business leadership in the church

We are able to learn from business expertise and apply these learnings in a church leadership context. However, taken to an extreme, more negative effects are revealed within church management. A book I have found to be beneficial in reviewing this notion of effective business management within the church is Don Cousins’ Experiencing LeaderShift: Letting Go of Leadership Heresies. Don promotes the idea that the institution of the church should look first to the Biblical model of church management and not attempt to adopt the corporate / institutional approach to running the organization of the church. I believe an additional chapter should be added to Don’s book which describes how this Biblical approach could be adopted by the business community to manage companies.

Another perspective parallels the book The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber and church leadership and is reviewed in Rett Smith’s post Balancing the Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician in Ministry.