When Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam was recently researching America's challenge in forging a common identity amid demographic diversity, he visited fast-growing Protestant churches--and was surprised by what he found.
"In many large evangelical congregations" in the United States, Putnam wrote in the obscure but academically credible journal Scandinavian Political Studies, "the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed." His team concluded that such "megachurches" have become "substantially" integrated, in racial terms.
Solving the thorny diversity problem? What CEO wouldn't give his vested options to do that in his organization? It turns out CEOs may have a lot to learn from their counterparts running evangelical megachurches--those congregations of several thousand believers, in cities from coast to coast, that are among the fastest-growing institutions in America.
In Pictures: Bible To Boardroom
These "megapastors" are essentially CEOs who successfully address many of the same issues that challenge their business brethren. "There are a lot of similarities between growing and running a megachurch and a business," says Timothy Hoeksema, CEO of Milwaukee's Midwest Airlines--and a megachurch member. "We can all apply a lot of the same principles."
And anyway, many CEOs try to improve their leadership through precepts that ultimately have a biblical basis. "In the past, the church would go to secular leaders for leadership lessons, but now, it's vice versa," says Doug Schmidt, senior pastor of Woodside Bible Church in Troy, Mich., one of the nation's fastest-growing congregations, where attendance is more than 4,000 each Sunday. "The secular books I'm reading on this sound a whole lot more like the Bible."
The article goes on to describe several megachurch and Biblical principles and how they can be applied in the business world. You can read the rest of it here.
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