Friday, 27 January 2012
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Church Government: Training Ground for Secular Government?
By Dean Lusk
A good friend sent me a copy of a blog post by Director of Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming (and newspaper columnist) Paul Flesher in Wyoming. Flesher's blog and column are both called "Religion Today".
The post he sent me was entitled "The Best Training Ground for Democracy: A Business or a Church?" Unfortunately, Flesher hits the nail squarely on the head when he describes why church leaders are generally well-prepared for the nuts and bolts of a secular government.
One of the statements in the post made me retch, yet I doubt many American Christians see very much wrong with this arrangement, because they readily engage in it:
"A church's management challenge is to provide what the congregation as customers want, for the cost that the congregation as investors are willing to pay through their tithes and donations. If the management fails in this balance, they can be removed." (emphases mine)
Ugh. Management? Customers? Investors? "Willing to pay"? Absolutely sickening to me. But those things describe many churches perfectly. These are the kinds of things that eventually convinced me that the system most Americans know as "church" is not actually based on the Bible, but is based upon a system of human invention.
This could apply to the government all day long and I have no problem with it. But a church? The Church?
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person who has heartburn over this.
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About the Author
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- From: deanlusk
- Location: Huntsville, Alabama, United States
- About Me: Former worship pastor, now meeting and living in an "organic church" setting after a two-year journey through the Word, comparing it to the system I'd been a part of my whole life. I'm a musician and a very disorganized deep-thinker.
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Comments (4)
So are you troubled by the mindset of equating a church with a business? Are you troubled by the fact that large institutions inevitably have to answer questions of resource allocation? Both?
@Nous_Apeiron@xanga - the troubling thing to me is that a typical church fellowship is almost always a business but is a living expression of Christ in far fewer cases. I believe those two can coexist, but it's difficult; the business typically chokes out the organism in that situation -- in my opinion.
Large institutions must be required to answer questions of resource allocation, absolutely, whether that institution is a church organization, a business, a non-profit, etc.
@deanlusk - I can certainly see your point about the discrepancy between the nature of churches in practice as it compares to what the nature of the church should be. It would worry me as well if a church leader viewed me more as a customer than as a member of his flock. I've been to a church in which I got the impression that I was in that situation, and thankfully haven't been to that church in many years.
So do you have any ideas for what might address the problem of churches that are in the business of religion and perhaps turn them into churches that handle their business while keeping the focus on what Christ is calling them to do?
@Nous_Apeiron@xanga - Whew. That question is a pretty big one. I struggled with it for the final two years I was a full-time worship pastor. I found that very few people in staff positions (either my fellow leadership team or at other church fellowships) agreed that such a problem existed, which made addressing the problem almost a non-sequitur.
Observers in the pews might agree that there's some kind of problem there, but ironically, the way most see to address the problems of "the business of religion" is to take their tithes and their attendance to another church because the one they meet with has become too worldly and business-like.
I eventually resigned my position/office in the church and went back to being a servant of Christ in the "secular" workforce. We meet with a much smaller group of believers in houses now. We haven't cut ourselves off from local churches, though. That would be arrogant and denying that God works through His Church.
So I don't really have an answer to the question yet, other than in the process of discipling believers, we always, always focus on lifting up Jesus Christ rather than religion. I also have to realize that God doesn't seem to acknowledge that my timeline, or my idea of when/how things should change, is very important in comparison to his. Darn!