The Global Economy and Business

The first time I thought about religion and business after reading one of the fundamental books in management science “Management” by Michael H. Mescon, Michael Albert and Franklin Khedouri. The authors used the example of the Rome Catholic Church to explain that sometimes traditional organizations can exist without any improvements in management for centuries. I returned to this example more and more thinking about what would happen if the leaders of the Rome Catholic Church decided to make that changes (I mean only business and management spheres, and maybe personnel motivation or some marketing but nothing concerning religious doctrines). Will the organization operate better or worse? Will more people choose Christianity from other religions or Catholicism instead of Protestantism or Orthodoxy or other Christian direction? And in general, will more people start thinking about attending any church? Will using business instruments attract or antagonize people?..
 

Today I see a lot of churches from different denominations using business instruments. It works. They advertise on TV and radio, issue posters. They train their stuff to be good managers. They use interesting and sometimes even intrigue titles for sermons to attract different groups of people (more churches started teaching about money, business and investments). But what I wanted to emphasize they use franchise strategies to expand their influence.
 

Certainly, I do not want to say that this was invented in the 21st century. Mentioned before Rome Catholic Church has the outstanding number of congregations all over the world. And they continue to open more and more. But the main difference as I think is hidden in the procedure of opening the new ones. The initiative comes not from the leaders but from the prospective pastor. The leaders of the church motivate people to move to other cities, towns and countryside but the final decision is made by particular believer. The main church like ordinary franchisor provides him with start-up and current training, helps to solve technical problems and so on. The subsidiary church pays a royalty (usually it’s 10%), and everybody is happy.
 

Is it good and bad? As for me I think that it’s more likely good because being a part of a big church chain the young pastor has fewer opportunities to fall into heresy…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 8:44 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.