My church is not a business

12 November 2010

My church is not a business

Wow.  I've heard "the church" described in business terms, and seen it function according to business concepts, but a post I read today  still astonished me:

In most church planting strategies. Failing churches are expected to fail, leading to the needless waste of untold amounts of resources. Not to mention alienating potential customers through negative shopping experiences. This pessimistic approach to failing churches is apparently borne of the desire to avoid the hard conversations that might otherwise save some businesses from failing1.... After all, not many individual businesses concern themselves with assisting other businesses in a purely altruistic fashion3.....

Rather than planting new businesses or crops while allowing others to fail, we should be making the wiser investment decision4 to patch up failing churches. That may mean that we need to revisit SBC polity and seriously ask ourselves whether it is time to change the governmental structure of the SBC or, as a less invasive option, produce material designed to help failing churches adapt to current market conditions.

Regardless of how we go about attempting to salvage failing churches, the tactic of writing them off and allowing the resources they contain (which includes people, our brothers in Christ) is needlessly wasteful....

In my next post I will explore the problem of excess supply....

Even secular businesses understand that it is far cheaper to keep an existing customer from leaving than it is to gain a new customer. [↩]

Apparently there will be a whole series of posts of this nature. 

Oh dear.

MY CHURCH IS NOT A BUSINESS