The Business of Church: Wrap Up

The last number of weeks I have written about the Business of Church and how business and the church correlate with each other. There are different key factors in each topic that were discussed in the series that separated a perfect correlation between business and the church, which is a good thing.

As much as it would be enjoyable to go over each topic in a brief overview, I have decided not to do that since you can go back and read each one whenever you fancy. Instead I will discuss some of my initial background in this area to let you understand my insight on this topic.

In the very first week I mentioned that I am a child of a Pastor, I have a brother who is a Worship Pastor, I created and co-led a young adult program at a church, worked as a youth leader (Church Staff) for seven months and now work as a volunteer, volunteered 2 summers at a church camp and have had to be in planning processes at the church. I could give you knitty gritty details, but let's be honest now, you don't care and the details don't get to the point.

I have seen churches work in some of the smartest ways and also some of the dumbest ways. For example, I have seen churches create committees that send a representative of their committee to a management group who then runs the church. This committee makes decisions and has a person from each specific committee to voice an opinion. Then I have seen some churches just rely on the pastor to do everything and wonder why the church is falling a part when that specific pastor is no longer there.

Both of these examples fit into a business model with the first having designated committees (departments in the business sense) and have a larger meeting when all the head's of departments meet together and discuss what is happening in a touch base. The second example is a model of relying to heavily on one individual, which will cause your church (or business for that matter) to crumble.

A more specific example is the position that two of my friends and I went into at the church. The youth group had been in transition for a while and the group had a number of leaders in a short period of time because life happens. That is how we became interim youth leaders (originally planned about 2-3 months and lasted 7 months), but with us gaining this position we were required to cast a vision for the youth program. The two guys and I met every Monday during that summer to create this plan and might I add that it was detailed. We created this outline to go to this Staff parish meeting and present what we had. This outline was about 3 or 4 pages long with specific groups we wanted to start, topics we wanted to reach and Scripture that backed it up. The committee looked at it for about 5 minutes and then decided to look for a new youth pastor. We spent about a month and a half working on this detailed outline and they didn't want to give us a chance, which for the longest time held us back from taking the kids on trips because we didn't want to force someone new to go on this trip if we made the initial commitment and they were hired on before the event. It was just not good communication.

Now does this happen with everything? Of course not, but it is not good planning. It also doesn't go into what their mission statement is, because we created our own for the youth but it fit into what the overall church's mission and vision. If you are unable to be consistent in one area, then there is a chance that this may carry over to other areas. This is not always the case, but from my experience of the church this is all too true.

My experience of the church in a business sense has been completely mixed as you can tell in this post and during this entire series. Do I think the church should be exactly like a business? No, because the church is not a business, but have some areas that are business-like. The church is not a business of making money, but in the business of saving souls (I get that it sounds like a lame bumper sticker on the back of a beat-up car, but it's true). There is going to be a much deeper emotional connection in the church than in business, which can lead to some poor decisions (emotions are good, but emotional decision making is not).

So my final thoughts on The Business of Church:
There are some key aspects that must be thought of in a business way, but not every aspect or you lose the entire meaning of what the church is. The business way may be able to keep the church financially afloat, marketable and have a strategic plan to bring more people in, but if the church is not changing people's lives then it is not succeeding in what it is called to do.