If Entrepreneurs Ran the Church

Introduction

The Christian Church in the UK is a motley patchwork of denominations, groups and independent churches. Even the larger denominations often form loose and complex organisms with management structures of debatable efficiency. I often wondered what an entrepreneur would make of it all. What might a powerful and influential group of entrepreneurs do if they were running the Church, with its different denominations and its many thousands of buildings? The substance of this book is what emerged from this idea: a series of challenging interviews with a group of particularly successful Christian entrepreneurs, people who have built substantial and successful organizations.

The interviewees were not allowed to start from scratch: they had to take responsibility for the Christian Church in the UK in its current state.

I was interested to discover what direction might be taken by people who were accustomed to shaping and directing organizations. How ruthlessly would they deal with having too many buildings yet too few members? What would they feel about denominations and the question of branding in the context of the Church? What did they feel about the use of digital technology? What sort of leadership style would they wish to promote?

I was able to ask these and many other questions of an impressive range of entrepreneurs who had between them a wealth of experience in a wide range of industries, each having built significant businesses through their own energy and abilities. My questions were at times deliberately provocative, to try to press the interviewees to be less reserved in their responses, to be more realistic about what they faced or to be bolder in how they expressed their vision. What follows is an edited form of those interviews. Whether you agree or disagree with what they say, I hope you will find much food for thought.

As a concluding chapter, I have written a summary which gathers the responses to some of the major questions. I think you will agree that there are some surprises, and also areas of agreement which could offer some very useful ideas to individual churches and their impact in the communities they serve.

Peter Kerridge

1 Oliver Pawle

Oliver Pawle is Chairman of Korn Ferry Board Services, advising on corporate board recruitment for major companies. He is Chairman of the board of FTI Consulting. Previously, he was MD and head of corporate broking at UBS Phillips & Drew. He is a member of the National Theatre Development Council and sits on the board of Goodenough College (a postgraduate educational institute).

If you wanted to recruit people for the Church, what kind of people would you hire and why?

It depends a lot on what specific roles you are going to hire them for: whether in administration, research, marketing or as people involved in actually going out and preaching or evangelizing. As a head-hunter involved in people’s learning and development, I pay a huge amount of attention to helping to develop people’s competencies. What I mean by that is looking at how we can help people develop their ability to work in a team, and also their ability to develop their own people. One of the huge problems in business is the lack of development. Managers don’t seem to have enough time to develop the people who work for them. Another hugely important competency is the ability to think and react in a very flexible way. Both the business environment and the social environment are changing very rapidly and one of the key things is to be able to react to a newly changing environment very quickly. It requires flexibility.

The way the Church traditionally has taken on new people is quite a rigorous process. There are various boards that the candidates have to pass and they are looking to see whether God has called each candidate to a particular cause, and whether he or she is the right candidate to put forward to pursue that cause. It is a very different kind of process with very different kinds of outcome from those you would find in a secular hiring process. How would you say this particular method needs to change, in order to survive in the modern world?

In the Catholic Church the process of discernment, teaching and education is lengthy and by and large does a very good job in ensuring that the person involved really has the vocation and the skills to become a priest. Where it needs support and help is particularly in the leadership development side. There the skill training which we see among business leaders could well be applied to helping priests to become leaders. That revolves around their ability to deal with other people: the people skills, the communication skills and the presentation skills.

Why do people go to church? If you speak to people who go to church two things stand out: music and the homily. If the music is beautiful that is something which people can carry away with them. If the homily is good that again is something which stays in the mind. We have got to get clergy to communicate well and to preach well. A lot of that can be taught. I would strongly endorse a view that there should be much more regular training for existing clergy. I think the younger priests will be much better trained, but we have got a huge number of older priests who need that training.

If we look at the Church today, what roles are needed – apart from full-time priests or church leaders? What would be the key roles in a local parish?

I am speaking from the perspective of the Catholic Church because I know so much more about that than I do about the other denominations, but I suspect there will be a lot of similarities. A business guru coming in and looking at the Church would do a proper investigation as to the state of the ‘business’ – the Church. I think it would be a very important and useful study to undertake because you have got a Christian Church with falling attendances, crumbling buildings and financial challenges; and you need to understand why. So the first thing you need to do is try and understand what is happening at the parish level. I have looked at some American research, but I suspect it may also be true for the UK: in a big study in the American Catholic Church, it was found that roughly 7 per cent of the parishioners dedicated 80 per cent of the volunteer hours and 6.5 per cent of the parishioners provided 80 per cent of the donations to their local parish. The crossover between the two groups was 84 per cent.

That is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Church is very reliant on a very small number of people. The good news is the potential: what you could achieve if you could increase that 7 per cent to 10 per cent or 15 per cent. You would have a huge impact on the parishes. That is the challenge; so we need to assess why there are so few parishioners involved actively in their churches, and then decide a course of action to deal with it.

Is that something that happens at a national level with local buy-in, or could local church leaders just do it themselves?

So often, movements in the Catholic Church have started at local level and grown outwards to be great movements. The wonderful thing about local movements is that they shine by example.

To return to the problem, I think if you look at the 7 per cent of parishioners who are really active, curiously enough they have four things in common. The first is that they lead a prayerful life. The Church isn’t very good at helping to teach people to pray and (I say this from personal experience) people’s prayer habits can be very intermittent; they can vary a lot and they can often feel unsuccessful.

I think there is real merit rather in understanding how committed parishioners pray. You will find that often it involves getting into routines: it is quite extraordinary how transformative and transformational a real routine of prayer is. A prayer life is the beginning of everything.

The second aspect to this 7 per cent of parishioners is study. Nearly all of them are involved in some prayer group; they read the gospel on a regular basis and get to learn about their faith. One of the great tragedies of Christian churches today is that so few people really understand the key tenets of the Christian faith and so, when asked to talk about important issues of faith, they feel uncomfortable because they simply don’t have the knowledge to be able to do so. I firmly believe that encouraging people to study every week for a very short period of time would be hugely helpful in helping them develop their faith.

The third aspect is generosity. What distinguishes these parishioners is that they are people who are naturally generous in spirit, people who are always the first to put their hand in their pocket, however little money they have, to support a church project. Among them are always people who will be generous for non-church projects, too; and people who will always have a good word to say about someone. Encouraging generosity of spirit is important. I firmly believe it actually comes as a by-product of prayer and of study.

The fourth element is evangelism: although a lot of these people would not be natural evangelists, what you will tend to find is that in their own way, however small, they are spreading the faith. So for example when they get a good religious book, they will probably talk to a friend about it or send them a copy; when they hear about a good radio programme on the faith, they will encourage others to listen to it. In their own small way they are evangelizing.

Those four key aspects I think help to create a dynamic Christian and represent those 7 per cent who are actually driving parish life in our communities.

So if you were the HR director of Catholic Church UK and you had a group of priests asking what should be their priorities today, you would encourage those four dynamics?

I would firmly encourage those four dynamics; and I would also try extremely hard to help the priests understand the importance of the two key elements of church services that I mentioned before, which are music and homily.

In many ways this would be almost a blueprint of a good church leader: prayer, study, generosity and evangelism.

Church leaders may well think these aspects are important in their own life, and see that they could be important in the lives of their parishioners, but for some reason it doesn’t always seem to carry across very effectively. What are the barriers to this happening?

I think quite a lot of the clergy do not have the energy and the courage to make this happen. It is hugely important to have inspirational, driven priests in the parishes, priests who are there to commit to these four elements of a proper holy Christian life; yet that courage and inspiration sadly has not been apparent. There are a number of things you can do.

First I would call together all priests and leaders in the parishes, and I would explain to them very clearly and openly that each parish was going to commit to doing a number of things. The priests themselves were actually going to spend a lot of time and energy learning to communicate more effectively, and they should be prepared to commit themselves to training. It is amazing what training can do to help people in this area. Take John Major: he was not someone who stood out in the crowd when he was a young junior supporter of the local Surrey Conservative Party, but he underwent a huge amount of coaching and eventually developed into an articulate and effective communicator and became prime minister. We can take all our parish priests and make them effective communicators, as long as they are prepared to do the training.

The second thing I would do is to ensure that the parishes put in place proper training programmes to help people with those four aspects that I have discussed previously: teaching people to pray, helping them with study, encouraging generosity of spirit and training them in evangelization. I think there is a lot that parishes can do this way to really transform their local communities.

How much does this revolve around a very active priest, though? When you talk to church leaders many will say that it is a very draining activity. With the best will in the world, the mutable nature of their tasks means that they are not able to concentrate in the areas that might seem most beneficial.

Yes, that is a fair point, and it is why the role of the laity is so important. I would like to see a much stronger and more developed role for the laity.

How would you effectively mobilize the rest of the Church beyond the 7 per cent?

What I would do is to encourage the retired people who are often part of that group to take more responsibility. I would also encourage them not just to hire a youth worker, but to hire someone who was young, dynamic and able to do more than just youth work.

As part of this whole area, I would like to move to one of the points which I have already spoken about to many people: I would like to see the parish community – particularly within urban areas – become a much more vibrant community. This can be done most effectively by an exciting project to share places of worship.

Let’s take a small town with ten churches. We know that half the churches, in England at least, have 50 members or less. Thinking of our 7 per cent, a town with ten churches, each with 50 members, has probably only got 30 or 40 really committed people. Presumably it would make a lot of sense to pull those together and ask them how we should encourage prayer, study, generosity and mission locally.

Yes, I agree with that. I have said that churches are expensive buildings to keep up, and I would very much move towards a much better utilization of churches.

What would you use them for?

I would love to see the old traditional Anglican/Anglo-Catholic churches used jointly by the Anglican/Catholic/Methodist/Baptist communities. It should be perfectly possible to have weekend services through Saturday and Sunday to cover all those denominations. A lot of the classes, such as Bible teaching classes, can be kept separate for those that need to be separate, whereas the general prayer groups could be communal. A lot of what I call ‘generosity of spirit’ projects could again be done communally. By ‘generosity of spirit’ projects I mean, for example, drop-in centres helping people with financial problems. I am very keen to see parishes help people with employment opportunities and problems, and help tend to old people’s loneliness problems. In fact, a whole raft of services – not just for the local parishioners in their community but for the whole local community.

It would seem to me that currently there is an awful lot of duplication going on. In your model where people combine resources, do you think that there will be more work getting done, or less?

I would like to think that if you combine resources and get teams working more effectively, you will find that you cut out duplication. It will be much easier for everyone and less onerous on the various people involved. From a business standpoint, it would seem to me perfectly clear that combining these groups would make a huge amount of sense.

A key problem to be overcome would be the thorny question of doctrine. There are ten churches in the town because they each perceive themselves to be different from the church across the road. How can we enable people to put that to one side for a while and do work together?

I think that it would be perfectly possible to have different services for different traditions. They should be respected, and you could ensure that during Saturdays and Sundays, when most services tend to take place, you would have a pretty fully utilized church just because there are all the different traditions. We are not talking about forcing all these to worship together. What we are going to be amalgamating are many of the projects that I referred to as the ‘generosity of spirit’ projects, which are helping the whole of the local community. There are no doctrinal differences as to how to deal with the poor and the lonely. All the Christian churches are about getting close to Jesus Christ and living a Christlike life, and we all know that the principles are the same. The traditions are different, and I am not trying to belittle those, but by and large they melt into the background when compared with what unites all Christian churches, which is belief in the love of Christ.

In order for this kind of idea to gain momentum, it has to be not just the church leaders who buy into it, but also the man and woman in the pew.