why God cares about church administration
In 2021, Christianity Today released a podcast series called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church detailing how the megachurch in Seattle went from a few hundred members to fifteen thousand members and then collapsed all in the span of about ten years. As I listened to the podcast there is one phrase that stuck in my mind:
There are spiritual consequences to church administration.
How many times has someone walked away from church, and maybe their faith, because of how the church was mismanaged, spiritually or administratively? Or how many churches have failed because of the spiritual and administrative abuses of church leaders? From my perspective, you cannot fully separate spirituality and administration. Every church scandal involves both spirituality and administration. Unfortunately, Mars Hill is a perfect example as there were both spiritual and administrative issues.
On the spiritual side, Paul David Tripp, a prominent church leader who served on the board of advisors to assist in a reconciliation process for the church is quoted saying, “this is without a doubt the most abusive coercive ministry culture I’ve ever been involved with.” In the first episode, Mike Cosper, a former pastor who works for Christianity Today and hosts of the podcast, shares the letter from 21 former Mars Hill pastors presenting formal charges “of bullying, domineering, leveraging the church to build a personal brand, intimidation, and even violence” and “the investigation of formal charges revealed patterns of persistent sin in the areas of arrogance, a quick temper, and domineering leadership.” In discussing the impact of abuse, Ed Stetzer, a missiologist at Wheaton College who was involved with Mars Hill, says, “I know a lot of people who have left the faith, [including] people who [were] pastors [who] are now not Christians because of their experience in those contexts. And then I know countless numbers of people who were just in lives that were just a mess and were redeemed by the power of the gospel and changed at Mars Hill, and have moved from there”. Cosper summarizes “[the] contradiction [at] the center of the Mars Hill story [is] stunning life change and stunning pain. Radical transformation and wounds so deep. They drove people from the church or from the faith altogether.”
On the administrative side, in the seventh episode Cosper explores the governance of Mars Hill focusing specifically on the story of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer. There is too much to cover in depth here, so I recommend you listen for yourself. But to make a long story short; in 2008, the church decided to rewrite their bylaws to accommodate rapid growth and the need to move more quickly. However, as Cosper points out, “by passing these bylaws, the elders would be signing away all governing authority of the church to this new body.” When Paul and Bent questioned the changes they were “fired, accused of disqualifying behavior, had a cloud thrown over their reputations with the church, aren’t being told that the investigation has cleared them, and are [told not to come to trial].” Ultimately, the elders “voted to disqualify Paul, to discipline Bent Meyer, and they passed the bylaws, giving up all of their legal governing authority to the board of directors.” Paul and Bent were forced out of the church community they loved and cared for because they wanted to preserve governance; meanwhile when additional issues came up later in the life of the church, the elders did not have the capacity to respond appropriately.
As church leaders it is important to recognize the connection between the spiritual and administrative life of the church.
The administrative life of the church impacts the spiritual life of the church. If the church is not well managed and everyone is stressed out about money or there is a lot of unresolved conflict or whatever the circumstance may be, there is a spiritual impact. The way a church is managed impacts how people connect with God.
The inverse is also too. The spiritual life of the church impacts the administrative life of the church. If the church is growing closer to God and growing closer together through praying, reading Scripture, and other spiritual disciplines, the church will be managed a lot differently. How a church connects with God (and how connected that church is to God) impacts how the church is managed.
Sometimes for church leaders there is a tendency to separate ‘spiritual’ and ‘administrative’ work. ‘Spiritual’ work like praying, reading Scripture, preparing for sermons, etc. is elevated while 'administrative' work like planning, budgeting, and coordinating volunteers is neglected. It is easy to become so focused on growing the church that it is easy to lose sight of how those goals are achieved.
Yet it matters how the church is managed. God cares about church administration because there are spiritual consequences.
Ultimately, Mars Hill collapsed because of both spiritual and administrative abuses. When church leaders are spiritually abusive or manipulative, or when they are administratively disorganized and chaotic, it impacts people. In talking about Mars Hill, Paul David Tripp said, “any local church, whether it’s 50 or 50,000, whose leadership culture is not shaped by the same grace it says it believes, is unbiblical and heading for trouble.” So as a church leader it is important to consider the spirituality of church administration.
There is a quote that captures the heart of what I am trying to say. In the second episode, Diane Langberg, a psychologist who works with trauma survivors, caregivers, and clergy and has written about abuse in the church says,
“when abuse is done by a pastor who has a position of power in the church, and part of that power is to tell people who God is and what he’s like, when those skills in that position and everything are used to sanction what is in God’s eyes evil - whether it’s the sexual abuse of someone in the church, whether it’s the way he treats people with his mouth and his arrogance and things like that - it becomes spiritual abuse the way all abuse is, but then it also means that God has been dragged into it and He is on the side of the abuser. I, after all these years, and I’m a word person, I really don’t have words for the kind of damage that that does to a soul.”
