God and organisational development

Part of the reason at least, is that some Christian OD [organisational development] work is functionally agnostic, if not atheistic. Our strategy or team-building exercises, for example, are sometimes no different from a secular process. We treat them as simply technical processes. By keeping our faith separate from our OD work, we practice OD as if God was not interested or involved in human change. We try to change our church organisations in our own strength alone and end up exhausted and disillusioned.

Rick James in Creating Space for Grace: God's power in organisational change. [Available as a pdf download from the Swedish Mission Council.]

A time to be simple

Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples, by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger.

Based on case studies of four hundred American churches, authors Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger prove that the process for making disciples has quite often become too complex. Simple churches are thriving, and they are doing so by taking these four ideas to heart: Clarity. Movement. Alignment. Focus. Each idea is examined here, simply showing why it is time to simplify.

One Amazon reviewer noted: The only part of this book, or the genre, that ought to give the reader pause is that the authors presume that ministry requires a strategic process through which people are funnelled on the way to spiritual growth. While that is the reality of modern, institutional church management, it seems to overrule the fluid and organic (if not disorganized) ministry of Jesus and the disciples while co-opting their names. This is not a major critique of the book, just the observation that business management principles are governing the church whose founder had very little to say about business management.

Responses to this book vary from considerable enthusiasm to some concern about the way the authors ideas of ‘decluttering’ tend to throw some babies out with the bathwater.