During my residency training, I spent several months caring for hospital patients. Every morning our entourage of five or six doctors, residents, and students went from room to room, checking on patients assigned to our medical team. One lady who stands out in my memory is Donna Sue.
Though hospitalized for pneumonia, Donna Sue’s long-term problem originated with her weight. Although seemingly on the mend from a lung infection, antibiotics and other medications weren’t going to cure her morbid obesity. Therefore, we did our best to help her shed excessive weight by placing her on a strict diet. We emphasized the medical necessity of this regimen and explained why caloric restriction was necessary for her health and well-being.
Yet, after several days of this strict diet, we were confounded to discover it wasn’t working. If anything, Donna Sue had added a few pounds. We set out to search for a myriad of rarely-seen metabolic causes behind her problem.
One day, I went to check her heart and lungs, trying to tactfully lift the rolls of fat before placing my stethoscope onto her chest. To my surprise, a flattened Twinkie—still encased in a clear wrapper—fell from the folds of her torso and landed on the bedsheets. We discovered she had been sending a friend to the candy machine for goodies. No wonder!
We can learn two key lessons from the case of the “Twinkie Lady”:
1) When our programs aren’t producing results, we should re-evaluate.
2) Sometimes the answer is right in front of us; we just need to dig to find it!
I am concerned about ineffective treatments for the ailments of the (big C) Church, especially in America. While many have written about how to help, too many of the treatments prescribed assume the church should operate like a business.
Indeed, we often run our churches that way. Like a corporation in a proxy battle, we line up voting members to support our interests as we compete for control of the church. In place of evangelism we have marketing campaigns. The senior pastor is our CEO and elders make up the board of directors.
Meanwhile, clergy and laity remain separate from each another, occupying separate turf and not crossing into each other’s fiefdoms. We try to win the world by using the ways of the world, and then wonder why we are irrelevant when we step outside the church walls.
The fact is, many of these programs haven’t produced good results. A leading problem: we’ve forgotten we’re supposed to be a living body. I confirmed this view by how little I discovered during extensive research about the Church and the necessity of a biological—or “living”—point of view of Church life.
Why has this occurred? I believe that as society has grown more affluent, believers have self-organized local churches using a business model instead of a living-body model. Treating the church as a business seems pragmatic: projects must be serviced, operating expenses paid, people in charge held accountable, and the church made presentable to the community.
Ironically, I have found more emphasis on the biological concept—so vital for a healthy church—in secular material than books by Christian writers. Business authors understand the value of biological concepts. Their books suggest businesses work better when they feature a biological (i.e., “organic”) design, rather than top-down control rooted in the early days of the Industrial Age. The latter seems popular in too many sanctuaries.
The frustrating aspect is that, while church people often don’t “get it,” highly intelligent people in the world do (even though they may use different terminologies and have little to say about the Church).
Whether organizational leaders, business managers, game theorists, or computer programmers, smart people recognize that mimicking biological principles works. That’s how God made living things, with all sorts of positive developments that would be impossible without a living model.
However, the Church, which is supposed to be a living body, has moved in the opposite direction. This is disastrous, because the Church is under ever-increasing attack. As subtle attacks turn into less-veiled hostility and persecution increases, believers will need to understand they are members of a living body, and not just part of a church establishment that can be usurped or driven out of business by worldly powers.