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.