---

Jesus, CEO
America's most successful churches are modelling themselves on businesses

VISIT Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, an upscale exurb of Chicago, and you are confronted with a puzzle. Where in God's name is the church? Willow Creek has every amenity you can imagine, from food courts to basketball courts, from cafes to video screens, not to mention enough parking spaces for around 4,000 cars. But look for steeples and stained glass, let alone crosses and altars, and you look in vain. Surely this is a slice of corporate America rather than religious America?

The corporate theme is not just a matter of appearances. Willow Creek has a mission statement (“to turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ”) and a management team, a seven-step strategy and a set of ten core values. The church employs two MBAs—one from Harvard and one from Stanford—and boasts a consulting arm. It has even been given the ultimate business accolade: it is the subject of a Harvard Business School case-study.

Willow Creek is just one of a growing number of evangelical churches that borrow techniques from the corporate world. Forget those local worthies who help with the vicar's coffee mornings and arrange flowers. American churches have started dubbing their senior functionaries CEOs and COOs. (North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, even has a director of service programming. Can Chief Theological Officers be far behind?) And forget about parish meetings in which people bat about random ideas on how to keep the church going. America is spawning an industry of faith-based consultancies. John Jackson, the senior pastor of Carson Valley Christian Centre, a “high-impact” church in Minden, Nevada, has taken to describing himself as a “PastorPreneur” and has published a book with that title....

...These pastorpreneurs are committed not just to applying good management techniques to their own organisations but also to spreading them to others. This is, after all, the world of evangelism. Willow Creek has a consulting arm, the Willow Creek Association, that has more than 11,500 member churches. It puts on leadership events for more than 100,000 people a year (guest speakers have included Jim Collins, a business guru, and Bill Clinton) and earns almost $20m a year. Rick Warren likens his “purpose-driven formula” to an Intel operating chip that can be inserted into the motherboard of any church—and points out that there are more than 30,000 “purpose-driven” churches. Mr Warren has also set up a website, pastors.com, that gives 100,000 pastors access to e-mail forums, prayer sites and pre-cooked sermons, including over 20-years-worth of Mr Warren's own.

Indeed, in a nice reversal businesses have also started to learn from the churches. The late Peter Drucker pointed out that these churches have several lessons to teach mainline businesses. They are excellent at motivating their employees and volunteers, and at transforming volunteers from well-meaning amateurs into disciplined professionals. The best churches (like some of the most notorious cults) have discovered the secret of low-cost and self-sustaining growth: transforming seekers into evangelicals who will then go out and recruit more seekers. ...

...The marriage of religion and business has deep roots in American history. Itinerant Methodist preachers from Francis Asbury (1745-1816) onwards addressed camp meetings of thousands of people, and often borrowed marketing techniques from business. Aimee Semple McPherson, one of America's first radio Evangelists, built a church for 5,300 people in Los Angeles in 1923. (She had none of Mr Hybels's worries about religious symbolism: she topped her church with an illuminated rotating cross that could be seen 50 miles away.) And the gospel of self-help and prosperity is as American as apple pie. In his 1925 bestseller, “The Man Nobody Knows”, Bruce Barton, an adman turned evangelist, pictured Jesus as a savvy executive who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organisation that conquered the world”. His parables were “the most powerful advertisements of all time”....