I’ve been reading BusinessWeek for over 20 years, and enjoy finding things that apply to the church. The backpage column by Jack and Suzy Welch (he’s the renowned former pres of General Electric) is always engaging. They just answer questions people send. In the January 15 issue, someone said workers went on strike at their largest factory, demanding higher pay, even though they paid the same as at other factories.

The Welches responded that when labor issues erupt, the trouble can usually be traced to workplace leadership–usually, a plant boss or foreman who is abusive, insensitive, bullying, secretive, or all of the above. “In short,” they write, “bad management most likely caused your strike.”

Is that usually the problem when problems arise in churches? A pastor or “church boss” or elder board who are insensitive, bullying, secretive? Yes, I’ve seen shades of that time and again in our churches. (At my own church, though, we try to be highly transparent, and our pastor takes the lead in that.)

The Welches say the answer is to install plant leaders who are transparent, candid, fair, and respectful. Yes, we need church leaders like that, too.

A key principle, they say, is to give workers a voice and dignity. “All employees, not just the ones carrying briefcases, need to be heard. Factory workers in particular need to know they are more to the company than just a pair of hands at a machine. Their ideas count.” So how do you do this? You listen, you create forums where workers are encouraged to raise their ideas for doing things better. “Nothing builds resentment like a factory boss standing cross-armed in his glassed-in office, overseeing from on high.” We at the denominational headquarters (my day job) are often perceived this way, though it’s not fair.

And then they conclude with this, which I really like: “What you need are local plant leaders who are comfortable with dialogue. That builds trust….When managers operate transparently and fairly and workers know it, there is no need for a third party to broker the conversation between them. There is just one team, working together to win.”

A lot of good stuff there about dealing with people.

My favorite writing about church matters is Keith Drury’s “Tuesday Column.” I always look forward to what he has to say. He tackles all kinds of topics and inevitably imparts a fresh spin.

Today I read his latest, “In Praise of Mediocrity.” He writes, “Mediocrity is the average, the median, the ordinary churches, music, talent, and intelligence. In short I want to say a word of praise for you, and me, and most ordinary people like us.” He then praises ordinary churches, ordinary marriages, and people with “ordinary” spiritual passion. It’s really great stuff.

About churches, he writes:

I think ordinary churches deserve more praise. I’m talking about churches in the big fat center who don’t have thousands of attendees and sprawling TV ministries. They aren’t famous and nobody ever asks their pastor to teach “How I Did It” seminars. But the pastor and people show up every week and worship and study and serve each other and love their community. Good for you!¬† I wish more of my students wanted to go to ordinary churches.

After nearly 30 years working for my denomination and being around churchmen from the broader Christian community, I’ve seen up-close the disdain directed at small churches, especially the little white church on a country road that has never had more than 80 people. Many times over the years, I’ve heard sentiments like this: “We need to just close a bunch of our little going-nowhere churches and cut our losses.” Yes, I’ve heard that many times over the years.

I disagree with that view (and, I’m afraid, I’m typecast as an apologist for mediocrity). Churches go through ups and downs. I’ve seen superstar churches crash and burn, tiny churches come alive under the right leadership, and all manner of churches enter a period of funk. But usually, there’s still a community of believers and a foothold in that neighborhood, and God still does things there, regardless of how we in Mecca view them. Today’s superstar church might be tomorrow’s goat, and vice versa. You can’t write off (or deify) a church based on what you see today, because God’s purposes tend to take a long view.

Not that every church should survive or be kept on life support; some are so dysfunctional that they should be closed, because they only bring disgrace to the cross of Christ. But if there is a community of believers, regardless of size, I see God in their midst and think they deserve some respect. But in a culture that worships the megachurch, I’m in the minority on that.

There are a lot of “Best Church” lists. The “Fastest Growing Churches” and the “Largest Churches in America” lists are always popular (PDF of 100 Fastest-Growing in 2006). A few months ago I came across a list of the “50 Most Influential Churches in America.” Wikipedia has a list of the “Tallest Churches in the World,” tallness being an obvious factor in church health. And now I’ve discovered a list of the “25 Most Innovative Churches in America.” They are mostly megachurches with high name recognition.

I’m sure there might be, somewhere in America, a fellowship of 50 believers laboring in a slum amidst tremendous poverty and adversity, doing things that no other church in the country is doing, and getting by on pocket-change resources. But can that church rank among the country’s most innovative churches? Absolutely not. Not with a mere 50 people. Heck, they don’t even count. Might as well not exist. Fifty people? Who gives a rip?

These lists are not “the 25 Most Innovative Churches with Over 2000 Attenders,” but just the most innovative churches in general, and the results imply that smaller churches either don’t count or just don’t cut it. Now, I’m not big-church bashing. Many of these churches display an incredibly focused passion for reaching the lost, and we can learn much from them. But the adulation, hero worship, and self-congratulation that often surrounds megachurches is not necessarily a wonderful thing which thrills the heart of Jesus.

While there are about 400,000 churches in the United States, the “Best Church” oscars generally get circulated among the 1200 megachurches. For example, 15 churches placed among both the “25 Most Influential” and “25 Most Innovative” churches. How cozy. Over 400,000 churches to choose from, but they round up the usual suspects.

Around 20 years ago, people thought of megachurches as having at least 1000 people. Now, membership in the Megachurch Club requires at least 2000 people. I guess way too many churches were crashing what had been an exclusive party, so they raised the admission fee. Riff-raff churches with a mere 1400 people (most likely non-innovative people) became bouncer-bait. It’s good to have high standards. Even then, the club is swelling and becoming less intimate. In 1990, the US had 350 megachurches. By 2000, there were 900 megachurches. Among the current 1200 megachurches, the average attendance exceeds 3800. So now there’s a Premium membership–the Gigachurch, for congregations with 10,000+ people (currently, about 35 members).

The 1200 megachurches represent .3% of all congregations (not 3%, but three-tenths of a percent). But they get all of the kudos because, as James 2 tells us, we should go out of our way to recognize the rich and influential and famous. But I’d like to suggest some other “Best Church” lists that nobody will bother crafting, because it would entail recognizing those inconsequential 99.7% of churches that don’t qualify for the Megachurch Club, and therefore do nothing meaningful for the Kingdom.

For example, these lists might be interesting:

• Churches that don’t have lots of money and their pastor isn’t the most gifted fellow, but they have a great heart and try real hard.
• Churches least interested in entertaining themselves.
• Churches that best integrate evangelism with a keen social conscience.
• Most effective landlocked churches–no room for more parking or building–that refuse to leave their community to build a new campus on farmland with highway access, so that they can become a megachurch and make a Best Church list.
• Churches that, per capita, give the most money to missions (small churches would dominate this list).
• Churches with the smallest proportion of worship attenders who are just spectators, rather than active Christians.
• Churches that intentionally locate themselves in poor communities, rather than merely “go to the poor” on mini mission excursions and feel really good about themselves when they return to their suburban cathedrals.
• Most innovative churches with less than (choose one: 100, 200, 500) people.
• Churches located in wealthy suburbs with the largest number of low-income people attending regularly.
• Churches with the largest proportion of people actively involved in ministry.
• Churches with the lowest average income among its lay leaders.
• Churches that have maintained a positive reputation and influence in their community for the longest period of years.
• The smallest churches that have intentionally given away the most people to start other churches.

When I write this kind of stuff, people assume I’m just a traditional small-church guy who is insanely jealous of large churches, and takes gratuitous potshots at highly visible targets. I have never attended a church that wasn’t innovating and reaching the lost and growing; I could never be satisfied sitting in the pews of a status quo church, of which there are legion. But I don’t think megachurches are the final word in faithfulness, nor the only qualified candidates for “Best” lists.

The first thing I turn to when BusinessWeek comes is the back-page column “The Welch Way,” by Jack and Suzy Welch. They simply respond to people’s business-related questions, and always provide rich insights. Very often, their words apply directly to the church.

This week, they responded to a question about how business schools can best prepare today’s students.

They lamented the scant classroom time given to people issues–hiring, motivating, team-building, and firing. Instead, business school focus on “brainiac concepts” like disruptive technologies and complexity modeling (whatever those are). “Those may be useful…if you join a consulting firm, but real managers need to know how to get the most out of people.” While business curriculum emphasizes strategy and finance, the Welches would prefer seeing people-management front and center.

There are parallels to how ministers are trained. Seminaries, from what I gather, focus on learning biblical languages, theology, strategy (mission statements, goal-setting, etc.), and church administration. How much is spent on developing relational smarts? Not much, according to what I’ve seen from my perch at my denomination’s headquarters.

Ministers never need to leave a church because they lack sufficient understanding of Greek and Hebrew, their theological understanding is sub-par, or they don’t know how to develop a mission statement. Rather, almost always it involves bone-headed relational skills. Ministers get in trouble because they do and say stupid things in their relationships with parishioners. Do seminaries not teach people-management skills, or do students just not pay attention, and revert to their default behaviors once they get assigned to a church?

I’ve always admired my Dad’s ability to deal with people. Relationships are tricky in small churches. Tricky and treacherous. Young bucks fresh out of seminary regularly get eaten alive. But Dad knew how to keep the church bosses in line, how to marginalize or chase away carnal laypersons who sow discord, and mobilize persons to move the church forward. Nobody ever ran over him. I wish I had more of his relational smarts. It’s a whole lot more valuable than (to take something from my field) knowing how to diagram a sentence.