Tithe Eaters?

I recently compared the membership directory of my Church to the one from 1980. It turns out that today there are 33% more staff for a solidly evangelical church that has roughly the same membership and attendance as back then. To be fair, the Church has two more services and a flourishing Wednesday night program, none of which existed in 1980. But I couldn’t help but be struck by the difference between my church’s historical staffing performance and that of other industries that I am familiar with. Had we been a typical manufacturer, we would be doing the same tasks with one third the staff of 1980[1]. Had we been Wal Mart, we would have used only one fifth of the staff to get the same work done[2], the average bank, half[3].

Now Church is not Wal Mart and a manufacturer’s goal is not God’s. But it is a commonly observed characteristic of Churches that while people work hard and often long, the intensity and focus typical of well run investor owned organizations is lacking. There is a carelessness with time if not money that one doesn’t normally experience in well run private businesses. Why should this be? After all, the Church’s mission is infinitely more important than any businesses’. And any resources the Church can save from its daily operations can be invested in Kingdom efforts that have a far greater return than T Bills. So why do private businesses do more with less each and every year and Churches and Christian schools don’t?

Institutional Integrity

I believe that while Churches are focused on individual integrity they tend to struggle with institutional integrity. In my definition, institutional Integrity is the commitment that an organization makes to the achievement of a specific goal. Whatever you believe about its ‘morality’ Wal Mart exhibits a high level of institutional integrity. Sam Walton founded his business because he wanted to bring low priced brand name merchandise to small towns, just like the big cities. Since then, “Every Day Low Prices” for common people has been Wal Mart’s (and Sam’s Club’s) singular focus. And they’ve delivered – largely due to Wal Mart’s unceasing focus on cost reduction, the price of the things that Americans use every day has fallen dramatically. Everything Wal Mart does is focused on lowering costs to the consumer. For example, a friend of mine was an executive with a (soon to be bankrupt) specialty retailer. He tells of going to a conference at a tropical resort: as was customary, he took a room at a luxury hotel. His two counterparts from Wal Mart – by then the richest retailer in the history of the world, doubled up at a discount motel.

By contrast, while all Churches have goals, they generally don’t look upon the resources that they command with the hard-nosed perspective of an investor. We aren’t asking: “Where can we deploy these resources for highest impact for the kingdom? Where can we use technology or technique to become much more productive? Instead we tend to spread our efforts like peanut butter over many activities to please influential parishioners and givers. We don’t seek continuous improvement that allows us to do more with less. We react rather than pursue the goal.

We management consultants often note that the most successful companies - the ones with the most institutional integrity and commitment towards their goal - are seldom the most pleasant places to work. These companies have a sense of ‘driven-ness’ a commitment to excel against a specific goal that comes from inside the institution and the people themselves. It’s often exhausting to work for such a company because doing the best for the goal often takes a lot out of employees.

I’m not saying that the staff at my Church don’t work hard because they do. But the lack of focus on productivity, the notion that we must get more done with less each year so that we’ll grow and have more to share with others is as foreign to Church as it is integral to business. And it results in wasted effort. Effort that could be diverted to higher impact ministries. Wasted money that could better spent elsewhere. We seem to be comfortable with being comfortable. Because we don’t challenge ourselves to do more with less, we end up doing less with more. Slowly, inexorably, our Churches become Tithe Eaters, consuming the resources that God has given us to expand the Kingdom for our own comfort, our own ease.

The Parable of the talents sets the standard: The rich man gave money to three men. The two that he praised as “good and faithful servants” doubled the money they had been entrusted. The wicked servant merely preserved the principal, failing to earn even a moneylender’s interest. I fear that many of our Christian institutions are doing even worse than the wicked servant: returning even less than we are given.

It’s time to ask not only are we doing God’s will but are we doing it more productively each year.

It’s time to stop being Tithe Eaters.

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[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod4.pdf

[2] The Power of Productivity, McKinsey Global Institute

[3] Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prin2.t02.htm