Successful faith-based organizations are focused on achievable, maintainable growth. But with reason, within limits. Don t let your reach exceed your organizational grasp. Leading and managing a complex and successful faith-based organization is one of the most difficult challenges in the postmodern organizational world. Once churches have 500 in average attendance and have at least 1000 people regularly connected with the church through membership or involvement, then the complexity of leadership and management increases geometrically with increased size.
Places of worship are more difficult to lead and manage than are community service organizations.
The stakeholders are more clearly defined in churches, and many call for very detailed accountability. Faith principles or spiritual core values are the first building block of churches. Yes, churches need to be on mission, but this is secondary to a captivating passion around the core ideology of the church. 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.