The effective pastor: Focus on contribution

The effective executive, Peter Drucker tells us, always asks this question: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and results of the institution I serve?”

Rather than paying attention to effort or what he or she is owed or deserves or what authority he or she should have, the effective executive pays attention to results and how to improve them.

Drucker writes that every organization requires results in three areas: direct results, building values and reaffirming them, and developing people for the future. Direct results in business is quantified by profi and loss. In non-profit sectors it is defined differently.

Looking to results necessarily forces a person to look to others. We usually cannot ensure results on our own. We need other people to work with us or take what we do and go from there.

Looking at results also puts demands on us to examine ourselves and build on our strengths.

Drucker argues that looking at results also eliminates many of the problems we chalk up to “human relations” difficulties.

Executives in an organization do not have good human relations because they have a ‘talent for people.’ They have good human relations because they focus on contribution in their own work and in their relationships with others. As a result, their relationships are productive – and this is the only valid definition of ‘good human relations.’  Warm feelings and pleasant words are meaningless, are indeed a false front for wretched attitudes, if there is no achievement in what is, after all, a work-focused and task-focused relationship.

I quote Drucker here because it is in this practice that I think we begin to sense some distance between Drucker and what many in a church setting would embrace. Drucker’s focus on functional relationships and an emphasis on what we can do and achieve may strike many as ill-suited for thinking about pastoral work.

It challenges me.

It forces me to ask the basic question: “What are pastors for?” Why do they exist? Why does the church they pastor exist?

We talk a great deal about the issue of laity involvement and lack of involvement. There is no end of concern about the attitude that worship should entertain and people come to church and belong to church so they can get something out of it.

I find myself wondering these days if all these issues are tied to a improper conception of the church. The church is not a business, but it exists for a purpose. Members of a church are a part of that purpose. They are on the team. They are not the clients or customers of the church. They are the workers, the staff, the employees of God.

The pastor’s job is not to tend to the flock, but to help the church be the church. The pastor’s contribution is to focus the church on results – direct results (however we want to define those), building values, and developing people.

These ways of thinking may not fit perfectly. Some might find them harmful. But I find Drucker’s argument that failing to focus on results leads to weakness and chaos an accurate description of some churches I have known. When we cannot even describe what results we seek, how can we organize anything we do?

I dare say, John Wesley worried himself greatly about results and how he could best contribute to them. He famously resolved to take to field preaching despite his personal distate for the practice because it was the only way he could preach his message.

The question for pastors is this: “What can we do that will significantly affect the performance and results of the institution we serve?”