Organization

Everyday life is bound up in organizational life. We work for business corporations, belong to clubs, become members of churches, sit on committees, link with political parties, experience citizenship, struggle with bureaucracy, submit to government, attend colleges and schools, participate in unions, join professional societies and get health care through complex systems. Most of our waking hours are spent in an organizational context.

God, it is often thought, is interested only in people, not in organizations. In contrast, the Bible reveals a God who deals with nations and people groups, who created and upholds a structured, ordered context in which humankind can thrive (Genesis 1-2; Col. 1:15-17). God has a purpose for the largest corporations, such as General Motors, and the smallest club. In this article we will develop a theology of institutional life, which will consider how organizations function, the problems we encounter (organizational sickness and sin) and some directions for seeking organizational holiness (for specific challenges, see Organizational Culture and Change; Organizational Values).

Can Anything Good Come from an Organization?

An organization is a collection of people or entities formed into a whole composed of interdependent parts to accomplish a purpose. Organizations are characterized by regularized ways of operating (rules), repetitiveness in procedures (traditions), permanence (institutionalization), a distinctive milieu (culture), patterns of influence (power) and a governance structure (authority). No good idea in history has made a substantial impact on society without becoming incarnated in institutions and organizations. Even Francis of Assisi would have been an isolated saint with a limited influence had he not founded the Franciscan order.

Organizations are essentially created for our good. They serve to coordinate people and resources to accomplish a mission, and they often provide a context for meaningful work that cannot be done by individuals or informed groups. Organizations can be healing, energizing and life-giving. They can also be hurtful, draining and destructive. The process of becoming organized does have risks; institutions are by nature intractable and resistant to change. In the worst of cases organizations can become demonic and idolatrous. This downside of organizational life has a theological explanation: organizations, including the organizational life of the church, participate in the fallenness of all structures in this world.

It is often said that the church is an organism and not an organization. In fact, it is both. As an organism the church is a living entity, pulsating with the life of God’s Spirit; it is the body of Christ, the family of God, the covenant community. But the church is also an organization—ordered in a structured life with officeholders, patterns of accountability and decision-making, traditions, power structures and an implicit or explicit organizational mission. In the short run the church can be the most influential organization in society, and in some countries it has been or still is. In the long run the church will outlast all other organizations and be consummated in the heavenly Jerusalem—a city-church-state-environment—though this can only be seen with the eye of faith.

The most apparently influential organization in the modern world is the business corporation. Since it is so adaptive, many thinkers today regard business as potentially the most creative force on earth for dealing with global issues: “The churches, governments, and our learning institutions . . . have become too cumbersome for today’s modern pace, where constant change is the norm” (Renesch, p 11). Edward Simon, president of Herman Miller, says that “business is the only institution that has a chance, as far as I can see, to fundamentally improve the injustice that exists in the world” (quoted in Senge, p. 5). In a prophetic book edited by John Renesch, twelve leading thinkers explain what business is becoming. (1) The company is a community, not merely a corporation; it is a system for being, not merely a system for production and profit. (2) The new image of the manager is that of a spiritual elder caring for the souls of the employees. (3) Employees are members of the body working interdependently for the common good. (4) While mission statements, vision, goals and values will continue to push a company, a “higher purpose” (parallel to the “Higher Power” made popular by Alcoholics Anonymous) will pull a company forward. (5) The corporation is an equipping (learning) organization that provides an environment for every-member service (ministry) so that each person will become more human, more creative and more integrated with the higher purpose. Many firms have already progressed in these directions.

Critical to this thinking is the increased awareness of the connectedness and wholeness of everything, in other words, a systems worldview. Instead of dog-eat-dog competition, people are cultivating interdependence and cooperation: “Although we may compete, we are nevertheless each part of a unity, so that no one `wins’ unless we all do” (Harman, quoted in Renesch, p. 15). The model system is the body of Christ, in which “the eye cannot say to the hand, `I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21). But the theoretical development of systems thinking came first from observing other living organisms.

Understanding Organizations as Systems

As early as the mid-1920s Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a practicing biologist, began to understand living organisms in a systems way (p. 12). He recognized that biological organisms could not be adequately understood by the classical Newtonian method, which regarded each object as a collection of distinct and disconnected parts. Instead of seeing the whole as the sum of the parts, he said we should see the whole as more than its parts (Bertalanffy, p. 31). This means that unity in an organism is a complex whole, an idea promoted centuries before by Aristotle.

Other concepts implicit in systems thinking are homeostasis (the tendency of any organization to return to the tried and true, like the keel of a sailboat), isomorphism (the structural similarity of fields or systems that may be intrinsically different but behave the same way) and synergy (the mutual reinforcement that comes by the total effect of two or more elements in a system or organization). Family systems theory, developed in the 1950s, works with such concepts as fusion and differentiation (the need to be both “we” and “me”) and intergenerational transmission (the way problems and blessings are handed down generation after generation in both families and churches). As I show elsewhere (Collins and Stevens, chap. 6), there is substantial biblical congruency with this way of thinking, though one needs to be critically aware of the presuppositions of some of the more radical systems thinkers (Collins and Stevens, epilogue).

As a new way of thinking about reality, systems theory has recently been applied to a host of other fields, including transportation systems, national financial planning, outer space exploration, leadership, management and large complex organizations. Ministers of finance are now painfully aware that the economic health of their country cannot be achieved by tinkering with only one factor, such as the prime lending rate for banks, but is the result of many complex factors, most of which cannot be controlled. Along with its applications to family therapy and family ministry, systems theory has recently been applied to pastoral care and leadership in the church (Friedman; Pattison). So systems thinking helps us understand how organizations work; it also helps us grasp what goes wrong with organizations.

The Sick Organization

Symptoms of disease in an organization are similar to those observed in unhealthy individuals. Organizations can be directionless, weak, manipulative and addictive. Some organizations “eat people up,” consuming their vitality rather than energizing them. When leaders in an organization burn out, it is often a systemic problem: an overfunctioning leader is in a codependent relationship with underfunctioning members who are adapting to his or her “all-competence.” While all might complain about the status quo, they have usually contracted (often unconsciously) to keep it that way.

Some businesses, corporations and organizations can become all-consuming alternatives to family, church and neighborhood. Taken to an extreme, an organization can become demonic, turning people away from the love of God and leading to paralyzing and deadening lifestyles. The organization has become an alternative to the kingdom of God, that yeast that leavens everything in everyday life.

The addictive organization is an extreme example of what can go wrong. While we become increasingly aware of the addictions in our society—sex, money, chemical substances, power and romance—we should also be willing to ask hard questions about the addictive functioning of organizations. The first level of addiction occurs when an addict is in a key position. If the president or pastor is addicted to work or power, the members will never be able to do enough to please him or her, but they will keep trying (see Drivenness). The second level of addiction occurs when the organization supports addicts—perhaps alcoholics or workaholics—in their addictive functioning as an enabler. Anne Wilson Schaef gives an all-too-common example of a church that had an alcoholic in a key position: the church spent an inordinate amount of energy trying not to notice that the person was doing a poor job on an important committee (Schaef, p. 118). The same thing happens among old-boy networks in clubs and businesses. The third level is organizational addiction—when the organization itself provides the fix. People who look to the organization to be the family they never had are setting themselves up for disillusionment. Some people working for high-tech, high-demand firms feel they are not working for a corporation but more for a religious order. In such cases the mission of the organization (even if it is the church) has become too important. The fourth level of organizational addiction is when the organization itself functions as an addict. “In these cases,” notes Schaef, “there is an incongruity between what the organization says its mission is and what it actually does” in personnel practices, emphasis on control and how it interprets and works with power (p. 18).

The Sinful Organization

Are the organizations described above sick or sinful? Can we speak of organizational sin and repentance, organizational conversion? The analogy between individuals and organizations applies once again. Organizational illness predisposes to sin; organizational sin makes the organization and its members sick.

A theology of organizational life includes two complementary ingredients. First, God created a structured organized life as a context for human beings to thrive. Second, God gave humankind the capacity and mandate to craft organizations as part of the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:26-28). Simply put, organizations were intended to exist to serve God and God’s purposes in the world in the three ways human beings were to express their calling: (1) building communion with God, (2) building community with people and (3) developing their earth’s potential through cocreativity with God (see Laity; Ministry). The service to be rendered by the human enterprise was symbolized in the Old Testament by what is sometimes called the threefold office of prophets, priests and princes. The prophets discerned and brought justice; the priests taught and brought peace; the princes governed and brought service to the world.

Tragically all organizations have fallen, both the God-ordained institutions of state, church, family and marriage and the humanly made organizations of clubs, workplaces and all kinds of human enterprises. Individual sin in Genesis 3 leads to systemic evil, a complex of negativity that resists God’s purposes in the world. Organizations have become part of the principalities and powers, which were created good but have now become tyrannical, colonized by Satan and intractable. The organization of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is a case in point. It is the inversion of the three God-given purposes for an organization: building a name for themselves instead of cultivating communion with God; forging a homogeneous unity of people instead of building a richly diverse community; resisting God’s creative and cultural mandate by putting their energies into a single enterprise glorifying human beings and skills.

Sinful organizations are autonomous, inflexible to God’s leading and self-serving. Separated from God, organizations and their memberships tend to become arrogant and take on a life of their own. This is a danger in many major corporations and governments and even in churches. Is redemption possible? Does conversion apply to organizations and not just to people? What would a redeemed organization look like? (To explore the extent to which redemption of the visible and invisible structures of life has been accomplished by Christ, see Principalities and Powers. To consider the ways of encountering fallen structures, see Structures.)

The Virtuous Organization

A virtuous organization is not merely a collection of Christians working for the same business, not-for-profit society or church. It is much more. Holiness has to do with values, the way people are treated, relationships, the way power is used organizationally and the ultimate purpose of the organization. Ironically, a group of Christians may craft an unholy organization that is self-serving and destructive to people, while a group of nonbelievers may form an organization that, unknown to them, accords with God’s purposes. The following are ways in which holiness is expressed organizationally, all of them based on a biblical theology.

Trusteeship. The organization has a purpose that is larger than its own self-interest and fulfills some aspect of God’s threefold call in the human vocation: communion with God, community building and cocreativity. Prophetic business thinkers today speak of this as a higher purpose that pulls the organization rather than as a mission statement that pushes or drives it. The virtuous organization has a sacred trust handed to it, often through the vision of its founder though ultimately from God, again usually unknown to the people working for it. Critical to this way of thinking is developing trusteeship—being stewards of a vision—rather than gaining ownership (see Ownership). Richard Broholm has expressed the difference this way: ownership appeals to self-interest and captures an organization for the agendas of the members (“This is my mission”) while trusteeship appeals to a sense of calling or vocation (“This is our mission, which we have been given”).

Community. The virtuous organization is concerned to build, to cultivate a rich, healthy interdependency of all the people involved: administrators and workers, employees and customers, shareholders and staff, students and faculty, caregivers and clients. All levels of personnel in the organization from the sweepers to the CEO are treated with equal dignity. People are not considered as human resources to be manipulated and used but as God-imaging creatures with inestimable value. Difference is not feared but welcomed as contributing to a rich social unity of personalities, gifts and talents. In theological terms the goal is Pentecost (the rich, interdependent unity of many peoples) rather than Babel (a bland, homogenous uniformity).

Service. The ultimate goal of the organization is to serve. Service takes us to the heart of ministry in the world, as attested by the four servant songs in Isaiah (Isaiah 42:1-9; Isaiah 49:1-6; Isaiah 50:4-9; Isaiah 52:13-53:12) and the words of Jesus (Matthew 20:26-27). If it is a business, the purpose is not primarily making a financial profit but adding value to the customers, though it is value for which customers will normally pay a fee. The organization serves, and so do its members. Since the Greek word for service is the same as that for ministry, Christians in the organization may regard themselves as those in full-time Christian ministry.

Equipping and learning. Every human interaction and every contact with the structures of the organization are regarded as an opportunity for equipping (Ephes. 4:11-12)—bringing the best out of people, drawing out gifts and talents and assisting people to become mature. The CEO and those beside her regard themselves as primarily equippers rather than do-it-yourself leaders. They equip people and the culture in their time allocation, attitudes to control and power, focus of time investment, commitment to team building and willingness to work with people developmentally. In line with this, the challenges and problems of the organization are addressed primarily in a conceptual and theological manner rather than with programmatic, expedient answers. It is, as Peter Senge expounds, a learning organization.

Values. The organizational values foundational to the company are shaped by biblical and theological realities: faith, hope and love. This frequently repeated triad of virtues (1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Thes. 1:3) can be translated into values for both persons and structures. (1) Faith is seeing and trusting the invisible as well as the visible potential of each and every human being and every organizational situation. (2) Hope is responding to the gains and losses of the present in the confidence of a future worth laboring towards—confidence and courage in relationships and organizationally. (3) Love is relating unconditionally to people to meet their real needs, caring unconditionally for imperfect people, communicating their worth and value independently of their performance. Love also means showing caring loyalty to the culture, structures and values of the organizational system.

Soul. The employees or members are gently nudged in the direction of living and working by ultimate sources—through inspiration that renews, rather than by principles that function as laws to direct and restrain. The organization invites and evokes faith. Those on a spiritual journey are invited to consider discipleship to Jesus not only by sensitive and appropriate verbal witness of those who are believers but by the aroma of Christ in the structures and organizational culture.

As noted before, many Christian organizations are not really Christian in terms of trusteeship, community, service, equipping, values and soul. Some secular organizations seem closer to this goal. The challenge of making organizational change in these directions is a matter for separate consideration (see Organizational Culture and Change). What should be apparent is that organizational life itself is a spiritual discipline. Spirituality is not something imposed on an organization through religious practices or language; it is implicit in the challenge of working together for the commonwealth (the common good). Organizational life invites faith, appeals to the soul. It also reveals systemic sin, and it cries out for systemic redemption. The issues of competition, creativity, cooperation and cocreativity invite people in organizations to engage in a process of transformation that moves from the person to the organization and eventually from the transformation of organizations to the transformation of the world. As with all other human enterprises, organizational life will experience only partial redemption in this life and must wait for the inauguration of the new heaven and new earth.

» See also: Organizational Culture and Change

» See also: Organizational Values

» See also: Power

» See also: Power, Workplace

» See also: Principalities and Powers

» See also: Structures

» See also: System

References and Resources

R. Anderson, Minding God’s Business (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); L. von Bertalanffy, Perspectives on General System Theory: Scientific-Philosophical Studies (New York: Braziller, 1975); M. Bowen and M. Kerr, Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory (New York: Norton, 1988); P. Collins and R. P. Stevens, The Equipping Pastor: A Systems Approach to Empowering the People of God (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1993); E. H. Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guilford, 1985); M. E. Pattison, Pastor and People—A Systems Approach (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); J. Renesch, ed., New Traditions in Business: Spirit and Leadership in the Twenty-first Century (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992); A. W. Schaef, “Is the Church an Addictive Organization?” Christian Century 107, no. 1 (1990) 18-21; A. W. Schaef and D. Fassel, The Addictive Organization (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); P. M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

—R. Paul Stevens