Prior to entering ministry, my wife and I owned a small business. It was small in the sense of how economists measure businesses, but it was a big business to us. Whenever you have to make payroll for almost 40 people (including yourself)…that seems big. This was my second venture as an entrepreneur. The first was extremely successful, but this one was not. An opportunity came to sell and we quickly accepted. We learned tons of principles from that negative experience that still help us today, but it was a very challenging time for us personally.
Looking back on that experience, I realize one of the major problems we had being successful. There were hundreds of issues, including some of our own mistakes, but one aspect of our company and where we were in the market worked against us most. I discovered that:
We were often too large to be responsive but too small to be competitive.
Have you ever been there?
We were too large to change quickly. Our processes were too set in stone. We couldn’t react to the changing markets fast enough. We didn’t have teams that could quickly adapt. Our pricing structure was more inflexible because of our fixed costs.
We were too small to be competitive. We couldn’t compete with the really big guys. They could eat our lunch at the bargaining table. We could never match their price. They could deliver on large projects so much quicker than we could.
My guess is that this scenario can happen at several growth points in the life of a business. Successful businesses learn to navigate through these times to protect the company and continue to grow. Had we continue as owners we would have had to figure out survival at this critical stage in the life of the business.
My question now, as a church planter/leader is: How does this principle translate to church growth? Are there certain times during the growth process of a church where this dynamic comes into play?
Are there times the church is too large to adapt quickly to the changing needs of the community and people it is attempting to reach? Could the church be too small to meet all it needs to do, because the church can’t afford the facilities and staff to meet the opportunities?
Could it be that church leadership needs to recognize when this dynamic is in play and figure out ways to navigate through it, so the church can continue to thrive?
For those that hate applying business principles to the church world, please forgive me, but I’m just asking questions to stir discussion. Sometimes understanding the nature of a problem is the hardest part in addressing it. What do you think? Have you experienced either of these scenarios?
Logging you in...
Loading IntenseDebate Comments...
Reading from Nairobi Kenya..thanks for the great articles. Truly appreciate. Judy Gichuru
Love it. Thank you.
I’ve served at churches where my team and I had the privilege to grow and take care of 500+ members. But currently I am trying to church plant in my hometown of brooklyn with limited success, far as numbers goes. Some weeks we have 60+ and other we have less than thirty. What I learned thru experience is that the larger the church/org. The more it makes sense to apply the business model but in some cases like ours the business model doesn’t work. I know business models but nothing can begin to explain, supernatural healing-a person with a broken arm was healed instantly, cancer victims went from stage 4 near death to almost full recovery, strangers dropping 2g’s in the offering basket, strange things are happening, drug dealers who made 70k a month getting a real job and accepting Jesus. I shake my head in disbelief. No model seems to work in the presence of God’s amazing grace. If grace was a business model I would follow it. Its nothing special we are doing, its just Jesus doing his thing in the ghetto areas of brooklyn. We found Jesus and he is living in brooklyn.
awesome analogy, you put in my words exactly…
We are facing a situation here on my home church in the worship team( in Kenya that's Africa by the way)… our leaders don't want to leave room for the spirit of God to move,hence there's a bit of pushing and hustling being done… its hurting the group too..
I just wish we could experience a move of God like you guys in Brooklyn.
The church is about God and His works, if we become too business-like we loose His presence in the process..
that's my take ..what do you think Guys?
Thanks Nancy. Praying for a mighty work of God in Kenya!
Please don't misunderstand the purpose of the "lean startup." This isn't doing one thing until it is perfected. It is launching a piece of the vision and recieving feed back almost instantaneously so that you can adjust or pivot towards the community. The key focus being on the adjusting and pivoting. Obviously this does not mean we adjust God's word. It does however mean that we must be willing to adjust our model. Andy Stanley says it this way, "Marry the vision, date the model."
A Biblical example of this would be Jesus pivoting on his journey and making a pit stop to meet the woman at the well in John 4. Had he not pivoted on his path in Judea or had he gone with his disciples she would not have experienced the goodness of the Lord or what I call in my latest post the alluring affliction.
I agree with Frank. The church should run within the context of scripture. And this takes more effort than making the church into a business. Business models require marketing a product for a particular consumer. The gospel done properly isn’t a good product to the world.
I believe that there are times when principles that govern the corporate world can be applied to the body of Christ, if you look at the majority of companies today they are focused solely on the bottom line. If churches today were focused solely on their bottom line, which is winning the lost and having their people develop their relationship with Jesus the Body of Christ would be shining forth as Christ desires it to. To often Church, I believe,has become merely a social club, but in a business if the people are not “producing fruit” or a part of impacting the companies bottom line the are viewed as expendable. Now while I am not saying people in the church are expendable, I am saying we as a church need to be more focused on saving the lost and walking with Jesus, which is our bottom line, than the other things i.e. fame, a large church, money, which have crept into the body
Well said, Julius.
i would be one of the few that would disagree with the "business/church" model. church is not and never was designed to be ran like a business and because we have allowed our corporate culture to influence our faith communities we feel we have to keep the "machine" going. Its time to get God's people off of the respirators and revive them back to true relationship with God. As a network of house churches, none of these issues apply to us. We are so small we CAN be effective, change is easy and our size allows us to move quickly and be ultra responsive.
I appreciate you sharing even when you think it may be a minority opinion. That's leadership. I like your thoughts relative to the need of the church today. Thanks!
I think this is where my congregation is currenly at. We fluctuate between 220-250 and I’ve read several places where the dynamics change at 300. Yet the 250 we have are firmly rooted in the way things have always been. So we’re not big enough to be as effective but too big to move forward. There is an endless list of things I’d like to see my church do, buy my pastor applies the ‘lean startup’ idea above- he is singularly focused on a single thing until we are large enough to take on more.
Thanks Frank for sharing this. It's a fine line between starting, staying and maintaining lean and what that means to each church. If things are moving forward though, some changes to strategy (not necessarily vision), need to be implemented.
Yes to the too small questions and the too big questions. That's why we need both. I've led two church plants through pre-mature launches and have felt the weight of no momentum, but also enjoyed the ability to be responsive to real needs that other churches could not due to overhead and busyness. Now I wonder if our insistence on big is hurting our ability to multiply rapidly and keep up with the multiplying population in America. Would it be better for a city to have one church that grows to 600 rapidly or 5 churches steadily growing to 120 that can be responsive and reproduce quickly?
Thanks Lane. You pose a great question. I'd love to hear some responses to that.
This is where a lot of churches have trouble. Some can't pivot and some don't desire to pivot. Eric Ries "preaches" this thought of the Lean Startup. Where, instead of doing ALL the things you aspire to do, you only do what is neccessary to achieve your initial goals. Hence the thought of being lean. The key to this however isn't just doing one thing and doing it well, it is creating a system or process for constant feedback. This consant feedback loop allows you to pivot with the changing culture of a community. For a better explanation look up "iterative and incremental development cycle."
As an orginization that does this grows they will be able to succeed where those giants can not because they are in-tune with their communities needs and desires that are worth more than the bargin bin prices.
Great post, thanks for sharing the thought!
Thanks Mason. I like the "lean startup" concept. We basically did that at Grace. Though we launched big, we kept activities and offerings to a minimum until we could pull them off successfully.
I don't have a problem at all with the business analogy. A church in one sense is a business. You have a budget, you have a product and "customers". You have to stay true to your core values or your customers will go elsewhere and you look silly. And just like a business you won't grow from smaller to larger if you don't have a quality product and don't put yourself into it fully. Sometimes I think a smaller business does a better job because they are hungrier than the larger company. I think the tricky part can be knowing where to draw the line. A business is secular. It can fully use secular principles and tactics to grow and probably will not be looked down on and should be able to keep its core values.
A church, on the other hand, is not secular. It needs to delve into the secular world in order to grow and thrive, but the lines that shouldn't be crossed need to be drawn completely differently or the church will lose the message and become the tactics.
Thanks Jon. Good analogy. A business has to stay true to it's core values also to remain successful. Good thoughts.
Good point at the end there, Jon – the lines that shouldn't be crossed need to be drawn carefully. What are those lines is a good & important question.
IMHO it's easier to live on the wrong side of those lines than on the right side. Here's why, it's easy to forget that you're not competing w/ other churches, that we are all an important part of the body of Christ & we are working together. Church competition leads to tremendous waste of resources, re-inventing the wheel, disunity, ineffective at the larger war – just like an army whose batallions refuse to communicate & work together.
Also, I feel it's easy to become all about maintaining the status quo, working to hit your budget numbers & pay down your debt. What simpler and more satisfying measurement is there to try to grow than attendance? More attendance = more money (mostly), more popularity, more programs, more staff, more than another church, more energy, & more appearance that God is moving. That's a lot of temptation for just focusing on growing attendance, but growing in size doesn't necessarily correspond to growing in depth.
However, it doesn't take a move of God to grow church size – you can do it with clever marketing, cool music, interesting messages & cool programs. Growing Christians to be like Jesus? How the heck do you do that? Without driving everyone else away? Maybe small groups, or classes or something. Sunday school? And without enough attendance, you may not have the money for discipleship programs (– if your model depends on money to do these things, which I think it should not, as we are all an important part of the body of Christ & have a responsibility to contribute our gifts & skills to it).
Unfortunately, it's easier to work on growing attendance than to grow your attendees (help them become mature followers of Jesus). I'm afraid that an overactive focus on the attendance number leads to an oversimplification of what it means to be a successful church (big attendance = good church), which leads to our current situation: lots of pew-sitting Christians who look very little like Christ (myself included) possibly because of an underdeveloped focus on discipleship.
Well, maybe. Not sure. What do you think, Jon?
well, those are just my thoughts. I apologize if I am way off in any area. I confess, I have never run a church, I just have worked for a few churches and work in the church world.
I agree, it's so much easier to fall on the wrong side of those lines just for the reasons you mention. And unfortunately I think it's hard to see that from the outside. Most churches are a business. There is a budget and accountability and physical needs. If those aren't attended to properly the church will fail, no matter how well intentioned the really important stuff is. And I think marketing is OK to a point, but again it's where you draw the lines that's important. A vibrant web page is probably a good tool. Having the pastor tweet the sermon while giving the sermon, is probably not
If we put God first and make His message the priority and run everything from that standpoint, we can probably draw those lines successfully.
well said!
Thanks Jesse