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

Volume 1: Internal Relationships

Malcolm Torry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349345199, 9780230347946
• eBook ISBN: 9781137394668
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This two-volume work explores the management of religious and faith-based organizations. Each chapter offers a discussion of the earliest Christian organizations based on New Testament evidence; a study of managing faith-based organizations; and an exploration of secular management theory in relation to the management of faith-based organizations.

1

The Christian Religion and Its Organizations

The Christian religion is its congregations

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. By ‘Church’ (with a capital letter) I shall mean the total sum of all Christian congregations. By ‘congregation’ or ‘church’ (lower case) I shall mean an individual congregation.

The same author, Paul, in his letter to the congregation at Corinth, describes to them their organizational activity:

When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation …

(1 Corinthians 14: 26)

in the Letter to the Colossians, the congregation is exhorted to

teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God;

(Colossians 3: 16)

and in the somewhat later First Letter to Timothy the elder is exhorted to

give attention to the public reading of scripture, to exhorting, to teaching.

(1 Timothy 4: 13)

This being before the New Testament came together, the ‘scripture’ here referred to would have been the Jewish Scriptures, the ‘Old’ Testament; and it would have been the elder’s task to draw out a Christian meaning from the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the history of Israel. However, it would not be long before there were Christian letters circulating:

And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea;

(Colossians 4: 16–17)

and then the Gospels: and these too would have been read in the congregation – always in the congregation, and rarely privately.

From the beginning, gathering together was essential to the life of the Christian and to the nature of the congregation, and that gathering was for two connected purposes: the worship of God and the spiritual health of the congregation. So the author of the Letter to the Hebrews encourages a congregation to

provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together.

(Hebrews 10: 25–26)

For 2,000 years, the congregation of believers, gathered for these same purposes, has been the fundamental reality of the Christian religion. Where the Church has been persecuted, Christians have done all they can to continue to gather, even at the cost of their lives or their freedom.

Jesus left very little definite instruction about religious activity, but he did ask his followers to share bread and wine in remembrance of him:

The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’

(1 Corinthians 11: 23–25)

Sharing in the Eucharist (the taking of bread and wine, giving thanks, breaking the bread, and sharing the bread and wine) has been at the heart of congregational activity from the beginning, and it necessarily still is. It is not putting it too strongly to say that the Christian religion is its congregations and their activity: that is, Christians gathering for Eucharist, for prayer, for singing praise to God, for inspiration, for education, for the sharing of God’s gifts (physical as well as spiritual), for mutual encouragement, and for proclamation of the Kingdom of God’s nearness and future coming.

For the purpose of this book, I take as a working definition (in the context of the Christian religion, but also more generally):

A religious organization is an organization that has gathering for worship as its main purpose.

This means not only that the archetypal religious organization is a congregation, but that a congregation is the only kind of religious organization. It also means that gathering for worship is essential to the definition of a religious organization and therefore to the definition of religion (a point recognized in English law: Sandberg, 2011: 43). This is not to say that worship will be the only religious activity undertaken – we shall find that there are two ‘imperatives’ experienced by Christian religious organizations: (i) worship and (ii) proclamation – but it is to say that worship is essential to the definition of a religious organization.

I use the word ‘purpose’ in the definition, and not ‘goal’. Daft (2006: 11) defines an organization as ‘a social entity that is goal directed and deliberately structured’. This definition is appropriate to many organizations, but not necessarily to religious ones. Often in this book we shall note that a religious organization is not best described as ‘goal directed’. A religious organization might have a purpose: to gather for worship; it might, as we shall see, experience an external authority structure that requires it to live and proclaim the Kingdom of God; and it might sometimes develop subsidiary goals and the strategies and plans needed to meet them: but the congregation is not essentially goal driven. Similarly, whether a congregation is deliberately structured is an interesting question. The Apostles and other early Christians gathered for worship, for prayer, for proclamation, and for other activity inspired by Jesus and his resurrection. As the generations passed, structure evolved, somewhat differently in each place. The structures that emerged had a variety of roots: in the Scriptures (themselves witnesses to previous evolved structures), other organizations in the local context, contemporary needs, the personal preferences of significant individuals, and the experience of neighbouring congregations. Subsidiary aspects of the structures that developed might have been deliberate, but the fact that congregational structures and the structures of denominations have tended to be cumulative, with new elements being added and new and old elements slowly adapting to each other, suggests that deliberate intent has been somewhat lacking.

I would therefore amend Daft’s definition as follows:

An organization is a structured social entity with a recognized purpose.

This definition includes every organization that Daft’s definition would include, and it can also include religious organizations, the definition of which we can still state like this:

A religious organization is an organization that has gathering for worship as its main purpose.

I also take as a working definition:

The Christian religion is its religious organizations and their religious activity: that is, its congregations gathered for worship, and the religious activity undertaken by those congregations.

(Dunlap, 1970: 257; Torry, 2005: 14–17)

This definition coheres well with that developed by the social scientist Emile Durkheim when in 1915 he published The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. He defined a religion as a

unified set of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.

(Durkheim, 1915: 47)

For Durkheim, beliefs are ‘often only an interpretation of the practices’, so it is the practices that are significant for the definition of religion, and they are always the practices of ‘a collective thing’ that can be ‘recognized and observed from the outside’, that is, of a Church (Durkheim in Pickering, 1975: 92, 47, 75).

There are of course other aspects of the Christian religion. Individuals might be committed to Christian beliefs, and to that extent they will be Christians; and individuals might be committed to Jesus’ summary of the law, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength … You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mark 12: 30–31), and to that extent they will be Christians. A recent survey of Anglicans in Great Britain (that is, people who count themselves to be members of the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Church in Wales) found that 50 per cent declared themselves to be non-churchgoing believers, 33 per cent non-churchgoing doubters, 5 per cent churchgoing ‘Godfearers’ (relatively certain of their beliefs and sure that God is their authority in religion), and 12 per cent churchgoing ‘mainstream’ (less certain of their beliefs or of the ultimate source of authority in religion) (Woodhead, 2013). Non-churchgoing believers are religious people, and any definition of religion must therefore include non-churchgoing religion. Does this suggest that it might be too simple to say that the Christian religion is its religious organizations and their religious activity? No, it does not. If there were no Christian congregations then there would soon be no non-churchgoing religion, because it is the organizational aspects of religion that sustain the non-organizational parts. There has to be a local church for the non-churchgoing Christian not to go to it, and there has to be a congregation to hold the carol service that the non-churchgoing Christian might decide to go to occasionally.

Similarly, our society’s institutions and its culture are heavily influenced by what we might still call ‘Christian values’, and Guest, Olson and Wolffe (2012: 74) distinguish between ‘the trajectory of the organized churches and that of wider Christian ideas and values … the latter continue to be formative influences in British culture and society’; though again, whether the ‘wider Christian ideas and values’ would survive for long if there were no Christian congregations to embody and express them is rather doubtful.

So there might be aspects of the Church that transcend the current organizational form, or that operate alongside it, but it is still true that the ‘institutional element’ remains essential to the Church (Dulles, 2002: 27). My working definition would still appear to be appropriate. It is also appropriate in relation to the development of the non-organizational elements of Christian faith. Congregations gathering for worship are the context in which Christian beliefs have evolved, and it is particularly as congregations have gathered for reading together the scriptures that Christian beliefs have taken shape. Such beliefs have sometimes been expressed in creeds and liturgy, and it might sometimes look as if the Christian doctrine thus expressed is itself the foundation of the Christian religion: that is, it is the set of beliefs that is the reason for the congregation gathering. Not so. In all denominations and fellowships of congregations, doctrine has developed within gatherings of Christians, not vice versa; and in some denominations, and particularly within the Anglican communion, the text of the liturgy is where doctrine has developed and is where the enquirer will find the denomination’s doctrine (Sykes, 1978). Once doctrine has developed, it will of course influence future changes in organizational structure. The books that the Church of the first four centuries wrote and circulated were brought together into a canon of Scripture (the New Testament) and became in subsequent centuries a source of institutional guidance, and, since then, these scriptures, and the beliefs that they contain, have established parameters within which acceptable organizational forms might evolve (Mao and Zech, 2002). The result is a circular process: organizational form influencing doctrine and doctrine influencing organizational form – but it is still true that it was within congregations that Christian beliefs evolved, and that it is within congregations that Christian belief still evolves.

At the national scale, denominational structures, and such denominational office-holders as bishops, might look like the primary structures within which congregations evolve and operate. Again, not so. If there were no denominational structures, and no denominational office-holders, then there would still be congregations. If there were no congregations then there would be no denominations or denominational office-holders. It is the congregation that is the archetypal religious organization: the fixed point around which other structures evolve, disintegrate, and evolve again. Denominational structures have evolved alongside congregational ones, but still it is the Christian congregation and its activity that is the foundation of the Christian religion, and it is the myriad of congregations around the world that constitute the Church (Von Campenhausen, 1969: 74).

It did not take long for the early Church to develop quite complex structures. The congregations that Paul founded recognized that different people performed different functions. These were ‘gifts’ rather than offices:

To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

(1 Corinthians 12: 8–11)

By the time of the later Letter to the Ephesians, the list of gifts looked more like a list of office-holders:

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

(Ephesians 4: 11–13)

In Jerusalem ‘deacons’ were appointed to serve at tables (Acts 6: 1–6), and we find ‘elders’ listed alongside the apostles (Acts 15: 6); and by the time of the rather later letters to Timothy, we find elders structured into an embryonic hierarchy, tasked with passing on the teaching that they had received (1 Timothy 4: 6, 16–17) and subject to an appointment process and a disciplinary code (1 Timothy 5: 17–22). Whether the bishops or overseers of Philippians 1: 1, 1 Timothy 3: 1 and Titus 1: 1 are the same as elders is an interesting question, and perhaps equally interesting is a passage in the third letter of John:

I have written something to the church; but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing in spreading false charges against us. And not content with those charges, he refuses to welcome the friends, and even prevents t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Sources
• Notes on Terminology
• 1. The Christian Religion and Its Organizations
• 2. Secular Management Theory
• 3. Managing Story and Culture
• 4. Managing Members and Volunteers
• 5. Managing Strategy
• 6. Managing Groups
• 7. Managing Governance
• 8. Managing Christian Clergy
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical Texts
• Name Index
• Subject Index