RealCurrents

I recently ran across a popular discussion of Rick Warren’s concept of a “purpose-driven church” on Tim Challies’ blog, which has prompted me to finally get around to posting some basic background information on this subject that most folks may not have.

I don’t by any means intend for this to be a detailed examination of the subject, but before Christians get to beating each other up over it, which is unfortunately what often happens, we need to know that this whole issue of the tension between “purpose” and “comfort” is very basic to management of any organization, not just churches.

Way back in 1973, Ralph Winter (who co-founded the U.S. Center for World Mission) wrote an article, “The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission” that describes this basic dilemma. For those who have taken the Center’s Perspectives course, the article is also in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (Ch. 19 in the earlier edition).

The basic tension is between two distinct purposes for the local church, what Winter calls “sodalities” and “modalities”. Sodalities are mission/purpose-driven to accomplish ministry to the outside world. Modalities serve/minister to the members of the organization itself.

This is really a very basic tension that exists in all organizations, not just churches. Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, discusses this at length in his book High Output Management (Ch. 8). He calls the two types “mission-oriented” and “functional”, and links them to the well-known organizational tension between decentralization (independent project-oriented groups on a mission) and centralization (bureaucratic controls set up to serve the organization itself).

Regarding the basic, inevitable nature of this tension, Grove asserts, “Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, ‘Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.’” Grove calls this desired result “a balancing act”.

And indeed it is. Before churches go about splitting over “purpose”, Christians need to understand that both points of view are legitimate. The local church is to minister to congregants, as with the widows in Acts 6, and it is also to minister to the outside community, even to the point of sending missionaries as the church at Antioch did (Acts 13).

Nevertheless, we also need to heed the warnings of many with management experience, that left to their own devices, organizations naturally tend to degenerate into bureaucracy and thus an excessive focus on internal ministry, which is more comfortable than external ministry. Legendary GE Chairman Jack Welch has argued forcefully against bureaucracy, saying it is something that must be constantly battled in order for a company to grow and remain profitable.

Of course, unlike a business, a local church doesn’t exist merely to achieve an external goal such as making a profit. It must care for and disciple its members. Indeed, a failure to emphasize discipleship has been one of the problems with many evangelical growth strategies.

Yet it seems clear that, outside times of major persecution, growth should be a normal outcome of a healthy local church (Acts 2:47). As someone has asserted, perhaps the best measure of any successful entity is that it reproduces capable “offspring” after itself. If this is the case, then the proper measure of a successful church is not the size of the congregation, but whether it is producing other local churches, whether across town, perhaps in a depressed area needing help, or in another country (what is traditionally considered to be a “missions” activity).

The Wall Street Journal article cited in Challies’ post (”Veneration Gap: A Popular Strategy For Church Growth Splits Congregants” by Suzanne Sataline), quotes a “purpose-driven” minister as saying that occasionally leaders have to “play hardball” when certain congregants don’t catch their vision for growth or ministry. Perhaps this is the case, but I certainly hope it is the exception.

Leaders must realize that developing a vision for external ministry, whether evangelization of the immediate community, ministry to local needy, or world missions, is going to be a major paradigm shift for most American Christians.

In other words, this is a necessary change in outlook for most churches, but it’s going to take a long time. In moving back along the continuum from modality/internal ministry toward sodality/external ministry, church leaders should bear in mind that it would probably be easier just to move to the other extreme (even though it might well split a church) than to actually move gradually toward a proper balance, educating members and communicating a vision over time.

Yet this must be the goal for a healthy church - a proper balancing of attention toward both internal needs and discipleship and external needs and evangelization.