Mitt Romney, who just won the Iowa caucuses by the slimmest of margins, is going all out in his pursuit of the U.S. Presidency. Whether or not Romney will win the election and make a good President remains to be seen, but by all accounts he appears to be a good manager.
In last Sunday's edition of the Democrat and Chronicle, Sharon Cohen of the Associated Press reminded us that
Romney tasted defeat in his first campaign [for President] but found a new outlet for his management skills. He took over the floundering scandal-ridden Salt Lake Olympic Games and is credited with turning them into a financial success.Gillespie, his former aide, says Romney bucked up a demoralized staff, recruited people with Olympic experience, and tackled problems with an orderly management style that involved asking probing questions."When somebody says, 'Look this is the way it's always done,' his first reaction is going to be, 'Not necessarily. Let's talk about why,'" she recalls. "There's a really intense challenging of the status quo."
I love that approach and can't help but wonder how much more effective and fruitful the local church would be if we were willing to ask the hard questions. And lest someone think, "Wait, that's incorporating worldly business practices into the life of the church," let's not forget that when Jesus told His disciples not to do what the Gentiles do, He was speaking in terms of lording it over people, i.e. using your position of leadership to serve yourself rather than others. Jesus was not denouncing the practice of asking probing questions and challenging the status quo. After all, the record of Scripture shows that Jesus himself asked probing questions and challenged the status quo as much as anyone!
Some church programs need to die. We can give them a good funeral, but let's let them die! In some cases, a swift execution would be an act of mercy to many.
Just because we may criticize other churches for doing things wrong doesn't mean that we're doing things right. Moreover, I concur with Harry Reeder that "true effectiveness is never achieved at the expense of faithfulness." But let's not confuse biblical truth with stubborn traditionalism. Faithful stewardship demands that we look at where our church resources (personnel, finances, time, energy, etc.) are being expended, and if this is the most effective means of pursuing a biblical vision for ministry.
In his immensely helpful book, The Deliberate Church, Mark Dever rightly states, "When it comes to building a people for His own name and glory, God cares how we go about participating in His redemptive purposes." How we "do church" says a lot about our theology and our faith (or lack thereof) in the power of the gospel.
It all boils down to the goal of Christian ministry, and that is to make disciples. Are we doing this effectively? That's the bottom line. And it's a question that even the most conservative evangelical churches must be willing to ask themselves. Colin Marshal and Tony Payne put it this way:
Even among those godly, faithful pastors who avoid the trendsetting fads of Christian marketing, there is confusion--most especially between what Christian ministry is in the Bible, and what Christian ministry has become in the particular tradition or denomination of which they are part. We are all captive to our traditions and influenced by them more than we realize. And the effect of tradition and long practice is not always that some terrible error becomes entrenched; more often it is that our focus shifts away from our main task and agenda, which is disciple-making. We become so used to doing things one way (often for good reason at first) that important elements are neglected and forgotten, to our cost. We become imbalanced, and then wonder why we go in circles.
