| Bishop's CornerIs The Church A Business?
By Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker
 It is quite common to overhear
someone remark, “The church is a business.” A member of a
staff-parish relations committee may be trying to motivate her pastor to
be more attentive to his administrative duties. Or a pastor may be
explaining to her colleagues why she is promoting new techniques to help
her congregation grow. When I was a district superintendent I myself
said this when I had to justify my expectation that a finance committee
adopt more stringent controls on handling money.
Managing a congregation does require the kind of
skills necessary to operate a small business. Raising and handling
money; hiring, evaluating and supervising staff; setting policies for
child protection and sexual ethics; purchasing property and expanding
facilities; planning and coordinating a complex program; and operating
an office are just some of the activities of a congregation that make
it like a business. Yet, is it really appropriate to think of the
church as a business?
There are dangers in becoming accustomed to
thinking of the church as a business. Pastors may begin to look upon
their congregations as religious stores where certain commodities are
sold to customers. Lay members may begin to think of their
congregations as cooperatives in which they are co-owners of
properties and services that feel like extensions of their own
personal wealth. Consequently the church will become secularized and
weakened in its theological identity and mission. Years ago the
Methodist theologian Edwin Lewis lamented how a “utilitarian and
efficiency philosophy” had laid hold of the church so that its
leaders “have conceived the church as exclusively an ‘organization’
to be ‘run’ according to the most approved ‘business methods.’
” Lewis asserted, “If there is one thing more than another that
religion needs to do in our time, it is to bear witness to another
side of life and to another form of reality than that side of life and
that form of reality which is present to people at almost every moment
of their secular pursuits (A Christian Manifesto).”
The church is not a business. It is the people
of God, the body of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
created by the triune God upon the foundation of the teaching of the
apostles for the purpose of worshiping God, proclaiming the truth of
the good news of Jesus Christ, and shaping us to become and live as a
people who have been born anew by faith as a new race of humanity
restored to the image and likeness of God. Its “business” is
worshiping, teaching, praying, serving and learning to live in a
community of love, applying our lives and our society to divine truth,
and also inviting others to become disciples of Jesus Christ.
We have no right to treat the church as if it is
ours to own. The church belongs to God who purchased it with the blood
of His own Son. It has been handed down to us by the bloody hands of
martyrs and the holy hands of saints. It is worthy of being handled by
only those of us who understand what a precious gift we have received
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