The other day, I was reading a book about the story of a particular church movement in this country. It mentioned a church which I know slightly. At the turn of the last century (1900, not 2000), this church had a thousand kids in its Sunday school. Today, it has half a dozen elderly ladies in its congregation, and is teetering on the edge of extinction.
How can successful churches die? Maybe we can learn something from the world of business:
Business guru Tom Peters recently put a very interesting post on his blog. It’s all about how large companies perform badly – in fact, over the long haul, large companies almost always do less well than the stock market. Peters says
Giant companies are stinkers when it comes to long-term performance.
His blog post quotes:
“The difficulties … arise from the inherent conflict between the need to control existing operations and the need to create the kind of environment that will permit new ideas to flourish—and old ones to die a timely death. … We believe that most corporations will find it impossible to match or outperform the market without abandoning the assumption of continuity.”—Richard Foster & Sarah Kaplan, “Creative Destruction” (The McKinsey Quarterly)
Or this:
“A pattern emphasized in the case studies in this book is the degree to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard-of heights. But in most cases this is a sign of impending death.”—Jim Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation.
Or:
“You don’t get better by being bigger. You get worse.”—Dick Kovacevich, CEO, Wells Fargo
If we can draw the parallel, the point is that our churches’ love affair with bigness may actually be one of the reasons for our decline. (Yes, I’m sure there are all kinds of more ‘spiritual’ reasons too, and cultural reasons, but bear with me on this.) Peters ends his blog article with this quotation. I wish every church leader in the UK would read it, think about it, memorise it, and perhaps even chant it to themselves in the bath. It’s called ‘Life 101: A 40-year Reflection:’
Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Who knows, you might get lucky …
Or:
Extract “lessons learned” or “best practices.”
Thicken the Book of Rules for Success.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.
