Thursday, March 30, 2006
YUCK!
Out of Ur, pimping the latest issue, interviews Andy Stanley
Yes, as Christians we should do what we do well, and yes, there is a corporate element to any church - American law demands it. But, a church is not a corporation and it has decidedly different goals.
A corporation produces a product and distributes that product to a buying public. In a church, "the buying public" is the product. If you reduce your thinking of the church to services for the public, then you rob the gospel of its tranformative power. If you use a business model and you think of the public as the product, they cease to be peopple and become mere feedstock - raw material. That results in legalism or dehumanization.
And now I must stop or I will rant forever.
Related Tags: church, corporate, evangelicalism, transformation, the gospel, Christianity
"What is distinctly spiritual about the kind of leadership you do?" I asked Andy Stanley. Nothing, he said. "There's nothing distinctly spiritual. I think a big problem in the church has been the dichotomy between spirituality and leadership."Boy its that one of those barrages of good and bad stuff mixed together in a way that makes it hard to sort it out so you end up just going along for the ride.
His answer surprised me.
As pastor of a thriving megachurch north of Atlanta, with an additional ten satellite locations fed his sermons by video, Stanley is becoming the model for the next generation of large church pastors.
[...]
"I grew up in a culture where everything was overly spiritualized," Andy said. "I don't want to be a cynic, but raking out all the spiritual versus non-spiritual, I think, is healthy."
He agreed with those who contend that good leadership is good leadership, whatever the setting. "One of the criticisms I get is 'Your church is so corporate?' And I say, 'OK, you're right. Now why is that a bad model?'"
Good business principles work for Andy and North Point. "A principle is a principle, and God created all the principles," he summarized.
[...]
"Churches should quit saying, 'Oh, that's what business does,'" Andy said. "That whole attitude is so wrong, and it hurts the church. In terms of the shifting culture, I say thanks to guys like Bill Hybels and others who have been unafraid to say we have a corporate side to ministry; it's going to be the best corporate institution it can possibly be, and we?re not going to try to merge first century [with the 21st ]."
Yes, as Christians we should do what we do well, and yes, there is a corporate element to any church - American law demands it. But, a church is not a corporation and it has decidedly different goals.
A corporation produces a product and distributes that product to a buying public. In a church, "the buying public" is the product. If you reduce your thinking of the church to services for the public, then you rob the gospel of its tranformative power. If you use a business model and you think of the public as the product, they cease to be peopple and become mere feedstock - raw material. That results in legalism or dehumanization.
And now I must stop or I will rant forever.
Related Tags: church, corporate, evangelicalism, transformation, the gospel, Christianity
