Places of worship deal primarily with volunteer leaders, which calls for a complex system of discovery, recruitment, ongoing learning, coaching and rewards. It is a system that can easily break down with leaders still feeling that everything is fine. Innovative and effective churches work hard on an ongoing and excellent lay mobilization system. Increasingly, second and third level ministry staff in churches will emerge from the faithful volunteers in church life. They will not necessarily be formally theologically trained, but they will understand their spiritual gifts, their skill sets and their ministry preferences.
Churches do have markets and customers or clients.
They must be faithful to present their unchanging spiritual principles to people not connected with the church in a manner and style that makes it easy for them to respond to the difficult challenges of Christian discipleship. Faith-based organizations need to listen carefully to their constituents. It may be that accountability criteria are changing. Newer, younger generations may have more specific questions that faith-based organizations need to hear. This may relate to a different set of financial criteria, and it may relate to more specific measurement of the effectiveness of the church.