What kind of business are we?
I hope that as a reader you can see that whether one wants to conceptualize the church as a business or not is irrelevant – the question we should be asking is: Are we a good business or a bad one?
- Do we operate ethically?
- Are our methods of internal governance defined by corporate policy or by personal ambition?
- Are profits being held over for the gain of leadership or for the growth and expansion of the product?
- Are our investors being sold the appropriate benefits, and are the dividends we promise being paid?
Every parish needs to sit down as assess its purpose – its mission – on the basis of several critical factors to its obligation to the gospel:
- What procedures are in place to maintain the integrity of the gospel?
- Are people being encouraged to use the product to its full potential before trying to ‘sell’ it?
- If you are a priest, you have to ask yourself:
- Do I know the gospel through and through?
- If not, am I ‘overselling’ – talking about things I don’t know or trying to guide people along paths that I have not been willing or able to walk yet?
- Do people have the necessary encouragement and tools to understand the gospel and engage the product on a regular basis?
These are actually questions that every individual should answer as well – not just thinking about one’s church involvement, but the personal commitment that each believer makes toward serving God by living out the gospel.
Without asking these questions, a person risks living out a faith that has a low or ineffective level of integrity. There is no half-gospel – no half-truth – that can give life where it is needed. The lukewarm approach is like never approaching at all. When we say, “Let us commit ourselves, one another, and our whole life to Christ our God” we are talking specifically about pursuing integrity, for ourselves, our church community and the needs of those around us – the entire created world.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny