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Great Idea 7: Be About Your Father’s Business – Part 1

MICHAEL LOFTHOUSE

My Father is always at his work to this very day and I too am working

John 5.17

Top Tip: Church leaders need to formulate profitable objectives for their organization.

Business Perspective: When leaders know clearly what their objectives are and can legitimate those decisions within the management team efficacy is the result. Effective leaders discover how their environment and the capability of their organization are changing by gathering facts through a continuous process of scanning, research, consultation and monitoring. Formulating objectives that are feasible, sustainable and acceptable is the primary task of the leader of any organization. This is the management heart of leadership. And why do leaders engage in this process? It is because they want their organization to grow, continue and succeed. They want it to be a profitable organization.

The Church is no different; it needs to grow, continue and succeed. It needs to be a profitable organization. Church leaders need to formulate profitable objectives for their organization.

The difficulty is that the collection, analysis and exchange of information uses resources, is time consuming and incurs costs, and the process is often outside the skill set of most church leaders. An additional significant difficulty is that church leaders conflate ministry with management. They fail to disaggregate the organization leading to aggregated decisions that are bounded by individual preference.

The first step is to understand and accept that at the management level the church is a business; that effective management is the necessary foundation of effective ministry. Now a church leader can disaggregate the organization so that strategic elements of the organization can be identified (see Figure 1). By disaggregating the organization we create a linear model that segments the organization into its component parts.

Now we can engage in a decision-making process that is also disaggregated as we make decisions within the confines of each component part of the organization. Given a problem or opportunity we can identify which part of the organization needs our managerial attention. For example, one of the organization’s products, the Sunday service, is failing to attract a target audience as defined within our purpose, and as a consequence we fail to be in profit in this area of our ministry.

By utilizing the disaggregated business model we can examine in detail each component part of the organization to find a solution. Perhaps the problem is in the marketing, or in the product; it is just not attractive to the target audience, or in the economic environment; we have failed to invest in the infrastructure surrounding the product.

This disaggregated business model also draws our attention to the connective nature of our business. The efficacy of each component part of the organization is reliant on the efficacy of the rest of the component parts. For example, a church could be delivering excellent ministry to a dwindling set of customers. Perhaps the problem is in leadership or finance, we simply do not have enough capital to expand or support the infrastructure of the church. Perhaps the problem is the current culture of the organization?

The challenge is that you must be able not only to disaggregate the organization, to think of it as a business, you also have to take the next step and disaggregate each of the component parts of the business.

The tough question to ask is: ‘What counts as profit for your church?’ You have to be able to disaggregate profit by creating performance targets that are connected to your purpose. And of course this means disaggregating your purpose.

For reflection and discussion

1 How do you measure profit in your church?

2 Are your meetings dominated by discourses that are generalized and aggregated?

3 Is it difficult to reach implementable management interventions that support your purpose and generate profit?

4 Are you managerially frustrated? Why?