Spiritual leadership != business leadership

Mike Bonem over at LeadershipJournal.net writes in his article “Good to Great to Godly”:

"We need more structure in our decision making. Without that discipline, we'll never accomplish anything."

"We're a church, not a business. We need to rely on God. We can't operate like the corporate world."

Ever been on one side or the other of this argument? Or perhaps in the middle? The tensions are present in most churches in America today. As corporate "best practices" are applied to church life, church leaders struggle to make sense of it all.

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In the church, the "bottom line" is life transformation, which defies simple cost-benefit analysis. We wonder whether it's better to see one new convert or five believers who grow significantly in their faith. Or whether the dollar spent on children's programming produces more fruit than one spent on youth ministry. Or how to make the trade-off between music ministry or benevolence. So we wrestle with priorities and resource allocation, trying to make the right choices as we pursue a goal that is sometimes vague and elusive. What kind of leadership is needed to move from blurriness to clarity, from seeing through simple business lenses to seeing more as God sees?

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My experience is that church leaders—senior pastors, other staff, and laity—need a style that transcends both of these, a leadership approach that is spiritual and situational (sometimes legislative, sometimes executive). Even as we create structured processes for making important decisions, we must allow time and space for God to speak into the hearts of leaders. Sometimes it's the pastor who hears God most clearly; at other times one or more lay leaders may have a divine insight. In other words, the "best practices" from business have much to offer regarding decision making, but they omit the greatest asset available to congregational leaders—the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

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Jim Collins' monograph Good to Great and the Social Sectors has an interesting line before the title: "Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer." Is Collins right? Yes and no. It's clear that the unfiltered, wholesale adoption of best practices from business is not the answer. The church is not a business, and if we run it like one, God might end up as just one of the constituents to be considered, not the One for whom the whole thing exists.