Image via WikipediaEric Landry, over at Out of the Horse's Mouth, has what can be called, fairly, a scathing analysis of Willow Creek's Summit of business leaders and church leaders.  I think some of his criticism could be called, fairly, heavy handed.  I assume there are many things pastors of large or small organizations can learn from business leaders...from those who have found new and exciting and successful ways of leading people.  Lord knows I could learn a few things.

But, how much can we learn from business?  I know it is not terribly uncommon to hear business language in the church..."bottom line," "clients," even "product."  But the end goal of business is to make money.  While I'd love to be bringing in more money at our present church that's not "our business."  "Our business" isn't "getting more butts in the pews" -- although, again, it would be great if we had more of those as well.  Our business is offering Christ.  Our business is doxology, offering our praise.  Our business is discipleship.

Landry's most pointed, and I think strongest, theological argument is directed at Bill Hybells.  Here it is:

Bill Hybels said yesterday that the church is in the life transformation business. I’m glad to say that the Bible doesn’t support that view though it does seem to be a fairly common misconception today. We all want Jesus to come alongside us and improve us, our marriages, our children. We want to go to sleep at night confident that we have taken several steps forward, getting a little better every day. We want to reach the end of our lives and see that we have accomplished something of lasting significance and worth, to know that we were worth something. In all of these scenarios, however, Jesus is a means to an end (a very personal, therapeutic end: feeling better about ourselves). As one new acquaintance said at dinner last night, the problem isn’t that we need to align our hopes and dreams with Jesus; it’s that Jesus upends our hopes and dreams, intruding into our lives with such force that what we thought was important actually dies and new life is born in its place. As the great Episcopal preacher Robert Farrar Capon puts it, “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things work.” As long as the church thinks it is in the life business instead of the death business, it will constantly clamor after every tool to improve life and it will judge its success in the way that bookkeepers and accountants judge success.

Oooh... there's a few things I want to pull out of here.

I don't think I'd say that the church isn't about transformation, at least as the author here does.  It is true that much of contemporary Christianity is about "making you a better you."  It's about "improving the living."  That is partly why we now offer Alcoholics Anonymous and a Grief Support Group and why we've offered Financial Peace University.  But the author is right that this can't be the primary goal of the church and every sermon series on "Five Easy Steps to Improve Your Marriage" moves us closer to a gospel of self-help.  That's not the Gospel of Christ.

Secondly, that Robert Capon quote rocks.

Lastly, I do love the phrase "as long as the church thinks it is in the life business instead of the death business, it will constantly clamor after every tool to improve life and it will judge its success in the way that bookkeepers and accountants judge success."  This hit a little too close to home as we move towards a new accounting of membership and attendance in our churches.  Whose model are we following here?

I think, as it comes down to it, if we are all about "improving the living" instead of "raising the dead" we are selling Christ short, we're reducing his incarnation, death, and resurrection into something that we can get from Oprah or the next big CEO.  There is something much more radical and, dare I say, transformational, at work as persons are raised to new life in Christ...not just a marginally better life in him.