Without a doubt, my all-time favorite animal is the duck-billed platypus. It appeals to my nonconformist instincts because it breaks so many rules of biology. Consider: The platypus has a flat, rubbery bill, no teeth, and webbed feet, like a duck. Yet it has a furry body and beaverlike tail, and nurses its young like a mammal.
But wait-it walks with a lizard gait and lays leathery eggs like a reptile! And the male can use venomous hind-leg spurs to strike like a snake.
The strange animal stymied scientists for years, and in fact the first platypuses shipped back to England in 1800 were judged frauds. Europeans were still reeling from an expensive and popular fad item: imported "genuine mermaids," which turned out to consist of monkeys' heads stitched to the bodies of fish from the China Sea. They were not about to fall for a bizarre concoction of duck's bill, webbed feet, and beaver's body.
The platypus holds a certain charm precisely because it does break all the rules. Somehow or other, it still works as an animal. I like to believe that, in designing the platypus, God had fun stretching the limits of natural law (or "pushing the edge of the envelope," to borrow a phrase from test-pilot Chuck Yeager).
I like the platypus for another reason: its combination of so many incompatible features in one humble animal gives me hope that we humans, too, can break some of the rules that govern the "organisms" in which we are involved. I am thinking particularly of the local church.
The New Testament's favorite metaphor for the church, "the body of Christ," describes an organism, and pastors use organism-type words in speaking of their congregation: the flock, the body, the family of God. But churches also function as organizations; most have a formal governing structure and involve themselves in personnel management and supervision. Even churches with single-person staffs must supervise volunteer programs. Like it or not, every church becomes a Christian organization. Those two words thrown together set up an immediate tension.
Christian connotes community and family feelings and spirituality.
Organization conveys hierarchy and institutionalism and the pragmatic pursuit of goals.
Read a management textbook and Jesus' parables back to back, and you'll notice a clear difference in the way they view the world.
Organism vs. Organization
I have spent most of my adult life in Christian organizations of one kind or another. For sixteen years I have worked in Christian publishing. Besides the direct employee experience, in my writing career I have often covered stories that occurred in a local church setting or in such Christian ministries as Wycliffe Bible Translators and World Concern. In addition, I have served my own local church in various volunteer capacities, and my wife currently works on a church staff. All this exposure to Christian organizations has convinced me that the church, like the platypus, is a whole made up of contradictory parts.
Organizations, such as the army, government, and big business, follow one set of rules. Organisms, such as living things, families, and closely knit small groups, follow another. The church falls somewhere between the two and attracts criticism from both sides. Organization people accuse it of poor management, sloppy personnel procedures, and general inefficiency. Organism people complain when the church begins to function as just another institution and thus loses its personal, "family" feel.
I have concluded the tension between organism and organization is unavoidable and even healthy. I would feel uncomfortable within a church that tilted too far toward either model. A healthy church combines forces normally found in polar opposition. We must strive to be efficient and yet compassionate, unified and yet diverse, structured and yet flexible. We must live like a platypus in a world of mammals, reptiles, and fowl.
Recognizing the value of healthy tension is one thing. Living with it is quite another. Too easily, even the healthiest tensions lead to open conflict.
For the church to work effectively, we must become aware of the underlying forces of organism and organization and then learn how to harness them.
I will outline four areas-goals, status, structure, and failure-in which the tension commonly occurs and give some opinions on how the church can respond.
Goals
A pure organization has the advantage of clear and measurable goals. Take the military, for example. In wartime, the army has one ultimate objective agreed on by everyone: win the war. Such measurements as body counts and control of territory indicate how well the objective is being met.
Groups of people that function as organisms, however, find the task slipperier. What is the "goal" of a family? One could reduce the goal of parenthood, say, to "creating adults." But any parent could tell you that goal is as difficult to measure as it is to accomplish. Churches sometimes go through the exercise of defining their goals. I have participated in three-day retreats where such goals were spelled out in dazzling detail: evangelize the city, balance the budget, develop Christian leaders. But, again, these goals are much easier to state than to fulfill. I have watched highly paid consultants come into Christian organizations with a certain cockiness. "What this organization needs," they conclude, "is a Management By Objective plan. Let's define our objectives, then manage a way to meet them." I have watched those same consultants leave a year later, shaking their heads and mumbling. Christian ministry is not easily reduced to neat MBO formulas.
If MBO principles were rigidly applied, we would have abandoned missionary efforts to the Muslims long ago, and we would give up most of our current relief work in despair. True, Christian ministries have much to learn about efficient management of their resources, and goal setting may help that process. Yet we dare not become so goal oriented that we shut our ears to God's direction.
I would love to see someone try to interpret God's activity in the Old Testament from an MBO point of view. Goal: to create a godly nation of many people. Modus operandi: start with three barren women (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel) and factor in four hundred wasted years in Egypt and a forty-year detour in the wilderness. Or, move to the New Testament and try to explain Jesus' parables of the ninety and nine or the Prodigal Son from an MBO perspective.
With respect to goals, churches tend to fail in two ways: they become obsessed with them or they ignore them completely.
Either response makes me equally nervous. I feel utterly frustrated in churches that care nothing for the goal-setting process. Often they merely squander resources and stunt the growth of their people. The saying "He who sets no goal will reach it" applies directly to such organizations.
On the other hand, I have noticed that goal-oriented churches usually choose goals that are relatively easy to accomplish: a new building, an increase in size. But Jesus said very little about those goals; he talked instead of unity and love and justice. How well are we accomplishing them?
As a general principle, a church should deliberately stock its leadership with some people who are goal-oriented and some who are people-oriented. Very often, especially in smaller churches, the pastor will come from a people-oriented perspective. He or she chose the ministry, after all, because of a concern for the needs of people. Yet the pastor's job includes many tasks-supervising, running programs, juggling the demands of a crowded calendar-that can be planned and measured for effectiveness.
For several years I attended a suburban church with a small congregation (around seventy-five regular attenders). We had a loving, concerned pastor-so loving and concerned, in fact, that he never got around to much of the business of the church. A scheduled counseling session with a needy person would expand to consume an entire morning. The person being counseled would thrive under all the personal attention, but the rest of the church grumbled on Sunday morning when the pastor delivered an ill-prepared sermon and the bulletin never made it into print.
The church leaders concluded they needed more than a resident counselor; they needed a full-fledged pastor who could minister to the entire congregation. But the pastor, having no staff to share his work, never could get to all the important tasks. For two years the church lurched on in unpleasant tension.
Finally, a quiet but successful businessman asked if he could try an experiment for a few months. He volunteered to meet with the pastor every Monday morning for a two-hour breakfast. Together the two would plan the pastor's use of time for the coming week. The next week, they would begin breakfast by reviewing exactly how well the pastor had met the previous week's goals, then move on to more planning.
The pastor had enough openness and security to welcome a reporting structure that might seem demeaning to other pastors (but is actually quite common in a business setting). And the businessman showed sensitivity when the pastor had to change his priorities midweek in response to other needs. After such meetings had been going on for a year, I never heard further grumbling about the pastor's use of time. Together the two men had found a successful balance between the demands of organism and organization.
Status
Organizations rely heavily on status. Soldiers know exactly where they stand, and everyone else knows, too; uniforms announce rank. Competitive ranking begins with the A's, B's, C's, and F's of first grade. In the business world, title, salary, and other perks signify status. You can climb floor by floor up the Sears Tower in Chicago and, just by observing the office furniture, see the status of Sears executives rise with the height of the building.
In an organization, status depends on performance. Prove yourself worthy, and you'll get status. It's easy to haughtily look down on such rewards as appeals to "lower instincts." But the business world has learned that human beings respond well to marks of status; they can be incredibly good motivators.
In organisms, however, status works a little differently. How does one earn status in a family? Every family has divisions based on status and privilege. Parents reserve certain privileges they do not allow their children and they dispense privileges according to age and behavior. A seventeen-year-old daughter may date; a fourteen-year-old may not. A ten-year old can stay up till midnight to watch a movie; his five-year-old brother cannot. Status and privilege are assumed.
Yet the rules within a family do not operate like those within a corporation or army. Careless parents may show favoritism to one son or daughter, but at the risk of alienating the others. How many older siblings resent the privileges granted the "baby" of the family, who gets to date at fifteen when they had to wait until sixteen. In a family, and other organisms, something inside us instinctively calls out for fairness and equitable treatment, not privilege.
At an even deeper level a child "earns" the family's rights just by virtue of birth. A backward child is not kicked out of the family. In fact, a sickly child, who "produces" very little, may actually receive more attention than her healthy siblings.
In God's family, we are plainly told, "There is no Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free." All such artificial distinctions have melted under the sun of God's grace. As adopted children of God, we gain the same rights, albeit undeserved, as those granted the first-born, Jesus Christ himself. Paul dealt with the topic directly, using his analogy of the body of Christ to warn against valuing one member more highly than another.
Tensions surface, however, when a church tries to work out the principles of grace and equality in an organizational setting. Why else do youth pastors chafe so at being "just" a youth pastor?
In a large Christian organization, the reward system almost always expresses underlying belief about status. Government and industry make no apology about offering higher rewards for more "valuable" employees. But some Christian ministries flinch at such practices. A few, such as Campus Crusade and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, attempt to pay all employees the same amount, regardless of status. And some, such as Mennonite Voluntary Services and certain Catholic orders, pay their employees almost nothing: room-and-board expenses plus maybe thirty-five dollars per month for spending money. More typically, churches and Christian ministries have a sliding pay scale but tend to downplay what it signifies. They appeal to employees on the basis of loyalty, sacrifice, and shared commitment to the common goal, and then apply rewards on the basis of status.
How does status affect the local church? Even if a pastor tries to avoid the issue of status, it will inevitably come up because of the very nature of organizations. In most church settings, the pastor has status simply because our society has invested most leadership roles with higher status than follower roles. It is up to the pastor to keep status from being a barrier.
I have known a few pastors successful in using their status in effective ways. They do not ignore the status barrier, but rather, make specific efforts to have regular, sustained contact with people of "lower" status. One pastor visits each church committee at least once every six months on a rotating schedule. She recognizes that her very presence at an obscure committee meeting can raise the value of the committee's function in its members' eyes.
Another pastor expresses his gratitude in thank-you notes. His obsessive, endless stream of thank-you notes causes the church secretary much consternation, but it conveys a spirit of appreciation to every volunteer in the church.
A third pastor chips away at the status barrier this way: Once a year, he cooks a lumberjack-type breakfast for all Sunday school teachers. Seeing their pastor in an apron, flipping pancakes, frying bacon, and buttering biscuits does more to motivate teachers in that church than anything else all year.
American business unashamedly allows barriers to grow up between levels of employees. High-status employees earn more rights and privileges. But what works in an organization may not work in an organism-or in a church that combines qualities of both.
Structure
Although organizational structure often relates to status, the two are not the same. Structure, particularly the reporting relationship, makes formal an organization's lines of power. And any military or civil service veteran knows that a person can have high status with no real power.
Once again, business excels at structure. Nearly every major company has a corporate organizational chart, some as labyrinthine as a Tibetan map of the universe. Management experts, recently influenced by the Japanese, have added exotic new appendages to the old-fashioned pyramid, but all organizational charts confirm a formal hierarchy. Structure serves the same function in an organization that a skeleton serves in a biological body. And, predictably, organisms with no structure become soft and squishy, and sag in the middle.
In contrast to the corporate world, churches often have no organizational chart. I asked one employee of my church, "To whom do you report?" and received a blank stare in response-something that would never happen in the corporate world. (When he did think of the person he theoretically reported to, it was the staff member least gifted in supervisory skills.)
Over the years I have become acquainted with some of the leaders of large Christian ministries. I sense among them, with very few exceptions, an extreme discomfort with their power. The very word power seems to embarrass them. If they deal with corporate structure at all, they do so with a feeling of suspicion, as if dabbling in heresy.
Yet just as nature abhors a vacuum, organizations abhor a vacuum of power. In the absence of a formal structure, an informal power structure will grow up. By defaulting on power, those leaders simply open the door to someone else's power. How many churches in America are held hostage by one power-greedy deacon or elder or a maverick music director?
David Hubbard says that when he was asked to head Fuller Theological Seminary, he had one major question for the search committee that interviewed him: "What is your philosophy of power?" He knew that a school as large as Fuller could not squander power or spiritualize around it by pretending it did not exist. And he did not want to step into a role without the appropriate power to match his abilities and the structure's needs.
True power in Christian ministries often gravitates toward people who have good skills but not the skills necessary to handle power. Commonly, in an evangelical subculture that prizes verbal skills, the smoothest talker rises to the top. Verbal skills work well in a figurehead function. But when the need for hardheaded decision making arises, those verbal skills may actually turn into a disadvantage.
The Bible gives little advice on organizational structure. Jesus left no corporate chart for his disciples; the only one known to hold an office turned traitor. And when Paul outlined qualifications for church office, he focused exclusively on spiritual character qualities: temperance, integrity, honesty. We ought to reflect on that very carefully.
But does godliness in itself qualify a leader to manage a staff and a multi-million-dollar budget? Giving full responsibility for budget and personnel management to an individual who can teach, preach, and pray but who may not be gifted in administration will usually frustrate both pastor and congregation and make the church ineffective. A solid structure must somehow account for the varied abilities of its leaders.
I have no room in this article to propose a philosophy of power for Christian organizations. (In previous issues of LEADERSHIP, individuals such as Gordon MacDonald and Arthur DeKruyter have detailed structural possibilities. And World Vision's management seminars attempt to deal with the question.) I would simply raise a caution, because most Christian ministries and churches I have observed seem to stumble here.
Failure
Several million people in the United States could testify how the corporate world handles failure: If the economic climate is cloudy, you get laid off. And if your performance consistently fails to measure up, you get fired.
Organisms, however, view failure differently. A family may have black sheep, but does it ever "fire" a son or daughter? Such a drastic step as disowning a child is, in most families, inconceivable.
Christians hold up a single word as the ideal response to failure: forgiveness. The Prodigal Son's father welcomed him with open arms. Even the incestuous Corinthian was permitted back into the fellowship after his repentance. David the murderer, Saul the Christian-hunter, Peter the denier-they all found a new place in God's family. But what happens when this same gospel of grace gets applied in the Christian organization?
Good management requires a balance between responsibility, authority, and accountability. Churches and Christian ministries must be accountable to a board concerned about efficient management and to the people funding the ministry.
In turn, those ministries demand accountability from their employees. And yet, I sense great confusion on this issue. Too often management and theology get muddled. Christian ministries begin ministering to, rather than administering, employees. Employee mistakes get overlooked, and bad habits form.
Ignoring an employee's failures produces three very undesirable results.
First, it makes a statement to the rest of the organization: There's no need to be conscientious about excellence and promptness-the church secretary (or custodian or children's worker) abuses those standards constantly and no one cares.
Second, it makes a statement to the community at large: You could probably get a job as a youth pastor-they're desperate for any kind of help.
Perhaps most important, it makes a statement to the employee, a subtle message that the work has little value.
In my early years at Campus Life magazine, I had the great fortune of working under a wise Christian manager who viewed his role as helping the employees under him grow and develop. Many times in those early days I yearned for a more "understanding" boss. Why wouldn't he accept the fifth draft of my article? Why insist on a sixth?
Now, looking back, I see his professional attention was a form of loving concern. He knew I could become a better writer, and he committed himself to push me toward that goal. I even watched that same man fire employees in a loving way. The sentence may sound self-contradictory, but it is not, for separation was the best thing both for the company and the employee. In most cases, he worked hard to find another, more suitable job for the fired employee.
Working toward Balance
These four areas represent many others in which churches will feel tension between two different forces: a pull toward organization and a pull toward organism. The tension, I have concluded, is a healthy one, and each church must grope for solutions that combine the best elements of organization and organism.
Like a platypus, the church pieces together different parts. It combines some features from business and some from family. But what features, and how? Should the platypus have a duck bill or a rooster's beak? A beaver or muskrat tail? You will have to work out the specific details within the environment of your own church. But my experience has taught me some general principles that may help. I admit they are highly subjective and may not apply in every circumstance. But they illustrate an attempt to deal with the conflicting realities of a "Christian organization."
1. Separate the person from the function. A truly Christian leader will seek to recognize the inherent value and worth in every worker. Each person's intrinsic worth comes from being created in the image of God, and has nothing to do with skill or performance. But an employer does have the right, even the obligation, to judge a person's function. A pastor who loves an assistant pastor or church treasurer can express that love even through correction.
For a model of how, read through the gospel accounts of Jesus and his disciples. Among the scenes of intimacy and fellowship, you will find some rather harsh incidents of corrective management. When Jesus' disciples failed in their roles, he never let it slide.
Jesus singled out two disciples especially for correction. One was hot-tempered, self-centered, and inconsiderate, earning the appropriate nickname, "Son of Thunder." Another was blustery, pretentious, and ultimately treacherous. Yet under Jesus' careful management, these two flawed individuals became the apostles John and Peter. What would those two have accomplished had not Jesus attended to their failures?
2. Take risks with undesirables. Theologians in Latin America use the phrase "God's preferential option for the poor" to describe the biblical emphasis on justice. The bias is unmistakable: when God constructed a just society, he gave preferential treatment to the weak, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the alien.
I know of two organizations that apply this principle in radically different ways. One, Servicemaster Industries, is managed by dedicated Christians but operates in the fiercely competitive business world. In the free market, the government sometimes has to rely on a quota system to force hiring of minorities and handicapped persons. The managers of Servicemaster, however, try to reach beyond any quotas and intentionally seek out employees with true human need.
New employees at Servicemaster all start at the lowest level, cleaning floors.
Everyone gets an equal chance, but Servicemaster has little tolerance for failure. The company excels at defining "performance objectives" and then monitoring an employee's progress. They take risks in hiring but not in gauging performance. If employees do not measure up, they are released. As a result of their efficient management and strict adherence to performance, Servicemaster consistently performs with one of the highest profit margins of any company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Another company I know operates on a much smaller scale on the far north side of Chicago. There, a Presbyterian minister runs a nonprofit construction crew staffed mainly by alcoholics and recovering drug addicts-the poorest of the poor. Not a single one of his employees would make it at Servicemaster. They miss days, do sloppy work, relapse into chemical dependency. "With each job, we try to figure out how much money we can lose, and then go raise that amount to cover it," says their foreman. And, over time, a few good employees emerge, skilled and responsible enough to make it on their own.
Both companies take risks, and both seek to stretch their employees. I, for one, am glad the kingdom includes both.
Local churches do not have so many employee opportunities, of course. But when some low-skilled functions do arise-janitorial services, building maintenance, occasional typing-whom do we think of first? Are we willing to take risks with people who may fail? And if we don't, who will?
3. Make Christian virtues the style of your "corporate culture." The best-selling book on management, In Search of Excellence, gives great emphasis to "corporate culture," the combination of unified behavior, commitment, attitude, even dress, as practiced by companies like IBM. Local churches and Christian ministries ought to have a corporate culture also, one that has been defined for them already in the New Testament.
Sadly, many local church offices are full of strife and bitterness and favoritism. How can a leader bring to a group such qualities as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? The only way is for leaders, and those around them, to commit themselves to those qualities as enthusiastically as they commit themselves to such goals as fiscal soundness and productivity. It means a commitment to employees that extends beyond the last day of work, a depth of commitment that could never be expressed by a "one-minute manager." In Search of Excellence says nothing about a manager's prayer life, but that factor alone may do more to determine the success of a leader than all the management textbooks put together.
4. Encourage relationships. The corporate world has ambivalent feelings about how much to encourage relationships among staff. One rule is clear: People from different status levels must maintain a certain distance. Some companies even set rules forbidding car-pooling and social lunches between employees on different levels.
I realize that managers have wide disagreement on this issue, but a church offers a unique environment for nurturing personal relationships. Pastors sometimes encounter certain cultural barriers to intimacy: they feel set apart from other people. But I believe the rewards are well worth the energy it takes to dismantle those barriers. I believe that because I experienced it myself.
In ten years of employment by a Christian organization, I encountered all the common pitfalls of mismanagement. Yet now I look back on that time with a feeling much like longing. A group of people on a magazine staff became for me a kind of family. Those people prayed for me, saw me through hard times, encouraged my professional growth, corrected me, and, in short, loved me.
Love was not in anyone's job description at Campus Life. But it happened-there was an atmosphere of true community.
I now recognize that this nurturing environment, coming at a critical period of my life, was the most positive force toward growth I have ever experienced. I doubt it would have happened in a nonChristian environment. And for that reason, I don't believe a "Christian organization" has to be a contradiction in terms.
