Showing posts with label leadership. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leadership. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Refraining from using business as a metaphor for the church

I'm finishing up Alan Roxburgh's and Fred Romanuk's book entitled The MIssional Leader: Equipping your Church to Reach a Changing World. On p118 I think they give a pretty convincing argument as to why we cannot and should not use the language and metaphor of business for the church. Now, in the following quote they are talking about leaders, but there is a sentence (or two perhaps) on the church using the language.
At the core of leadership, then, is the question of one's identity and its source. This is why the church cannot simply borrow its categories for leadership from other arenas and impose them on its life. To do so is to borrow a purpose and end that are not shaped out of this fundamental participation with God. When we borrow from other arenas such as business or corporate governance, we actually form a character and identity as a leader that, though it may be successful by any number of measurements, leads away from formation as God's person. It also gives the church that is involved a distorted understanding of itself and its own purposes. For example, some current leadership models derive from measuring effectiveness in terms of numbers and size, which are not necessarily measures of success in a life with God.
I think they are spot on. We have played a numbers game for so long, as if the size of our congregations prove our effectiveness. However, we are called to make disciples not just attract the masses. I've refrained from saying anything else...to just let what they say stand for itself.