Church Issues

The Christian & the Business World #12: The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 5

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How do we redeem corporate America?

Over the last eleven installments of this series, we’ve taken a historical walk through the Industrial Revolution, analyzed various ministries in light of it, and seen how business and the Church ultimately merged. We’ve seen the destruction of two-parent home-based economies, the flight to the cities, the nascence of youth ministry, Businessmanthe rise of Darwinism, the frightful folly of the eugenics movement spawned by Social Darwinism, and seen the Church subsumed by business practices. The only question to ask now is what to do about it.

To redeem the business world, we Christians have to ask some brutally difficult questions, the first being, “Where to begin?” The only answer is that we address the Darwinian thinking that informs business. When businesses say, “Change or die,” “You gotta swim with the sharks,” “We need a paradigm shift,” and “How do we manage human capital?”, they are all using Darwinian terminology. The idea of corporate “mutation” and the survival of the fittest ensures that while the company might live, much—usually human—will be sacrificed to meet that end.

To make this change, Christians need to abort the Darwinian thinking that dominates our own thoughts. Christians need to be thinking in terms of a worldview centered on Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ follows this three part worldview. God created man for a purpose, gave him work with a purpose, yet man fell and those purposes became lost or deviant. Today’s business practices reflect that lostness and deviancy. For this reason, every Christian needs to rework their worldview to be in line with a truly Christian view of all of life.

A good place to start in recreating one’s worldview, breaking the hegemony that Darwinism has over the whole of our social and economic fabric, is Nancy Pearcey’s outstanding book, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. For those who want more, Pearcey’s work is largely drawn from the writings of Francis Schaeffer, possibly the last of the great Christian thinkers. Schaeffer articulated the Reformation’s idea that God’s purposes for Man have been the same since the Garden, only that the Fall mangled them. But with the advent and subsequent death of Christ, God’s own seed of purpose can be re-implanted in the very spirit of Man. Our churches in America must begin to systematically work to counteract the Darwinian and Pragmatic worldviews—both of which are set up against the knowledge of God—that have prevented the work of God from being done in the souls of His people. Churches can no longer assume that a few memorized verses and attendance on Sunday is equivalent to espousing a worldview that is utterly Christian at its core. The strongholds the Bible readily acknowledges exist are housed in our worldview, and these are almost primal within us. Not only can the business world be affected by this change in worldview, but the issues that have rendered the Church in America little different from the world around it can finally be addressed if we start teaching people that what they believe they are using to process the world that goes on around them is far more Darwinian than it is Christian. Judgment begins in the House of God.

Christians have attempted to bring Jesus into the workplace and the result has been little or no fruit. We have not dented the business world. This is not to say that co-workers have not been witnessed to or that lives have not been saved for eternity because of this, only that our vision has been too small. because the problem is central to our culture and nearly subconcious. Laying a veneer of Christian practice over the top will not make the inner ugliness that defines corporate America vanish. We have to lance the business boil. Part of the blame here goes to Christian leaders, particularly those with media connections, who have utterly forgotten that Americans work, and who never mention workplace issues when the spotlight is on them.

Part of the fault lies in the fact that not enough people are willing to think long-term to a possible future wracked by devastating business meltdowns that threaten everyone’s livelihood. Much like modern business and politics, the Church is mired in short-term gains and is not planning for the worst case scenario. Or even the merely difficult one.

Church leaders need to be able to go to business and say, “What if we gave you a better employee and worked alongside you to strengthen the moral and ethical foundations of your company?” An employee with a fully realized Christian worldview IS a better employee, and far less likely to descend into the depths we mentioned in earlier installments of this series. We have to be able to show that a business that runs on Darwinian principles is running on empty and is sacrificing profits at the bottom line. I believe this is possible. But we need smarter Christians than me to be able to get that message out.

Another thing that can be done is to show that businesses that hold to a Christian worldview of Creation, Fall, and Redemption are capable of outperforming a competitor using Darwinistic business principles. Nothing proves a point like a living example. Again, if someone—anyone—with some business sense in the Christian world could step up and put this truth out there, then I think it might gain some traction. If nothing else, business as a whole loves to join bandwagons. We just need them to jump onto ours.

Christians business leaders must work conclusively to prove that there are better options than the short-term thinking that gives us globalization, H-1b visas, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing on demand, and longer hours at work. Those are the easy answers and are beneth a truly Christian response. Our leaders in this need to be on the cutting-edge of business practices by showing how a Christian worldview opens up new possibilities that lead to win-win situations and not Darwinian win-lose.

This is where it must start.

Truthfully, though, I am not certain that two hundred years of assumptions will be changed. Our society is so inured to having dad (or now, dad AND mom) running out of the house to go to work that we may not be able to get back to a home-based economy—ever. Nor is the task of rooting out Darwinism or pursuing Christian alternatives to common business assumptions easy. Old habits die hard unless we have the thinkers and the bold Christian leaders who are prepared to tackle the monster of business. We easily forget how our current work lives influence every aspect of our existence, down to our church structures and even our faith itself. Who can honestly spend two hours a day in focused prayer and Bible study given the work lives we now pursue? Christians will never change the world unless we get a grip on our work lives. If we are not actively working with our Christian leaders—and most of all, with the Holy Spirit’s lead—to think and work radically different than the worldly people around us, then this lofty enterprise can only fail. And when it does, it will hurt us as much or more than the society around us. We can’t afford NOT to start speaking out and thinking differently.

In the next installment of this series, The Christian & the Business World #13: Radical Christian Workers Unite!, we’ll take a look at what we Christians can do to work around business follies that might never change, pursuing alternative work and living practices that can free us up to be more of the godly, countercultural people God has required us to be.

Thanks for reading.

Previous post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #11: The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 4

Next post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #13: Radical Christian Workers Unite!

The Christian & the Business World #11: The Redemption of Corporate America, part 4

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I really want to blame it all on Zig Ziglar.

Actually, it’s just the name that gets me right here in the epiglottis. Mr. Ziglar was not the one who first perpetrated the idea of “The Business Church,” though. So let’s zag instead of Zig and take a look at the reasons that Church and business converged.

In the #6 installment in this series, I pointed out that an ad man, Bruce Barton, published a little book in the mid-1920s that went on to bestselling status: The Man Nobody Knows. This book took the Christian triumphalism and postmillennial viewpoint that grew in the Industrial Revolution and brought the growth of business in the first quarter of the new century in line with the Faith of Our Fathers. It was a perfect melding in a day when Christianity was beginning to fall prey to higher criticism of the Bible and to Darwinian thought. Those heady days after WW I and before the stock market crash made business almost as big as the Church of Jesus. Syncretism was inevitable.

The problem for the Church, though, was that it simply did not understand the cultural changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution enough to quarrel with them. The result was tolerance and accommodation. In fact, many of the entrenched ministries we see today are a result of the Church attempting to minister around the fringes of the changes brought about by the new business landscape. Unable to establish a Christian center in this new world, Christianity became susceptible to being incorporated by it, just as one business swallowed another.

The World Wars played their parts in keeping us preoccupied while the world changed around the Church, so it is hard to blame it all on sleeping sentries. The Church was fighting on more fronts than it knew how to control. Still, no one raised a cry when barbarians appeared at the gates. Eventually, the question of “Can we run the Church like a business?” became moot.

At this point, we must diverge for moment to go down another track. A missionary named Donald McGavran, having seen sporadic success on the mission fields of India in the 1930s, began to hammer out theories as to how to better make disciples by asking why some evangelistic crusades worked and some didn’t. His conclusions eventually took him to Fuller Theological Seminary where The Church Growth Movement began.

The Church Growth Movement basically says—and this is a truly simplistic explanation—that the most important thing you can do to have an effective ministry is to grow the number of people in your church. This theory rebuffed Jurgen Moltmann’s idea that the best church is one that is heterogeneous and instead sought to appeal to a homogeneous “tribe.” In the United States, this tribe took on the form of middle to upper middle class white suburbanites gathered around a common set of needs. In order to best determine how to reach that tribe en masse, the Church Growth Movement searched for catalysts to growth. They found those catalysts in business models.

The hope for the Church Growth Movement was to incorporate the same kind of customer modeling that companies like Procter & Gamble had perfected. P&G became the number one consumer home goods company that it is today by extensive studies performed on customers. Why does the housewife prefer that brand over ours? P&G labored to know. Their example became the rule at companies all over the world.

With the taboo of mixing Jesus with big business long ago removed during the era of Barton’s book, the Church Growth Movement saw that business practices like P&G’s could work in Church circles, too. By identifying the unchurched as a consumer of a specific product, it was possible to craft a Church from nothing that met the needs of the tribe targeted for evangelization.

With Church Growth, the ends of growing a church numerically justified the means. As the movement grew in power in the late 1970s, the language it chose was that of business marketing. A phrase like “target audience” or “demographic niche” could come either from a marketing manager at IBM or a pastor of a church following Church Growth principles. Churches also began to see that business leaders could do more than be deacons or the private bank of a church—they could even be pastors.

Who better to be a pastor of a church than someone who already understands business practices and what makes business tick? To this end pastors talked like CEOs. In fact, church leaders started to quote from bestselling business books as if they were deuterocanonical. In more than one church, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was drummed into the congregation in multiple messages. Human Potential Movement speakers who traveled the business circuit showed up in pulpits and preached a nebulous convergence of business and watered-down gospel that was little more than “me-isms.” And countless churches were told by their pastors that success and leadership were all that Jesus was about. (I wonder if anyone ever questioned why the most successful Christians in history were routinely martyred for the Faith. But then, I was always a troublemaker.)

New Christian leaders rose up that resembled nothing like them in history. Bill Hybels filled the role of America’s pastor. George Barna became the thinker of the hour (Note: I think Barna’s studies on the state of Christianity are vital and I highly support his polling, but I do not support at all his business model solutions to addressing the issues his surveys raise.) In the quest to reach a church perfectly modeled on business practices, churches leapt into Total Quality Management principles—ironically, as Francis Schaeffer had noted before, even as the secular business world was abandoning those practices as flawed. Churches excitedly pointed out that their staffs were now loaded with retired business leaders or, better yet, those who had heard the call of Church Growth and left the The view inside Willow Creek Community Churchbusiness world to “heed the voice of God.”

Church Growth principles and the business models that drove them have created for us the landscape we see today in modern Christianity: megachurches, church planting demographics studies, the addition of retail stores within churches, and that “cloned” atmosphere found in churches across North America.

The problems with Church Growth and its reliance on business models are legion. The cross does not exalt one’s business acumen, but calls people to die to self. Feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and such are explicitly off message and Church Growth leaders are told that this social outreach aspect of the Gospel is a waste of time because it doesn’t translate into growth. Progressive growth in discipleship is scorned since numbers are all that matter, not the depth of the disciples being made. Spirit-filled Christians gifted by God are rejected for leadership if they call Church Growth principles into question or do not have the prerequisite business world curriculum vitae as proof of potential ministry success. (Certainly, anyone reading this could add dozens more abuses.) In the end, it’s a bitter twist that the very problems that show up in Barna’s surveys of American Christendom are largely the result of the failures of the Church Growth Movement that idolized his findings.

Today’s vast wasteland of churches that have driven themselves into the ground is proof of the stark failure of the Church Growth Movement and its dalliance with business. It will take years to root out all the unbiblical business practices from the Church in North America and fix the damage they left in their wake. In the end, the syncretism of Church and business broke pastors, churches, and families. One must even question if the people who came to the “Christ” preached in churches adhering to Church Growth principles actually met the Lord Jesus at all. Only Judgment Day will tell.

Giving people what they want works for diapers and deodorant, but it doesn’t make disciples of any depth.

Where does it all lead then? In the next installment in this series, The Christian & the Business World #12: The Redemption of Corporate America, part 5, we’ll examine what steps Christians and businesses can take to realize both of their potentials in Christ through a fully holistic Christian worldview.

Previous post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #10: The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 3

Next post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #12: The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 5

R.I.P. America, June 23, 2005

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The Supreme Court BuildingAmerica—at least the America founded by the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin— has officially died.

The AP has the story here: Supreme Court rules cities may seize homes for business purposes. You can find the text of the ruling here.

See my post on where this will lead: Taking Away Your Church Building

This is not in the least a political blog, but just let me say that we are losing the United States of America one anti-Constitutional judicial decision at a time. And let me also say that this ties in with The Christian & the Business World series I’ve been writing for weeks now. Eminent domain has only been claimed for government purposes and then not very often. But now the Supreme Court has ruled that private businesses have an interest at least as compelling as the government’s to seize land. I can easily see “Christian” business developers pulling rank now in the name of “community leadership” to raze people’s homes to put in a shopping mall.

Notice especially the dissenting comment by Justice O’Connor:

The Court rightfully admits, however, that the judiciary cannot get bogged down in predictive judgments about whether the public will actually be better off after a property transfer. In any event, this constraint [ed.- the Court’s “public test” clause] has no realistic import. For who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.

She concludes with this:

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result. “[T]hat alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

This is classic Darwinian business practices at work, and just another nail in the coffin of the middle class.

Here’s the really scary part: What happens when a foreign-owned company tries this here? With government and big business merging, who is to say that the Mexican, Russian, or Chinese governments could not manipulate our country through Mexican, Russian, or Chinese corporate land grabs of private American property? Don’t think it can’t happen.

Or consider this: How much closer are we to the seizure of church buildings to benefit corporations or to allow a municipality to generate more tax revenue from a nonreligious source?

God have mercy on our country.