Book It

Every year I teach a Leadership Forum class that is designed to help people who are now, or one day will be, leaders of the church to understand what church leadership is all about and how it is different from leadership in other venues. What happens in a business setting, institution, or non-profit differs from what happens at the church. We can't run the church like a business, though we must understand sound business practices. We can't run the church like a non-profit, though we must understand non-profit management. We must run the church realizing that it isn't ours. The church belongs to Christ and we're simply the care-takers of this ministry. We are called to be bold, ambitious, but also pastoral and caring. We are called to be all things that Christ was in His earthly ministry and to understand that this all belongs to Him.

With that in mind, I've been working this week on book selection for the class. We'll read 8 books in 10 months and gather monthly to learn together. When I started this course one of the books I used was Leadership on the Line. It's written by two Harvard professors, one in the business school and one that teaches psychology. (It's an excellent book on organizational psychology and still worth the read.) However, I've decided that there are enough books on church leadership that a business book just didn't make sense.

Actually, I've come to wonder what it might be like if businesses started asking their managers and manager trainees to start reading books on church leadership? What would happen if businesses began their managers with a course in grace, compassion, and caring. What would it be like if every business leader was asking "what can our organization do to enhance the lives of our customers as well as our employees?" What if the single motivating factor wasn't the bottom line? What if instead of increasing corporate profits the goal was to decrease the level of suffering in the world? I know that there are a few companies that actually operate out of such a mindset, what if there were more?