ChurchRelevance.com (the first time Ive found said site) posts an interesting article on How Toyota would run a Church detailing 5 work processes that Toyota incorporate into their business, and then some short simple ideas on how these can be used.
I’ve swayed back and forth in the thinking towards business ideas being used within church, and thought a little more about it when I had a comment conversation here from this post on Church Marketing with Andy White, which turned into this.
The long and short of it for me is that, Church is not a company, it does not seek to be productive numerically or even logically, it seeks to expand the Kingdom of God and not its profit margins (though there are some guys in white suits maybe looking to do both!) therefore simply stating that Church should be run like a business is a No. But when when a Church values expanding the Kingdom of God (which for me is feeding the poor, binding the broken hearted to bring the gospel to the lost and disciple the saved) then I think that business models can be used to fulfill the biblical goal. The key here is that business models are used to Kingdom profit and not at being sucessful in a business sense.
What do you think? How far can business models be implemented in the Church? Should we reject all business concepts in relation to Church?
1 response so far ↓
1 Zack Caldwell // Apr 11, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Those are all good questions you posed. I don’t have an answer, but I’m searching right now. There was an episode of the simpsons that came up during this search that was aimed at church business and poking fun at the megachurch. Bart builds a model ricket and destroys the church building. Mr. Burns says that he will rebuild the church if the church will agree to let him run the church like a business. Well, when the rebuild is complete, they have agrand re-opening. Pews replaced by luxury recliners, jumbo sceens with God cams and a full scale advertizing campaign to bring in the people. Lisa is repulsed and claims that Mr. Burns has stolen the soul of the church and that she can no longer attend…
I think that’s one extreme, but the other extreme lends itself to poor stewardship. If the answer is somewhere in the middle and I think it is, then what types of questions do we need to be asking? I’m reading Andy Stanley’s 7 Practices of Effective Ministry and I do not endorse it, but for me, it got me thinking about how to lead a congregation, and for certain it is one was of doing things, but in my heart it just doesn’t seem right. I feel that they have cornered the market on God and boxed Him into their neat little model and if by chance God showed up and did something outside of their model, then their model would chalk up God’s work as a loss and continue on winning according to their model. Again, I’m not saying I have the amswers, but I’m searching.
Blessings