Shepherds or CEOs?

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

Sally Morgenthaler writes "about our cultural shift away from an autocratic CEO model of leadership toward a more reflexive and cooperative model, and why many churches have failed to get the memo":

Large-church leaders have been trained in the modern, command-and-control paradigm for thirty years. Here, organizations aren’t seen so much as gatherings of people with a common purpose but as machines. There is no irony here. Machine parts don’t have minds or muscles to flex. They don’t contribute to a process or innovate improvements. Machine parts simply do their job, which is, of course, to keep the machine functioning.

The mechanical paradigm of organization largely explains why modern church leaders are trained as CEOs, not shepherds.

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