At the center of God’s Kingdom are relationships.
Relationships are the focus of His plan for accomplishing His purposes on earth. One of the greatest downfalls of the modern church era is the movement away from genuine relationships, and into the corporate model of the church where we think the most important thing is to increase our market share, and expand our influence through size, numbers, and a year-over-year increase in attendance and giving.
I would not be too surprised to see the day when a church has an IPO and begins selling stock to investors.
Robert Farrar Capon
Yet we have adopted the corporate model because we think big churches can do everything better. We feel that big problems require big answers and big bank accounts to offer big solutions. And to get the big bank accounts, we need big donors, so we can pool lots of money to make the biggest difference in a big world of big needs.
Bigger is not always better
But as more and more churches are beginning to understand, this “big is better” approach does not work. At least, not for God’s way of doing things.
While it maybe be true that large pools of institutional money are better at buying political favors, influencing scientific research, and swaying foreign governments, it has always been known and is frequently demonstrated that individuals always do better at loving and caring for other individuals, tend to be wiser stewards of money, and view their giving and service toward others as a means of actually helping them, rather than a means to gain political power or popular prestige.
There is another way. A better way. A way modeled by Jesus, the apostles, the early church, and many other churches throughout history. We will look briefly at this model of helping others in the next few posts.
I agree that this is terrible. It goes against the fundamental purpose of church. One has to wonder if they are spending more time as a corporation, or evangelizing.
Encouraging Thoughts for Life
In his recent autobio,Eugene Peterson calls it the abomination of desolation
This is what he says about the Corporate model of church? Wow. I never thought I would hear something like this from him.
I will have to get that book.
I agree with your post. This is what A.W. Tozer said on Corporate Christianity:
We in the churches seem unable to rise above the fiscal philosophy which rules the business world; so we introduce into our church finances the psychology of the great secular institutions so familiar to us all and judge a church by its financial report much as we judge a bank or a department store.
A look into history will quickly convince any interested person that the true church has almost always suffered more from prosperity than from poverty. Her times of greatest spiritual power have usually coincided with her periods of indigence and rejection; with wealth came weakness and backsliding. If this cannot be explained, neither apparently can it be escaped.
The average church has so established itself organizationally and financially that God is simply not necessary to it. So entrenched is its authority and so stable are the religious habits of its members that God could withdraw Himself completely from it and it could run on for years on its own momentum.
-Tozer on Christian Leadership
What a great quote from Tozer! I had not read this before.
Ironically… he was the first president of the CMA denomination, which I am part of, and I think it is fairly corporate.
Corporate means Body and according to scripture there is only One Body, which is Christ, and we are as saints, “members individually” of that Body and thus each other. To call the local church a body slights the fact that it cannot be. To call the local church a body, because it is unified in a work also slights the fact that we are bound to Christ and to do the will of the Father, not the work of the church.
Hi – thanks for this. Where can this quote from RFC be found?