8 Lessons from Megachurches

In the Dec 21, 2007 edition of Forbes Magazine, Dale Buss reported that "CEOs may have a lot to learn from their counterparts running evangelical megachurches." The pastors and business leaders interviewed for the article say that business has a lot to learn from how churches are run. In fact, a lot of today's business manuals are based on the idea of "servant leadership," a concept straight out of the Bible!

Running a church of several thousand is in fact a lot harder than running a substantial for-profit business. For example, in a business, the motivation to show up each day and work hard is money and career aspirations, and it is the company leadership that provides that external motivation. In a church, the motivation is all internal - the people come for their own intrinsic reasons. More than that, they often give time and money to the organization because of only a 30 minute speech by the "Chief Encouragement Officer."

Using data from Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, Buss gives us 8 key lessons from the pastors of the healthiest megachurches in America, lessons such as casting a vision and showing gratitude, doing regular reviews and saying no so you can do the important things well, and focusing their passions in ways that help the organization, instead of boosting their own ego or status in the community.

I encourage you to read the article for yourself. There's a lot of meat in that one quick page. This is the stuff revolutions are made from (though some of the people who have commented so far don’t quite “get it”).