If you are unaware of it, consultant businesses for churches, especially mainline churches, are booming. The reason is that they are responding to the demand side economics that church membership declines has prompted. What churches do is pay people money to help them strategize ways that they can better serve the community. I have worked with a lot of consultants in the past. None of them are cheap and the product they have to sell is actually more work for you in order to revise your operations to fit their understanding of organizational structures. They will usually rope you in for an extended period of time so that your account is a consistent source of their revenue which means that the church has to invest more money in itself in order to invest more service to the community. Hm.
This seems to me to exacerbate the core issue at hand: churches continual capital investment in their own operations including property, payroll, and insurance. The problem is that the church is spending too much time and energy investing in itself rather than directly investing itself in the communities that churches find themselves as statuesque relics of a by gone tall steeple era. As the divisions of labor between rich and poor increase, manufacturing employment, in which most churches still find themselves, continues to decrease, divorce continues to be high, acculturation of ex-prisoners, adaptation to changing life cycle demographics, and a foster care system that is perpetually stuck in irons, among other things, the church continues to question its own self-investment in order to pay for existing assets and debt. This saps the energy of the people to do much else. At the end the tall steeple is just a better looking relic of a society that does not need it anymore.
So why not change the economic model? Rather than invest in ourselves, why not create local foundation activity to make it possible to invest in others? As local businesses continue to get pushed out by big corporate machines sucking the economies dry, like Wal Mart, Lowe's, and Home Depot, among others, they wind up in the same spot as many churches – forced to reinvest capital into the assets of their business just to keep the doors open leaving little time, energy, or money to grow. It requires investment in banks in order to stay floating and to hold off the inevitable like a patient with terminal cancer going for one last shot at chemo when we all know it will not do a lot to help.
Why not develop systems in local churches for community re-investment through local grant programs and fundraising? This would be brokering deals with locally owned business and organizations of various services where the church would act as a small foundation to offer grants to these organizations in order to engage in community re-development programs. We are talking about re-investment in local YMCAs, social services agencies, hospice care agencies, private trash collection, construction, local farming, privately owned drug stores, whatever it might be. It's a win-win. The church becomes a central organizing hub of social service and all it asks for in return is community investment. Starting with a grant from Lilly or some other foundation would be perfect seed money to get to a critical enough mass. Loans from banks are a big fat no-no since that is the heart of the church's economic problem along with unsustainable labor costs.
As with churches now the two big problems off the top of my head are property and payroll even in this sort of system. True there could be a way to earn interest off of the investments into the foundation, but that might be a stretch. Clearly some sacrifices would have to be made and true volunteers would have to be found to help with the work. Also, property would have to be sacrificed and no longer be the center of church budgeting. This is why this idea is a hard sell for existing tall steeple churches that are struggling. It requires minimal red tape, small but efficient organization, very small overhead costs, and more time from people than can be paid for. But these things often have a way of working themselves out over time. Branching out could mean fostering other churches along by giving them grant money in order to re-invest in their communities in the same way. They would not pay for consultation, but receive money to do work by reinvesting in their communities with the same system.
Basically this is the question, Is it possible not only for the church to change its very economic model, but to offer an alternative economic model for the community that is independent of the government (which includes independence from bank loans by the way), non-profit, and eventually essential to the community?
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isn't the point of the church to serve one another and those around it? its the main problem with church. it is a business model and looks nothing like what it is suppose to be, a gathering of believers. the money from that gathering should be to help those in need with in and outside of it.
I think your dream is a good one! I hope for it for the gathering of Christ followers. I do, because we are missing the point, generally.
isn't the point of the church to serve one another and those around it? its the main problem with church. it is a business model and looks nothing like what it is suppose to be, a gathering of believers. the money from that gathering should be to help those in need with in and outside of it.
I think your dream is a good one! I hope for it for the gathering of Christ followers. I do, because we are missing the point, generally.
You need to read "Making Mondragon" which documents how a priest transformed the economic landscape of his community. It totally awakened my imagination for the possibilities the church could explore to providing a more wholistic transformative gospel. Be encouraged.