the corporate church

I was an elder of a large – and growing – local church. We had many ministries, multiple paid staff and a large facility that had to be managed. We had to handle a six-figure budget with precision and negotiate contracts with maintenance companies for our HVAC and security systems. Sometime during the church’s life, our pastor discovered an article that defined the ‘modern’ church as a cause, community and a corporation. The article gave us permission to re-vamp our governance structure. We hired a Christian business consultant who provided definitions and roles for a leadership team that championed the three aspects.

Since then three things have happened that have made me re-consider the validity of applying any corporate model to local church governance. The first thing is our church stopped growing. Oh, granted, there were other issues involved, but it is not a simple coincidence that when we introduced a corporate model, and a corporate personality in the leadership that our church started to decline. The second thing that happened is my son – a wonderful, artistic, activistic young Christian – made me watch the video "The Corporation." And the third thing was reading Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed. It has been very easy and very destructive for the contemporary church to adopt corporate operating principles.

The problem is that the corporate model puts the success of the corporation above everything else; over the needs or concerns of any individual. People don’t matter as long as the corporate vision is being accomplished. So non-productive people should be fired, and the success be measured with numerical goals. The vision is everything (even if that vision is biblically based) and non-visionary people be removed from their positions.
Walsh and Keesmaat make a very compelling case that we, as Christians, are to be as radically wary of the modern corporate empires as the Colossian Christians were to the prevailing Roman Empire.

And, further, Paul’s descriptions of church structure is that of individual importance and organic structure. Each has a gift to offer the local church, and the church becomes that place where everyone can serve meaningfully. A "corporate" church soon begins to value competence and excellence as the acceptable standards of service. The late Mike Yaconelli told a poignant story in his Messy Spirituality of a woman, Connie, who was a poor reader, and who wasn’t able to enunciate her words properly. But she desperately wanted – just once – to read the scripture in front of the congregation. The pastor let her, and the elders reamed out the pastor: "The girl can’t read or speak. Her reading took ten minutes! The church,’ they said, ‘is not a place for incompetence." (p. 33). But, on the contrary, the church is the place for the incompetent, unfinished, unhealthy, struggling and imperfect people.

Let me suggest that the church that will reach the next generation will be a church that actually stands as a counter-culture to the corporate empire that rule us. We are called to be distinct, even radically so, to the prevailing culture. Maybe it is time we wrote an article calling the church to be a spirit-led, humane, and safe place for us incompetent people to call home.

Jim Dethmer, "Moving in the Right Circles," Leadership (Fall Quarter, 1992), pp. 86-91.