Barneyisfat

I'm not opposed to using business and marketing language when discussing the church. At licensing school we had to learn the mantra that "You have to run the church like a business. But, the church is not a business."

In contemporary circles, many discussions focus on growing our churches. Some people don't believe this is important. I tend not to have too much time for them. The rest of us seem to fall into two groups. One group insists that we just have to pray more. I hope they do.

The other group tends toward changing methods and practices which are ineffective.

Ineffective churches bother me for one reason. It takes just as much time, energy, and resources to run an ineffective church as it does to run an effective one. Usually more. My mentor has often said that if he was in such a position, he would close down half the churches in America: and not necessarily the smallest half!

A common theme has been to focus on improving the product. Church's that focus on this goal tend to work hard to improve their Sunday morning worship services. Something about this paradigm has bothered me for years.

Those who distrust business jargon would contest that Jesus is the product, but - that's not quite right. Jesus isn't a commodity. We don't buy or sell him. We can't focus on making Jesus better.

But, we have been working hard to produce the wrong product. The product that we produce is disciples. As churches we create disciples. While we have worship services, youth ministries, education programs, etc.: these are not the product we create.

The Hershey's corporation has probably spent millions of dollars on the complicated machinery it takes to produce Hershey's kisses. But, other than an occasional tour or 30-minute special, we never see the machinery. On a daily basis, we see the product and not the machinery required to produce the product. What if you had to tour the factory every time you wanted a delicious chocolate kiss?

You probably wouldn't be eating too many chocolate kisses. And yet, week after week, we attempt to expose pre-Christians to the machinery and not the product.

Perhaps it is time to turn that idea upside down. Maybe we need to hide the machinery and show off the product. Maybe we need to stop pushing worship attendance and begin pushing our disciples out into the world. And not to do "ministry." But, just to be out in the world.

What would it take to move our churches toward the goal of producing BETTER disciples. Not more of them, but qualitatively better Christians.

Would we need to scrap the Sunday worship service? Would we need to individualise Christian education? Would our structure need to change to allow for one-on-one discipling instead of weekly lecturing? Would burn-out be as common or as severe?


The mission statement of the United Methodist Church (with just a touch of business jargon) is "to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." The commission was to make disciples. Church as we know it is almost entirely absent in the Bible.

Our focus must again move toward producing disciples. Not members, not worshippers, not attendees; but disciples. Unless our machinery is creating people willing to go anywhere and do anything in the pursuit of Jesus Christ and the transformation of the world - it is time to replace the machinery.

Looking around ... I'm going to vote that it's time to replace some machinery.