The Church You Can Measure And The Church You Can’t

“What is our business?
Who is our customer?
What does the customer consider value?”

—Questions reportedly displayed on Bill Hybels’ office door

“The church is a business! People come to us to get religious goods and services. We give it to them, and they give us money.”—An elder

I once heard those words in an elder meeting of a church I was assisting. I was astonished. A business? Really? People come to us for religious goods and services; we provide them, and in exchange they give us money? Something about that description seemed profoundly wrong to me. It was wrong because the language revealed an entire way of thinking about the church.

Words matter. The metaphors we use shape what we see, believe, and value. And once we begin calling the church a “business,” it isn’t long before we start treating it like one. If people become customers, then pastors become executives, ministries become products, and giving becomes revenue. Attendance becomes market share, growth becomes expansion, and success is measured by whether the numbers are moving up and to the right.

There is just one problem.

That isn’t how the Bible talks about the church.

Not. At. All.

The Metaphors We Have Been Given

The New Testament gives us metaphor after metaphor to help us understand what the church is–terms such as “the body of Christ” (Romans 12:4–5; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27), branches connected to a vine (John 15:1-8), the household of God (Ephesians 2:19; 1 Timothy 3:15), living stones being built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:4–5). It is God’s field and God’s building (1 Corinthians 3:9). These metaphors are remarkably different from one another, but notice what they have in common: they are overwhelmingly relational, organic, connected (some might even say “covenantal”), and dependent upon God.

Of course, Paul never uses the terms business or corporation, and he definitely never refers to Christians as God’s customers. Can you imagine Jesus telling Peter to identify his target demographic and determine what religious goods and services they consider valuable? Jesus’ words in John 6:53-56 certainly blow that concept up,

“So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”

If a church was a business, then Jesus certainly wouldn’t say that, simply because the “customers” walked away never to do such business again! (cf. John 6:66).

Such a thought is ridiculous! Instead, Scripture gives us the language of bodies, branches, families, fields, buildings, shepherds, sheep, brides, and living stones — and that language is meant to communicate something deeper about what the church is meant to be.

The Church Is an Organism

One of the most important distinctions we can make is between the church as an organism and the church as an organization. The church is both, of course. A church needs organization. It is not all prayer and preaching with everyone knowing what they are doing. Someone has to recruit and schedule volunteers, put together budgets, maintain buildings, pay employees, write policies, purchase insurance, and hold meetings. When I was in Bible college, we called it “church administration,” but today, many call it the “business” of the church.

Colin Marshall and Tony Payne insightfully described this distinction as the trellis and the vine. The trellis is the structure that supports the work. The vine is the living thing growing upon it. The problem comes when we forget which exists for which. The vine does not exist to support the trellis, but the trellis exists to support the vine. Many churches can become remarkably good at building trellises, and often in doing so, have lost a proper understanding of the vine.

As a trellis, churches create departments, systems, budgets, facilities, organizational charts, metrics, strategic plans, and five-year goals. Before long, maintaining the machinery can consume enormous amounts of energy, and we forget that the organization that was created to serve the organism slowly becomes the thing the organism is expected to serve.

That is when something has gone terribly wrong.

A Body Is Not a Business

Paul’s favorite metaphor for the church is the human body, as we read in 1 Corinthians 12:12, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

That is organism language. A body grows, suffers, heals, and matures. It has to be taken care of and nourished. It needs rest and to be fed. Its parts depend upon one another. Paul even says that the members that appear weaker are indispensable (1 Corinthians 12:22). God cares about who we are becoming with Him and with one another.

Think about how radically different that is from the essence of a corporation. Organizations naturally ask questions about productivity and value: Is this person contributing enough? Is this department producing results? Is this program worth the resources we’re putting into it? The underlying values shaping them are profit and efficiency. But Jesus is surprisingly inefficient. He doesn’t look at people the same way that businesses do.

Sometimes churches have to ask stewardship questions like those. But they cannot become the primary questions by which we understand people. Because in the body of Christ, people do not derive their value from their productivity. Health is relational before it is numerical. You don’t join a body the way you join a gym or purchase a membership. Instead, the Bible says you belong to it. Paul says as much to the Romans in Romans 12:5, “So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”

Notice that last phrase: Members one of another. We belong to one another. That’s what Christian belonging is about. It is not contractual, but covenantal. We belong to Christ, and because we belong to Christ, we belong to one another. We are in covenant with each other. That’s why church discipline is important; that’s why we have leaders to teach and guide us; that’s why the congregation of a local church is a “hermeneutic of the gospel.” It is the people loving one another under the authority of God’s Word, living out all that Jesus taught us (Matthew 28:19-20), that is a sign to others about who God is.

Branches Aren’t Customers

Jesus gives us an even more organic picture in John 15:5: “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Here, life itself flows from Christ. Branches don’t develop strategic plans for producing grapes. They bear fruit because they remain connected to the vine, as Jesus says: “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”

This flies in the face of a church culture obsessed with productivity. Businesses can function without intimacy, but branches cannot. The danger for many churches is that they can learn to manufacture activity that looks remarkably like fruit. With enough money, talent, charisma, marketing, technology, and organizational expertise, we can create crowds, programs, buildings, events, and experiences – but lack the fruit of transformation. Activity and fruit are not the same thing.

If we go back to the words of Jesus, we quickly discover that fruit doesn’t come from great programs, but fruit comes from abiding. That means the most important question facing a church may not be: are we growing? It may be: are we abiding? And the difference between the two is immense. It’s not sexy, and it goes against our modern desire for the kingdom to be big, fast, and famous, but it is abiding that makes all the difference, as God cares not only about the task that is being accomplished, but who we are becoming in the process.

You Don’t Scale a Family

In Ephesians 2:19, Paul tells the Gentile believers: “You are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” And in 1 Timothy 3:15, he calls the church the “household of God, which is the church of the living God.” A household is connected by blood and heritage. It is relational and covenantal, but it is not transactional.

No one thinks that a family is a business. Nevertheless, we often refer to businesses as families, but upon close examination, they have entirely different goals. Businesses exist to produce something for customers, but families exist simply because the people belong to one another.

Think about it. A father doesn’t look at his least productive child and wonder whether the family should cut them off from the family. And hopefully, none of us could conceive of a mother evaluating her children according to return on investment! Can you imagine! Both examples are ludicrous, of course. We know that when someone in the family suffers, everyone adjusts because that person belongs. After all, you don’t scale a family. You raise one.

That distinction alone should cause us to pause and reconsider some of the language we have imported into the church from the business world, and return to more biblical images, like 1 Peter 2:5, where Peter refers to us as “living stones” who are being built up as a “spiritual house.” It’s a puzzling way of looking at it. How can stones or a house be alive? Even in using architectural language, Scripture refuses to allow the church to become merely an institution.

It’s the church, the people of God, that God is dwelling in. The structure matters, but only because of the life within it. The church is a people, not a building. A church building can exist without a covenant people inside it. The church exists as an organism wherever Christ has gathered a people to Himself by His Spirit. The organization serves that reality, but it does not create it.

No CEO Can Make a Field Grow

Perhaps nowhere is the distinction clearer than in 1 Corinthians 3, with our ministry namesake, Apollos. The Corinthian church had begun attaching itself to gifted leaders. Some followed Paul, while others preferred Apollos. To that, Paul responds: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth”—1 Corinthians 3:6. Then he adds: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth”—1 Corinthians 3:7.

Paul and Apollos worked, planted, watered, and cultivated, but they could not create life. Paul could only plant the seed; Apollos watered it. It was only God who could make it grow. No CEO can make a field grow; that belongs to God alone. This doesn’t eliminate strategy, leadership, planning, excellence, or hard work, but it does eliminate controlling outcomes.

What Happens When the Metaphor Changes?

This is why calling the church a business is more consequential than it might initially seem, because if you change the metaphor, employing terms from the business world, you eventually change the mission altogether.

Let’s do a quick exercise and use the business metaphor. If the church is a business, what does the church member become? A customer. And if that person is a customer, the obvious question becomes: What does the customer want? That is a very good question for a business, but it is a disastrous question for a church.

Jesus never commissioned His church to give people whatever religious goods and services they happen to desire. He commissioned us to make disciples (i.e., learners, followers, apprentices of Jesus), which is a time-consuming and messy process. That’s why the Bible uses such terms as “babes in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1), who require “milk, not solid food” (1 Corinthians 3:2; 1 Peter 2:2) and who need to press on to have solid food (Hebrews 5:12-14). It’s a progressive formation that takes place over time. God cares greatly about who we are becoming. Not character formation as much as union with Christ. He wants us to become more and more united to Him.

The issue is that most of our Western theology has focused on converts rather than disciples. There is nothing wrong with converting to faith. Converts are well and good provided they become disciples. But if we focus just on the conversion, then we are missing what discipleship really means.

Back to the business metaphor for a moment. If we employ the term “business” and members become “customers,” we will quickly discover that customers and disciples are very different things. Customers ask, “What can you provide for me?” Disciples hear Jesus say, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”

The issue is obedience. Customers evaluate whether their preferences are being satisfied. Disciples are being formed into the likeness of Christ, and that requires obedience to the demands of discipleship. Customers can leave when they find a better product; members of a body belong to one another. That’s why church discipline is so important – it keeps the body holy. You can’t discipline a customer.

Perhaps the deepest problem with the business metaphor is that it subtly relocates authority. In the market, the customer is king, but in the church, Christ is. It’s not about what people want of God, but what God wants of them.

The Trellis Still Matters

Let me go back to the trellis for a moment. Churches need management. Churches are required to steward resources with extraordinary integrity. They should treat employees well holistically, and not cater to the market where your personal life stays at home. In the church, your entire life matters, and you are to bring your entire self to God. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t parameters and everything is shared. But it does mean that we are holistic beings with a variety of experiences and needs.

It’s incredible to me the shift that I have watched over the past decades. When I was in Bible college, we were required to read from the business world on organizational management. The trend at the time was to look to the business world for how to manage churches. We were following the world. But fast forward to now, and you are finding the business world talking about “servant leadership” and looking to Christ. The irony is that the church is still following – but not Jesus – but the market.

Hard Facts Vs. Heart Checks

Church administration requires careful planning, strategy, communication, maintenance of safe facilities, establishing healthy policies, developing leaders, and measuring what can appropriately be measured. I call these “hard facts.” And this we can learn from the business world, but it must be supportive of God’s greater purposes. Learning from business is very different from believing that the church is a business. Numbers can demonstrate fruitfulness, but they can’t dictate faithfulness.

Discipleship is about obedience — surrender, reconciliation, stewardship, forgiveness, love, perseverance, and the like. These are the “heart checks.” Both hard facts and heart checks are necessary to lead a church well. Like two wings of an airplane, we need both if we are going to fly.

We need to know the numbers. Attendance, giving, baptisms, participation, volunteer engagement, and other metrics can tell us something important about the health and effectiveness of a ministry. Numbers are limited. They can only inform our judgment; they cannot make our judgment for us.

That is why we must distinguish hard facts from heart checks. Hard facts measure what we can readily count. Heart checks help us discern what we are actually trying to produce. A church can grow numerically without growing spiritually, and it can experience deep spiritual growth that does not immediately show up on a spreadsheet.

We should count what can be counted without assuming that everything that counts can be counted.

While business practices can be tools that help, they cannot become or determine our ecclesiology – and therein lies the error. The tail is wagging the dog. When the market determines the message, we have lost the other wing of the plane, and the church comes crashing down.

The trellis matters, but only because a vine is growing on it. There are several warning signs that should tell us that the trellis is taking over the vine.

• When protecting the organization becomes more important than shepherding people, the trellis has taken over the vine.

• When budgets become more important than discipleship, the trellis has taken over the vine.

• When numerical growth becomes synonymous with spiritual health, the trellis has taken over the vine.

• When pastors become executives, members become customers, and ministry becomes the delivery of religious goods and services, we haven’t merely changed our vocabulary. We have changed our understanding of the church.

Remember What We Are

Maybe we hear the words of Mufasa from The Lion King to his son Simba – we need to remember who we are, or what we are, because we have forgotten. Maybe the church doesn’t need a better business model; instead, maybe we need to recover the metaphors that God has already given us.

• We are a body, joined to one another.

• We are branches, abiding in Christ.

• We are a household, belonging to one another.

• We are living stones, being built into a dwelling place for God.

• We are a field, planted and watered by servants while God gives the growth.

• We are an organism before we are an organization.

And perhaps one of the great challenges facing the modern church is simply remembering which one is supposed to serve the other.

The church certainly needs a trellis.

But God did not send His Son to save a trellis.

He came for the vine.

Lord, save us from being a business.

Amen.