Managing Religion: The Management of Christian Religious and Faith-Based Organizations

In his history of the early days of the Christian Church, Luke offers us a vision of how the early Christians constantly gathered:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.

(Acts 2: 1)

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread from house to house and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

(Acts 2: 44–47)

This was already an organization. It might not have had a very developed structure, but that would not be long in coming. The opening line of what is probably the oldest document of the New Testament is addressed

to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

(1 Thessalonians 1: 1)

that is, to a religious organization in the Greek city of Thessalonica. By this time there were congregations of Christians in a number of cities around the Mediterranean, which raises the question of terminology.

Secular management theory — that is, management theory developed elsewhere than in the religious organizational sector — has developed a wide range of powerful conceptual tools, tested by empirical study, that enable us to understand organizations in the private, public, and voluntary sectors. In this chapter I offer a brief overview of the field as a basis for employing aspects of secular management theory as we study religious and faith-based organizations. The more detailed explorations of management theory to be found in succeeding chapters will enable us to ask to what extent the secular theory can usefully enhance our understanding of religious and faith-based organizations and of the ways in which they are and should be managed.

With this chapter we begin the pattern that we shall follow throughout the rest of the book. Texts from the New Testament will take us into the heart of the earliest Christian communities; a section will then explore one or several aspects of Christian religious organizations as we find them today; and we shall study examples of secular management theory that might be relevant to those religious organizations. We shall conclude by exploring connections between the three sections. The particular focus of all of the sections of this chapter will be ‘story’ and ‘culture’. By ‘story’ we mean the evolving account of how the organization came into existence, and of those aspects of its historical journey that remain significant; and by an organization’s ‘culture’ we mean a shared set of understandings, the ways in which ‘people have a similar idea of things… and do them in the same way’ (Becker, 1982: 514). Culture and story are of course connected. An organization will tell its story in order to describe and to give reasons for its culture; and its culture will influence the way in which the story is told.

Private sector companies are populated by directors and employees, and might hire contractors. Public sector organizations are populated by democratically elected governing body members, by employees, by contractors, and possibly by volunteers. Voluntary and community sector bodies are populated by voluntarymembers of a governing body, by volunteers, and maybe by employees and contractors. But who populates a religious organization?

Should this chapter be in the first volume of this book, because strategy is something that organizations formulate through their structures and through the relationships between the people who belong to those organizations; or should it be in the second volume, because an organization’s strategy is necessarily influenced by, and is intended to influence, the organization’s environment? I place it in the first volume simply because the formulation and implementation of strategy is of relevance in a number of subsequent chapters, but the fact that there will be numerous references to strategy in the second volume suggests that this chapter could equally well have been located there.

Every congregation, apart from the smallest, will contain groups: perhaps a choir, a group that cares for the churchyard, and a Bible study group. The church council or the standing committee will also function as a group.

We have studied a number of aspects of a congregation: its story and culture; its members, volunteers, and staff; its strategies; and groups within it. We now come to some more general questions: what kind of an organization is a congregation? And therefore how might it best be governed?

Most congregations will appoint, or will have appointed to them, a minister (whether that minister is called a minister, a pastor, or a priest). To the minister will be allocated a variety of functions, and particularly those of teaching, preaching, pastoral care, and presiding at the congregation’s services, so in this chapter we shall study New Testament texts relating to bishops, presbyters, and deacons, and we shall explore how clergy function in congregations today. We shall find that a number of aspects of management theory developed in the private sector might be of use, and because we shall find a large number of both interesting parallels and interesting differences between the ways in which private sector managers relate to their companies and the ways in which the clergy relate to their congregations, we shall draw some of our more detailed conclusions within the third section of the chapter rather than include them in an already rather long list of conclusions. Finally the chapter will offer a case study on teams of clergy.