Roger Owens: What does business literature have to do with theology?
Questioning the place of pagan philosophy in Christian theology, Tertullian asked, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” The question his heirs are asking today is, “What does Harvard Business School have to do with Duke Divinity School?” Many of the students in the class I taught this summer on missional leadership thought the answer was clear: not very much.
In that class we spent one week reading Harvard Business professor John Kotter’s bestselling business book, "Leading Change," and another week reading "The Missional Leader," by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, written explicitly for pastoral leaders. As a final paper, I asked the students to compare and contrast the approaches to change offered in each book. The students rightly noted that Kotter presents a more “top-down” leadership approach. For him, it is the primary job of the designated leader to set the vision and the direction for the organization, even though the leader must work with others and never “go it alone.”
Roxburgh and Romanuk, on the other hand, see the job of a missional leader as creating an environment where vision and direction can emerge. For them, the leader doesn’t set the direction, but sets the table for a conversation during which the people listen to one another and the Spirit in their midst and discern how they should be in mission together. The two approaches couldn’t seem more different.
I didn’t ask the students to tell me which one they liked the best, but many told me anyway. Some took this assignment as an opportunity to express worry over the encroachment of business leadership practices on the church. Roxburgh and Romanuk are right, they said—the calling of the church “does not require borrowing language and structure from secular organizations, but rather formation of a unique imagination as a social community of the Kingdom.”
I assigned Kotter’s book to encourage just such borrowing.
Here’s the problem: the change model Roxburgh and Romanuk offer is no more Christian than Kotter’s business model. They rely on the work of anthropologist Everett Rogers, whose book, “The Diffusion of Innovations,” shows how new technologies are sometimes successfully adopted into cultures and sometimes not. He’s the one who gave us the language of “innovators,” “early adopters,” and “laggards” to describe which people are more likely to use a technological innovation and bring others along. Is the anthropological study of how change happens in primitive cultures more Christian than the study of how change happens in business organizations?
A bottom-up approach is definitely more democratic, but that’s a different kind of borrowing altogether.
In fact, Kotter’s book, even though it uses absolutely no Christian jargon, might seem more Christian, at least if one looks at leadership in the Bible. Moses didn’t host a conversation among the Israelites in which they discerned their mission. He told them where God said they were going and he led them there. Jesus didn’t stop to take a poll either. I’m surprised no one has written a book yet mapping Kotter’s eight stages of leading change onto Jesus’ own leadership. It wouldn’t be difficult. And you’d certainly be stretching matters to call the Apostle Paul a bottom-up, consensus-oriented leader.
Maybe the problem is with the “which is more Christian” game to begin with. As leaders, our choice is not between business leadership or Christian leadership—neither is a pure category. The question is: How will Christian leaders exhibit phronesis—practical wisdom—as they do the work of leading organizations and shaping congregations? How will a leader know when top-down direction is necessary to move an organization off of a plateau or out of a rut or when a more collaborative, bottom-up approach will be useful? How will the leader recognize the more likely scenario when both approaches, and others as well, will be needed at the same time? Reading the latest book hot off the Harvard Business School press might help a leader figure out how answer these questions. So might the prayerful reading of Scripture each day.
Do we have to choose?
Roger Owens is the co-pastor of Duke Memorial United Methodist Church in Durham, NC.
At the very least, it is
At the very least, it is pretty clear to me that church leaders have a great deal to learn from business leaders. HR concerns are the most obvious, sense we rarely now how to hire, fire, or supervise our leaders and often create scandals as a result.
I do think we have to choose...We have to choose to think theologically about how we will lead. It may be that the primary prompt for our theological thinking will be an anthropologist, a business leader, or pastor who seems to be doing a particularly good job at leading even though they don't have the theoretical framework to understand why.
I tend to think we could provide a theological justification for a variety of models, however. Roman Catholic theologies of priesthood seem to encourage "top-down" leadership. Pentecostal notions of all being gifted would seem to encourage more consensus-making notions of leadership. (Ironic given the number of Pentecostal leaders that make all decisions from the pulpit.)
By all means, lets read the works of the best secular notions of leadership. But lets choose to analyze those concepts with our theological lenses.
Jeremiah Gibbs
Jeremiah
Yes, we have to choose
"Reading the latest book hot off the Harvard Business School press might help a leader figure out how answer these questions. So might the prayerful reading of Scripture each day. Do we have to choose?"
Do we have to choose between reading one or the other? Of course not. We should take good ideas wherever we find them. But "good" in this context has to mean consistent with Scripture. So we have to choose which to privilege? Absolutely we do.
Aug aid
Travis you won't be surprised I take my lights from Augustine here. Truth is truth wherever its found, and in fact we are occasionally more attentive to it when reading outside where we expect to find it. So if the Platonists or the Donatists or whoever says something true we recognize it as coming from God. Now, it has to be thoroughly scrutinized on Christian grounds of course--Platonists can show you the good but can't get you to it permanently, only Christ can. I take Roger's point here to be a thoroughly Augustinian one.
The Harvard Hermeneutic
Dear Esteemed Colleagues,
I agree that there is not necessarily an either/or in terms of leadership, and that truth is truth. And yet I am disturbed at recent excessive tendencies to look to business books instead of to Scripture for insight into leadership. Most of the time, I have found that the best business thinking is helpful only insofar as it illuminates something the church has already known through Scripture and tradition: the business book is just putting it in different (and, I think, less "true") language than the Bible does. At the same time, the business world is discovering the power of "integrative thinking" (see Three-in-One God, "servant leadership," and "the leader within," which we've known for about 2000 years. Why not, then, do what Roger says and look at Scripture first, instead of second? What do Moses and Paul have to tell us about leadership within the church? I can tell you that many of our rural parishioners are mystified at seminary grads who come to them talking in words they cannot spell instead of using their supposed common language of the Bible. Truth is truth, but what if Scriptural language and imagery are the most truthful descriptions?
Part II
Friends,
I just re-read this and it came off snarkier than I intended. My apologies. I think I am just trying to make a point that, to me, the greatest value in some of these business books is that they point us back to understand Scripture (as Roger suggests above) in new ways. I just want to be sure that we do, then, bring it around to Scripture. At times, I am also concerned that Scripture seems to have a whole different paradigm of leadership than anything the secular world can offer: namely, "Pray, and then follow the Holy Spirit." (The Book of Acts). I also have this nagging doubt that my own "business plan" or "5 Year Strategy" would never include things like visiting with a developmentally disabled boy - or winding up on a cross. Thanks for stimulating my mind and challenging me.
No worry
Jeremy that's both the strength and weakness of commenting on a blog--it's fast! I'm reading a fine book now by a man named Roger Parrott (thanks to Chris Heuertz for this tip), who's president of Belhaven College in Nashville. His first chapter is on how we should view leadership posts as jobs that we will have forever. In his first college presidency he met with the 'local burial club'--people who were sure (unlike him) to be buried in the local cemetery. Now, it's not likely we will be in our current jobs forever, in this age. So it's a salutary exercise. And that's an insight that's biblical in a roundabout way without being quite able to site chapter and verse. And that I think is Roger's point--we don't have to rank necessarily, though of course you're right, if there's a conflict the scriptures arbitrate and not anything else.
re-thinking the last line
Thanks for these thoughtful comments. I think, Jeremy, you are right to privilege Scripture. In fact, the choice isn't between choosing business books or choosing Scripture, as I suggested above. Rather, it's how, in thinking about our leadership, we will exercise a Scripture-shaped practical wisdom. It's that wisdom that will allow us to borrow in the most faithful ways whatever wisdom we can find, and recognize truth wherever we find it as well. I also think that we tend to have a narrow view of what constitutes business literature. Harvard Business school publishes a lot of stuff that doesn't make it onto the bestseller list, and much of it is very congenial to a church setting. I've learned from books by Henry Mintzburg (MIT) that there is no such thing called "a business approach." Check out his book Strategy Bites Back from the Fuqua School of Business library. It upsets a lot of assumptions and "frees" stategic thinking for excellent use in the church, I think.
How God Built a 2000 Year Old Organization
Wise Friends,
Thank you for these thoughts. I know that I must sound like a biblical literalist, which I am not. I agree there that is much that is biblical that does not quote Scripture: I read Wendell Berry, for instance, to better understand the Bible. I continue to think, however, that we actually do need to give more attention to not only using Scripture as a resource for finding other expressions of something deeper called "wisdom", but to attending primarily to its wisdom and using its language as well. I believe that the use of Scriptural language is a discipline. What if the fear of the Lord really is the beginning of wisdom? I really do believe that the language of Scripture is "truer" than any alternative. I am a huge fan of reading about new approaches from other organizational worlds. I enjoy it, and have profited greatly from it. And yet, if I am honest, part of this is because I have gotten a little bored with the language of Scripture, and am searching for something "fresh" sounding. I have, in Paul's phrase, "itching ears." Those of us of a certain education level tend to be attracted to cutting edge techniques and ideas, and we pepper our discourses with these words and phrases (I am chief among sinners). Contrast this with someone like Augustine (referred to above) or Wesley, both wide-ranging readers, but for whom every other line includes a quotation or an echo from Scripture. Will Willimon wrote a piece a little while back on how many church members in his conference had complained because new seminary grads seem to graduate speaking another language than the one in the Bible. I don't these those church people are just "backward": maybe they have a point. Just to push this (perhaps dangerously) further on how other language games can subtly displace the language of the biblical world: I LOVE the Faith and Leadership website, but I would invite you to look back through many of the recent articles, and do an analysis of how many of them quote directly from the language of Scripture. (They do, of course, come from a biblical worldview). To understand what leadership is, shouldn't we start with the people Roger mentioned in the orginal article: Jesus, Moses, and Paul? I really believe that we could spend the whole of the next year looking at II Corinthians for what it teaches us about leadership, stewardship, and organization theory. And yet, it is likely that in my next discussion on leadership, I will talk about Heifetz, Heclo, and Wendell Berry more than about Peter, James, and John. I will continue to be blessed by the insights from these other readings, but some part of me wonders if I wouldn't profit as much by spending the same number of hours re-reading, slowly, the Book of Acts: or having Heifetz in one hand only because I have Hebrews in the other. Thanks,though friends, for this dialogue, and for your great insights, and forgive my seeming-impertinence. I hope you will vigorously show me the error of my naive ways.
scripture on site
Jeremy thanks for mixing it up on this topic. Two thoughts on F&L, one, if you've seen no scripture on our site I don't think you're reading us charitably. We don't take the "Faith" part of our title as anything abstract, but rather take it as genuinely biblical Christianity. The other is that our particular vocation as a media outlet is to be an intersection of two things, as you know well. In this I do think Augustine is a good model (Wesley less so): Platonism can tell you everything true about the world that you need to know to convert (a reliable account of the nature of good, evil, creation, even a glimpse of salvation). It just can't save you. So too with the business lit we're learning from. It's a treasure trove. But it's certainly not salvific. I would argue against a sola scriptura approach to leading. 2 Cor is scripture and this literature is not. But scripture is not self-interpreting, nor does it fall from the sky without historical addenda, as you would agree. We're seeing a secular literature that throws light on scripture for us.
One way to argue over this is to treat a particular issue and whether things are clarified by this external literature or not.
Thanks Jason
Jason, I appreciate this, and defer to you, particularly on Augustine and Wesley. I regret the way the F&L Scripture comment came out: I felt bad immediately after I posted that, and I do ask forgiveness for getting too fired up and offering an uncharitable comment. No argument on biblical Christianity there. I continue to be grateful for your wisdom and insight. I think part of my frustration is that the action of some church leaders seems to suggest that if the church just got a better handle on some business leadership techniques, then decades of decline would turn around. I think the problem lies deeper, and must include spiritual renewal. The history of the church shows, pretty clearly, I think, that such renewal usually revolves around a rediscovery of the richness of Scripture and Tradition. I think I was responding to that train of thought more than to even this article or the comments. I agree that there is much we can gain from understanding how others have been led to approach different issues in community. Thanks to Roger and yourself for surfacing this issue and for a lively debate. Keep up the great work!
Sorry for coming in the conversation so late
I don’t really think there is a choice to make. The thing that always strikes me is that the best of business thinking, that which stands the test of time, is always based on biblical principles. Jim Collins level five leader, weather he is a Christian or not, weather his model was Christ or a CEO he knew, is leading with Christian ideals. The details will vary greatly but at the core of any great organization, business or otherwise, will be a leader that understands that the advancement of the whole is more important than any self serving goal and that leads from a perspective of truly caring for (loving) employees, parishioners, customers, clients, etc. , and that has a passion for the cause. I absolutely believe that business thinking has a place in Christian leaders minds, it just needs to be kept in perspective. As Christians we have the fantastic ability to take in huge quantities of information and allow God to show us what to use, if we will get ourselves out of the way and let him.
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