I attended a national business conference where John Maxwell was the featured speaker. The CEO brought his children, so I was ready to charge him with child abuse. The poor little kids were taking notes. Maxwell, knowing who wrote the checks, knelt on the stage and spoke directly to the children. Their ecstatic father was transported with delight.
Innocent and beguiled, told that he was a great speaker, I ordered two Maxwell books before the conference. When they arrived after the conference, leather-bound, they made a fast trip to the return bin at the post office.
I complained to someone who heard all the greats at the headquarters of a retail giant. All media celebrities, from Al Gore to famous entertainers and sports stars, are regulars for the Saturday sessions.
I moaned, "How can someone so famous be such a hot air merchant?"
The retailer explained to me, "There are only about 50 things to say about leadership. They all recycle the same things, over and over. One speaker is as good as the next. Believe me, I have heard them all."
Over the years I have listened to plenty of tapes, starting with Management by Objective by Peter Drucker. That is why I smelled a rat when WELS leaders began talking the same line as I heard from LCA leaders. Fuller professors ape MBO: they are the Prime Movers in treating the Church as a business. In that regard they have done well for themselves but served the Lord very poorly indeed.
Sidebar: The best take on all this came from a lifelong union member at General Motors, who was in my class. I had a struggle naming one book he had not read and remembered well. He said, "They are always looking for the Type A personality, but now they realize that those domineering bullies are the ones who wreck their companies." If someone had taken his advice at the moment, a wise investor would have sold all stocks short - long before the meltdown.
A business philosophy is the core--to coin a term--of all these apostate trends: Church Growth, Emerging Church, Becoming Missional. If I cared to attend Catalyst, Drive 08, Exponential, or any other pan-denominational lovefest, I would hear a lot of Andy Stanley recycling John Maxwell recycling Peter Drucker. In fact, the business conference I attended earlier was led by Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Roman Catholics who merged business with their Prosperity Gospel, giving me the uneasy feeling that I was indeed at another Fuller seminar. (I attended one when asked by a member of St. Paul, German Village. There Robert Schuman brought a bevy of the beguiled. Soon after, Schuman was selling Thrivent insurance. Maybe they weren't beguiled.)
WELS and Missouri continue to use the same business model employed so successfully by Fuller Seminary. McGavran and C. Peter Wagner started at the top by inviting the world mission executives of all the denominations to their scrofulous school. Once they bewitched the executives, it was easy for the useful idiots to refer downward. (Referring upward is much more difficult.) If the boss thinks it is a great idea, the sub-boss will think it is a great idea and recruit his junior managers, who will get funds for the pastors and laity to attend the same brain-washing sessions.
WELS and the LCMS teach these apostate trends in unison, with the tiny ELS and CLC shouting their little Amens. Sweet spoke at Our Lady of Sorrows in St. Louis and the sem president swooned. Sweet spoke to the Church and Changers while Paul Kelm stood unmoved by pleas he was polarizing the synod. Stetzer is speaking to Missouri and WELS in 2009. Is it possible both sets of Church Shrinkers listened to him at the same pan-denominational lovefest? VP Don Patterson (Kudu Don) organized a troop of WELS people to attend that conference.
The Purposeful Church by Rick Warren, John Maxwell, Peter Wagner, Reggie McNeal
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rlschultz has left a new comment on your post "Same Old Baloney: Leadership Principles for Church...":
What is interesting is that these MBO concepts are a failure in the secular business world as much as they are in any congregation. I was also a union member for many years at a division of GM. The assessment of GM by one of your students is quite correct. GM had all kinds of programs, slogans, acronyms along with the type A managers. They even had mission and vision statements. The plant where I once worked is an empty shell with a For Sale in front. The Lutheran congregations that try this nonsense will probably end up the same way. At my WELS congregation, we are constantly bombarded with this claptrap about leadership, available at workshops and conferences. Yet, there is not even a hint of an offering of any serious doctrinal studies in the Lutheran Confessions for our laity. Go figure.
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GJ - Ask for a study of any part of the Book of Concord and the pastor will sneer. Our little congregation just finished a study of the entire Book of Concord. We are now studying doctrinal comparisons. It's all available (free) at our Ustream website address. In the future we will study Pietism (many weeks) and the Leadership Principles of John Maxwell (5 minutes).
