Here’s an article from God and Politics in the UK, written by Gillan Scott. He’s responding to a recent study that shows the continuing growth of Fresh Expressions ministries in the Church of England. You can read the full article here.
The history of technology companies is littered with casualties and failures. During my childhood, my friends and I played on Atari consoles and began programming on Spectrums, Commodore and BBC home computers. Polaroids were cool cameras and we started renting videos from Blockbuster. Even now Nokia and Blackberry, two once mighty mobile phone companies are shadows of their former selves. Resting on your laurels, trusting in your own brand or failing to spot and adapt to culture changes or innovations are all ways to condemn your company to a slow and painful slide into irrelevance and then extinction.
Churches can learn a great deal from the success and demise of businesses. The church is after all a form of business although instead of dealing in commodities and seeking to make money, it sells truth and relationship with salvation as its greatest product. Most companies if they want to increase their market share know that investing in order to grow is a fundamental building block. Get your strategy right and you can achieve massive success. Fail to have a strategy or get it wrong and you’ll be consigned to the dustbin of also-rans.
It’s an interesting article, but I think Scott completely misses the point. For one thing, he spends way too much time on the horrible “church is a business” analogy. Secondly, his only solution to church decline seems to be younger and more conservative ordained leadership. It’s the old “we’ll stop declining when we look like evangelicals” routine. What about non-ordained leaders? What about changes to the basic way we think of leadership? More than that, when answering the “why” question – “why are we Christian, why do we do what we do,” his answers seems to be the idea that we are somehow a company that markets salvation. Our whole numbers-based idea of success comes out of this way of thinking. But if the “why” is different, the concerns change and the answers change. What if our “why” was the Great Commandment? We do what we do in order to love God and our neighbor. At that point, communion with God in the company of others becomes the main concern, and we measure our faith in terms of the depth of that communion.