As I said, I believe in accountability. I believe in good stewardship of the resources God has given. I just hope we have more shepherds than we do CEOS.
So with all my blogs, I have a couple of questions. Do you see corporate mentality in the Church? Do you think it has a place? How can people, especially in our Movement balance the issues of management and shepherding? Is being corporate really in line with the will of God for the Church and our movement? How can we hold ourselves accountable without developing a corporate mentality?
A church planter friend of mine who has been pastoring his church plant(well over 500 people attending his worship services in a plant that is only 7 years old) told me that his church will be building their first building in the next few months. The cost $3 million. His is a small church project. I am excited about the vision of his church and he volunteered the first 4 years, prior to being paid for being pastor. His wife works and he supplements his income by writing and speaking outside the church.
We also are in the middle of a couple of large projects in my realm of influence. Each of them will be $3 million or more. I deal with well over 600 employees in my position. I am also responsible to monitor and work with budgets that total multiple millions of dollars. Church is big business.
I thank God for the opportunity of ministry. I thank Him that He has blessed the church and particularly our movement with resources, beyond what we could ever imagine. Yet, with all of this, it is increasingly difficult for us to avoid the "corporate" mentality in our movement and in the Church. In other words, we find ourselves often managing with worldly methods instead of heavenly weapons. I am not so foolish as to believe there should not be procedures or accountability. I am also realize that corporation protects me from legal issues and in a way provides me with a comfortable life. I am grateful for that.
I think what scares me is that corporate mentality has crept into the Church at large. There are pastors and officers who see themselves more as administrators and CEOs than shepherds.
Let me illustrate. One of the people I work with attended a very large church in our area. 20 years into her time as a member, she introduced (yes that is right) introduced herself to her Sr. Pastor at the church. They had never even shaken hands. While he is a great preacher and writer, and I assume a great delegator and manager, he missed out on the pastor part, because of needing to be a corporate manager. His church is very much managed as a corporation.
Fortunately, I work with a leader who is very pastoral. If he errs he does so on the side of relationship. He visits his flock. He gets to know people. He does think through the corporate side of things, but sees the corporate side of things as a way to empower his flock instead of a way to control or just manage the business of over 40 congregations. In many cases, the corporate mentality would tell him to wash his hands of an issue and move forward. He instead sees his opportunity to defend and work with the situation in a pastoral way. He has not been infected with a corporate mentality.
He leaves the day to day business of things to others (that would include me). He is a leader not a manager.
We do have a big business going on here. Yet, I think we can avoid corporate mentality which will cause us I believe to function solely as CEOs. I want to be numbered among the leaders too, not just the CEOs.
I think corporate mentality has a way of watering down mission. I also think that when we become corporate in our thinking that we become more concerned with measurable results than being patient and prayerful about what the Spirit will do. As I said, I believe in accountability. I believe in good stewardship of the resources God has given. I just hope we have more shepherds than we do CEOS.
So with all my blogs, I have a couple of questions. Do you see corporate mentality in the Church? Do you think it has a place? How can people, especially in our Movement balance the issues of management and shepherding? Is being corporate really in line with the will of God for the Church and our movement? How can we hold ourselves accountable without developing a corporate mentality?
posted by Larry at 5:22 PM
7 Comments:
I'm not sure how big the church was where the woman hadn't met her pastor in the 20 years she'd been there, but I don't know that I have a problem with that. As long as the church had small groups that its members could be a part of and other "shepherds" to which they could be accountable.
Drew and I had lunch today to talk about some issues relating to church/Church and people leaving it.
I think one of the problems is that the very structure of how most of us do Sunday morning church - come in for an hour, sit down, stand up, lift our hands, sing songs, read scripture, hear the message, *all facing one direction*, where a few people minister to the rest and where most, including the leaders, leave unchanged - lends itself to a managerial mindset among leaders.
The church I go to now currently has several small groups which, my pastor always insists, is the lifeblood of the church. That, along with the after-church fellowship every Sunday is a good start, I think, towards enabling more people to become real leaders and shepherds of their congregation.
I agree with Phil. I doubt very much that Jesus had a whole lot of one on one pastoral contact with the people he preached to. Many of the Apostles spent the majority of their time travelling from one church plant to another. They too couldn’t have had too much one on one time to offer people. I think it is very possible to develop meaningful, mentoring type relationships, even within a very large congregation. But, as Phil said, you have to put forth an effort to give people the opportunity and even accountability in building those relationship. That seems to be the thing that is often missing in the church.
I stand by my belief that, big church or small church, it’s authenticity that matters. What are we about? Are we about meeting on Sundays? Is that our identity? If so, you’re going to continue to lose people because people just don’t find much worth in that, and they shouldn’t because there ISN’T much worth in that. Yet that remains the main thing is far too many churches these days.
As Phil said, show up on Sunday, sing a few songs, listen to a message, go home, we’ve done church for the week. That’s one crappy/hopeless definition of church.
p.s. I also think your question is trapped inside the box we’ve created for church leaders, i.e. we assume that once somebody is called, that they are suddenly bestowed with the gifts of pastoring, teaching, preaching, administration, etc. This is simply not the case. Therefore, if the “Sr. Pastor” has the gift of administration (i.e. Bill Hybels), and uses that gift wisely, understanding that since he is weak in the pastoral area, he must provide that support in other ways, I have no problem with it. In the Army (and in many churches) we guard authority positions fiercely and pay the cost of that by having overworked and under qualified men and women leading us.
For what it may be worth, here is my view from the pew: apologies for the essay!
The ‘mistake’, to my mind, of the accountability debate is that we have completely lost, therefore ignoring and disregarding, the need to understand, as well as the practice, that we should – first and foremost – be accountable to God. This supreme and defining dynamic appears to be absent, in far too many instances, from the entire equation. We have, in its stead, created an accountability agency out of the organisation that suggests that if we are accountable to the movement and then the movement is accountable to whoever demands our accountability, then we are ipso facto, accountable to God rather than, as should be the case, the reverse.
The Church put itself on a commercial footing and denominations, as well as many churches within them, now not only function but also actually regard themselves as corporations; the denomination being as some conglomerate. It appears that the Church, in responding to the world around it, chose to adopt prevailing commercial business principles instead of formulating and developing, for the want of a better word or phrase, kingdom-business principles where the need for accountability to God might have been the first objective of the corporate framework and not as an accidental or supplementary or ignored, as appears to be the case, in so many instances, now.
I think that in adopting the language of the commercial sector, we adopted the ways of the sector. We use the word, perhaps glibly, ‘corporate’ when it probably should be ‘collective’ but in the use of such a word we then transfer responsibility and accountability and often the resultant blame, from the local to the organisation. It is almost that at local level, therefore ‘my’ level, we expect ‘them’ to take on the mantle of organisational responsibility whilst ‘we’ absolve and abdicate from it altogether. Elements of this outcome can be explored within the hierarchical ‘top-down’ construct and cascade of the organisation (another debate altogether). I am convinced that in the oft-felt sense of powerlessness, in the organisational context, that we individually have lost our sense of personal responsibility and fail to understand (or have forgotten) that where we are, and the way that we work, is actually, in that place, the corporate response to a given situation. If you get it wrong, or get it right, the public will either praise or condemn the entire SA on the strength of what you have done, or not done, as the case may be.
A corporate approach is in the main the sum total of the approaches of the individual-collectives. Some collectives, due to numerical strength, organisational authority (and power) and positioning within the structure might be weighted (another consequence of the hierarchical construct and cascade) and therefore be somewhat more influential, in the terms of their determining, but they are nonetheless still one voice among the many, still one point of shaping amongst others. I am currently working on the theory of the congregational ‘mean’ in order to understand where attitudes and approaches towards certain issues spring and as to why they prevail. If the ‘mean’ of a particular congregation is a prime focus on accountability to God and that is replicated sufficiently across the organisation within a territory then that territory will also adopt such an approach and so on. We cannot, as it appears, we have come to practice, expect accountability to be undertaken at the top of the organisation on our behalf. It has to be a dynamic that springs at the lower levels of the organisation and wells up through it. Adage such as ‘if it is not happening where you are, it is not happening at all’ and ‘if you want things to change then you have to change yourself’ are more than inane cliché; there is, within the context of this debate, a wealth of significant truth in their simple statement. The cascading theory suggests, albeit subconsciously and unarticulated, that God is accountable to us. To understand how we have become so muddled, seemingly so unthinkingly and unknowingly, will need a far better brain than mine.
If the individual, and their collective, is truly earnest in their determination and their practice of being primarily accountable to God there is no way that, the resultant corporate mentality and practice can be anything other than also being primarily about being accountable to God also. Our language and our practice has taken the corporate, as we have come to understand it, out of the realm of the spiritual and placed it firmly in the world of the commercial. It will be to our eternal detriment if we do not reclaim and reshape it and put it back where it should be and where it belongs and consequentially replace corporate mentality and its ‘earthly methods’ with kingdom thinking and intrinsic ‘heavenly weapons’.
Davidson Walton
So....Phil..you would say that a pastor is doing his job if he had not even shaken hands with the person. I am talking about the very basic of human communication.
Tim, I would disagree with the point that Jesus did not do much pastoral ministry to the people he preached to. Outside of a couple of stories, Jesus is intimately involved in one-on-one relationships throughout his time on earth. Sure, he did not meet each of the 5000 men he fed or probably did not shake hands after the sermon on the mount, but look at the times he touched, called by name and counseled one-on-one. Preaching was not his only duty. He pastored.
Actually, he discipled, but that is beside the point.
Again, I think you’re assuming that everybody who leads a church has the gift and/or calling of pastoring. This just isn’t so is it? I also think you’re choosing to believe that, because the gospels didn’t document all of the times and people that Jesus spoke to, that there were only a few. If that were so, how do you explain the fact that a city full of people welcomed Him into Jerusalem by singing and laying palm branches in front of Him. Clearly Jesus had spent a lot of time preaching to large groups of people and also healing and yet, could not have touched each and every one of them.
If what you’re trying to suggest here were true, then any “pastor” of a large church would be out of God’s will and, and maybe this is more telling, are also suggesting that only those “in charge” actually have the gift of pastoring. How bad would it scare you if a non-ordained regular member of a congregation had the gift of pastoring and was called to use it to serve the church, but not necessarily on staff?
Can your SA cultural upbringing handle that??? : )
Actually, yes.....if you really are a soldier, you are called to be a shepherd. One of the foundational elements of salvationism is to mentor and bring someone along. In fact, didn't Jesus give that commission to us all?
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