Hey! As an Evangelical Christian whose church sends out church plants fairly regularly, I appreciated the basically sympathetic outside-in view of ourselves. Love this: “The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible.”
If I could add a bit of extra perspective:
At least in my circles of Evangelicalism, having a seminary degree is absolutely seen as a must. I’m happy to believe there are other circles where it’s not as important.
In addition to “convergent evolution”, there is a lot of explicit cross-pollination. I took a one-credit seminary course (see?) on “Philosophy of Ministry”, and the lecturer repeatedly referenced the organizational framework from the book “Barbarians to Bureaucrats”, which is explicitly about corporate lifecycle. I’ve read lots of books about church-planting and mission that clearly have influence from the corporate world, and lots of books about business that clearly have Christian influences.
Re launching with a “support team” from the sending church: I think you’re pretty close to the mark. There’s a massive amount of logistics required to run a service: set-up, tear-down, electrical, audio, music, coffee, food etc etc etc; and of course that doesn’t count things like accounting, legal, secretarial, social media, website, graphic design, and everything else needed to run a small organization. Having a team of enthusiastic people doing all that work for free is a huge help. So is, as you say, having a core of enthusiastic people listening to you preach every Sunday. Imagine the difference between standing up to preach maybe only having a dozen strangers, or maybe nobody at all, vs knowing you’re going to have a minimum of 15-20 supportive and enthusiastic listeners. And of course, just personally giving good advice and being encouraging.
To some degree the “creative destruction” thing is straight from Jesus: “If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It’s good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” “The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” He tells a story about a guy who goes around throwing seed everywhere; most don’t end up producing much fruit for various reasons, but a few do.
If there’s one weakness of the piece, it’s the sort of implication about the percentage of narcissists. You state that it’s the sort of job that would be attractive to narcissists, which is certainly true. And it’s undeniable that narcissists occasionally end up in positions of power (Mars Hill is a great example). But there’s sort of an unstated implication, therefore, that a high percentage of people (though unspecified) in church plants are narcissists, because you don’t see anything in particular preventing it.
There are several filters; the big one being that it’s just a lot of work. You’re expected to work long hours, be humble, put up with all kinds of criticism, be willing to do low-level service, etc etc. You’re going to have a hard time doing your plant without that initial “support team”, and you’re going to have a hard time finding an enthusiastic “support team” without playing the role. There are, on the whole, far easier ways to run your petty kingdom than by doing a church plant.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. From what I know, cancer-like mutations which cause unlimited cell growth happen all the time; after all, uniform cooperation of every cell in the body is an evolutionarily unstable equilibrium. But the body has mechanisms to detect and counter these. What we call cancer only occurs when a mutation has managed to evade the body’s defenses. I think a similar process has happened when a genuine narcissist’s church plant gains significant traction.
I don’t know a lot about church planters, but I do know a lot about startup founders and I overwhelmingly associate higher narcissism with longer hours and harder work.
There definitely is a category of lifestyle entrepreneur who wants to work as little as possible and is just hanging out for the image, but those people tend to be relatively non-neurotic social climbers who want to have a good time.
The real hardcore narcissists tend towards maximalism and masochism in their startups. They walk the halls whipping themselves so that others in the startup economy may admire how committed they are to the mission. Every project is as intense as they are, and must be executed as if its outcome has lasting consequences for the human race.
This kind of intensity has great ergonomics for narcissism—the pain and difficulty in conjunction with a great and important mission feeds the self-image of greatness in a way that a great and important mission alone does not.
One of my hopes for this piece was that evangelicals who read it would feel respected and seen, so I’m delighted to hear I succeeded. I also appreciate the inside info and push back.
I’m not an evangelical (anymore), but am sort of a missionary kid—my family moved to Poland explicitly to do church building (after seeing how much of a pagan wasteland it is—fun!). This was to a very evangelical denomination, where the official name is “Free Christians”. For legal reasons there’s a counsel that in theory has authority over all the branch churches, but no one cares about what they think. In these circles having a seminary degree was viewed sort of negatively. Not explicitly so, but it was viewed with suspicion. Studying theology was sort of frowned upon, as they’re more likely to lead you astray.
TBF I have friends from other denominations where you do need a degree of some kind to be respected, so it’s very denomination dependent. I get the feeling that the more America influenced churches care more about credentials (Baptists, Pentecostals). It’s correlated with how much structure and levels of authority there are.
Hey! As an Evangelical Christian whose church sends out church plants fairly regularly, I appreciated the basically sympathetic outside-in view of ourselves. Love this: “The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible.”
If I could add a bit of extra perspective:
At least in my circles of Evangelicalism, having a seminary degree is absolutely seen as a must. I’m happy to believe there are other circles where it’s not as important.
In addition to “convergent evolution”, there is a lot of explicit cross-pollination. I took a one-credit seminary course (see?) on “Philosophy of Ministry”, and the lecturer repeatedly referenced the organizational framework from the book “Barbarians to Bureaucrats”, which is explicitly about corporate lifecycle. I’ve read lots of books about church-planting and mission that clearly have influence from the corporate world, and lots of books about business that clearly have Christian influences.
Re launching with a “support team” from the sending church: I think you’re pretty close to the mark. There’s a massive amount of logistics required to run a service: set-up, tear-down, electrical, audio, music, coffee, food etc etc etc; and of course that doesn’t count things like accounting, legal, secretarial, social media, website, graphic design, and everything else needed to run a small organization. Having a team of enthusiastic people doing all that work for free is a huge help. So is, as you say, having a core of enthusiastic people listening to you preach every Sunday. Imagine the difference between standing up to preach maybe only having a dozen strangers, or maybe nobody at all, vs knowing you’re going to have a minimum of 15-20 supportive and enthusiastic listeners. And of course, just personally giving good advice and being encouraging.
To some degree the “creative destruction” thing is straight from Jesus: “If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It’s good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” “The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” He tells a story about a guy who goes around throwing seed everywhere; most don’t end up producing much fruit for various reasons, but a few do.
If there’s one weakness of the piece, it’s the sort of implication about the percentage of narcissists. You state that it’s the sort of job that would be attractive to narcissists, which is certainly true. And it’s undeniable that narcissists occasionally end up in positions of power (Mars Hill is a great example). But there’s sort of an unstated implication, therefore, that a high percentage of people (though unspecified) in church plants are narcissists, because you don’t see anything in particular preventing it.
There are several filters; the big one being that it’s just a lot of work. You’re expected to work long hours, be humble, put up with all kinds of criticism, be willing to do low-level service, etc etc. You’re going to have a hard time doing your plant without that initial “support team”, and you’re going to have a hard time finding an enthusiastic “support team” without playing the role. There are, on the whole, far easier ways to run your petty kingdom than by doing a church plant.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. From what I know, cancer-like mutations which cause unlimited cell growth happen all the time; after all, uniform cooperation of every cell in the body is an evolutionarily unstable equilibrium. But the body has mechanisms to detect and counter these. What we call cancer only occurs when a mutation has managed to evade the body’s defenses. I think a similar process has happened when a genuine narcissist’s church plant gains significant traction.
I don’t know a lot about church planters, but I do know a lot about startup founders and I overwhelmingly associate higher narcissism with longer hours and harder work.
There definitely is a category of lifestyle entrepreneur who wants to work as little as possible and is just hanging out for the image, but those people tend to be relatively non-neurotic social climbers who want to have a good time.
The real hardcore narcissists tend towards maximalism and masochism in their startups. They walk the halls whipping themselves so that others in the startup economy may admire how committed they are to the mission. Every project is as intense as they are, and must be executed as if its outcome has lasting consequences for the human race.
This kind of intensity has great ergonomics for narcissism—the pain and difficulty in conjunction with a great and important mission feeds the self-image of greatness in a way that a great and important mission alone does not.
One of my hopes for this piece was that evangelicals who read it would feel respected and seen, so I’m delighted to hear I succeeded. I also appreciate the inside info and push back.
I’m not an evangelical (anymore), but am sort of a missionary kid—my family moved to Poland explicitly to do church building (after seeing how much of a pagan wasteland it is—fun!). This was to a very evangelical denomination, where the official name is “Free Christians”. For legal reasons there’s a counsel that in theory has authority over all the branch churches, but no one cares about what they think. In these circles having a seminary degree was viewed sort of negatively. Not explicitly so, but it was viewed with suspicion. Studying theology was sort of frowned upon, as they’re more likely to lead you astray.
TBF I have friends from other denominations where you do need a degree of some kind to be respected, so it’s very denomination dependent. I get the feeling that the more America influenced churches care more about credentials (Baptists, Pentecostals). It’s correlated with how much structure and levels of authority there are.