Business or Spirit?

Many churches struggle between two extremes: whether to run a church on a business model, or whether to run it by relying primarily on the Holy Spirit. And there have been some great business model books that have seemed entirely applicable to the church. In an article on Leadership Journal online entitled Good to Great to Godly, Mike Bonem discusses the value of Jim Collin’s classic book, ‘Good to Great’ for churches. He notes that while it was of great value to him in his work in the business world, and still had good things to say when he moved onto a church’s staff, he also had to redefine his thinking in the light of another classic, Jim Cymbala’s Fresh Wind, Fresh Spirit.

This is an excellent article discussing the implications of taking the innumerable business models and adapting them for the church.

Mike Bonem is executive pastor at West University Baptist Church in Houston, author of Leading from the Second Chair and Congregational Change, a Harvard MBA. and a former business consultant.

Not so Godly business?

In an article entitled, Good to Great to Godly, Mike Bonem looks at the way in which Jim Collins' business principles have been extensively applied in the church. However, his concern is that the church isn't a business, and running it on business lines rather than God-led lines will ultimately cause it to fail. (He isn't denigrating Collins, by the way, whom he obviously admires.)

At one point in his article he writes:

There are also congregations that make no pretence of seeking God in their decisions. The leadership core may have been selected by virtue of tenure or financial contribution rather than spiritual sensitivity, or the church's culture may simply be "all business."

If you don't read anything else in the article, reflect on this one paragraph alone. It says a huge amount about how many churches are run - and possibly exposes why eventually they fail.

Time Management

How does [Jim Collins] manage his time? "I use a stopwatch," he says.

Does that mean that like any excessively busy, highly successful business researcher, author and consultant, he runs from meeting to meeting, tethered to his Blackberry calendar, measuring out his worklife in minutes and seconds? When I sat down with Jim at the annual CIPD conference and asked him, among other things, about his working style, I was surprised to find that rather than filling up his time, he intentionally empties it.

When he says he uses a stopwatch, he means that he tracks his time to make sure he gets the most from his waking hours. He divides his life into blocks — 50% creative time, 30% teaching time, and 20% other stuff ("random things that just need to get done").

Read the whole article here: Manage Your Time Like Jim Collins - Harvard Business Editors’ blog

A brief comment: we're afraid of 'creative time.' We're afraid that we're not doing enough 'for the Lord' and that He'll berate us for wasting time. I remember when I was (temporarily) in full-time care of a church that my biggest concern was that I was afraid to relax, in case someone caught me not 'working.' It's a dangerous approach to pastoring as well as business.

What return?

A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time. For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance.

For a social sector organization, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns. In the social sectors, the critical question is not 'How much money do we make per dollar of invested capital?' but 'How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?'

From page 5 of Good to Great and the Social Sectors: a monograph to accompany Good to Great, by Jim Collins.

Getting it wrong - dead wrong

We must reject the idea - well-intentioned, but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become 'more like a business.' Most businesses - like most of anything else in life - fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

So says Jim Collins, in the opening paragraph of his monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Yet so much of the church continues to think that being 'businesslike' is a good thing.

God's own land ... maybe even more than we thought

This is the title of an article by Simon Collins that appeared in the NZ Herald on the 29th March, 2008.

In it, Dr John Stenhouse, a Christian historian from Otago University, says: New Zealand may or may not be "God's own country" but it has always been more Christian than we thought. He told 'an evangelical Christian congress that "secular and left-liberal" historians, who have dominated New Zealand historical writing, have distorted the country's history to push contemporary agendas. "For most of our history, Christianity has been more widespread and influential than many historians, especially in recent years, have acknowledged."

You can read the whole article here, or, if it's no longer available on the original site, contact Mike Crowl, National Mission Research and Resource Assistant.