Friday, June 02, 2006

 

On Growing

Well I've talked about it a lot - what metric is used to evaluate success (say here - here - here - here - here - just to name a few) but it's good when a "big" enters the discussion.

In this case, I am talking about the Leadership blog from CT. The post in question adresses the necessity to find unique ways to measure "success" in church
The three most measurable "products" of church communities are bodies, bucks and bricks. It doesn?t take long in church leadership to begin to compare your ministry to others. And whether right or wrong, we all evaluate our churches relative to other churches. I believe every church leader asks these sorts of questions: Are more people coming in the door? Are we able to find a place for them to sit and a place to take care of their kids? Are we growing financially so that we can expand our programs to serve them?

No doubt you have probably heard the maxim before that every church is an organism. Every organism that isn't growing is dying. But as Collins suggests, there is more to growth in the not-for-profit world than the tangibles.

Simply growing the number of bodies, bucks and bricks at our church isn't the answer. I hope you already know that. But how do we define and assess the intangibles?

[...]

Although I agree with Collins' statement that resources are not goals but simply inputs into our churches, it seems to me that even according to Collins, bodies, bucks and bricks have to factor into our assessment of our churches. Perhaps there is truth to the growing or dying organism analogy. But something in me doesn?t want there to be. Somewhere inside of me wants to believe that attendance can be going down and God might still be blessing our community. I want to believe that giving can be decreasing but lives could still be changed.

But somewhere else inside of me knows that decreases to bodies, bucks and bricks are probably not typical signs of health for church communities. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: how should church leaders define success?
There are a couple of very important comments to make here. One is that the "organism analogy" really doesn't hold up very well. Most organisms do not always grow - to the contrary, a healthy organism reaches maturity, but it's size at that point should stabilize. Any organism that continuously and always grows ends up obese, a very unhealthy state. The only exception to this rule that I can think of is snakes which do grow throughout their lifetimes, but is that the organism the church really wants to model itself after?

The nature of growth changes when an organism reaches maturity, it does indeed grow new material, but in a healthy organism it only does so to replace dead material. You can tell an organism is unhealthy if it rapidly loses mass, but not if it's mass is stable.

And as our author wishes, sometimes loss of mass is in fact healthy - like in the case of weight loss for an obese person.

The other factor that I think is important in this discussion is that the institution is not the church. A church is a group of people, somehow organized. The institution is first a means of organizing them, and secondly, in America, a legal necessity - you simply must form some sort of legal entity (think corporation) to conduct business. The necessity of that legal entity does not mean we should confuse it with the church, nor does it grant the legal entity primacy as a concern for leadership.

This later point is really important. Caring for the legal entity is a straighforward and mechanical process. Thus people are readily sucked into it - they know how to do it, and it is easy to lay your hands on. But that entity exists to serve the real church. However, because the entity controls the resources (think money) somehow the entity thinks it leads instead of serves.

This leads to two vitally important considerations.

The first consideration is the division of labor in a church. You need people that can reliably be depended upon to manage the entity so the genuine church can get about it's business. But the most important function such people can provide is to free up the ministry staff from such considerations in order to allow them to do the real work of the church.

The seocnd consideration is even more vitally important. We need to raise mature Christians to perform these tasks. Mature Christians, and only mature Christians, can understand the nature of genuine, self-sacrificing service. Only mature Christians can have a proper attitude about taking roles in managing the entity.

And that, dear friends is terribly hard work.

Cross-posted at How To Be A Christian And Still Go To Church

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