See if any of these episodes sounds familiar.
Staffing the Sunday morning nursery had always been tough at one northeastern church, and this summer was almost impossible. Finally Ellen had agreed to do it “if you really can’t find anyone else.” Not many had noticed that Ellen invariably came into the worship service during the first hymn and sometimes later. Sure enough, when it was her Sunday for nursery duty, there were five or six parents standing around the nursery with their kids waiting for the “staff” to arrive. Ellen eventually showed up, and the parents trooped into the service at the end of the first hymn. The same thing happened every time it was her turn.
A friend, Allen, came home late Sunday night feeling as if he needed a week in the Bahamas. He’d been at church four evenings of the last week and had stayed Sunday evening to see that the church fellowship room was cleaned up after the high school party. The youth sponsors were great with youth, but they didn’t realize you have to sponge up spilled apple cider or you have a sticky mess next Sunday.
Then, as treasurer, Allen had to work on the bank deposit for the next morning and pay the bills before he could get to bed. At the office where he was a financial officer, he could control check requests; at the church, no one monitored expenses, and people didn’t always stick to a budget.
The annual business meeting at another church could always be counted on as a mental and emotional drain. It was scheduled to start at 7:00, but it was always 7:30 before the quorum finally accumulated, and by 10:30 it was only halfway through the “must list” of topics. The problem was partly the moderator: He was a nice guy, but he just didn’t know how to run a meeting and keep it moving. Some of the speeches from the committee chairs resembled keynote speeches at a political convention. Other people simply read the papers they handed out. People began slipping away, bored and annoyed, at 11:00, and those who stayed to the bitter end went home frustrated or mad.
Such are the famed inefficiencies of the local church.
Different Rules
There must be a better way. That may be how you feel after a typical evening at church. Or more accurately, that may be how you feel after a typical evening at the church after a typical day at the office.
I remember numerous evenings spent in dull, time-consuming committee meetings and wondering if church could not be run more like a business.
Down at the office, plant, or store, you can usually see how to get things done. Things may not always go according to plan, but you know that when you have to have results, your company can find a way to pull it off.
At church the rules are apparently different. Some activities work well; others seem to have a slapdash, hit-or-miss touch about them. Evaluation and accountability are often handled very informally if at all.
Once I looked around at a church business meeting and thought, What if we put a price on the hourly investment of the people in this room? Some of them must be worth twenty, thirty, forty dollars an hour. And we’ve taken almost two hours to table a suggestion.
Without anyone’s fault, many churches stumble along with considerable waste of time, money, and emotional energy.
Why We’re Inefficient
A church just getting started in a Detroit suburb felt acutely the conflict over efficiency. Six of its key leaders were executives in the auto industry. Leaving Fortune 500 corporations on Friday, they came to church with strict businesslike expectations of their young pastor and the Sunday program. It was just too much to expect.
They were up against the very nature of a congregation: It’s made up of volunteers. The corporation isn’t. With a payroll, an organization chart, and some lines of authority, you can do a lot more than you can with people who have donated their time and talent. The same problem turns up at PTA, Scouts, and the Lions Club.
True, the volunteer may have clean hands, a pure heart, and a desire to “serve the Lord.” But the employee is doing his job with peak energy and a fully equipped office. And in professional settings, supervisors usually watch with a closer eye. “Did the job get done according to our standard?” is the language of the plant. Who talks that way about a three-month stint teaching Sunday school? It’s all we can do to keep the post filled for three months!
Curiously, though, the volunteer organization, while “inefficient,” offers some striking advantages.
What some corporate refugees I know like most about their church is that it is the opposite of their workaday life. It’s not hard driving, goal oriented, high efficiency, high tech, and high demand. At church, people count for more than what they can produce. They’re worth something just as they are.
In addition, churches recognize that the process of growth is as important as the results that show.
Need proof? Think back to the last time you taught a Sunday school class. Who learned more—you or the students? Most of us would rather not have our teaching evaluated. It would be too painful to hear the results. But we know we learned something in the process.
The volunteer may be experiencing the most important growth of his or her life, regardless of how effective the actual service. This is how we handle young people who offer to serve. Maybe their singing, or speaking, or teaching suffers from immaturity, but “It’s good for them, and they’ll grow,” we all say. We make allowances for the novice because we care about him or her in areas that just can’t be measured by performance.
As a high schooler I found myself running around delivering messages to youth groups, evening services, and rural churches. No doubt they sounded awful. But those were days of growth in my early years that required the stump experiences everyone encouraged.
Paul Toms of Boston’s Park Street Church notes that “when someone says ‘You sure don’t run the church the way we run our business,’ I respond, ‘You’re right. We can’t.’ The church must stay open to patience and forgiveness, characteristics that business is able—perhaps purposefully—to ignore.”
The purpose of the church isn’t efficiency; it’s developing closer relationships with God and one another. Churches deal in a hard-to-describe and hard-to-measure commodity called spiritual growth. The process of personal growth can rarely be seen as an efficient operation.
Balancing People and Programs
This is the tension we feel in Christian service: personal needs versus program standards. Who can force cold, pragmatic standards onto someone’s personal growing edge?
“The church is the most complex of all human organizations,” says Ed Dayton of World Vision. “It’s what we call ‘goal-conflicted.’ One goal is to send people forth, and another is to care for them. People are always either getting on a stretcher or getting off. You’ve got this continual dynamic where relationships, not bottom-line numbers, are the key product.”
In churches, people take priority over programs. And yet, at some point we all have to impose some standards. And we do it precisely because we care about people—other people.
A poor Sunday school teacher may be learning a lot himself. He may feel involved and useful, but if he is missing the minds and hearts of a roomful of promising youth, we have to say their lives count for something, too.
Likewise if the musicians or church nursery fall below a certain level, the marginal attender may disappear and any opportunity for further ministry may be lost. The faithful remnant, the inner circle, Will put UP With quality defects, but the outer circle will go somewhere else—or perhaps nowhere.
Finding this essential balance between people and programs is tricky indeed.
I discovered this firsthand in one growing church my family was a part of. The congregation had long ago decided to have a full-time youth minister. And it had passed the point where people would volunteer a Saturday to come in and clean the church, so we had a part-time, paid custodian. The organist was also getting paid. But when the church decided to hire someone to watch the nursery during both morning services, this finally galvanized a minority reaction.
“I can remember when people in the congregation did everything,” one veteran said. “Now we are paying for duties that ought to be the normal voluntary ministry in a church our size.”
Precious memories. In days of yore you could count on cleaning teams on Saturday, nursery teams on Sunday, kitchen teams on Tuesday, visitation teams on Thursday. Now we had a payroll instead.
We wrestled with people versus programs. Our church had grown beyond the point where volunteers could do everything, and it was made up of busy people, folk whose volunteer time was at a premium. And because they were from corporate cultures, they wouldn’t put up with splotchy performance. Should we challenge our people to further sacrifice of time, or add the staff that would keep programs effective and able to reach people?
What to do?
Round Pegs in Round Holes
In any organization, solving such problems means rearranging people. Round pegs work best in round holes. What do you do if you don’t have an adequate supply of round pegs? And how do you get rid of the square pegs that may have been in the wrong holes for twenty years? Who decides if someone is a misfit for a function around your church? Can you dislodge such people without hurting their feelings? Grappling with these questions allows us to help both the people directly involved and the larger church.
I know one thing—when people find their niche, they blossom and flourish in a wonderful way. No one ever loved his service for Christ at church more than one older gentleman I knew who stopped trying to teach a class where he just didn’t work out. But then he began directing the building program for an extension wing. The program took off.
In business I’ve always taken the view that all problems are management problems. That doesn’t mean they can always be solved by management, but they land on management’s plate. Leadership, then, is the most important element of any organization. So I believe we find the balance when we give our leaders—whether pastors, Sunday school superintendents, or head ushers—some skill and authority to do their jobs with a heart for people.
This means that:
- We spell out who is responsible for what.
- We define the goals for their area of service.
- We provide peer support and stimulation to do a good job.
None of these “businesslike” structures need violate the human dimension of the church; indeed, each supports human relationships. For example, I’ve seen churches benefit dramatically from a simple organization chart. Knowing “who’s in charge” was all that was needed in some cases to get “A-level” performance out of present “C-level” people.
One Baptist church in New York makes the point in a job description: “The youth group director will be responsible to the associate pastor.” If you define the authority, you awaken a sense of responsibility on both sides.
Setting goals, likewise, has brought a quality standard to many a fuzzy activity. That Sunday school class—what’s its point? Simply conducting a class every week? Getting through the lesson material? Developing social contacts? Praying for one another? The answer guides us to a more effective effort.
People appreciate being told clearly what a task involves when they’re recruited. Expressed in a non-threatening way, we can say, for example, “The nursery needs someone who will be there at least fifteen minutes ahead of the service and who will make the parents feel confident their children will be safe and well occupied. Does this sound like a reasonable challenge for you?”
A simple non-bureaucratic job description can be developed for many of the problem jobs around a church. After all, what do we require of youth sponsors? To whom are they accountable? And how much do we expect of them in time and expense? These are elements of a job description, whatever we may call it.
One church lists three key responsibilities for the Sunday school superintendent: monitor the content of the Sunday school program, maintain the personnel of the Sunday school, and promote the Sunday school to the church and neighborhood.
Does all this make Christ’s church into a business? Not really.
The New Testament explains that the church “edifies itself” and is “built up” as the people involved take seriously their mutual gifts in Christ. I’ve found simple job descriptions and explanations of goals help people use their gifts more freely and fully.
Individual Priorities
Finally, as I’ve wrestled with the dilemma of people versus programs, I’ve realized every congregation has a little different flavor and will decide these issues in different ways. Like all organizations, churches reflect, to some extent, the people who make decisions.
Church A has people who insist on high standards in music, preaching, or a youth program. Church B may have people who insist on more finely tuned doctrinal points, appealing architecture, or a Christian school. These are the tests of quality, perhaps unspoken, for the people of influence in the respective congregations. It’s a matter of priorities.
But not every church will be able to have high efficiency in every area. Choices will have to be made.
This simply says that each church has some room to decide where the resources will be invested—what simply has to be done “right” and what can be patiently overlooked for the sake of the people or the price.
A British writer of seventy-five years ago, G. K. Chesterton, twisted a familiar saying with, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” He meant that even a clumsy attempt at a worthy goal beats making no attempt at all.
Maybe those long, clumsy business meetings are not worth worrying about—given the current situation and for the present time. Maybe other things take priority over computerizing the church office … but maybe not; it might be your gift to your church to push that project through and see the benefits of it in the years to come. But we all agree that not everything is worth making a big issue.
Every church is a tapestry of human effort and heavenly vision. The tapestry may not always be woven with the efficiency of a high-speed loom, but the ultimate concern is not speed but beauty.
Stephen Board is vice president and general manager of Harold Shaw Publishers and attends First Baptist Church of Elgin, Illinois.
