Rant ‘n’ Roll

July 9, 2008 by djackson.

7 Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley is the biggest pile of manure in two counties - and that’s only because the third county over has a commercial hog farm and a copy of Your Best Life Now.

Once during a doctoral seminar I unlimbered some similarly measured and moderate language about a different book. The professor challenged my scorched-earth approach, arguing that the book must have some value. “After all,” he chuckled, “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” I responded by citing Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers,” in which the clock is always twenty minutes fast - and thus is never corect. A broken clock is not only right twice a day; it is harmless: a glance tells you to ignore it completely. A misset clock is dangerous because it is always accurate - and thus always wrong.

That’s the problem with this book and its sister volume Next Generation Leader: Both say some useful things, but the whole argument is miscalibrated and thus even its truths become untrue. In fact, the Hemingway metaphor is a good one: Stanley’s books keep World Standard time but Christians long ago reset their clocks to Kingdom Central.

Warning: plot spoiler - Stanley frames his insights in a fictional device. There isn’t much plot per se, but what there is I’ll probably give away. But I don’t think anyone really reads this kind of book for the story anymore than kids used to buy baseball cards for the bubblegum.

7 Practices begins with an interesting premise: a hapless young pastor has blundered into the Great Dismal Swamp of church vision-casting, an entrepreneurial Okefenokee where theology no longer helps. Fortunately, the members of his board (also entrepreneurial initiates) conspire to hook him up with his own personal Crocodile Dundee, a savvy businessman who - though a professed and contented unbeliever - can navigate the hierophagous dangers of the real world. (Back to Ernest: Ray Martin is the Hemingway Hero, the callow youth seeking initiation from the Cult Hero, the scarred veteran, stronger at the broken places, one who has looked into the nada. Notice who is teaching whom; this is where the clock gets reset.) Joe Harlan, a sort of sanitized Ted Turner, teaches Ray the seven practices. The number is interesting: as if the letters to the churches of Revelation have been upgraded to something more practical.

Pete, the pastor-rescuing exec, shows his hand early. “It seems to me,” he quips, “that church work is a lot like any other business. You have a product, you have customers, and you have salesmen. The only difference is that you have God on your side and that should make it easier, right?” So - we reduce relationship with the unknowable mystery of the Almighty to our “product,” immortal souls created to bear God’s image become “customers,” and the call to transformation into the image of Christ sinks to the level of hawking Amway. And don’t miss the patronizing tag-line that tosses God into the mix sort of like the rear bumper of a muscle car - or more like the bumper sticker on the rear bumper of a muscle car. Indeed, Stanley himself, summarizing the book’s contents in the preface, notes breezily:

Notice something missing? Conspicuously absent here is any discussion about prayer, the Holy Spirit, and dependence upon God. Though absent from the book, these things are certainly not absent from the culture of North Point or any other healthy church.

Not absent, perhaps, but not necessarily necessary and, at any rate, not central. The real knowledge rests with the businessmen. Jesus eighty-sixed the money changers out of the temple; 7 Practices not only invites them back in but has the Saviour sit at their feet.

Nor is Stanley alone in this view. Ken Blanchard, who made his name with the blockbuster One Minute Manager, recently gave an interview to Rev! magazine under the heading, “If I Were a Pastor.” Apparently he has now mastered the art of the One Minute Minister and, though he has no experience with the vicissitudes of the pastoral call, is ready to complete the sentence that was the bain of my existence as a minister.

I’ve just written a book called The One Minute Entrepreneur, and it could be The One Minute Pastor. There are three aspects of running a great organization. One is that your income has to exceed your expenses. . . .The second one is to take care of your customers - business can help you on customer service. And third is managing people, treating your people right.

Notice anything interesting? Like the fact that you don’t need Jesus for any of this? At least, you don’t need him to die and rise again. Money comes first, giving people what they want comes second, and good HR rounds out the blasphemy of this secular trinity. But Peter told Simon Magus and his money to go to Hell, Jesus preached a sermon the day after he fed the five thousand that reduced his market share by about four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight, and he promised his junior execs that he’d get them all killed.

Later in the book, in the non-fictional exegesis of the opening parable, Stanley lists the “essential truths” his church wants to teach preschoolers, children, and youth. (This comes under the heading of practice #4, “Teach less for more.” It replaces Paul’s inept suggestion that we preach the whole counsel of God.) In the entire list (thirteen items total) I find only one, “Jesus wants to be my friend forever,” that could not be taught at a synagogue or mosque - and that one comes during the preschool years. In fact, six of the thirteen would work nicely at a gathering of secular humanists.

“If I were a pastor,” indeed! I remember a conversation in a restaurant with a well-meaning layman, a retired restauranteer. He described his disgust when, at a pastor’s conference, the keynote speaker described how his church handled deacon ministry. As soon as the meeting broke up, this man told me, he heard all those ministers saying, “Well, it would never work in my church.” Then he spun out a comparison: “If I heard about a restaurant that was serving a dish that people loved, I’d at least try it!” Now, my long standing motto is “Don’t feed the rednecks,” which means don’t get into every argument that comes along. But I yearned to enter a Socratic dialogue with the man. I wanted to introduce him to what Jim Collins, detailing the spectacular failure of a CEO when he tried to run a university, calls “a thousand points of no.”

“What if all your cooks said, ‘We don’t know how to make that kind of food’? What would you do then?”

“What if all your waitresses said, ‘You can put it on the menu but we’re not going to recommend it and if customers ask for it we’ll try to talk them out of it and if we can’t we’ll refuse to serve it.’”

Of course his reply would have been, “I’d fire them!” and that would have led me to ask,

“But what if the restaurant was jointly owned by the staff? And, for that matter, what if they all worked for free and you were the only one who drew a salary from the business? What if you couldn’t fire them but they could fire you?”

My point is not that he was a bad guy or didn’t love Jesus. My point is that being a pastor is a calling and a vocation but also a skill and a trade with its own secrets and arts and that Ken Blanchard is in no better position to tell ministers how to do their work than he is to give an interview entitled, “If I Were a NASA Engineer.” The One-Minute Brain Surgeon? Probably not. And this is more than an accidental oversight on Stanley’s part. In Next Generation Leader he confesses (or brags; I can’t quite tell which) that “ironically, my pastoring skills have almost nothing to do with my success as a pastor!” I would humbly suggest that if this is true, then his success - whatever it may be - is not as a pastor at all. Indeed, it is hard to feel too much rancor for my layman friend. How could he be expected to respect pastoral ministry as an art if pastors themselves have no respect for it?

Ultimately, all of this comes from the same source as any heresy: poor exegesis. In Next Generation Stanley offers the apologia for his un-traditioned (as opposed to the more popular term “untraditional”) approach by pointing out that “leaders in the first-century church had no model to follow and no traditions from which to draw.” But of course a basic class in church history, or even a decent commentary on Acts, would have taught him better. The early church drew heavily on the tradition of the Jewish matrix from which they emerged. In fact, Stanley makes this blunder in the context of discussing the creation of deacons in Acts 6. But the church needed deacons to oversee the distribution of food to the poor, a practice they had adopted from temple and synagogue! And this is more than (though, I admit, perhaps not less than) a bad-tempered quibble on my part. The church did not draw her practices from, say, the prospering and efficient bureaucracy of the Roman empire, which provide a pretty good model of modern business techniques.

Sloppy exegesis gets a good number of church-growth gurus into trouble. In an article called “Seven Ways to Rate Your Church,” megachurch maven Leith Anderson writes about newspapers that publish a “church review” in their religion sections. He cautions his readers, “Before protesting the impropriety of such ratings, reread Revelation 1–3 and recall the biblical reviews of the seven churches of Asia Minor.”

Do you see the problem? Secular newspapers and the New Testament both write critiques of the church. He may as well have pointed out that both use paper on which to write these critiques. The comparison is like saying that an abortionist and an obstretician are both doing basically the same thing! It all sounds very cocky and prophetic but is Anderson really comparing a word of judgment from the risen Christ, the wounds of his love for his church eternally visible, to the casual musings of a secular reporter who regards the whole thing on the same level with whether his water glass gets filled at the local eatery? This is the kind of loose exegesis I often find among church-growth types: a glancing blow at a text ricochets off a non-sequitur and becomes received truth.

Again, remember the miscalibrated clock: it isn’t that business has nothing to teach the church. The problem is that we’ve made secular business the template and the Christian faith one of the interchangeable add-ons. At one point Stanley’s secular cicerone dangles this little bit of bait before his prey: “We can stop at number five (of the seven practices) and your organization will last a good, long time. Or we can go on to number six and your organization can last forever.” Forever? And here I thought it was the rock of Christ that made the church eternal and threatened the gates of Hell. “Upon this practice I will build my church - along with a big league baseball franchise and an outlet mall.”

I could go on but perhaps it is time to hear the thoughts of a real businessman. A few years ago Jim Collins published his runaway best-seller, Good to Great. Of course, pastors and church-growth consultants bought it in bulk. A short time after, Collins released an addendum, a little tract entitled, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” He opens by insisting that “we must reject the idea - well-intentioned but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is the become ‘more like a business.’” Collins seems to respect that fact that business is not the Borg which will and should ultimately assimilate all forms of community. And he wisely recognizes that it comes down to language when he notes that “we need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors.”

One of my students recently wrote an excellent paper on her personal theology of church leadership. She wisely notes that most metaphors of the modern church come from the mechanism: We speak of a church that “runs smoothly,” is succesfully “programmed” and that produces “quantifiable results.” Biblical language about tending, shepherding, and growing we relegate to the status of archaisms fit only for the pulpit.

Let’s re-set our clocks to the GMT of Christ’s kingdom proclamation. In fact, we should let the New Testament reverse Stanley’s narrative framework. Jesus once released a booklet called “The One Minute Christian” (alright - it takes about twenty minutes to read aloud) that could have been called “The One Minute Entrepreneur.” What advice does he have for businessmen? When you’re sued for trademark infringement, give the plaintiff your market research as well. Price your stuff to where the people who need it can afford it, not as high as the market will bear. Give generously to charity, but don’t call in the media. Worry less about your bottom line than your eternal account. Don’t invest in power suits - you’re into a different kind of power. Well, that’s my pick-and-choose paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount; you’re welcome to develop your own.

The point is that it is Jesus who takes business to the woodshed, not the other way around.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »