Sunday.....Christianity.....The Pastor as Manager?

The criticism has been brought up often over the last few decades on how pastors, particularly of large churches, have become CEOs more than shepherds of the flock. One can only imagine the various financial responsibilities of a large church with its cafes, health rooms, parking lot attendants and assortment of other legal and budget issues to be taken care of. Many years ago, I was a member of a church that was putting an addition on the building. For six months, the pastor put drywall up, laid flooring and was essentially the chief worker. I want to present a different take on the problem in this blog. OK, so you need to be a manager, so how does one become an effective one? Today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting interview with Henry Mintzberg, the Cleghorn professor of management studies at McGill University and author of a book due out soon titled Managing. I want to focus on two aspects of the interview. Professor Mintzberg highlights interruptions as a chief problem in managing. He also talked about the three planes that one would have to manage on, information, people and action. From a business perspective, I could not agree more with his analysis. He says that there are times when a manager enters the fray, action, and coordinates the moves himself. Concerning people he says Managers deal with people who take the action, so they motivate them and they build teams and they enhance the culture and train them to do things to get people to take more effective action. The third plane would be information which comprises budgets and objectives, delegating tasks and designing organization structure and all those sorts of things. He sees the problem today as managers overemphasizing the information plane at the expense of the people and action planes. This is indeed a problem in business and in churches. You can get caught up in the facts and figures, the goals, projections and demands placed on others because of it. Asked how he would advise a group of new managers, he responded Be prepared. Its going to be a lot of interruptions, a lot of pressures. His final advice is to give more attention to the people plane and the action plane. We are in a very weak church age and surely the concept of the pastor as CEO is one of the culprits. I bring up this business advice, not to legitimate the relationship between a church and a business but to show the similarities in being driven by numbers, programs and growth at the expense of the people whose well-being a pastor should have at the core of his vocation. The proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and defense of the verities of such is indeed the goal, or the information plane. But the truths of the gospel need the ear of another human being or they sit useless written on a position statement in the the pastors desk drawer. All of the action, the personal involvement of the pastor, is incomplete at best unless it conveys our condition, Christ's work on the cross and the grace extended to those who believe. In business, we go off center at times. People, employees, can actually be viewed more as liabilities than assets. The success of a company like this will surely be short-lived. A church can attain mega-church proportions and be of no heavenly good to those who flock to it. The pastor is to feed those under his care, first and foremost he is to preach Christ. This is the Achilles Heal of the church today for it has forgotten how to do this. Now if you think that the Obama Administration was mad at right wing republicans during the town hall meetings, pastors would eclipse that in their feelings towards this statement I just made, but every pastor ought to be sweating bullets before every sermon for that awesome responsibility. Are you not subject to the same infirmities that we are? Do you no longer need a hedge of protection around your discernment? Is there no possibility that interruptions have lessened your preaching of Christ? If only the congregations around America would shout Feed Us...preach Christ to us with the same determination as the town hall folks.