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 business 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.

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On my first full day of living in Silicon Valley after moving there from Ohio to take a job at Apple Computer, I heard on the radio that the California Supreme Court had upheld a decision that said it was fine to fire employees for no other reason than they had gotten gray around the temples. If I remember correctly, the victim in this case was a man in his early fifties (at the time) who had received nothing but commendations throughout his career—until the day his company told him he was too old, hiring a much younger man to take his place. And now that firing had the imprimatur of the American legal system.

I literally shook when I heard this. Little did I know that I would be facing it, too. When my own career in tech crashed and burned through no fault of my own, I read the handwriting on the wall and knew I had to get out before it was too late. What I did not know was that it was already too late. My search in other fields continued to turn up one age-related rebuff after another. “No one will hire you at your age,” I was repeatedly told. My age at the time was 38. I am not getting any younger, either.

I’ve talked about “Age-ism” many times on this blog. Newsweek runs a huge six-piece gatefold on “The Office of the Future” and the first thing I notice is not a single gray hair or wrinkle in any of the dozen folks depicted in that whiz-bang, gadget-filled office—not even in the VP of the group. Next week the cover story is Botox. Coincidence? Not on your life. More than one respondent in that Newsweek article said, “I looked around and they were firing all the older-looking people in the department. I got Botox injections to save my job.”

Should we be surprised that the ugly stepchild of Darwinism, eugenics, is at the heart of this conspiracy? God’s economy lauds the elderly and their wisdom. But the Huxleys, Hitlers, and Sangers have no use for anything but prime youth. Getting rid of the aged makes us all feel better about ourselves since we no longer have to look death in the eye.

I know people in HR departments in many companies. They are routinely told only to go after people under twenty-seven. Fresh college grads are the target. People that age have fewer dependents (less insurance, fewer distractions from work), are healthier (less sick days, cheaper insurance), will sleep under their desks (no families to go home to, no Little League games or ballet recitals to interfere), will mouth the company line (without pointing out disturbing or unethical practices) and will eat and sleep their jobs. Better yet, as children of postmodernism, they have fewer qualms about doing what is necessary, even if that supposed “necessary” constitutes corporate malfeasance. Wisdom, the upbringing under more sober times, and the ethic instilled from those times counts for nothing.

Case in point: When I was working in Silicon Valley, the average age of a high-level manager at Sun Microsystems was that magic twenty-seven-years old. But consider that no large company has been harder hit or dropped faster from the heavens than Sun. The question about Sun today is, “Are they still around? What do they do?”

No one has learned the lesson, not even the Church. If anything, the Church today is on a youth bender unlike any I’ve seen before. The “old is bad” meme has caught on even within God’s Body. Churches preach that your appearance does not matter and that age means nothing—while at the same time they kick out the gray-haired worship pastor in favor of the trendy postmodern guy who loves Coldplay.

You can’t go a day and not hear some radio preacher talking about bringing legal challenges to abortion, gay marriage, or some other pet Evangelical cause. But where was D. James Kennedy when a guy in his fifties got a pink slip in California for being “too old?” Why isn’t Jim Wallis camped out in Sacramento protesting? Where’s the book by John Maxwell decrying “employment euthanasia” amid all that talk about leadership?

I’ve had too many conversations with men my age (I’m 42 now) who are asking if their careers are washed up because they’re in their forties and missed the brass ring; it went to a 29-year old, instead. The only consolation to my peers is that that 29-year old will get his a dozen years from now.

This is no way to live folks. And the Church’s silence is pervasive.

The Church has no words for the fallout of Jack Welch’s winning ways at GE, either. Lauded as a corporate genius, Welch poisoned the well for employment in this country by advocating downsizing as a great way to pad the bottom line. Capital is capital, whether it be cash or humanity. As mentioned in a previous post in this series, a total non sequitur exists when a company announces both a record profits and a record employee downsizing in the aftermath of those profits.

What pink slip mania has fostered means loyalty is gone. Again, the Darwinian effect is easily seen. Like the titan Kronos devouring his children lest they turn and seize his power, titans of today’s industries jettison employees to prop up their own corporate kingdoms, fueling enlarged egos at the expense of the common man.

What we in the church tell the downsized and unemployed is a contradictory message, too. We say we’ll stand by them, but then offer no help in finding them work. Instead, we offer to pray for them and that assuages our spiritual guilt while they burn through their savings. We can say nothing to the interviewee who is repeatedly told by the world to sell, sell, sell himself when the Christian message is to esteem others better and to be humble, having died to our very selves. We give job-seekers two different sets of messages and no help reconciling them. Do we not see the problem?

Why does the Church deal so badly with this? Where is the regulating effect of the Gospel in a corporate environment that downsizes real people at will and then asks questions later? Why must John Doe lose his job so that Jack Welch can write a bestselling book on being a winner? People simply are not capital—they are creations of God. Why does the Church in America tolerate this Darwinian “survival of the fittest” worldview in American business?

All this pressure on workers today is debilitating. If we wonder why most Christians look no different from the world around them, why are we not examining the one thing that consumes more of our time than anything else, our jobs? If the average American works 48 hours a week (and that rate of hours is still increasing), only sleep could possibly compete for our number one allegiance. With sleep deprivation epidemic, our employment is certainly the number one time consumer. Yet, why do we believe that we can do something for 48 hours in a week and believe it has no effect on our belief systems? If Christians got 48 hours a week alone with God, do you think the Church in this country would look radically different than it does?

That Christians act no different than the unsaved around them must have some roots in our work worldviews. Money issues are still the number one cause of divorce, even among believers. Since cash flow and employment are intimately related, we can’t ignore how work issues impact Christians in their marriages and family life. Nor can we believe that the worldview espoused in the workplace has no effect on one’s worldview outside of work. You believe in “swimming with the sharks” at work, you’ll certainly bring that view home. (Too often our translation of work worldviews to home paints our very neighbors as the competition, and yet we cry about lack of community all the time.) Christians who work for companies with a Darwinian worldview labor under that view for more hours a day than a Christian worldview. Is it any wonder then that most Christians don’t espouse a holistically Christian worldview?

We already have seen how the family was adversely affected by the Industrial Revolution. Home economies were abandoned. Families were split and made distant. In our age, we can expect to move every seven years—and this is increasing. Many people are chasing jobs as one place goes from boom to bust. Some who have tired of this have sought a return to Mayberry. Randy Frazee is a popular author who examines Christian community and daily lifestyle. He recently came on at Willow Creek Community Church as that church tries to rethink how to do community. Much of Frazee’s model resembles a return to a Mayberry-like existence. But the stick in the eye of this model (and you will hear more of this model now that Frazee is on staff at Willow Creek) is that Mayberry doesn’t exist any longer. All the jobs left town. No jobs, no town. And you simply can’t have a community of people stay a community if everyone in that community is in various stages of moving to pursue job changes, some of those elective, but an increasing number forced. Moves strain family ties even more. We talk about extended family more than ever after 9/11, but we are doing nothing to retain it.

Job pressures grab at every second of our day and it is our families that pay the penalty. Weekly commutes are longer, adding to the 48 hours dedicated to being at work and away from our families. Marriages are strained under the weight of activities and we are hearing more about couples who no longer have sex because there simply isn’t any time for it. Children must always compete for a harried parent’s attention, and we progressively must dump our kids into the care of strangers instead of family caring for them.

With all these pressures, is it any wonder that Christian families crumble at the same rate as non-Christian families? Constant moves to find work, breaking extended family ties by moving, bringing Darwinian worldviews home from work, trying to shove more activities in a day already consumed by more work hours than the day before—no family, even a Christian one, can function under those conditions.

Back in the day of this nation’s founding, the family didn’t operate that way. Both parents worked from home, taught their kids from home, and were around the home for each other. We now have the complete opposite of this, and yet we expect our industrialized family to work as smoothly.

As much as many Evangelicals have built an altar to family values, I never hear Focus on the Family talk about what we can do to address work issues so that both parents can work from home. I never hear them advocating for Americans downsized via outsourcing, offshoring or simple corporate greed amidst record profits. I know that once when my wife and I were in the middle of nine months with neither of us working after yet another downsizing, we called a Christian ministry that was offering to help via a book they were discussing for families in tough times like us. The book was a suggested “love gift” of $30. When we noted that we were burning through our savings as we tried to find work, it was funny to us that the suggested love gift remained a firm $30. So much for charity.

The Church of Jesus Christ has got to have a better answer.

In the next installment in this series, we’ll examine how the Church’s better answer has become “let’s model our church practices after leading business practices!” That will be part four of The Redemption of Corporate America in this series, The Christian & the Business World.

Thanks for reading. Your comments are most definitely welcome!

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Everything is made in China.

Wal-Mart, that quintessentially American company, used to display huge signs talking about all the American jobs it had saved by buying American. I dare you to walk through a Wal-Mart today and find fifty machined products made outside of China. A short trip I took recently through their toys section found no toys made in any country except China. Oh, and those big “We Buy American” signs? Nowhere to be found.

When the American flag you buy from Wal-Mart is made in China…folks, the end is near.

Globalization and consolidation are two nebulous problems the Church needs to come to grips with—now.

Say you were a neighbor of Paul Revere back in the home economy days of 1776 and you wanted to buy a set of candlesticks from the well-known silversmith. You get the pair home and you discover a nick in one of them. Simple question: who do you take the candlesticks back to? Paul Revere, right? He’s your neighbor. You know he’s an honest man.

Now try to do business with a multinational corporation. Worse yet, be a poor person living in a poor country under the shadow of a globalized company. That company may be headquartered in Sri Lanka, but while Sri Lanka may have draconian anti-pollution laws, Djibouti doesn’t. As a Djiboutian (sic) to whom do you complain about the toxic green sludge pumped into your backyard? Who really is in charge? Who is a division of whom?

The ability to globalize allows companies their own form of psy ops tool. A company, claiming it could no longer compete globally, tries to move its headquarters to the Caribbean to head off corporate taxes. Scariest of all, particularly to the employees who would lose their jobs in the U.S., there was no way to prevent this from happening. Because it is now easy for a company to move its headquarters to another country, they can use that as blackmail against communities about as easily as pro sports team whine to get new stadiums. If anyone who is reading this lives in a town gutted by a company that went “global,” you know about this kind of corporate blackmail. And in the end they leave anyway.

But for Christians, the biggest problem is not that globalized companies skirt a country’s laws by locating in a different country without those laws. Nor is it that jobs leave. The biggest problem with globalization is that we Americans, particularly us Christians, are not ready for the fallout of trying to compete globally against countries with costs of living a tenth of what ours is.

Let me tell you right off that I do not begrudge the man in Bangalore, India, his new IT job at Microsoft’s new multimillion dollar facility in Bangalore. But what does bother me is that I simply cannot compete against him. My education costs more, my food costs more, my housing costs more. my taxes cost more—basically everything it takes for me to live one day costs more than it does for that man in Bangalore. The cruel fact is that not only can I not compete against him, but no one in the United States can, either. A friend of mine recently told me that legal services are now being offshored, so even lawyers are not immune.

Futurists are predicting that not only is the United States post-Industrial, it is rapidly becoming post-Technological—the one hard science edge the U.S. has had over the rest of the world. “Invented here” is not just a slogan of Hewlett-Packard; it basically was the slogan for all of United States. But that time is ending. The Wall Street Journal recently noted that engineers in America who have college-aged children can’t get them to go into engineering or any other tech-related field because the kids saw their parents go through repeated down cycles in engineering and would prefer to be a history prof if that means not going to the unemployment line every three years.

The irony was that tech companies created a self-fulfilling prophecy when they announced that they couldn’t find tech workers to fill their jobs. The hard truth is that plenty of American tech workers existed, but the tech companies simply did not want to pay them market rates. Instead, they pumped money into India, Pakistan, or Malaysia, all the while decrying the lack of skills in American high school graduates. The thirst for H-1b visaholders (tech workers allowed in the country on a special permit that can be rescinded by the company they work for, effectively rendering them indentured servants) ran so high that even during the tech bust, American politicians like Orrin Hatch were manning the megaphone for companies who wanted to have the lower-paid visaholders. Now that tech got their due, there are lobbyists working tirelessly to expand the H-1b visa past the tech requirement to allow for this visa to cover airline and medical workers, and even professors, much to the chagrin of academics who initially argued for the visas back in the Clinton era.

If American jobs are being sent overseas and H-1b visas are expanded to cover more and more fields, what do we tell our children to go into when it is their time to join the job market?

Again, the same futurists who are claiming we are post-Technological, now claim that the only recourse for the United States workforce is to become entertainers. You read that right. The only thing the United States has a corner on is global entertainment. And so the United States is poised to become tap0dancing fools so the world can get a good chuckle now and then. Not a promising future.

We have to be prepared for this truth: Our children will not have it as good as we do. I believe that the standard of living in the United States is dropping, particularly in the middle class. My wife and I know many people who have lost jobs in the last five years and are working for much less money than they once did. There is no promise of that returning. Many were hit in their peak earning years and simply will not recover.

Darwinian theory accounts for this. There can only be winners and losers. For the longest time, Americans were the winners. Some Americans will continue to be winners, but at the cost of the middle class moving downward into the lower class. This is the first year I can remember where our family refused medical treatments we’d accepted in the past because we could no longer afford them—and that’s with insurance. The oddity is that the people above us have no problems with this and neither do the people below. The people above can easily afford treatments and medication we cannot, while the people below qualify for assistance that can get them those treatments and medications for free—at least as long as the government picks up the tab. But even for them, there is no guarantee this will continue.

Churches in America are unprepared for the fast-approaching day when their congregants will be unable to keep their heads above the global economic tide. We had our day, but what do we do now that world affluence will move to places like Bangalore instead of Baltimore? The threat of losing everything looms large for those who are caught in the paradigm shift. Perhaps our children can live with less and have lower standards, but for those of us born in the 1950s-70s, this will be a bitter pill to swallow.

The irony of this is that Evangelical America, in particular, will have to start paying attention to justice issues (a long-ignored part of the Gospel), particularly economic justice issues when it is they who are finding economic injustice perpetrated against them.

Not only does globalization, offshoring, outsourcing and expanded definitions for H-1b visas portend rough times ahead, but consolidation makes this worse. Several years ago, there was a movie called The Highlander that featured immortals clashing with giant broadswords capable of lopping off another’s immortal’s head, the only way to render him less than immortal. The tagline to the movie was, “There can be only one.”

In essence, this is Darwinism at work. If the selfish gene is truly selfish, then all other genes must die at its expense. Anyone conscious who paid any attention at all to the behind-the scenes transcripts that came out of the Microsoft monopoly trial can tell you that companies don’t play nice. Any advantage, regardless of the malfeasance involved, will be played. That this has become the de facto standard in most of industries should be shocking. Instead we yawn.

But beyond the evil that some businesses do to gain the upper hand and pass on their corporate genes at all cost, there is the issue that monopolies and consolidation defy policing and lead to a blandness that is at odds with the creative spark engendered in Christianity. Francis Schaeffer repeatedly noted that Christians should be the ones driving the arts, but consolidation has taken that out of our hands. Because so few companies control many industries today, the cost to break in against them is, frankly, impossible.

This, too, extends into previously unhindered fields such as art, writing, and film. The complete and total consolidation occurring in the publishing and media fields is frightening. Where once there were a hundred large publishing companies, we now have six global firms controlling everything you read. The cost to us is that we’ve gone from a thousand editors to perhaps only a hundred powerful—and highly overworked—editors at these publishing houses and all their affiliates. This means that it is much harder for new writers to have their voice heard. It also means that every editor is pressed to have instant hits or else. Because of this, editors are less willing to take chances and would much rather stick with a few name authors and their proven series strength than try something new. Sadly, consolidation has afflicted music and art in much the same way. Someone must win and someone must lose. Win-win is out.

Consolidation is one of the reasons that Christians find it nearly impossible to get their foot in the door in Hollywood. The whole apparatus of making a film has been raised to exorbitant costs by consolidation within the big film studios by global companies with large pockets. The good Christian film either never gets made or never gets adequate distribution unless an insider does it (think Mel Gibson here.)

One last note on consolidation—if anyone thinks consolidation make no difference to Christians, ask how it is possible to have a Revelation-style one-world government without consolidated business. Something to ponder.

So much of what is happening in business and the economy is so intertwined that it is a veritable Gordian knot for Christians. I’m finding it difficult to even write about because one rabbit hole leads to another. But we must start addressing these issues. Our silence is damning for people both in and out of the Church who are looking for answers and are finding that the Church has none except, “Pray harder.”

I think there are answers for redeeming business in America, but before we get there, let’s address the last few items in my list of nine problems, age-ism, downsizing, unnatural family situations that lead to stress and family breakdowns, and corrupt business practices adopted as models for the Church. Look for those in the next installment in this series.

{Image from In These Times, “High Tech Hijack“, Jan. 27, 2005.}

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