"Representing the Vision": Paid Spiritual Leadership Beyond Institutional Finances

A New Kind of Clergy for a New Kind of Christianity, Part 7

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“The church is a business. We have to run it like a business.”

If you ever heard a trustee say something like that, raise your hand.

For many spiritual people, that kind of comment is very cringe. We much prefer to think of the church as a community working to make the world a better place through loving mission.

It's not about the money, and it never has been. Even when churches have done well for themselves, increasing the coffers was really about saving for a rainy day so that the community of faith could continue its mission through time.

Right?

Well, if you are one of the people who cringe when you hear ministry equated with business, brace yourself.

I'm about to take that to a whole new level.

Let's talk about that bottom line

The church is in crisis. Membership numbers are dropping faster than a boulder falling off the edge of a cliff. Between 75 and 150 churches in America disband every week. Only about half of the congregations out there can support a full-time pastor. Yet seminary graduates emerge with an average of $66,000 in debt expecting to find a call with full benefits.

This system is no longer working. It hasn't been working for many years.

If things continue as they are, the most likely outcome is that pastors will become tentmakers. That is to say, they will need to get a full-time (or more) job to pay the bills (including those seminary bills), and volunteer to work with a congregation on the side.

Where are the practical solutions?

It seems like the only real solution out there is to do more of the same.

Sure, redevelopment programs can walk congregations through a process that may help them find new ways to connect with their community. And, those initiatives may help churches grow. But for the most part, it appears they are not working.

At the end of the day, I do not believe that trying to reinvigorate the system will work.

If it could, surely we would have done it by now.

But that doesn't mean the system cannot transform.

What if instead of trying to reinvigorate it, we chose to re-envision how it works? If we did that, we would need to focus the transformation on the linchpin of the system in a local context: the official spiritual leader.

So, what if—instead of trying to run a church like a business—we were to turn the ministry of spiritual leadership into a literal business?