Start-ups and appearances

This post is from the defunct blog “Dying Church”

Jordon Cooper has a fascinating post from the book Founders at Work. I don't always like applying business books to the church, but there are a couple of ideas that may be worth thinking about.

Start-up companies are often at their best when they start. "The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak." This has echoes of what Tim Keller and others have said about church planting.

Then this quote:

The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like…I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

I like this. We could use less emphasis on looking successful, and more emphasis on being the church.