How Is a Healthy Church Similar to a Business?

As we were in the latter years of running our business, we were asked to serve on a team of people to plant a church. I had had some experience with our own current church in different committee assignments and council assignments. Because of that, I felt like we might be equipped to be able to plant a church with a team of people, and we did that. We started a church a number of years ago, and we really applied all of our business skills to running the church. We found out in a lot of ways how it is very similar to running a business, and then in other ways that it’s very different. We spent about five years actively planting and starting that church and keeping it growing.

This material was originally recorded as part of the Renovations Project. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Strong leadership in a church vs. strong management in a business

We had a point where we needed to have a change in leadership in the church—a change in pastors. At that point, we served as a search team to find a new pastor. We served in all areas of church leadership. It really came at a time when we were winding down our own careers, and we had wanted to do kingdom work. We didn’t know what that looked like, but we decided that planting a church was a great way to jump in and get involved in kingdom work. 

In general, we thought that running a church is in a lot of ways very much like running a business. If you think about running a business, you know that you have to have strong leadership, and that is different from strong management. But you also have to have training, you have to do planning, you have to really work on financial development. Those are all cornerstones of business. All of the same principles apply to a church sometimes, just in different ways. 

In leadership, I think it’s the same for both church management and business management. You really need to provide a strong vision for the organization, and that applies in both scenarios. You need to be able to develop people. You need to be able to take those people along with you as you’re making changes in the organization. I think that’s different from management, where you’re overseeing people and giving them direction, but it’s not providing the vision for the organization. 

In a church setting, especially, you have a lot of people who are what I refer to as well-meaning people, but don’t necessarily have skills in running a business or running a church. You need to develop those people. I think that comes through training, and I think that comes through shepherding. You’re shepherding people through the organization, and you’re teaching them how you want them to be. I think the care and feeding of both employees in business and staff and volunteers in a church are very much the same. You have to be conscious and very deliberate and intentional about how you are treating your volunteers and your staff, not only just in bringing them up in the organization and training them, but also in caring for them. Sometimes, as churches, we lose sight of the fact that we need to be really taking care of the people who are helping us run the organization. 

Take care of your church members and they will take care of the church

In our business, we were very deliberate about taking care of our employees and making sure that their work was very much in line with their personal life. We encouraged people to take care of their personal life, to take care of their families, to be with their families, and to take opportunities to do that. We did the same thing in the church setting. But recognizing that the people who we were working with didn’t always have the same skills and talents that we needed to have. We had to develop that, and we would have activities for staff members and volunteers to gather. We tried very hard to have every member of the congregation be a volunteer in the church. We believe strongly that a healthy church requires that every person in the congregation has some kind of service that they’re providing. 

I think it’s so important that people who are giving a part of themselves to the church need to feel that they and their families are part of the family of the church. The church should work very hard to make sure that that happens.

Creating a healthy church

The journey to a healthy church is hard but really critical if you’re going to have longevity in the church. When we planted a church, our goal was not to have people come from other churches. Our goal was to find those people who weren’t in churches. We noticed that people were coming to our church who were not part of other churches, and when we asked them, “Why us?”, they said that it was because we were a Bible-preaching church. We recognized quickly that was not what people experienced in every church. We found that people were really hungry for churches that were preaching the Bible. 

That seems really simple, but I think as churches today, we are tempted to drift more toward fitting into culture, and we drift away from biblical principles. We found that the big draw, aside from every other thing that we tried to do in the church, was that it was a Bible teaching church.

Related: 6 myths about church health and why they aren’t true

Then we found that people really wanted to be involved. We learned that you need a huge base of volunteer support to be able to have a healthy church. We really felt like every member of the congregation needs to be in some type of service to make that happen. We also recognized that most churches are involved in some kind of mission program, but usually in a passive way, and we found that younger generations especially wanted to be active in missions. We decided that every member of the congregation should be involved in missions in one way or another, not just comfortably giving their money but actively serving. We sought out local and global missions programs that we could have almost every member of our congregation involved in. 

We felt like the big thing that we’re commanded to do is discipleship. Churches today are tempted to ignore that, even though it’s so critical and is the command from the Bible. We believe that we should actively be discipling. Every member of our congregation, we feel, needs to be prepared to do that; discipleship is a huge component of a healthy church. 

Related: Does your church have a discipleship strategy?