Church and business

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The books, Good to Great, How The Mighty Fall and, Tribes offer the business world surprising and proven insight into how organizations work and succeed. There are a few concepts that have stuck out to me a significant. How can these concepts be applied to the spiritual formation of congregations?


Concepts

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great offered many insights born of impressive imperial data spanning years and various companies. The results were sometimes surprising but always seemed to boil down to one word: Discipline.

Turning the Flywheel With Discipline

Collins’ research team identified what they called a flywheel. By applying the right small actions over and over again the organization builds momentum until the flywheel gives back the energy it has stored. For a business this means sound management disciplines, for a disciple discipline takes on an added spiritual depth.

In business disciplines center around management principles, like hiring the right people, watching the bottom line and adhering to sound accounting principles are essential to the success of the business. We have seen many high profile failings of businesses that abandon these principles looking for accounting techniques to make their earnings inflated for investors. Certainly the church must be wary of missing these wise business practices and going the way of an Enron or a mortgage company.

Disciplines in that are core to the flywheel of the church and the Christian are much different. They are unique and ancient. They are the classical Spiritual Disciplines. We must be just as disciplined as disciples of Christ as the great companies were to their concepts in Collins’ book.

Collins’ shows that the companies that transitioned from being good to being truly great didn’t do anything flashy to get there, it was organic, it took time and the flywheel needed to be pushed little by little until breakthrough made it spin with little effort. I am a pastor and the son of a pastor. My dad instilled in me the idea that the pastor doesn’t see the breakthrough until about year seven. Hopping from church to church wasn’t the answer. He taught me what it is to stick it out in difficult situations to see the fruit. When I came to pastor Sebewaing Assembly of God I knew it would take time. I had hopes but I didn’t have my every thing invested in hope, but rather in my faith in God and the call. Young families didn’t come, attracted by a young pastor. Projects I started were slow and God’s timing was not as quick as I would have liked. Yet we believed that God would use us to build the Kingdom. Collins calls this relying on faith rather than optimism the “Stockdale Paradox” (Collins, Good to Great 86).

For churches, this kind of discipline means not grasping for the next big thing. This struck me most from Collins’ book How The Mighty Fall. Stage four of decline, where the fall is really evident the company grasps for salvation. I have seen churches do this going from one pastor to another. I have seen pastors do this going from one fad to another. For a long time our church had a new pastor an average of every six months. A major reason I knew it would take time to do anything new in the church coming in is that they have had a string of pastors for decades come and try to do something new and fail and move on. They have tried it all. I need to be different.

Connecting Tribe Members

While Seth Godin doesn’t have the backing of the extensive research behind Jim Collins’ works, his insight into the impact of new media is helpful. There is one concept central to Tribes that captures me. Aside from the motivational stuff about being a heretic and leading audaciously, he talks about connecting tribe members to one another (25).
How do I get the people in my church talking to one another? This book is a great encouragement to cutting edge churches to make good use of social media. My challenge is different. I have only two church people with email and facebook. I serve an older, rural congregation. How do I get them talking?

Shared experiences offer a beginning place. We start small (Collins would be proud,) with disciplined time together Sunday mornings and at breakfast on Wednesdays. Some people have begun coming to Bible study and have been talking about needing more potlucks. These are all ways to build community. This discipline also needs to expand to shared service and missions endeavors.

Real fellowship requires something more than just a community. A Methodist pastor, Robert Rains discovered this in the 1950’s. There was great power in true fellowship (prompting him to write a book he called New Life In The Church), but what he discovered is that true fellowship was the union between community and engagement in theological reality. It is as the mystic disciplines intersect with disciplined community that something super-organic happens. We come to life.

Hedgehog Concept

Collins says that for a business to succeed it has to do one thing well, it just has to find out what that thing is. This thing is the intersection of passion, potential for greatness and the organization’s economic engine (Collins, Good to Great 96). This means a dogged commitment to the organization’s core values. For the church this means two things. First the church must be the church. The church needs to remember that it has something unique in the world. It can and must be the best in the world at providing access to the Triune God and God’s household. Secondly The church’s core values must come from her understanding of the nature of God. I was always confused by the course in college called “pastoral theology.” It was all the practices of being a pastor, but we didn’t discuss the theology. I have found it powerful to have at our core the contemplation of God when asking what we should do. Just as Collins said that great companies make consistent decisions in line with their “hedgehog concept”, so the church will well know what to do when gazing at the heart of God. Justice, mission, evangelism, community and ministry will flow from such a church.

Difficulties

I really find less exciting to read principles of management and leadership from corporate America than to read about how to enjoy mystical union with God. I find this ironic since finding ways to lead people into the mystical depths is where I sense my great need. I have mentioned the concepts I have found useful, now lets turn to some difficulties in applying corporate thought to the spiritual.

The church as a business

But the church is not a business. Looking to corporate America for solutions to becoming a great church runs the risk of neglecting our own hedgehog concepts; something Collins says can be done only at great peril (Collins, How The Mighty Fall 30). If we go after what is flashy, professional, and quality to draw people and define the church, we run the risk of forgetting how fulfilling connection with God in the Spirit truly is. So often we try to recreate things of the world in our churches, from clubs to the fun and games in youth group, and forget that we have something special to offer.

A second difficulty I have with Collins’ work is the idea of being best in the world as a marker of greatness and success. I can see, as I have mentioned that the church as a whole needs to be best in the world at connecting people spiritually to the Triune God and each other, but doesn’t saying my local church organization can be the best in the world seem awfully competitive. Competition is certainly the stuff of the free market, but don’t we all ready have too much consumerism in church? I should think that greatness in a church would be radically different, engaging cooperatively in the ministry of the wider body of Christ.

Who then what

The church doesn’t have the luxury to pick and choose who will come. We can recruit disciplined people for leadership positions but unlike a company we cannot pass over or fire immature church people. The lesson has to be modified to put our primary focus on developing people rather than running successful programs. Ephesians four gives us the model for this. The leaders are meant to equip the saints to do the work of the Kingdom.

A way in which many churches are following the world of corporate marketeering in selecting who can come is by setting a target audience. The church I grew up in embarked on a major transformation process recently. They redefined their target audience as the hip 20-30 year olds but in the process alienated my grandparents, who no longer attend, and my parents, who are restricted from ministry because of their age. If we truly value the body of Christ how can we make such distinctions by generation? The church is unique, not many corporations can serve people birth to the grave. We cannot abandon this core value to more effective marketing.

Economic Engine

I sense an incongruity of having economics a key part of church life. The world is already suspicious about the church wanting my money. We don’t exist for the money, despite what the skeptics say, still money allows us to do amazing things, when used properly. It allows us to engage in justice, missions, evangelism, and ministry to the community of faith. So cash flow is important as fuel for our core values. Defining our economic engine clearly can be a hedge against going after money and buildings.

The only formula I found useful was: cash flow to outreach/nominal attendee. This way our measure of success is tied both to how much we are giving but also how many people are moving from nominal attendees to fully engaged disciples. Collins would have us examine our actions, successes and failures in light of our hedgehog concept, including our economic engine to see how we fair.

Conclusion

The principles laid out by Collins and Godin are useful to the church, but the church must never loose sight of its core values. Collins is right in asserting discipline to a hedgehog concept, and for the church such discipline will mean modification of some of the other principles of corporate America. We, however, have a great guide who has promised to lead us into all truth.

Works Cited
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

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