Lifting Ministers from the Mud

You can’t run a church like a business!” Sometimes we hear it from a pastor, sometimes from a layman. But “running the church like a business” is a different concept from managing the church like an organization. And things are changing.

After years of apathy, if not outright hostility, the concept of “management” in the Church is attracting interest among both pastors and the executives of Christian organizations. Ministers are flocking to management and leadership courses. They are reading books on “Christian leadership.” After a recent swing around the country, a seminary dean reported that the question most often asked by pastors was, “Where can I find a good administrator for our church?” An issue of a seminary journal that was devoted entirely to management in the Church was so well received that it is now in its third reprint. Seminary professors in both Christian education and pastoral theology continue to search for better materials on management and administration. Many large churches are starting their own how-to-do-it courses (most of which appear to be this-is-how-we-did-it). Newsletters about leadership are finding acceptance in all areas of Christian organizational life. And there is now a management association for Christian organizations (Christian Resource Associates).

What’s happening? Why the change? Is this just the Church’s traditional lag behind the culture? Perhaps More likely, yesterday’s system, whatever it was, is no longer working satisfactorily.

In our increasingly fluid and dynamic society, the needs of people are changing rapidly and in many different directions. It follows that the organizational response to such needs must also change. “But we’ve always done it that way” is just not satisfactory. Rapid change demands a flexible, adaptable organization. Organizations are really structures of relationships between people. An organizational structure must be tailored to the particular situation, and it must be able to change as the need changes. In church after church and Christian organization after Christian organization, the people who get things done are those who tailor the organization to meet the need.

Thinking along the lines of “fluid organization” has not come easy in the church. Christians, and particularly evangelicals, are used to stating their beliefs in propositional terms; the truths they believe are unchanging. There is a natural tendency to think of organizational structures and the functions within those structures as being unchanging also. “Leaders” are considered necessary, but they are pictured as having various “gifts” and “styles” of leadership. Little thought is given to the acts of leadership. The result has been a continual and often futile search for the appropriate organizational structure.

To many, “management” sounds manipulative. It seems to imply pushing people around, to involve rigid planning and controls and a predetermined future. It is all right to have a “business” administrator. But to ask the pastor to picture himself as the manager of his organization seems to many to be an inappropriate, worldly concept. This is the result, of course, of the spiritual-secular dichotomy with which the Church has wrestled all its life. Things and means and methods are viewed as inherently sinful when in fact it is only people who are sinful.

And we have a problem with language also. Some worry about “interfering with the work of the Holy Spirit.” They imagine that any statement about tomorrow is an attempt to dictate to the Lord. They misread James 4:13–15. Rather than seeing James’s statements about the future (“You do not know about tomorrow.… You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes”) as statements of faith, and therefore in the Lord’s hands, they see them as an admonition against making any statements about the future.

Regardless of what we think of the term “management,” someone has to manage. Otherwise an organization cannot survive. One definition of management is “getting things done (reaching goals) through other people.” The late President Eisenhower defined it as “the ability to get people to do what you want because they want to do it.” When you think about it that way, there’s a lot of management going on in the Church—under such headings as recruiting, motivating, training, and supporting, which are acceptable terms.

Those who dispute the need for management in the Church might point to the many large, thriving churches that seem to have gotten along very well without having a leader who has studied management. Aren’t these large and growing churches proof of the power of the Holy Spirit to get things done without “man’s” help?

But the size of the average U.S. congregation is between 150 and 200. Furthermore, a close look at most of these “super-churches” will reveal that one or more of three important ingredients has been present: (1) There was a vacuum in the community, a large felt need into which the church could move very rapidly. (2) There was a strong leader with a clear vision (goals and plans!) of what needed to be done. (3) There was an outstandingly good job of management.

Someone else might ask, “What about people? Don’t the best laid plans have to be put aside when people are hurting?” Of course they do! It isn’t a question of people versus organization. It’s a question of how to help people most effectively.

A great deal of organizational development theory centers in the understanding that shared purposes and goals have more power to motivate people than any other single force. Good managers are people who create an enabling environment, an environment in which people can do things that support their common goals. Management is concerned with setting goals, making plans necessary to reach the goals, organizing people to carry out the plans, getting programs going, and continually evaluating progress and performance in relation to the agreed upon goals. All these are people actions.

Most of the practice of management has occurred in the business world. As Peter Drucker, an outstanding management theorist, points out, one of the reasons we equate “management” and “business” is that the business world is where we have had to make organizations perform. Now not-for-profit and service organizations are multiplying, and what has been learned in business is only a start. It seems to me that if we ever do learn how to manage churches effectively we will have much to teach secular organizations.

If you are a pastor struggling to manage your church and wondering why it seems so hard, take heart! It is hard. The local church is probably the most complex and highly developed organization on the face of the earth. Why? Well, a business organization is fairly straightforward. It knows specifically what its goal is: to make a profit within a given market. The not-for-profit organization has a somewhat more difficult task, for whether it attains its goals depends not only on whether it breaks even financially but on whether it has met a particular need. The volunteer organization, such as the Red Cross, has a still more difficult task. Its “market” is entirely people’s felt needs, and its motivation is entirely that of finding people who want to be involved in meeting those needs. But the local church is faced with the gigantic task of not only using volunteers and motivating them toward a common cause but at the same time nurturing and caring for all its members. And the only qualification for membership in this organization is that one has allegiance to its Leader; therefore the Church must accept all kinds of walking wounded. The leaders of such an organization are faced with a very difficult management task.

A skilled outsider can be very effective in helping a local church redefine its purposes and goals and organize to achieve them. Some organizations and individuals are now performing this kind of consulting ministry. Sometimes they are called “facilitators,” other times “enablers.” Most of these consultants are trained in the behavioral sciences.

A large California church that was faced with a great deal of internal tension on how to handle its future growth brought in one of these church management consultants. He led the various staffs and committees of the church through a series of self-discovery discussions. Common goals were discovered and adopted. This is an example of how a management consultant can help.

Management training seminars for pastors are proving to be effective. Some are conducted by management specialists within denominations and some by Olan Hendrix, Campus Crusade, and World Vision. They appear to have had a lasting effect on many of the hundreds of pastors and Christian leaders who have come to them. A professor of management systems who did a twelve-month followup of pastors who had attended World Vision’s “Managing Your Time” seminars found that approximately half were applying principles they had learned at the seminar a year before. As management seminars go, this is a pretty high percentage. One pastor—and his letter is typical of hundreds—wrote, “Since I’ve started setting some goals for myself, my family, and my congregation, I’ve discovered a whole new dimension to my ministry. I feel much more at peace with myself and my ministry. We’re moving! I wish I had had a management seminar like this twenty years ago!”

A number of seminaries are recognizing that management is a needed ingredient of the pastor’s training. Bethel and Fuller have pioneered in this area. One can forecast a growing recognition at the seminary level that “administration” must give way to broader concepts of management that include communications skills, group dynamics, organizational theory, and specific skills in goal-setting and planning.

The concept of “life management” seems to be catching on in both secular and Christian circles. There are more and more seminars on developing strategies for living, setting up individual purposes and goals, establishing priorities within marriage. More and more books written within a Christian context are based on the principle of defining a need (i.e., to reach unchurched people, or do a better job in Christian education), setting goals for meeting it, and then letting the organization and the resources flow into whatever shape is needed to reach those goals. This type of need-oriented thinking is bound to affect the way we think about management.

Perhaps management will find its place in the church under a different name. “Organizational development” is a growing field dealing with how organizations can bring about planned change and better meet the needs they are facing. Courses in organizational development are being offered in many secular schools and also in some seminaries.

As I suggested at the start of this article, retraining of laypeople is needed. The businessman is likely to believe that “we don’t do things that way in the church.” True, we cannot run a church as we run a business; a church is a far more complex organization. However, many of the tools of business can be very useful in the church.

Probably no one has written more on the subject of introducing new ideas to the Church than Lyle Schaller. In his book The Change Agent he explains with a great deal of clarity the process of innovation and change within churches. Parish Planning brings us some of the nitty-gritty of what really goes on. In his latest book, The Decision-Makers, he sheds a great amount of light upon how decisions are made within the Church. Ted Engstrom has written extensively in this field also, as have I myself.

The only way to move an organization into the future is to place before it continually a new vision of what it ought to be and what it can be. Management theory calls such a vision “goals.” Large churches and small, pastors and laypeople alike, are discovering that new vision, new goals, have tremendous power to take their eyes off the mud of the present situation and lift them toward the sky of what God wants them to become.

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